The call and response of blogmaking continues --everyone has one and everyone says they're no sweat to have. I figure, why not put my thoughts out there? So here they are. E-mail: justin_slotman at yahoo dot com

 
DAWSON: Returns from the nether regions of cyberspace to give us this Johnny Cash tribute. So what did you do to celebrate The Man In Black's birthday? I listened to Live At Folsom Prison --on vinyl even, when they used to bleep out cuss words.
posted by Justin at 11:36 PM

 
CRAPPY NEWS: The tape of the murder of Daniel Pearl may be sold on the streets of Pakistan. Via Amy Langfield.
posted by Justin at 11:07 PM

 
MORE -ON: Protein Wisdom has the latest get your blank on installment: get your mor on part one and part two. This version doesn't use the f-word so much.
posted by Justin at 10:27 PM

 
THE DONKEY: Makes you want to weep openly, that's how deep and meaningful his poetry is. Bravo, bravo. Polite applause.

UPDATE: I hear via Kyle Still that Jordan is having surgery and could be out the rest of the season. There's no reason to have the Wizards on tv now. C'mon, Stern. Let's have them Nets.
posted by Justin at 6:15 PM

 
TOPLESS PROTESTER: Can be found here. I wonder if she's more credible than naked protesters.
posted by Justin at 3:35 PM

 
MORE GITLIN: The Brothers Judd are not so high on his latest. And they have a ton of Gitlin links.
posted by Justin at 3:02 PM

 
MURTAUGH: Bullish on a cancer cure.
posted by Justin at 2:14 PM

 
LAST PERSON ON THE BANDWAGON, WILL YOU PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?: I'm the last person in the world to link to this, but here's get your voltr on. I must say, I did not agree with the politics or irreligiousosity of get your war on but it was pretty damn funny, especially when they were dropping the superhero references. AND the Family Circus reference down the bottom here. get your enr on was sort of useless. But get your voltr on keeps the politics to a minimum and allows me enjoy warped representations of an 80s childhood favorite.
posted by Justin at 2:02 PM

 
NYC BLOGFEST: Raghu has the details if you're in the area.
posted by Justin at 10:39 AM

 
NEWSWEEK: Has the big story on the Boston priest pedophilia scandal. They engage in psychobabble:

But some researchers think the priesthood may hold a dangerous attraction for pedophiles—not because of the opportunities it presents to indulge their fantasies, but for the opposite reason, that they hope it can help control them. “A very small percentage of pedophiles may go into the priesthood thinking that celibacy will solve the problem they’re dealing with,” says Dr. Frederick Berlin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins who deals with sexual disorders.

And then more from former priest Eugene Kennedy on Father Geoghan:

Priests “gravitate toward male children because they’re male children themselves,” he says. “These men were promoted in the seminary because they were good boys... There was an inevitability for their erotic targets to become children.” Geoghan fits that profile exactly. When he was a young seminarian in Boston, the rector wrote that despite a “very fervent spiritual life,” the 18-year-old Geoghan had a “very pronounced immaturity.”

Via Slate again.
posted by Justin at 10:30 AM

 
MEGNUT: Wraps up the recent swarm of blog articles nicely. She also claims to be the Ub Iwerks of Blogger --which is news to me but I'm ignorant.
posted by Justin at 10:00 AM

 
YESTERDAY: Was the 15th anniversary of Marcos being forced out of office in Manila and cheesedip has a post about it. She links to NeverAgain.net, which looks like a good introduction to the subject.
posted by Justin at 9:53 AM

 
THERE IS A BASKETBALL GOD: Slate says NBC and TNT are dropping the Knicks from the national TV schedule. Thank you, thank you. The bad news is it looks like they're replacing the Knicks with Wizards games, which is great with Jordan being healthy and everything. Hey Stern, the Nets are right there. You know? The Eastern Conference leading Nets? Remember them? Programming cretins.
posted by Justin at 9:38 AM

 
ATTACK OF THE CLONE COMMENTARY: Charles Murtaugh responds to Glenn Reynolds here, and even has some nice things to say about Leon Kass. He also has the link to The Chopped-Off Hands Of Star Wars page, which reveals George Lucas's hideous repressed apotemnophilia.
posted by Justin at 9:27 AM

 
OLD AND CRAZY --BUT AT LEAST YOU'LL HAVE YOUR HEALTH: Derek Lowe has been doing some reading --and some more reading-- and he has the depressing theorizing on the ossification of our personalities, though it doesn't have to happen like that, he points out. He also has good stuff on mental illness:

There are only a set number of ways in which humans go insane. Think of any given case of dementia, and you can come up with plenty of similar ones: you have paranoids convinced that their thoughts are being read - by their TV, by aliens, by invisible beams - or that the people they see on the street are all agents. There are the people who let piles of paper and garbage crowd them out of their houses. And the obsessives convinced that they are good friends with, are going to marry, are already married to some celebrity. You'll certainly find differences among these and among the many other types. But they're variations on the same master templates, differences of degree rather than kind.

Those templates sound like archetypes. Maybe.
posted by Justin at 8:44 AM

 
TODD GITLIN, QUALITY LIBERAL: Here he is on the SLA. Via Dr. Frank, who also has some thoughts on the subject:

The SLA were indeed murderers who made no sense. But I wish someone would explain how the Weatherman's "chaosify Amerikkka" program is any less nonsensical than the SLA's "death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people." In all sincerity, I cannot tell the difference. Of course, most people involved in the New Left were harmless, idealistic if misguided, non-violent, ordinary folks-- they even occasionally made sense. The SLA monsters are indeed a "special case" in that regard. Yet as to the obscurantism and vagueness (not to mention chutzpah) noted by Gitlin, that seems to me to be the essence of the Maoist and Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of New Left activism, not some bizarre exception. And if the widespread "kill the pigs" ethos did lead some psychos to take it upon themselves actually to kill some pigs, shouldn't those who peddled and promoted that ethos take some responsibility?

Gitlin is one of those guys, like Hitchens, who shed a lot of liberal orthodoxy after the attacks. Or at least the difference between him and the liberal orthodoxy became obvious after the attacks. I wonder if his thoughts on the media have changed as well since then.
posted by Justin at 8:26 AM

 
GHOST IN THE TIME MACHINE: I think Bjorn Staerk is the last man on Earth reading Time magazine, as he consistently has the links to Time goodies. Here's an interview with one of those Saudi princes.
posted by Justin at 8:00 AM

 
IF YOU WERE CONFUSED: Jim Henley explains just who he is and who he isn't. I need to read more Gene Wolfe myself.
posted by Justin at 7:54 AM

 
BLOG THEN METABLOG: Here's Oliver Willis on the Andrew Sullivan blogger manifesto. He brings the perspective the Sullivan manifesto does lack.
posted by Justin at 7:47 AM

 
ASK THEN RECEIVE: Mark Byron has taken up the challenge of the Paul problem; his response can be found here. I knew he'd have the learned response.
posted by Justin at 7:20 AM

 
HEFNER WATCH: Relapsed Catholic sends me to this analysis of Playboy that seems out of date in spots to me --but only because it's dealing with an out of date magazine like Playboy. Still an interesting read; I get to these comments down the bottom and enjoy them where not being horrified:

Hiding in plain sight in the June 2001 issue of Philadelphia magazine is Ben Wallace's essay "The Prodigy and the Playmate." In it Sandy Bentley, the Playboy cover girl and former Hefner girlfriend (along with her twin sister Mandy), describes Hugh Hefner's current sexual practices in just enough detail to give you a good long pause:

The heterosexual icon [Hugh Hefner] . . . had trouble finding satisfaction through intercourse; instead, he liked the girls to pleasure each other while he masturbated and watched gay porn.

Yes, you read that right. There it is, attributed to someone who ought to know, the stated fact on the public record. It may seem shocking or it may seem trivial, but it amounts to a significant confirmation that Hugh Hefner embodies what his detractors have been saying for years: All pornography is ultimately homosexual. All pornography stifles the development of genuine human relationships. All pornography is a manifestation of arrested development. All pornography reduces spiritual desire to Newtonian mechanics. All pornography, indulged long enough, hollows out sex to the point where even the horniest old Viagra-stoked goat is unable to physically enjoy the bodies of nubile young females.

Ultimately, Hugh Hefner is an old joke: a solitary master baiter. Armed with two-thirds of the truth and a well-lubricated marketing machine, he has single-handedly stroked the American id into accepting his adolescent fantasy of false desire and technological gratification, a legacy which amounts to our generation's toxic dump.

Those comments about all pornography being ultimately homosexual: I mean, they're true --there's reasons why there's so much gay porn and hardly any lesbian porn-- but they only go so far; it's like saying all fratboys are really gay, or all wrestling is really gay. These things have their gay elements but to say they're gay at bottom is just silly, especially when they are used (as the article rightly points out about porn) to prove heterosexuality in many situations.

And I'm all for Hefner trashing but this guy is way overstating his importance. He was just the first; if he didn't exist, someone would've done something else Playboy-like. But this is a pretty thought-provoking read, if you've got any interest in the subject. Dig this line: "The Playboy Philosophy, which requires women to be thin, infertile, and always available, essentially requires childlessness." I would say Playboy requires women to be thin, infertile, but never available, always an unrealizable ideal --which explains the lack of genitalia in Playboy and maybe Hefner's behavior quoted above. I mean, I doubt Hustler ever retarded anyone's social growth because the ideal reader of Hustler is a solitary masturbator. (I add this because the article opens with this quote: "In launching Playboy, perhaps the smartest thing Hugh Hefner did was in establishing his personality as that of a witty, urbane sophisticate who enjoyed the company of many, many young women. After all, who knows how many fewer copies the magazine might have sold, had he instead depicted himself as a solitary masturbator?") Playboy, on the other hand, he (he is Read Mercer Schuchardt) might be right about it in terms of its negative effects, or its limits as a pornographic magazine; if you substitute "Playboy" for "pornography" in that "All pornography...." paragraph above, I might agree with him. But read it for yourself, it's good.
posted by Justin at 5:52 PM

 
MORE FROM BLOGATELLE: I keep forgetting about this but Sekimori keeps an archive of all those "What X Are You?" tests on her page. It's on the right side as you face the screen. Go find out which Evil Anime/Sesame Street/Kids In The Hall character you are.
posted by Justin at 3:08 PM

 
SILLINESS: Via Blogatelle comes this Flasherrific blatant piece of Korean anti-Ohno propaganda. It's great. I love how the conspirators against Kim Dong Sung appear to be Ohno, a French film director, and Abraham Lincoln.
posted by Justin at 3:04 PM

 
STILL RANKED: For the Jamie Sale nude searches. Yeah, you and me both. But of course she'll probably be in Playboy like ten years after any of us had an interest in seeing her naked. Typical Playboy.
posted by Justin at 2:51 PM

 
HOLY HANNAH: DC actually released an anthology of old Bizarro stories. That's so great. Bizarro stories were so interesting to me early on, since they took the established comic book order and turned it completely around, and you'd open a random Action Comics or whatever in the barber shop and there would be the Bizarro Justice League and I'd say holy crap to myself and read on, engrossed. Neat neat neat.
posted by Justin at 2:07 PM

 
LET US NOW PRAISE BEARDED SPOCKS: Like I said before, Justin Raimondo names names and we will see if his speculation is born out; the FBI is denying that Washington Times story, but that doesn't mean anything. But even the FBI has admitted the suspect is an American or at least an employee of America.

Glenn thinks I use the term "bearded Spock" to mean "bizarro," but only use the term in its original sense, to refer to denizens of a universe roughly parallel to my own where, whether by accident of history or by a subtle change in that universe's fabric --as if the very quarks and gluons found there were of a sinister material-- have turned to evil. You know, Kirk is still a womanizing asshole, Spock is still a cold, calculating logician, McCoy is still a curmudgeon, yet they are now on the side of evil and not good. It's in the same half-joking way I refer to the American Samizdat as the Legion Of Doom: people who constantly and consciously take up a contrarian position. Christopher Hitchens, by the way, is a contrarian in reference to other contrarians. It's just the science fiction/superhero comics lens by which I tend to view the world; like Charles Murtaugh, for years I read little else but those.

I mean, today Justin is actually defending Slobodan Milosevic. I guess he never read Safe Area Gorzade. All evidence suggests this. Of course, reading Justin's column makes me think he has more of a problem with double standards than anything else, but come on.

By the way, the term "bizarro" properly used refers to a parallel universe where everything is physically the reverse of our own: up is down, happy is sad, good is bad, etc., and does not refer to actual moral choices and conditions the way "bearded Spock" does. "You might be a geek if": your conception of the moral life takes the form of a Star Trek episode inside your head. I'm done.
posted by Justin at 1:56 PM

 
HOCKEY: New York Times article introducing me to Jarome Iginla, who I had never heard of before the Olympics but he's the number one goal scorer in the NHL. He's also the first black guy to play in an Olympic gold medal hockey game. Even though he looks like he's black in an Alicia Keys sense of being black. I mean, I'm a frequent participant in the American obsession with race myself, and I think calling Alicia Keys simply black is just weird. Look at her. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Hus du gezen in deine leiben, she lighter than me. Woof!
posted by Justin at 12:18 PM

 
SOMEBODY WATCHED THE GLUTTON BOWL: And it was somebody at The American Prospect? You're kidding me.

TAP also introduces me to theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who is apparently one of the more interesting people going in Christian theology today. His latest book, however, was written before the 9/11 attacks, and the pacificism he espoused may be difficult to reconcile with the actual need to defend one's self sometimes. Or one's nation; the article, by Charles Marsh, says:

It is important, too, to keep in mind that the hero of Hauerwas's book, Karl Barth, was not a pacifist; nor was his best-known student, Dietrich Bonhoeffer--arguably the Protestant church's most powerful witness in the twentieth century. Barth made it clear that if the church is faithful to the primary obligation of calling the nations to repentance, it need not be afraid of how to act in a time of international crisis. For the church that does not give easy sanction to war, that in fact constantly seeks to avoid it and proclaims peace alone as the will of God on earth, will be able in a true emergency to tell the men and women who serve the country in the military that even though they now have to kill they are not murderers, and that they "may and must," as Barth says, "do the will of God in this opus alienum of the state."

The case of Bonhoeffer is even more troubling to Hauerwas's pacifism. As one of the few Christian dissidents in Germany and a member of the resistance, Bonhoeffer abandoned his own pacifism in the face of Hitler. Or more precisely, he continued to believe that Jesus taught nonviolent resistance and that Christians were called to witness to peace, but that his historical situation required sinful action for the sake of a greater good. Aware of the human costs of inaction, Bonhoeffer risked the moral consistency of nonviolence on the wager that there is in the Bible an implicit reservation in favor of those obviously extraordinary moments in history that responsible people understand as exceptional. Responsible Christians must sometimes sin boldly. Bonhoeffer died in a concentration camp in 1945 for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. "The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask," he wrote in prison, "is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live."

Bonhoeffer is another guy I keep meaning to read, mostly because my dad tried to get me to read him as a youth and I sort of yeah, whatevered him because he was, you know, my dad. But apparently Bonhoeffer is quite the important figure within 20th century theology. I should point out that Marsh is a theology professor, like Hauerwas, so he probably brings his own biases to the table that an outsider wouldn't pick up on. But that review is an interesting review regardless of my ignorance of the subject.
posted by Justin at 11:22 AM

 
PAGING MARK BYRON: Letter Never Sent has a post on the problem of Paul to Christianity, and has some quotes supporting the argument that Paul contradicted a lot of Christ's teachings. I know this has probably been done to death within Christian circles, but perhaps Mark can hip us to what the solution to the "Paul problem" is --if there is one.
posted by Justin at 11:02 AM

 
LET'S GO CRAZY BLOGWAY STYLE: Andrea See answered the Mike Sanders "blogrolling" questions, inspiring me to answer them too. I think "blogrolling" means linking to a blog. Here we go:

1) What is my policy for adding a blogroll? And for removing? I add a blog if it's interesting and good to read and I want to keep track of it. I haven't removed anybody yet, nobody has become noninteresting.
2) Who are the candidates to blogroll? And to definitely not blogroll? I think it's mostly whim on my part. What's the difference between this question and the previous one?
3) What will be the order of the blogrolls? And the implications of change? The order refers to the alphabet that I learned in grade school. Maybe I'll organize them at some point into genres or political outlook or something, I dunno.
4) Have I captured the spirit of blogrolling? The spirit of linking to other logs is just the spirit of the Internet as revealed in a little subsection of the Internet: you bring the good stuff with a link.
5) Can I only blogroll a blogger? Who is a blogger? I can link to anybody but I like to keep the blogs separate. A blogger is anybody who posts to a single page in cyberspace that is continually revised, with old entries hopefully shunted off into some archive section.
6) Will I make friends (or enemies) with my policy? I will SMITE MY FOES with my policy.
7) Should I explicitly state my policy? No. Unless I just did.
8) Is Mike Sanders serious about this? You can find out here.
posted by Justin at 12:03 AM

 
SPEAKING OF BEARDED SPOCKS: There was a little bit of infighting in over in the American Samizdat crew lately; Kristen Anderson had the temerity to post a link to an article in support of Bjorn Lomborg. Dr. Menlo --the Lex Luthor of the group-- had to set her straight, complete with the photo of Lomborg after --I'm sorry-- dumbshits hit him in the face with a cream pie. This Lomborg thing is revealing to me the cultish aspects of environmentalism, even as they (the Greens) and Lomborg both claim to have science on their side.

The Daily Dose directs me to this slashdot review of The Skeptical Environmentalist, where it is said:

But by attacking the book and the author so shrilly, the environmental community risks its own hard-won credibility. It acts just as Lomborg accuses it, like lobbyists with an axe to grind, not cold-eyed, empirically-minded scientists. Lomborg's study has its flaws, as does any environmental study. But those flaws should be attacked on their merits alone. At its worst, The Skeptical Environmentalist merely muddies the waters of scientific and public consensus on global human environmental impact. At its best it provides a crucial reality check for those who seek profound social and economic changes in the name of preserving environmental sustainability.

As Orchid says: "I still haven't read this book yet, but anything that gets attacked this shrilly I should at least skim." I haven't read it yet either, but dang I need to --The Economist loved it.
posted by Justin at 11:28 PM

 
ANTHRAX: The Washington Times has picked up the story now, with new details:

Law enforcement authorities and leading biochemical experts familiar with the FBI's five-month investigation said agents targeted the unidentified scientist after extensive interviews with more than 300 persons associated with the government's anthrax program, although no charges have yet been filed.
The scientist was identified from a pool of about 50 researchers known to have the technical ability to produce the sophisticated weapons-grade anthrax strain found in the letters sent to Florida, New York, Connecticut and Washington, D.C., the sources said.
The FBI has known for more than three months that the person responsible for sending the letters was a U.S. citizen and, according to the sources, probably a former scientist connected to the government's biodefense program.

Gosh. I should point out that when I asked why nobody was blogging this, Justin Raimondo wrote in to say he was. He even names names. So he is on the anthrax beat, but I wrote back to say he couldn't be blogging this, since antiwar.com isn't a blog but more of a online magazine. But he is covering the subject, days before Drudge was.

Ken says that Andrew Dodge says getting Instapunditted is like getting knighted in the blog world, but I think getting e-mail from Justin constitutes a similiar honor. In a bearded Spock kind of way.
posted by Justin at 11:05 PM

 
GETTING OLD: Inspired by that anarchists video game I went into the Toys R Us and tried playing this warplane flying game for the XBox that was sitting there, and crashed within three seconds. I felt like my parents playing Pac Man and not knowing which blotch on the screen was theirs. You kids stay off my lawn.
posted by Justin at 8:35 PM

 
I TRAVEL THE BLOGWAYS: Amygdala rocks. And I'm starting to dig the high-concept east coast/west coast blog, in which one guy blogs from New York and the other from San Francisco, even though the whole thing never fits in my window. They have a ton of links too. Ken is right about the blog quality explosion.
posted by Justin at 7:28 PM

 
KWAN: The Rabbit has the vitriol and the voices from God on the subject that we were all looking for. A sample:

And a great cry of "motherfucker" was heard across the land, and the people did weep, and tear their hair."Motherfucker!" they said once more, and raised their fists to the sky, questioning the Lord, "Why another preteen squealer, Lord? Why?"

Ah, sweet sweet bitterness, eases the pain.
posted by Justin at 1:10 AM

 
DALLAS MAVERICKS: Beat the Kings with their all new, all different lineup. There's a Sportsfilter thread on that trade, raising the prospect of David Stern having to award Mark Cuban the trophy.

Meanwhile, Ken Layne some good points on the Iverson/Bryant debate. Ken thinks that a poor kid emulating Kobe has a chance at being successful at any various walks of life --due to Kobe's sophistication-- whereas a poor kid emulating Iverson only has a chance at being an NBA basketball player, which is obviously unlikely for most poor kids (or anybody). But I think poor kids are pretty unlikely to emulate Kobe, who has never to my knowledge been a poor kid; he isn't exactly from Philadelphia but from Lower Merion, which is right on the edge of the city and a pretty wealthy area, I think. There's nothing in Kobe for a poor kid to emulate, whereas Iverson is a more familiar figure. Maybe his way of "keeping it real" while being a millionaire is sort of a put on at this point, but AI is only going with what he knows. You can fault him for not moving past that yet, but he's less of a jerk than when he started, he's young yet, and --as Ken points out-- he always plays like he means it. I think he's the more interesting player out of the two of them.
posted by Justin at 1:06 AM

 
SLOBOGOOGLING: My first try, # 456, nets bupkis. So does my second, # 629. Ditto third for # 907. I'm not very good at this. One more try: well, there's something at # 1147 but I'm not sure any of them are the right ones. I give.
posted by Justin at 4:51 PM

 
DIGITAL EQUIVALENT OF THE ETERNAL TOILET PAPER DEBATE: You know, whether you let the toilet paper hang forward or let it hang from the back? Has to be links open in same window versus links open in new window. I am congenitally unable to enjoy links opening in new windows. I have no rational defense for this. I also prefer the toilet paper hanging forward, if there's a correlation there.
posted by Justin at 4:32 PM

 
TANGENTAL: My discovery of Old Man Murray leads me to belatedly discover Erik Walpow's gamer's love of America:

I am a gamer. That means I've become too frail to enact any kind of real justice, and so providing real justice will just have to be delegated to those more suited to it. My talent is sitting alone and amusing myself by pretending to be Sylvester Stallone pretending to be Rambo. And if that hasn't made me actually able to eat things that would make a billy goat puke, it has at least transformed me into the perfect weapon for showering America's enemies with towering acts of simulated revenge. What's the point? I am quite possibly the weakest non-baby male in the country, so if I can find a way to strike back, then so can you.

Using the world league option of NHL 2002, my plan was to beat an Arab-Muslim country so bad that they'd be humiliated forever. In preemptive open defiance of what I was sure would be protests from Muslim groups, I christened my plan Operation Infinite Goals.

The whole thing is pretty funny.
posted by Justin at 4:18 PM

 
MORE ON CORPORATE COOPTING OF THE COUNTERCULTURE: Dave Tepper directs me to this Salon piece by Wagner James Au on State Of Emergency, a video game where you get to fight the faceless evil Corporation in the guise of a street protestor. Says Erik Wolpaw of Old Man Murray:

"If there's one message you can take away from SoE," says Wolpaw of Old Man Murray, "I think it's that capitalism has finally, irrevocably won. Using advanced technology developed in Japan and financed by a publishing company in the U.S., a group of smart people in Scotland has created what's possibly the most useless consumer product of all time ... Playing State of Emergency is like spiking the ball in the end zone of competing ideologies. Feel the burn, Marxism!"

Au also picks up on the corporate funding of anti-globalization angle. It's funny, back in the day I would've read Salon first thing in the morning but now I read a bunch of blogs --so I need Dave Tepper or somebody to tell me to go read Salon. Perhaps the quality of Salon has fallen off as much as people say it has, but maybe, now that the Internet hype is gone, there's less of an intimidation factor at work here where you don't feel like you need a big flashtacular site or have delusions of dotcom big bucks to get yourself yammering on the Internet and there's an inverse relationship between the dotcom bust and the blog explosion. It might be true for me, anyway.
posted by Justin at 4:13 PM

 
ANIMATION: Via Little Red Bucket of Hate comes this appreciation of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. The appreciation, by Tim Goodman, errs when it says SpongeBob Squarepants isn't meant for adults --it's meant for anyone with a bizarre sense of humor. Which is probably a lot of people; watch a little SpongeBob, man, you're hooked.
posted by Justin at 3:38 PM

 
RC3.ORG: Rafe Colburn has a neat idea on how to improve Olympic coverage: don't give one network exclusive rights, but allow the various channels to bid on individual sports. That would be super cool, we could get the complete curling coverage on A&E, all the women's hockey games on Lifetime, etc. Coverage would only improve.
posted by Justin at 12:37 PM

 
OLYMPICS SCANDAL WATCH: The Russians are only still there because the hockey team has a chance at a medal and a chance to beat we Americans. The Koreans are thinking about suing the short track refs in US court. In a case where I don't think anybody impartial thinks they have a leg to stand on, the Russians are protesting Irina Slutskaya's silver medal. Bullcrap, Sara Hughes had everybody beat last night. And there's a shifty rumor that only Drudge has that the US women's hockey team stomped on the Maple Leaf before the game, which Julie Chu denies. Maybe Hayley Wickenheiser made it up to fire her own team up, which is the theory Chu believes. True or not, it didn't work for the US women. Read the whole Drudge post, these two teams really hate each other.
posted by Justin at 12:28 PM

 
INSOLVENT REPUBLIC OF JAPAN WATCH: Electrolite brings the goods.
posted by Justin at 12:07 PM

 
RATINGS RANTINGS: Drudge is reporting that figure skating kicked the crap out of everything else, "MORE THAN 4 X AUDIENCE OF NEAREST COMPETITOR" in Drudgespeak. That means figure skating kicked the crud out of The Glutton Bowl, which is a good thing. Not that competitve eating is bad, but thinking that you're going to draw viewers off the highlight of the Olympics by putting on fat guys stuffing their faces is an idiotic programming decision. "Hey, guys won't watch ladies figures skating, let's bring in the hot dog eating contest." Schmucks.
posted by Justin at 12:05 PM

 
ANOTHER MONONOKE IN STATURE: The latest Hiyao Miyazaki epic, Spirited Away, has bested his previous one, Princess Mononoke, for box office gold in Japan. Both beat Titanic, I think. I'm so there for this one.
posted by Justin at 11:47 AM

 
MORE ANTHRAX: Blowback has a link to more on the anthrax attack: inside job theory:

An advocate for the control of biological weapons who has been gathering information about last autumn's anthrax attacks said yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly letters.

But the FBI might be "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with "secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.

Rosenberg goes on:

"We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the Washington, D.C., area," Rosenberg said. "He had reason for travel to Florida, New Jersey and the United Kingdom. . . . There is also the likelihood the perpetrator made the anthrax himself. He grew it, probably on a solid medium and weaponized it at a private location where he had accumulated the equipment and the material.

"We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it's likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," Rosenberg said. "And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.

"I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made that he just disappears from view," Rosenberg said.

"This, I think, would be a really serious outcome that would send a message to other potential terrorists, that (they) would think they could get away with it.

"So I hope that doesn't happen, and that is my motivation to continue to follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and pressure on the FBI to follow up and publicly prosecute the perpetrator."

Here's the Google file on Rosenberg. Why isn't this story being blogged more?
posted by Justin at 11:05 AM

 
NORTH KOREA WATCH: Bjorn Staerk is on that beat, providing links to Kim Jong-Il's birthday party and an interview with one of his bodyguards. Kim's, not Bjorn's. Check out the dirt the bodyguard has on the Dear Leader:

Kim's real partying took place at one of his two residences in Pyongyang, where he could drink, act the big shot and get close to pretty girls. The beverage of choice was Paekdu Mountain Bulnoju (or Eternal Youth) a fiery liquor made from rice. Female band members and dancers wore micro-minis and tank tops and the men gave them drinks if they performed well. The women were trained not to drink too much but the men, including Kim, usually ended the evening trashed.

During the working day, the drinking started again, sometimes as early as noon (although Kim didn't get sloshed at the office). Kim became furious if he wasn't the center of attention: he got upset if he saw people shaking hands while he was in the room, scolding them for ignoring him. When Kim was in a good mood, he would shower his guards with gifts: deer and birds he hunted and sometimes pineapples, bananas and mandarin oranges—all rare luxuries.

Dear Leader sounds like a fabulous job, except for the hideous repression of your citizens. What I don't get about the bodyguard is that he's just working a day job in South Korea now. Wouldn't you think Seoul would need him for intelligence on the North or something? Or is North Korea so obviously weird that you don't need intelligence to tell you that? Maybe that's the South's plan, waiting for Pyongyang to topple itself over so there's a minimum of armed conflict. I guess.
posted by Justin at 10:44 AM

 
THE SPONTANEITY OF CHINESE PRESIDENTS: Funny-cause-it's-true article on Jiang Zemin being totally baffled by having to answer spontaneous questions from foreign reporters. They ask him twice about oppression of Christians within his borders and he just ignores them. "Rather implausibly, he also claimed to have no influence over who is imprisoned in China and why." Smirk. Via Drudge.
posted by Justin at 10:27 AM

 
ON THE PLUS SIDE: The Insolvent Republic is number 10 for this search.
posted by Justin at 12:30 AM

 
AND IN THE ROLE OF DAN MARINO THIS EVENING: Once again Michelle Kwan loses to a screeching teenage moron, a girl who's never known disappointment or heartbreak or anything. This sucks.
posted by Justin at 12:09 AM

 
ALL YOU ZOMBIES: Here's this New York Times article of a few days back with the great title Hijacking the Brain Circuits With a Nickel Slot Machine. If you've got an addiction, your dopamine system could be out of whack. And it all happens unconsciously --hence the zombies reference.
posted by Justin at 8:24 PM

 
WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO BE A PROTESTOR TOO?: Andrea See argues that NGOs need a good marketing strategy if they're ever going to be taken seriously. She says:

If the corporates can co-opt the 'hipness' of the activist counterculture, why can't the activists fight fire with fire? There should, no, must, be a plan to work out the brand image of each movement, and a co-operative effort to link their brands under one cohesive 'best interests of the world' global brand (where the individual brands are seen as discrete but equally important extensions). Maybe it's cool to be part of a subculture, where the mainstream just doesn't get it, but if we truly desire change in our space, we need to be more pacifist-guerilla marketing about it.

It's sort of a practical suggestion for the protest kids (as Matt Welch always calls them) that marketing is a potent and possibly non-evil or at least morally neutral way to reach people. I would add to this Matt's suggestion that protest kids start reading The Economist.
posted by Justin at 7:16 PM

 
IMMIGRATION: There's this TNR piece that isn't making a ton of sense to me. Richard Weissbourd writes:

The longer immigrant children live in this country, the worse, on average, their health, their attitude, and their school performance. What's more, with each subsequent generation, immigrant children do worse and worse. On average, first-generation children function at significantly higher levels than do typical American-born children. But, by the third generation, that advantage is gone. To take just one example, the school performance of first-generation Chinese teenagers--one of the highest performing immigrant groups--markedly exceeds white teens. By the third generation, the difference disappears: English proficiency and school performance are inversely related. In other words, while once upon a time people came to the United States expecting to make better lives for their children, today the sad fact is that the more Americanized immigrant children become, the less successful they are.

Once you get outside the first generation you're talking about actual mom-and-apple-pie Americans --so of course they're not going to have the competitive advantage of their forebears' willingness to take a cruddy job because it was better than what they left behind. It's like what the guy's arguing is that Americanization is an insidious process, which, I mean, fine, he can have that opinion and everything, but he doesn't need to tie it in with immigration.
posted by Justin at 6:35 PM

 
BEARDED SPOCK REFERENCE: Right here.
posted by Justin at 6:00 PM

 
CURLING A GO GO: It has spread to Philadelphia. I'm envisioning a future where curling ice sheets are as commonplace as bowling alleys or pool halls. The article pegs curling as a definite growth sport and you doubt them but then wonder why was curling all over the tv? So maybe that rundown bowling alley on the outskirts of town is going to have a few ice sheets in the future. It could happen.
posted by Justin at 5:52 PM

 
DRAT: We lost the curling bronze. Bummer.
posted by Justin at 5:44 PM

 
WHODA THUNK IT: Adam Vinatieri is the Patriots' franchise player. Yes, he's the kicker. That's so great.
posted by Justin at 5:35 PM

 
DECLINE AND FALLING OF SCIENCE FICTION: Judith Berman issues a genre call to arms. A sample:

Baby boomers--the cohort for whom Golden Age authors evoke fond recollections of childhood--currently dominate sf production and consumption. This supersized slice of the demographic pie has exerted hegemony over the pace and direction of cultural change for decades, but the Age of the Internet and the New Economy have, it seems to me, begun to dethrone them in favor of the 20- and 30-somethings who are as comfortable in the seething, mutating cultural ferment of the web as fish are in the sea. The Internet is perhaps the best symbol of everything disquieting to boomers (and their elders) about the present, including the generational divide with respect to technology. This divide is the subject of the old joke about the 8-year-old being the one who programs the family VCR. Part of what the joke expresses is the fear that members of the younger generation, at ease with all new technology, are growing up strangers to their parents.

Via actual science fiction writer Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.
posted by Justin at 5:15 PM

 
WEIRDNESS: I keep seeing this quote in the short track reports:

''It's absurd that the Korean was disqualified,'' said Italy's Fabio Carta, who placed fourth behind China's Li Jiajun and Canada's Mark Gagnon. ''I don't know what happened. We should use a rifle on Ohno.''

What is he saying? Does he want Ohno shot?
posted by Justin at 1:40 PM

 
UTAH WATCH: Via Fark comes the story that Utah leads the nation in prescription antidepressant drug use. The article indulges in the usual sociocultural explanations:

Few here question the veracity of the study, which was a tabulation of prescription orders, said Dr. Curtis Canning, president of the Utah Psychiatric Assn. But trying to understand the "why" has puzzled many, he said.

"The one true answer is we don't know," said Canning, who has a private practice in Logan. "I have some hunches.

"In Mormondom, there is a social expectation--particularly among the females--to put on a mask, say 'Yes' to everything that comes at her and hide the misery and pain. I call it the 'Mother of Zion' syndrome. You are supposed to be perfect because Mrs. Smith across the street can do it and she has three more kids than you and her hair is always in place. I think the cultural issue is very real. There is the expectation that you should be happy, and if you're not happy, you're failing."

The happy thing is an American ideal, but carried to the nth degree by social pressure. But I'm baffled. Mormons can't have alcoholor caffeine but they can have all the CVS pharmacy drugs they want? There's your explanation right there: no caffeine no beer make Homer pester his family practitioner for the sweet sweet legal drugs. There is probably a legalize pot argument here too but its tangental, as if you could prescribe pot Mormons would be able to smoke it. I mean, is that the difference? You can only take scientifically verifiable and approved by the FDA drugs? Or what? Another tidbit:

Utah also leads the nation in the use of narcotic painkillers such as codeine and morphine-based drugs, the study found, and is ranked seventh in total prescriptions overall. Kentucky ranked first.

Church fathers, let them have coffee. They need it.
posted by Justin at 1:19 PM

 
AND ANOTHER OLYMPIC POST: We as a nation are really kicking the crap out of those aforementioned economists' predictions. They had us at 21 total this year and we've got 26 and I'm guessing with more short track, hockey and figure skating to come, we've got at least another five medals coming. So why were they wrong this year? Did they fail to anticipate us inventing and rehabbing and getting female versions of sports in place? Sort of a version of that Paul Romer thing about economists failing to appreciate the possibilities of new things being discovered. (Read those articles if you can get past the smirky picture.) Maybe.
posted by Justin at 12:50 PM

 
OLYMPICS SCANDAL WATCH: The Lithuanian ice dancers had their appeal denied. The South Koreans are up in arms about the Ohno gold, like it'll do any good. If this was wrestling Ohno would make a grandstand challenge to Kim; Kim would come out and either tease another race or get his butt whupped for the majority of the race before pulling off the victory by clearly cheating outside the vision of the referee. Sadly, this is less entertaining than wrestling --though I'm still watching.
posted by Justin at 12:35 PM

 
NEW HITCH: Hitch on the n-word. He's a little obtuse this time, I think he's arguing in part for keeping the n-word a bad word because otherwise we wouldn't understand Mark Twain. He also makes the distinction between the n-word and nigga, the former an epithet, the latter adopted ironically by hiphop types yet still banned on the radio. Neat.
posted by Justin at 11:43 AM

 
MORE ANTHRAX: American Samizdat also has the link to this little-blogged New Scientist piece on who sent the anthrax around and killed that National Enquirer editor and that nurse in New York City and those postal workers. Their analysis is it was an inside job, due to the strains that were used being available at only a few places. Someone working at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases is a good possibility:

One more clue points to someone who worked at USAMRIID itself. A US marine base got a letter in late September, after the anthrax letters were posted but before Stevens was diagnosed, calling an Egyptian-born scientist, Ayaad Assaad, a bioterrorist.

Assaad was laid off by USAMRIID in 1997, and was harassed while he worked there. He was cleared of the bioterrorist charge. Barbara Rosenberg, a bioweapons expert for the Federation of American Scientists, suspects the letter was the real attacker's attempt to frame Assaad by capitalising on anti-Muslim feeling after 11 September. It revealed an insider's familiarity with USAMRIID.

The attacker also masqueraded, unconvincingly, as a Muslim in the anthrax letters themselves. This could be a clue to his motivations. If he wished to scale up US military action against Iraq, he almost succeeded-many in Washington tried hard to see Saddam Hussein's hand in the attacks.

If he wished merely to make the US pour billions into biodefence, he did succeed. And as a US bioweapons expert, he might already be reaping the increased funding and prestige that now goes with the job.

Actual conspiracy theory stuff here.
posted by Justin at 11:02 AM

 
HISTORY: The American Samizdat legion --just because they're eeeeevil-- dredge up this article from our idiot past on how to tell Japanese from Chinese people. Except the article doesn't use the word Japanese, obviously. By the way, why are they called American Samizdat? Are they spreading the American intelligence like their fellow samizdatists do for libertarianism?
posted by Justin at 10:43 AM

 
CURLING: The US women lost, but they can still play for a medal today.
posted by Justin at 2:01 AM

 
SHORT TRACK: Is losing its charm for me after the guy who was across the finish line first was disqualified because Ohno drew the foul. It looked terrible on television because the foul was not obvious and the crowd started booing when it looked like the Korean guy won. But then a voice came over the loudspeaker and gave Ohno the gold. It was very WWF. And NBC couldn't be bothered to put on the women's 3000 meter relay, which is supposed to be the most roller derby-like of the short track events. At least they're putting on all the hockey games.
posted by Justin at 1:38 AM

 
GOOGLEWHACKING: Is it a fair whack if one of the words is pig Latin? Probably not.
posted by Justin at 1:31 AM

 
HOLY CRUD: Belarus beats Sweden. The winning goal went in off the goalie's head. Garsh.
posted by Justin at 12:41 AM

 
KEN LAYNE: Has picked up on the Tom Tomorrow blog. (If you go there now there's a Dubya pinup.) Ken makes the Tomorrow/Rall comparison: "Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tomorrow) takes on a lot of the same targets as Ted Rall, but Perkins' cartoons are funny." S'funny, I think back in the day when the Comics Journal interviewed one of those two he (whichever one it was) said people often got the two of them confused, probably because they appear in the same places (free alt weeklies) and have a similar spare, nuance-via-repetition style. Ken also says, regarding Rall: "A cartoon should be funny." I'm probably in the minority here (and I've said this before) but I think Rall is funny sometimes --the one where he gets run over by Art Spiegelman's SUV is hilarious. For me the "cartoon should be funny" criticism applies to Lynda Barry, whom some people absolutely love but I've never been able to get into because I never thought her stuff was that....funny. For good non-funny comics check out Palestine, the amazing journey into the mind of a geek called Mail-Order Bride and everything Harvey Pekar ever did.
posted by Justin at 1:24 PM

 
THE GREAT WHITE NONTHREATENING NORTH: Yes, Wurtzel is nuts, she's made a career off that. But here's why she thought she could express herself:

Wurtzel acknowledges she'd never dare say such things in the U.S., noting, "You can't tell people this. I'm talking to you because you're Canadian."

Which reminds me of this recent post by Olympic blogger b-may:

A Canadian skater kept approaching the stairs up to the ice, only to be told that, for security purposes, we had to stop everyone, even if we knew them:
"I'm not a security threat: I'm Canadian"

The Can-Am consensus appears to be: Canadians? They wouldn't hurt a fly. Is there another country whose national identity is based on being non-threatening? Well, probably.
posted by Justin at 12:54 PM

 
FAKE CURRENCY WATCH: Redsugar Muse has the link to the Harry Potter money converter. It's a totally literal conversion based on the UPC on the Harry Potter books and unreflective of any actual virtual economy like that of EverQuest.
posted by Justin at 12:35 PM

 
IF I EVER BECOME THE UNABLOGGER: The site will be called Instapoondit.com. Get it? GET IT? I mean, it took me years to get the "male plane" joke in Three Amigos....
posted by Justin at 12:25 PM

 
SPEAKING OF PUCK HOG: He links to this Faceoff.com piece on the Columbus Blue Jackets, who are making money in the face of the NHL having a crappy product.
posted by Justin at 12:01 PM

 
BY THE WAY: Thanks to Charles for the kind words on my thing on that Peter Lawler thing. In a later post he reminds us all of the existence of his wife's sports blog, which is sadly rarely updated. Which is a shame, the world needs more sports blogs; I love Puck Hog and Sportsfilter, but could always read more.
posted by Justin at 11:59 AM

 
HEY: I'm back and I actually read the Charles Murtaugh invasion of National Review. Murtaugh on cloned kids, as any clone would have to be at some point:

A cloned child, made rather than begotten, is a pet: His or her "breed" picked out for its "unique characteristics" just as a border collie is chosen for its intelligence and a poodle because it doesn't shed much hair.

Our children do not live for our pleasure. They are not pets, and we are not their masters. In addition to warming the hearts of their owners, cloned pets may serve as living, breathing reminders that the bonds of family life are not simply psychological leashes.

Glenn Reynolds promises revenge on Charles for these transgressions --wait, no, he just said he'd rebut them mildly. For my own take on this, I think Charles' points are sort of leading me to wonder what kind of parents are going to be the ones who choose cloning for their reproductive option. I mean, they're either going to be high-profile adventurer-tycoon types (like the father in Beggars In Spain) or people really emotionally stuck on their own genome --both types not what you'd call ideal parents, if you have an ideal for parents. To say the same thing a different way: it'll be your traditional techmonkey early adopters --the laserdisc buyers of reproductive tech-- and people really caught on a memory of someone they love or once loved. An odd set of people creating a set of people who have to be raised by the odd set of people. But hey, nobody ever said technology was going to eliminate the creation of new freaks --Brave New World dystopic visions or not.

An aside: Brave New World is the most tossed-around book that I have never read. That or 1984, but I've read 1984, clocks striking thirteen and all that. But Brave New World is a term comprehensible outside of its origins at this point, like lilliputian or something, so I don't feel that bad about using it in a sentence. (Why do you say Orwellian but not Huxleyan? Maybe because there's more than one Huxley.) I should probably stop proclaiming my own ignorance and just read the stupid thing.
posted by Justin at 11:52 AM

 
I, BLOGGIUS: First, Vehrs. Then, Layne. And now ---Murtaugh.
posted by Justin at 11:13 AM

 
TEE HEE: Hlatky on Wurtzel.
posted by Justin at 11:03 AM

 
SPEAKING OF MY ADOLESCENCE: Also via Fark is this story of Hasbro --my favorite toy company of my Rhode Island youth-- trying to steal some kid's domain name. The writer, John Hawkins, compares Hasbro to the mafia for trying to bully this kid out of his dinobot.org address. Jerks.
posted by Justin at 11:01 AM

 
FA FA FA --I THINK: Globe And Mail story on a new security scanner that acts like you wished those X-ray specs in the Johnson-Smith catalog worked:

ABC's TechTV recently reported that one system being studied is a holographic scanner capable of producing 3D, computer-generated, fully nude images of people who pass through the device.

The report said a circular Holographic Imaging System has been in development at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Kennewick, Wash., since 1989. The FAA is considering the scanner as a next-generation replacement for magnetic scanners now used in U.S. airports.

Although it can't produce a skeletal image the way an X-ray does, the scanner would produce images that would leave little to the imagination.

While effective, the technology raises major privacy concerns. Even at a low resolution, an operator can see not only concealed weapons but also the entire surface of the naked body, according to TechTV's report. It is safe to assume that most people would object to a virtual strip-search every time they travelled on an airplane.

Via Fark. All my adolescent fantasies are coming true. Except the one involving Deborah Norville. Unless I'm flying with her. Never mind.
posted by Justin at 10:57 AM

 
FLIT: Bruce is still following the troops in Afghanistan, you see, and he links this New York Times piece to prove it. We bombed Afghanistan again but not for the usual reasons: "The strikes appeared to differ from previous American bombing raids in Afghanistan because, according to warlords in the region, they were aimed at controlling clashes among militia forces, and not at destroying the Taliban or Al Qaeda, the focus of American attacks since the first bombing raids on Oct. 7." Which leads Bruce to comment: "A little known fact of wars in Afghanistan: the big defeats never come during the initial invasion. They always come during prolonged periods of using foreign military resources to prop up domestic regimes." As Bruce says, "ominous."
posted by Justin at 10:49 AM

 
DAZE READER: Has picked up on the interblog porn debate. Go there and scroll down, it's there.
posted by Justin at 10:38 AM

 
DILFER --NO, REALLY, DILFER: Ben Domenech sends me to this Len Pasquaralli column on the fine football player who is Trent Dilfer, Superbowl winner, winner of 19 of his last 20 starts, and player for three different teams in three years.
posted by Justin at 7:05 PM

 
NEW ANNE APPLEBAUM: It is the rare Foreigners that isn't about foreigners, but rather on Colin Powell's approach to them. Applebaum usually has a different take on whatever she's talking about, which is a good thing; her take on Powell is one I think only she would point out:

Unlike some other secretaries of state I can think of, he hasn't gone out of the way to court the limelight—which means that when he does speak, people listen. More to the point, it also turns out that he has a special skill: He is extremely good at speaking to foreigners. In particular, he is extremely good at explaining the more unilateralist-sounding bits of Bush's foreign policy to foreigners—those bits, in other words, that he is widely thought to oppose—in language they can understand.


posted by Justin at 7:00 PM

 
WOW: One passionate defense of Utah begats another.
posted by Justin at 5:55 PM

 
SO WHERE WERE YOU WHEN BLOGGER WENT DOWN?: What I do is I surf on over to oliverwillis.com or serialdeviant.org(y) or Boing Boing or Blather and delve via their links into the mysteeeeerious pre-Instapundit bloggerverse, where the HTML non-simps live. Apparently these non-simps can manipulate pictures and fonts and such and actually change the look of their blog. I mean, wow.
posted by Justin at 5:26 PM

 
CAN'T KEEP A GOOD NEOCON DOWN: Interesting Weekly Standard article by Ethan Gutmann on the Chinese internet whose value as a channel for huddled masses yearning to breathe free has been choked off:

Before the crackdown one could escape and surf anonymously in a cybercaf or use a proxy server--another computer that acts as an intermediary between surfers and websites, helping to hide their web footprints and evade the filters. Not surprisingly, the most common search words in China were not "Britney" and "hooters," but "free" and "proxy." Fully 10 percent of Chinese users--about two million people--used proxies regularly in an attempt to circumvent government controls. In what Michael calls "the first sign of cleverness" by the government, a proxy pollution campaign began last spring when the Chinese authorities either developed or imported a system that sniffs the networks for signs of proxies. A user, frantically typing in proxy addresses until he finds one that isn't blocked, effectively provides the government with a tidy blacklist. After a few of these tedious sessions, many of my Chinese friends simply gave up climbing over the firewall. For a small fee, expat users could turn to a web-based proxy browser, such as Anonymizer. But credit cards are effectively blocked for Chinese citizens. Just for good measure, Anonymizer was finally blocked as well.

Good thing we have Peek-A-Booty now. Via kuro5hin.
posted by Justin at 4:35 PM

 
TEMPLATE: If I wasn't an HTML simp, my blog would look a little like this. The color scheme and the Benevolent Leaders, I mean.

UPDATE: Or like this.
posted by Justin at 4:06 PM

 
POWER OF IDLENESS: One of those screensavers that crunches numbers when it's on actually discovered something, according to the New Scientist. Well, actually, what it did was narrow down possible drugs that could be used as a cure for anthrax to a manageable number. Says the article:

Oxford's result is a major coup for the new field of distributed processing, in which PC users donate their computer downtime to crunch data on a high profile project, like running the SETI alien signal hunting program.

Writing on the university's website, head of computational chemistry Graham Richards described the anthrax result as unprecedented. "The realm of life sciences is in for a radical shift in its approach to drug discovery," he predicts.

Of course there's a bit of controversy as the people who had these screensavers didn't know the numbers were being switched from cancer numbers to anthrax numbers. But now they're back to cancer numbers, I guess. It took them four weeks to do this anthrax thing.
posted by Justin at 3:25 PM

 
IOC NO FUN WATCH: They won't let this guy race his 9/11 themed skeleton sled. No fun at all. When that was true about the NFL (I'm not sure it still is true) you could call it the No Fun League; with the IOC you get....Intolerant Of Comedy. Or anything else. Hey, I saw about a zillion swooshes this week --how are those legal?

From the same article, a comment on skeleton: "Many see the sport as dangerous and those who race as crazed adrenaline freaks."
posted by Justin at 3:08 PM

 
DORKITAL DIVIDE: I have a feeling that it says something about you if you use the word meme a lot or not, but I'm not sure what.
posted by Justin at 1:34 PM

 
DIVERSIONS: There must be some What X Are You? generator out there because I've been seeing more of these lately. Here's the Sesame Street one. Via Blogatelle. I've seen in the past couple days tests for John Cusack characters and Office Space characters too.
posted by Justin at 1:06 PM

 
COOL NEW COLLABABLOG: Sekimori of Blogatelle points out her dream blog, Soul Illustrations --dream blog like dream journal; it's a blog where the collaborators record their dreams. Neat. Just like Rarebit Fiends, by one of my comics faves Rick Veitch.
posted by Justin at 12:51 PM

 
IT HAPPENED AGAIN: Kenyan lioness adopts another baby antelope. Her last one, you may recall, got eaten by another lion. But her antelope-love is no fluke:

When the lioness adopted her first calf last month, animal behaviourists said she had probably mistaken it for a lion cub. But on Friday she showed full awareness of the calf's species, allowing its real mother to feed it before chasing her away.

The bad news is if she keeps protecting the little thing it'll starve. I guess she's not consistently letting it feed from its real mother. Via the evpsych list.
posted by Justin at 11:50 AM

 
LITTLE SANITY: Digs up the prescient Paglia quote.
posted by Justin at 11:11 AM

 
MODERN LIFE: While I was over at ABC I found a pair of stories about Modern Living: this one on women postponing childbirth and this one on couples choosing to remain childless. Both get mileage off the idea of "having it all" and how possible that really is. The latter has a little bit on the highly weird pro-childlessness types who call the child-bearing "breeders" --just as an example of the fringe opinions you'd get with any group of people. The former is a little more hopeful as the woman they profile is sort of hopeful about being able to change the workplace eventually so having a kid doesn't hurt somebody's professional life. I guess that's the idea of "having it all," though squeezing a kid in there on the side sounds like the kind of thing that's going to damage the kid. But, then again, kids are more resilient than we usually think. Interesting stuff.
posted by Justin at 11:00 AM

 
NEWS TO ANNOY: Little AP thing on which president Americans think was the best:

Lincoln was first among whites, but second among blacks, who overwhelmingly chose Clinton as the greatest president. One of Lincoln's best known achievements was freeing the slaves during the Civil War. Roosevelt was the leader among those 65 and older.

Via Drudge. Here's the ABC story.
posted by Justin at 10:41 AM

 
FOOTBALL HELMETS: This Sportsfilter post reminds me of this old Dean Rasmussen piece on the aesthetics of football helmets.
posted by Justin at 10:10 AM

 
CURLING: Richard Bennett has the rundown on the American women reaching the final four and the elimination of the men's team.
posted by Justin at 9:27 AM

 
MORE MUSIC LISTS: Dave Tepper has one that he hasn't named yet. Start here and scroll up. Unlike the Dido Demographic, this is a list of albums that Dave thinks you actually should own, and not a list of albums whose presence in your collection indicates a high degree of faux-hipsterism.
posted by Justin at 9:07 AM

 
STANLEY KAUFFMAN: I like his reviews on TNR and everything, but it's 2002 and he's seeing his first anime? How did he miss Princess Mononoke? Which got a ton of hype.
posted by Justin at 3:49 PM

 
MORE FREAKY FUTURISTIC WEAPONS: AC-130s will soon be equipped with lasers "that can shoot down missiles, punch holes in aircraft and knock out ground radar stations." That's what this article said with typical British journalistic hyperbole. Via Next Right.

posted by Justin at 3:20 PM

 
MARYLAND BEATS DUKE: There are few more satisfying victories in sports than Maryland over Duke, and few greater sports hatreds than mine for Duke in March.
posted by Justin at 3:13 PM

 
I JUST NOTICED THIS NOW: But the Interesting Monstah had the Valentine's Day posts I was looking for.
posted by Justin at 3:12 PM

 
SNEAKING SUSPICIONS: Fritz Schrank counters the Dido Demographic with his own Out of Touch Bunch Music Test. All I have off that list is the Talking Heads album, so I am neither Out Of Touch nor Hipper Than You. I just don't have enough CDs.
posted by Justin at 2:11 PM

 
SPORTS METAPHORS: If you're keeping score at home, short track equals NASCAR and figure skating equals pro wrestling. There you are.
posted by Justin at 2:03 PM

 
MORE ON STEVEN MARBURY: ESPN has something:

In the midst of all the shock and disgust, Bradbury kept circling the ice, wearing the look of a child on Christmas. He had been blessed with not one, but two rounds of sheer dumb luck. In the semis, he also was far behind the leaders, but survived a crash 10 meters before the finish line.

Now he had won his country's first-ever Winter Olympic gold medal. He skated numbly around the oval to foundation-rumbling boos. He konked himself lightly in the head with his fist, as if he was checking to make sure he was awake. Then he looked up and pointed at two Aussie journalists who were up out of their seats, cheering him on.

Later, as he sang his national anthem during the medal ceremony, Bradbury couldn't wipe the smirk off his face.

"What a story we've got," one Aussie reporter exclaimed to his fellow writers as they waited for Bradbury in the mixed zone.

"Our first Winter gold medal ever?" another replied, sucking in a laugh.

"We're working with the French judge," joked another.

So does the Sydney Morning Herald, which points out that:

Commentators for NBC, host broadcaster of the Games, argued for a replay, pointing out an Australian, Jim Hewish, was race referee and that four of the five competitors were brought down on the final bend, leaving Bradbury to coast home.

But that's b.s. since Hewish restarted a race earlier that, if it had been left like it came out, would have benefited the Australians. This comment, which follows the above in the Herald, is also b.s.:

The complaints are echoes of the pro-North American media campaign which resulted in Skate-Gate and a promotion of silver medal-winning pairs skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier to the gold alongside their Russian colleagues on Saturday.

Whatever. Tim Blair has comments too and is also down on the crowd for booing Marbury. He also reminds me that Ohno himself didn't seem disappointed in the least when they interviewed him afterwards; he said, without bitterness, "I skated the race of my life, and I got silver."
posted by Justin at 12:04 PM

 
MATT WELCH: Actually gets paid to write and does so well in Reason, explaining the events and figures behind the "1.5 million Iraqi children killed by sanctions" story. Here he is on why sanctions are a bad idea in general:

Yet the basic argument against all economic sanctions remains: namely, that they tend to punish civilians more than governments and to provide dictators with a gift-wrapped propaganda tool. Any visitor to Cuba can see within 24 hours the futility of slapping an embargo on a sheltered population that is otherwise inclined to detest its government and embrace its yanqui neighbors. Sanctions give anti-American enclaves, whether in Cairo or Berkeley or Peshawar, one of their few half-convincing arguments about evil U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War.

Reason also has some new Peter Bagge up.
posted by Justin at 3:02 AM

 
USA TODAY: Says Vegas has abandoned the family-friendly rhetoric and gotten back to the business of gambling and nekkid ladies:

''We pretended to be a family destination,'' says Gamal Aziz, the president of MGM Grand, which opened an entire theme park next to its casino in 1993. ''The (core) gambling market had gotten to a point of stagnation, and it was just another way to expand.''

Alas, the family-friendly rhetoric ''really backfired,'' he says.

But do you really have to go all the way to Vegas to find a strip club? Oh wait --these are artsy strip clubs:

''The buzz is that one of the casinos will install its own strip club,'' says Curtis, who notes that way back to Vegas' mobster days, casinos have lusted after every dollar that tourists bring to town.

But while the finances make sense, MGM Grand's Aziz says it's not something his casino plans anytime soon. ''You can't chase every business that is lucrative,'' he says.

Aziz says such an operation undoubtedly would draw a howl of protest from certain customers and shareholders of the casino's parent company, MGM/Mirage. ''It's not a morality call (on strip bars), but it certainly does not fit into our business.''

Indeed, casino executives -- perhaps eager not to offend female gamblers, who make up nearly 60% of Las Vegas visitors -- are careful to differentiate their new topless shows from those at the gentleman's clubs. Aziz stresses that La Femme is tasteful, noting that two-thirds of ticket buyers are couples.

That 60% has to include a whole lot of old ladies sitting in front of slot machines to explain the skewing female of Vegas tourists, I'm guessing.
posted by Justin at 2:57 AM

 
DESTRO DID IT FIRST: Online proposal for research into an actual Air Force weather dominator or something like that. From the introduction:

A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.

Via the eeeeevil American Samizdat collective.
posted by Justin at 2:44 AM

 
AN ARTHUR ANDERSEN STORY: The great wrestling writer Irvin Muchnick sends along a link to his personal experience working with Arthur Andersen. Apparently Andersen's been a bit clueless for a while now.
posted by Justin at 2:35 AM

 
SALON: Jumps on the Figure Skating: Sport Or Not debate. Kerry Lauerman offers the more-objectivity-needed argument:

If figure skating is to remain a valued part of the Olympics, and to continue being treated as a real sport, it must be forced to conform to understandable measures of accomplishment, instead of relying on the whims and connivings of what often appears to be an extremely bitchy sewing circle. If skating officials refuse to clean up their act, then they should be booted from the games -- and then, considering how lucrative the sport has become -- we might see some real tears on the ice.

King Kaufman on the other hand argues people watch figure skating for the same reason they watch NASCAR: for the crashes:

Figure skating dominates the Winter Olympics precisely because it's a circus. As a sport, it's never going to be anything but nonsense. As train-wreck entertainment, it's riveting. This is a sport whose popularity skyrocketed after Harding conspired with her then-husband and a buffoonish thug named Shane Stant to whack rival Nancy Kerrigan's knee and take her out of the Olympic trials in 1994. It's a sport where the stunning caprice of the judges and the amazing goofiness of the performers are assets, not detriments.

Sure, there are plenty of people who enjoy the salchows and the lutzes and the toe loops and the camels, there always have been, but figure skating is a commercial monster because of all the people who tune in to goof on its weirdness and wait for it to burst into flames and go over a cliff again, as it did this week.

I think he's wrong (just like I'm wrong about why people watch NASCAR) because there are figure skaters like Michelle Kwan who can consistently involve an audience emotionally via a dominating athletic performance. A truly objective way to judge figure skating would be to measure crowd reaction, which is also the way you can tell which pro wrestlers are really great. That or make them all skate the same routine every time.
posted by Justin at 2:25 AM

 
GOOD OLYMPICS SITE: The Deseret News' WinterSports 2002 site. Via Protein Wisdom.
posted by Justin at 1:56 AM

 
TV WATCHING: These guys on NBC are bitching about Apolo Ohno not getting the gold, saying he got knocked down and it's unfair he and the other racers who got knocked down don't get a chance at winning medals fair and square and they should rerun a race like that when it happens in a medal round (if you fall down in a non-medal round you can still advance, apparently.) I say no way, it's the unpredictability of short track that's getting me interested. Did you see the way Ohno won the silver? Just by scrambling and getting his blade over the finish in front of the Canadian. Cool. And I can't believe that crowd booed that Australian guy who won. He had the look of "holy crap, look what happened to me" amazement when he won and I hope they run some sort of human-interest story on him.
posted by Justin at 1:55 AM

 
HOCKEY: USA and Russia just skated to a 2-2 tie. Good game. Keith Tkachuk got hurt near the end there, but Canadian American Brett Hull got the tying goal. This is what we wanted from this NHL Olympics thing.
posted by Justin at 1:39 AM

 
BASTARDS: Terrorists behead sixteen-year-old girl in Kashmir. Via Rand Simberg.
posted by Justin at 1:30 AM

 
MEDIA MINDED: Has the lengthy reader mail from Chris Blanchard on this USA Today article on racial diversity in the movies. Chris writes:

People can complain about Hollywood being racist all they want. But like any other major business, Hollywood always has its eyes on the prize: money. The reason why Hollywood doesn't cast minority actors, or casts them in certain genres, has nothing to do with not wanting to tell their stories, or not wanting to see them on the screens. They know certain audiences around the world do not want to see them there.

Chris also appears to be the first blogger to pick up on the Jayson Williams-limo driver "suicide" story. The Star-Ledger provides the details:

Former Nets star Jayson Williams was playfully twirling a loaded shotgun while giving friends a tour of his home early Thursday when the weapon accidentally discharged, killing a limousine driver Williams had hired for the night, law enforcement sources said.

The account of Williams' involvement in the shooting emerged in hours-long interviews with witnesses who initially reported the death of 55-year-old Costas Christofi as a suicide.

The hey? At least the Nets ended that losing streak.
posted by Justin at 1:26 AM

 
PHOTODUDE: Has the neat post called The Hidden Olympics on what NBC isn't showing you. The other Hidden Olympics involves a curling match on TV not involving an American team.
posted by Justin at 1:03 AM

 
KEN GOLDSTEIN: On the actual cityness of Jersey City, a little-known fact to the rest of the world, I'm guessing. Or even the rest of the state.
posted by Justin at 12:49 AM

 
THOSE NIKE ADS: With the piano in the background and the clips of all the athletes? I find them inspiring. I'm still not buying their crappy sneakers.
posted by Justin at 12:13 AM

 
SHORT TRACK SPEED SKATING: Why hasn't this caught on yet? It rocks. And it's very science fiction-looking. Australia wins its first Winter gold the same day China does.
posted by Justin at 11:51 PM

 
MORE HOCKEY: New York Times article on the half-assed way the NHL is approaching the Olympics.
posted by Justin at 6:31 PM

 
KLOOGNOME: Robert Crawford beats up on this Guardian article about the IOC never wanting another American Olympics. Robert fails to mention that the writer thinks Utah is in the Midwest. I mean, it's in the Mountain West and there's a real and substantial difference resulting from living at that altitude. RIght? Maybe that's a small point to make --but it's my only line....
posted by Justin at 6:26 PM

 
THE SADNESS OF JAPAN: Is The Economist's cover story this week. They report:

Even those onlookers who see Japan’s malaise as chronic but not at crisis-point, are fretting for another reason. Unlike most previous bouts of panic, this one has far more potential to cause trouble in the rest of the world, where much of East Asia is still in recession, and an American recovery is still shaky. Japan remains a big trader, investor and lender, so any collapse would affect all its counterparties.

Much bigger than the Argentine collapse. Scary.
posted by Justin at 5:44 PM

 
ESPN: Has a nice history of hockey in Russia.
posted by Justin at 5:08 PM

 
REASON'S BUCKET O' LINKS: Just noticed the Reason Editor's Links page, which gives their recommendations for surfing in the form of something like a miniature Suck article. They should give it its own page like Best Of The Web so we can all link to it.
posted by Justin at 4:40 PM

 
MORE ON THE MORBIDLY OBESE: Boing Boing has the link to the report on Fox's new Glutton Bowl show. International Federation of Competitive Eating? Has a website? You're kidding me. I guess this is what the male morbidly obese do, since my dad, who does some bariatric surgery, tells me most of his patients are women. Except I think I'm wrong because the Japanese competitors are little guys. I don't know what to think.
posted by Justin at 4:36 PM

 
THE ATLANTIC WATCHING: Thanks to the Atlantic I am hipped to the existence of Andy Warhol's time capsules:

This serial work, spanning a thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, consists of 610 standard sized cardboard boxes, which Warhol, beginning in 1974, filled, sealed and sent to storage. Warhol used these boxes to manage the bewildering quantity of material that routinely passed through his life. Photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art-work, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages, along with objects and countless examples of ephemera, such as announcements for poetry readings and dinner invitations, were placed on an almost daily basis into a box kept conveniently next to his desk.

That statement from the Andy Warhol museum is, of course, far too kind in calling Warhol's old junk a "serial work" but I have to admit this appeals to my own sense of obsessiveness, which I think is behind every urge to collect. Sadly, my collecting urges are mostly stillborn, and I have neither the drive nor the money to collect on the scale Warhol did. The best I do, I guess, is that I collect a bunch of links. But this Warhol thing is something I would have found amazingly cool when I was about ten or so, and would've no doubt started my own time capsule that afternoon. And would have abandoned it within a month.
posted by Justin at 4:24 PM

 
OLYMPIC BLOGGING: While you're reading The Donkey's dispatches, you should also be checking out blogger b-may, who is also live and in color there. Found via Confessions of a girl in love, who I found via one of those Blogsnob ads that I saw on next right. I guess advertising does pay dividends sometimes in terms of publicity.
posted by Justin at 4:11 PM

 
KING "CURLING" KAUFMAN: If you haven't been reading Salon lately, King Kaufman is also on the curling beat. First here:

I kind of forget about this every four years, but I love curling. I have no idea why. There's nothing about the playing of the game that interests me particularly, but it's somehow hypnotic. Compared to curling, bowling is like a flamethrower fight between naked movie stars on motorcycles, but there's just something about curling's deliberate pace, its simplicity, its regular guy and gal competitors, its buffoonish spectacle of frantic sweeping, that tickles me somehow. I can watch curling all day long. I used to watch it as a kid when, for reasons entirely lost on me then as now, it was on PBS on Saturday mornings. Unless I'm mistaken, the brooms back then looked like brooms, where now they look more like plastic mops. That's a loss, but it's still a fine, fine game.

Japan had a commanding 6-1 lead at the midway point. NBC announcer Don Duguid put it well when he said that it was like being behind 42-7 at the half in football. The U.S. came back to win in dramatic fashion on the 10th and final end -- an end is like an inning -- as they did again in an evening match when they stunned heavily favored Sweden on skip Kari Erickson's perfect draw on the last stone. I know you have no idea what I'm talking about, and I'm not entirely convinced I do either, but take my word for it: It was exciting!

Then here:

NBC daytime host Jim Lampley practically came out of his shoes, he was so excited Thursday at the prospect of the Dream Team round starting. He was giddy. I thought he was going to lick the face of hockey analyst Bill Clement, who was a rugged center for the Philadelphia Flyers' Stanley Cup-winning "Broad Street Bullies" teams in the mid-'70s and who wanted nothing more, I kid you not, than to talk about curling! It seems he used to play it on Wednesday afternoons during his minor league rookie year in Quebec City, and he fell in love with it. "There's a lot to it," he said to a panting Lampley, who kept trying to bring the subject back to hockey. "It's a great, great sport."

I'm telling you, curling is the growth sport of the millennium. You spend a few minutes with it and you're hooked. NBC and its hench-networks are showing plenty of curling, which is good, but they're concentrating way too much on the mediocre American teams, which are both 2-3. Can we see the Canadians and the Germans please? Both sexes. And also the Norwegian men and the Swiss women, who we did get to see beat the Americans Thursday.

His tongue is no doubt in cheek, but the CNBC curling gurus were also talking about the bright future of curling. I mean, why is it on all the time this year? I don't think it was like that in Nagano, but the fact that Salt Lake City is within the continental United States probably gives the NBCs some room to highlight odd sports you don't see at any other time. And Kaufman is right, curling is strangely watchable; it has to do with the brooms and the way the person throwing the stone just gently releases it and keeps on sliding behind it for a little while. It's, like, what a sport in zero gravity would kind of look like, so maybe I derive a similar satisfaction in watching curling as I do watching the Blue Danube space-station docking scene in 2001: an sort of poetry in motion of decidedly non-poetic looking objects and people (unlike figure skating, where the people are pretty poetic looking too.)

Kaufman also calls figure skating "a horrible sport." But at least he called it a sport.
posted by Justin at 3:30 PM

 
POLITICS OF BLOGGING: Speaking of Charles, he offers these intelligent comments on Why We Blog:

Frankly, if you show me an Instapundit-style blogger who isn't trying such a maneuver for his or herself, I'll show you a blockhead. (Bloghead?) 90% of us got into this after seeing Glenn Reynold's dazzling success; whether or not we are trying to get rich on the web, we are all at least trying to boost our public profile, to generate the sort of buzz that we can parlay into bigger and better things.

The "maneuver" he refers to is Virginia Postrel's busting on Andrew Sullivan for comments like these:

But it's interesting to see former labor secretary Robert Reich report over $750,000 in corporate speaking fees last year. "I do the speeches because it's very, very easy money,'' he told the Boston Herald. "I am utterly amazed the businesses are willing to pay so much for my economic expertise . . . but, if they want to pay that much, it's a free market, I'm delighted.'' Among the companies that have given him money - at $32,000 for a sixty minute speech - are Ford Motors, Panasonic, Merrill Lynch, Aetna Financial Services, Standard & Poors, Deloitte & Touche, Forbes Management Conference Group and Behrman Capital. Now, he's running for governor of Massachusetts, and pandering to the left in the primaries. There's nothing wrong with what he has done; and he has disclosed it all. But he's also a journalist and founding editor of the American Prospect - a magazine often railing against corporate excess. It's useful to know - however belatedly - just how much Reich has benefited from corporate speeches recently, while writing columns that often deal with economic issues that affect such corporations. I guess, like Paul Krugman, he is in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls. Fair enough. But I hope he doesn't push his new-found populism a little too far in the campaign. It would sound just a little bit phony, don't you think? He even backed out of an early candidates' debate in order to cash in on a $40,000 IBM gig. Those are his priorities. Or maybe they're just a Third Way. Take it away, Mickey Kaus!

To which Virginia responds (an excerpt; of course you should read the whole thing):

Like many other people who sell their ideas, I get paid to make speeches. Just recently, for instance, I went to Rochester, New York, to talk to a conference on local economic development issues. I was invited because some of the people involved wanted to inject a dynamist perspective into a discussion that is usually dominated by various sorts of technocratic planning. In other words, they hired me for the same reasons that editors hire me: because I had something unique to say. I'm not planning to write anything about Rochester, and if I did the speech would be part of the story. (I'm prohibited by contract from writing such a story for the NYT, although it wouldn't fit the column format anyway.) The client paid $7,500, and I netted $5,250 after my agents' fee. That's considerably more than I make for writing, but I wouldn't have taken this particular speaking job for less.

I see no more reason to apologize for taking speaking fees than I do for accepting manuscript fees from the NYT or D Magazine or the WSJ or HarperCollins. It's just another form of compensation, in this case for oral rather than written communication. While my fees are nowhere near the Robert Reich range, that's a matter of supply and demand, not principle. He's a TV celebrity and former cabinet secretary. I'm an obscure public intellectual (so obscure I didn't make Richard Posner's famous list). If a reputable organization wanted to pay $32,000 to hear me speak, we'd be living in another universe, but I'd take the money (minus 30 percent for my agents). Reich and I have this much in common: Our messages are consistent, regardless of who's paying the bill. The people who hire us get to hear our ideas, not to determine them.

Charles adds these comments:

She goes on to a larger and more interesting examination of the economics of authorship in the digital age, where me-ziners like her give away most of their written content for nearly nothing, but parlay the resulting fame into better-compensated gigs, such as speeches to corporations and conferences.

Which takes me back the Murtaugh-comments I started off with, where he trains his cold scientist's eye on his and mine and our motivations for blogging: to increase our status in the public eye, or at least one sliver of it, ", to generate the sort of buzz that we can parlay into bigger and better things." I would have to agree with Charles there, at least in my own case, even if in my own case the bigger and better things involve me making sense to myself (as the corner blurb says, I'm trying to put my thoughts out there, whatever that means) because I can't really envision what kind of material gain I could exchange this thing for --I mean, I'm mostly a linkmeister, as you can tell from the left there. But I'm all for the hopefully bigger and better things gained via blogging. Ken Layne pointed out this Far Eastern Economic Review piece by Jeremy Wagstaff, also on the money (or lack of it) in blogging:

I'd like to think that blogs do what the much vaunted portal of the dotcom boom failed to do: collate, filter and present information from other sources, alongside comment. Bloggers-those that blog-will be respected as folk who aren't journalists, or experts in their field, but have sufficient knowledge and experience to serve as informal guides to the rest of us hunting for stuff on the World Wide Web.

There's not much money in this, though doubtless they're likely to upset the media barons who realize that their carefully presented, graphics-strewn home pages are being bypassed by blog-surfers stopping by only long enough to grab one article. But that may be the future: The editor that determines the content of our daily read may not be a salaried Webmaster or a war-weathered newspaper editor, but a bleary-eyed blogger in his undershirt willing to put in the surfing time on our behalf.

He ends with the hopeful and futuristical "Who knows? We may even be willing to pay to read their blogs. As long as there are no grinning, laptop-carrying hand-shakers in sight." The grinning hand-shakers, of course, are the symbols of the failed corporate portals. So I guess the moral of all this is: there is certainly no money in blogging, at least not in the short term. The end.
posted by Justin at 3:20 PM

 
LAGNIAPPE: Derek Lowe has the neat post on why it's hard to test drugs for psychiatric ailments like schizophrenia. and also has developed an interest in the insolvency of Japan. (So has Mark Byron, actually.) I think Charles Murtaugh is right about the bloggersphere needing more scientist bloggers, they bring the goods.
posted by Justin at 2:19 PM

 
LADLING BOWLS OF SWEET CREAMY JUSTICE: The Canadians get the gold too. As dangerousmeta said, "it'll shut some people up, but doesn't solve the problem."
posted by Justin at 2:11 PM

 
MORE CURLING: Swen Swenson has the coverage. And Richard Bennett quotes Slate on the subject. And via the DVDVR links page I get my first look at curling.com, which, in retrospect, is an obvious place to start with the curling appreciation.
posted by Justin at 1:13 PM

 
HOCKEY: Starts today in earnest. And it's all over the tv. Check Puck Hog and his links section for the hockey insights.
posted by Justin at 12:26 PM

 
INSTAPUNDIT: Watched CNN and saw something I wish I had seen. I take that back, for I was watching figure skating and the Curling National Broadcast Company and have nothing to be ashamed of, though that Greenfield thing sounded pretty cool. Curling, Sport Of Kings And Queens.
posted by Justin at 12:19 PM

 
BELATED VALENTINE'S HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Here's Tony Adragna on the pagan origins of Valentine's Day. Don't all our holidays have pagan origins? Besides Thanksgiving, I guess.
posted by Justin at 12:06 PM

 
ME AND MRS. STAMPLEY: Ginger is also psyched about A Scanner Darkly on the big screen. She wants Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which I endorse, though I would fear that somebody would art-film the heck out of it and make it way bleaker than it should be --all you really need to do is get some good actors and just film Archer, since its story rests entirely on its characters. She also wants UBIK, which would be fun and cool in a more cynical version of X-Men the movie way; I always thought UBIK was what the Justice League would be like if Dick wrote them. The Dick books I've always wanted to see as movies are Martian Time-Slip and The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. Stigmata especially --Robert Duvall was born to play Leo Bulero. I also always saw Gabriel Byrne as Norbert Steiner from Time-Slip, but that's just me. Considering how much of the Dick oeuvre has been translated into movies already, this probably isn't idle speculation.
posted by Justin at 11:58 AM

 
HEMP, HEMP EVERYWHERE, AND NOT A BUD TO SMOKE: This Time article is a good explanation of the differences between hemp and pot, and the federal government's inability to tell the difference. Found via American Samizdat.
posted by Justin at 6:15 PM

 
MAGAZINE WATCHING: Here's Bruce of Flit (after the apocalypse when we all live online he'll shorten it to Bruce O'Flit or something) on the greatness of the New Republic. Meanwhile I saw the new Atlantic today and it had a real cool story on our revised understanding of what pre-Columbus Americans were like; it suggested that there were a lot more of them than we used to think, that they were in some respects more advanced than the Europeans who supplanted them (with disease mostly), and that the Amazon rain forest might be a human artifact and certainly not the pristine Nature In Its Glory it has always been portrayed as. Neat stuff. And I got the new Vanity Fair and yes, it had the idiot Attack Of The Clones cover and the WTC horror coverage inside. Vanity Fair, covering everything with equal seriousness --kind of like this blog, except I cover everything with equal goofiness. And so it goes.
posted by Justin at 5:37 PM

 
RETURN OF THE DONKEY: Ken today has the latest of his much-loved Salt Lake Dispatches, his take on the objective-subjective view of sports and a crossblog wrapup of the same, and the link to the high-yuks "Sound Of New Jersey Made Him Snap" story. Wisconsin made him go crazy too, but Reuters isn't putting that in its headline. Oh no, not that --because the world needs one more cheap Jersey joke. It's Jersey. It's funny. It's JERSEY. It's FUNNY. HAHAHAHAHA. Thhpt.
posted by Justin at 5:24 PM

 
REPORT FROM THE ANTI-ANTI-DRUG WAR: Rand Simberg links to this story about the latest DEA raids of medical marijuana clubs. Here's a clip:

DEA agents arrested three men in two cases. A fourth man, Kenneth Hayes, a former executive director of the San Francisco pot club CHAMP, is in custody in Vancouver, B.C. His attorney, Bill Panzer, said Hayes has petitioned the Canadian government for political refugee status.

Panzer, an Oakland lawyer who co-wrote California's medical marijuana initiative, had the more amusing take on the day's events. Since the feds are pushing the message that buying drugs aids terrorists, he said, it seemed strange they would crack down on people who are cultivating marijuana for the state's sick people -- a perfectly legal enterprise under Proposition 215.

Voters approved the initiative legalizing medical marijuana in 1996, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled several months ago that its use was a federal crime. Local marijuana dispensers swore at the time that they would continue to remain open until federal officials shut them down.

"Now, since they can't buy it from people producing in state, sick people have to buy it from drug dealers, who are aiding the terrorists," Panzer said. "I feel it's a shame that this administration is helping to aid terrorists."

I mean, I'm sure we all understand the hypocrisy involved here, so the above is just more proof of the misplaced priorities of the drug war.
posted by Justin at 5:17 PM

 
I BRING THE CUTENESS: Here's a website for a cat with a cat wheelchair. Via the Boing Boing Guestbar --it's the little blog on the right side there.
posted by Justin at 5:08 PM

 
LAYNE TO EAST COAST: GO BACK TO EUROPE: I feel like Drudge with that headline. I hope he's not basing that on one trip to Baltimore.
posted by Justin at 5:03 PM

 
MORE SCANNING DARKLY: Boing Boing has the news that A Scanner Darkly has been picked up by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh --which is cool, they did Out Of Sight which I really liked, though they may not make the movie in a creative sense though. The movie could be a cartoon in either traditional or computer animation. Huh.
posted by Justin at 4:48 PM

 
THAT'S WHAT I WANTED TO POST ABOUT: Steven den Beste picked up on these weird comments made in the swirl of the Skategate that I noticed too:

[T]onight the head of the French Olympic team told the Associated Press that French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne had acknowledged feeling pressure before casting her vote for the Russian team.

Didier Gailhaguet denied any wrongdoing on the part of the French skating federation and said of Le Gougne: "Some people close to the judge have acted badly and have put someone who is honest and upright, but emotionally fragile, under pressure. She is a fragile person and I think she has been somewhat manipulated."

Weird that the guy is psychologizing her by way of explanation. Maybe, weirdly French.
posted by Justin at 4:37 PM

 
MEANINGLESSNESS OF RACE UPDATE: The Scientist does the job this time. The scientists they profile are kind of agnostic on the subject:

Harold Freeman, director of the National Cancer Institute's Center to Reduce Health Disparities, said at a recent meeting, "Race disappears when you look at the human genome."

But scientists know that they cannot ignore the clinical data that show, for example, that African Americans die at a higher rate from coronary heart disease than do whites. Moreover, population genetics has long shown that certain single-gene disorders are more prevalent in some populations, such as Tay-Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews. Polygenic disorders also tend to be more common in some population groups. So, it isn't surprising that epidemiological studies show that certain drugs have a better efficacy rate in some groups than others. The controversy arises over what to do with this type of information. For some scientists, the question now is, "Do different ways exist to organize people?" So far, researchers are exploring a few ideas, including studying the human brain and identifying gene combinations that control drug responses. Says Freeman, "Race doesn't exist, but yet it does."

I think the scientific view on race is that it's something so fluid as to be meaningless, especially in the long timeframe studying evolution requires. None of these articles have mentioned Jon Entine yet, though. Is he a crank and nobody told me? How embarassing.
posted by Justin at 4:19 PM

 
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY: I was scouring my links for some kind of post for the lovelorn and found nothing; the bloggersphere appears happy and contented where the romantic feelings are concerned. All is as it should be. Tony Pierce has a shout out to the ladies, a sentiment I agree with. The Daze Reader, which should be read daily, brings the history of kissing. Ed Mazza has the penguin lust. Andrea See lives in a place where Valentine's Day is already over. I think. But to those of you who are still in the 14th, have a happy hearts day.
posted by Justin at 4:05 PM

 
ENTIRE OLYMPICS PREDETERMINED: New Scientist article on these economists who had a 96 percent success rate in Sydney in terms of predicting numbers of medals won. They use no information about the athletes themselves to make their predictions:

Their accuracy is uncanny, considering they have never taken any athlete's sporting prowess into account. Johnson and Ali base their predictions on little more than a country's GDP, political situation, and its population, latitude and climate. They created their predictions by investigating how these factors were related to past Olympic achievements. The aim was to analyse how economic and political conditions can affect a nation's sporting achievements.

As you might expect, they found that the probability of success is closely related to a nation's wealth. But there were also surprises in the data. Athletes from communist and single-party regimes excel at winning medals, Johnson says. Contrary to popular belief, these nations don't send disproportionately many athletes, but they consistently outperform other nations with the same economic and geographic attributes. The difference is, on average, 18 summer medals and 10 winter medals.

You can read the actual paper here.
posted by Justin at 12:30 PM

 
SKATEGATE: I don't know if ESPN came up with that title or not --someone was bound to-- but their figure-skating page has the poop.
posted by Justin at 12:22 PM

 
HIPPER THAN THOU: Interesting and funny piece on the Dido Demographic, who are way hipper than you are despite their advancing age. Via the null device. I have three of those albums (Moby, Lauryn Hill, Macy Gray), which apparently puts me in the safe area. Whew. The Dido Demographic reminds me of the Bobos in some half-realized way.
posted by Justin at 1:06 PM

 
POSTREL: Has the link to the overlooked Financial Times special report on the corporate funding of the anti-globalization movement. Then I get more on the same subject when the nefarious American Samizdat collective leads me to this Working For Change thing on a Reebok award for human rights --kind of the same thing.
posted by Justin at 12:45 PM

 
A SCANNER CRUMBLY: What I dig about the Crumb Dick comic is what I dig about Crumb when he does Harvey Pekar stories: he conveys the story well yet the comic remains unmistakably Crumb. I think Crumb was and is infinitely more jaded than Dick, so even in the midst of illustrating and illustrating well Dick's mind-altering religious experience he still manages to make Dick an average-looking mortal person. I think Dick would have approved.
posted by Justin at 12:12 PM

 
SPORTSFILTER: Has a thread on subjectivity in sports, and a link to a Times article on the same subject. Vis-a-vis my own thoughts on the subject, I have to disagree with these comments that the more objective you get, the truer a sport is; I think they're all sports, ranging from man or woman versus nature to man in collaboration with man or woman to produce a neat, nature-defying effect --in an athletic way, of course. Or everything ESPN covers plus pro wrestling is a sport. Take your pick.

The Times writer says this, which I found odd:

Boxing might seem to be the least subjective sport of them all — after all, you don’t worry about marks for artistic impression when your opponent is lying concussed at your feet. But what about Lennox Lewis? He was given a draw — which meant that he failed to become world champion — after outboxing Evander Holyfield over 12 rounds.

I don't think anyone anyone has ever thought boxing is an objective sport, because it's so obviously manipulable in a pro-wrestling way. Like I said, the closest thing to perfectly objective sports is something like billiards or bowling, things where it's clear to everybody, athlete and audience, what victory constitutes, and there is no third person --the referee-- to decide what has atually happened. So I guess for me objectivity is inversely related to the influence an official, referee or promoter has on the contest under discussion.
posted by Justin at 11:47 AM

 
VOTE TRADING: Both the Globe and Mail and ESPN are reporting actual allegations of vote trading between the French and Russian judges, to be paid back at the cretinous ice dancing competition. The Globe and Mail piece adds another factor:

Sources also say Ms. Salé and Mr. Pelletier weren't the only skaters not judged fairly in the pairs. Yang Jiasheng, the judge from China, went with the Russians ahead of the Canadians too. Sources are suggesting that the Chinese judge gave the first-place vote to Ms. Berezhnaia and Mr. Sikharulidze, hoping that the judges from the former Eastern Bloc countries would help in giving the Chinese pairs team the country's first medal in the event. All nine judges ranked Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo third, despite a shaky performance in the long program.

Meanwhile the ESPN article suggests this story "has legs, " according to Christine Brennan:

The scandal already is drawing comparisons to figure skating's most famous pair of all -- Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. The story could grow if the United States were to get involved because it's conceivable that if Sale and Pelletier should have won gold, Americans Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman could have won bronze, Brennan said.

"This is really starting to remind me of Tonya and Nancy, but it's not there yet," Brennan said. "There's something about this that's starting to build and there's the sense that the pace with which it's starting is like it was with Tonya and Nancy. Now there's an investigation and the story has legs."

Here's Brennan on the decision.
posted by Justin at 11:09 AM

 
THE TONY PIERCE OLYMPICS RUNDOWN: Is a fun read.
posted by Justin at 6:42 PM

 
MORE ICE SPORTS: Here's a Globe and Mail piece on ice dancing, where the fix is already in, apparently. Ice dancing has had a bad rep for this sort of thing, much much worse than figure skating, for years. Via Doug Corti. The Globe and Mail has a bunch of stuff on Sale and Pelletier, by the way. And a neat opinion piece on the state of women's hockey.
posted by Justin at 5:56 PM

 
FREAKING A: Go read this Rod Dreher post excerpting an article about two brothers who witnessed first hand the WTC horror. It's one for the Never Forget file. And the article was in Vanity Fair, which continues to have my vote for weirdest magazine going, covering celebrity gossip, politics and world events with equal seriousness, and publishing Christopher Hitchens on a regular basis. Editorially schizophrenic, in a very good way.
posted by Justin at 4:55 PM

 
ORNPAY UPDATE: Kevin has a summary post in the latest chapter of Blog Wars II: The Search For More Pornography.
posted by Justin at 4:48 PM

 
FLIT: Bruce, as usual, has the stories nobody else does, like this one about Canadian Falun Gong guys getting thrown out of China. Follow-up here. Bruce's theory is that these guys are just trying to remind people about what a cruddy government China continues to have.
posted by Justin at 4:46 PM

 
NEAT STUFF: Here's the Quirky Japan Homepage, about all the weird and cool stuff to be found in Japan. Pictures are kind of slow-loading, though. Via the always worthwhile Aqua Hydro.
posted by Justin at 4:11 PM

 
MORE FIGURE SKATING: Here's the Rabbit on why she likes figure skating, and Michelle Kwan:

When figure skaters get carried away, so do I. This is why I like the sport - it's all about overwhelming emotions like pure joy and grace and the desire to bust someone's knees in with a baseball bat. You can practice all your life, but get a little bit distracted, just for a second, and you won't be nailing that triple, which means no gold for Goldilocks. This is why we like Michelle Kwan - when she's in the zone, not only does she do everything right, but she has that look of thrilled happiness on her face that really gets everyone within 100 square miles into it. I am growing tired of her pure joy signature move, I have to admit - that slightly skewed one-legged arms-outstretched thing? But I like the red necklace, and I want her to win. That little weasel Tara Lipinski made her stay in the game for another four years, and it had better fucking pay off.

Go read the whole thing, Heather appears to be a legit figure skating fan. Her hatred of Lipinski mechanistic cutey-pooness I find pleasing, I must admit. I believe I hate Britney Spears in a similiar way. That's right --BRITNEY SPEARS.
posted by Justin at 4:02 PM

 
HAPPY LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY: If you work for the Postal Service I think you get the day off. Lincoln is such a weird and towering figure in our national consciousness, what with the sickle cell anemia and the nutty wife and the personal tragedy and of course the assassination. He also presided over what is supposed to be the event that made America America --the Civil War-- so I guess he's earned his holiday and the penny and the five dollar bill and all that.
posted by Justin at 2:45 PM

 
HEY: Airstrip One has gone collaborative. Their new guy, Hadrian Wise, has a big post on his and others' pereceptions on the situation in Africa. AND he use the expression "tinker's cuss," known to all right-thinking Americans from the Architects Sketch.
posted by Justin at 2:18 PM

 
RICHMOND REDUX: The DVDVR playaz have their report on the Richmond adventure up. It is, of course, much funnier than mine, and displays the vast wrestling knowledge the playaz command. Enjoy.
posted by Justin at 12:54 PM

 
ARTICLE: About the one Indian athlete at the Olympics.
posted by Justin at 12:41 PM

 
THROUGH THE BLOGGING GLASS: Charles Dodgson has the post on Enron and Bush. I mean, it's a real good post.
posted by Justin at 12:25 PM

 
ED MAZZA: Has a post today on the Port Authority officers found in the WTC wreckage along with the body of the person they were trying to save --whom Ed calls a Fat Person and draws attention for his newer readers the troubles he's had with these people over the years. The clinical term for Fat People is the morbidly obese, and there is a way to fix it, though it's pretty drastic.
posted by Justin at 12:20 PM

 
BY THE WAY: The below inspires me to seek out the secret Rand-Nietzsche connection; I enjoy this old Lingua Franca piece. I am moved to blog the final lines of said piece:

Was Ayn Rand just a writer of pulp-fiction sensibilities with a knack for euphemizing greed in a spirit of self-help profundity? Or was she the last of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals--a novelist-sage who was able to address the problems of freedom and domination in terms that readers are likely to appreciate well into the next millennium (whether their teachers want them to or not)?

If value and judgment are grounded in objectivity, it should be possible to reach some definitive conclusion. But at the risk of metaphysical evasion, the answer may be: both.

The article describes Objectivism in quasi-religious terms. Here's the part where I talk out of my ass: Ayn Rand is the A.E. van Vogt of philosophy. There you go.
posted by Justin at 11:03 AM

 
ONE FOR NATALIE SOLENT: Without further ado, here's the 50 fantasy and science fiction novels socialists should read. Hey, Atlas Shrugged made the list. Wanna know why?

Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive "objectionivist" (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of "collectivism" is visible in this important an influential -- though vile and ponderous -- novel.

Via Boing Boing. Of course. Somebody should make a list of the 50 F&SF novels for libertarians.
posted by Justin at 10:29 AM

 
BWAHAHA: Rutgers football renaissance? That'll be the day.
posted by Justin at 8:58 AM

 
LINK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF: Oldest fossilised vomit pile discovered.
posted by Justin at 8:53 AM

 
OLYMPICS: Here's Jim Caple on last night's figure skating flap. I was reading Oliver Willis on the Olympics and he, like a lot of us, feels that figure skating is not a sport. I have to disagree. Figure skating --on the vast continuum of sports, with, say, pro wrestling on one end (an entirely fictional, and hence entirely subjective sport) and, say, billiards or bowling on the other end (sports with minimal or no human judgement as to what constitutes victory, and hence entirely objective sports)-- lies on the subjective end, toward pro wrestling. The great American team sports would lie in the middle, with maybe the NFL right in the middle and the NBA and MLB heading towards subjectivity. Anyway, the subjectivity of figure skating is no reason to say it isn't a sport. It's just more subjective than most.
posted by Justin at 8:43 AM

 
STEPHEN MITCHELL: The New York Times also has a review of his book. Via Reductio Ad Absurdum. This one is a little less high on Mitchell than the Salon one.
posted by Justin at 6:13 PM

 
ORNPAY UPDATE: Mark Byron joined the debate on Saturday and I just noticed now.
posted by Justin at 5:52 PM

 
HOLY CRUD: The R. Crumb adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1974 religious episode is online. Via Boing Boing.
posted by Justin at 5:45 PM

 
ONE MORE: Here's the story of what is said to be the first racial murder in Ireland.
posted by Justin at 5:15 PM

 
BBC ASIA SECTION: Another girl was suspended for wearing a head scarf in Singapore. And I got to it before Andrea See. Awright! (Can you really legislate racial harmony, by the way? My guess is no.) Meanwhile over in Thailand the first female Thai Buddhist monk has been ordained. I can't imagine it'll be that much longer before the Catholics do that too. As for the celibacy thing, in Thailand and in Rome, that I think'll stick around, if only because it's always going to appeal to some people. Meanwhile here's a little piece on the 60th anniversary of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. You want an evil axis, you got it, sixty years ago.
posted by Justin at 5:02 PM

 
MORE ON UTAH: The Economist does his/her usual even-handed job on Utah and Mormons. Not only have they stopped with the polygamy, but the socialism as well:

In the early years, the church was almost communist in its attitude to private property. It required Mormons to hand over their goods to the church, which then handed them back but gave the former owners only “stewardship” over them. This meant that the church's leaders could make discretionary demands on the faithful for the greater good. Like polygamy, this system was abandoned long ago, as the church's embrace of corporate capitalism shows. Yet vestiges remain.

Worth reading as an introduction to the current state of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
posted by Justin at 4:48 PM

 
PAT BUCHANAN --WRONG! WATCH: Rod Dreher on NRO deflates Death Of The West . Dreher's main point is Pat seems to think Latin America isn't part of Western civilization, which it clearly is. What I found interesting in that article is Dreher adding Japan to the developed world, which it obviously is a part of. Unlike the rest of the developed world, Japan to my knowledge does not have much of a history of immigration, which is a large part of our American economic engine. Maybe the weirdo Japanese racial-purity ideals and the subsequent immigrant fear are another reason why they aren't getting out of recession anytime soon.

One more Dreher tidbit:

Still, France's birth rate remains below replacement level, and perhaps 10 percent of its population comes from African and Arab countries, whose migrants have relatively high birthrates (and, worrisomely, have proven strongly resistant to assimilation, even over two or three generations).

Do American African and Arab communities have a similar tendency to not assimilate? I never noticed one.
posted by Justin at 4:26 PM

 
MORE ON KOBE HATING: Stephen Smith in the Inquirer picks up on the class reasons for Philly's Bryant hate:

[Kobe] also knows Philly is a blue-collar town, that his eloquence, his style - and the fact that he does not resemble, at least outwardly, the tattooed, braid-wearing, playing-with-reckless-abandon persona of Allen Iverson - contribute to the distance Philadelphia feels for him.

That Michael Lynch thing I just alluded to is pretty high on Iverson, who is pretty much Kobe's opposite in a public-perception way:

Take your hat off to Iverson, who not only kicks butt on the court, (if not in last night's NBA All Star Game) but plays well on paper, too. He's stayed true to his roots, refusing to wear suits and even appearing on NBC's Meet the Press in tattoo-revealing sweats. "People used to always tell me to wear a suit, look this way, look that way, cut my hair and stuff like that," says Iverson, who declared "I did this my way" when accepting last year's NBA Most Valuable Player award.

I prefer Iverson over Kobe in terms of their personas, but that's just me. I'm also not a Kobe fan because a.) he's a Laker and b.) he plays with Shaquille O'Neal and we'll never be able to tell how great Kobe is until he is sans Shaq. I am reminded of these Bill Simmons comments:

Wouldn't it be much more fun watching Kobe carry a team built around his offense, like Vince in Toronto, or T-Mac in Orlando? As his 56-point explosion Monday night against Memphis proved, this would be "MJ in 1988" all over again. Other than MJ, when was the last time a noncenter was a legitimate threat to drop 70 in a game?

Here's the sad thing: Shaq goes on cruise control for 90 percent of the regular-season games, mainly because he can (Shaq doesn't have that crazed desire to dominate every single game, the way Bird, MJ and even Moses did, and that's fine, I guess). And he probably saves Kobe's legs in the long run, as Kobe doesn't have to expend nearly as much energy carrying his team during the season.

But the fact remains that, at this point in his career, the Kobe Experience would be 10 times more interesting if he were forced to carry a .500 team. I watched some of the 56-point game -- coincidentally, the first game of Shaq's three-game suspension -- and Kobe was showing more flair and explosiveness than anyone since the young MJ. He was totally unstoppable, looking like a guy who finally had the chance to let loose.

This isn't another case of Magic-Kareem, or even Bird-McHale or MJ-Pippen, where there was a mutually beneficial relationship that allowed both players to reach even greater heights. In this case, Shaq makes Kobe's life easier, and vice versa ... and I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. Hey, it might translate to 10 championships before everything's said and done, but I can't shake the feeling that neither player will reach his optimum potential with the other guy hanging around. We'll see.

Reading Simmons on the NBA has made me into a bigger NBA fan. You all should read him too.
posted by Justin at 3:49 PM

 
THE GREAT ORNPAY DEBATE: Follow it like this: Holtsberry, Radic, Holtsberry, Radic, a Holtsberry aside, an a Dale Amon aside. Ornpay because the adult filter software in the library wouldn't let me read Kevin's initial post as it had too many banned words in it. Wotta development. So I'm limiting my use of the p-word, if I can. Never mind, I give up. Here's a Natlija comment:

People do not use marriage as a marketing devise, they use sex, because that is what people actually think about much of the time. Pornography is just the essence of that. In reality most well adjusted people do not get porn and real life confused, keeping them in different boxes in their heads. Yet I don't read Vogue primarity for the articles anymore than most people read Playboy for the articles (which are mostly crypto-socialist drivel anyway). I read them both for the sex. I don't have a problem with pornography because unlike many conservatives and their socialist-feminist friends, I do not have a problem with the reality of human nature. I just wish those conservatives and their statist allies on the left would stop trying to use the force of law to impose peculiar world views on everyone else.

I don't know from crypto-socialist, but the articles in Playboy really do suck. The only thing that's sometimes okay are the interviews, like the famous Paglia interview, the Parker & Stone one, this month's Iverson one is supposed to be good too. But there's no consistent sort of point of view in Playboy articles; the magazine has no reason to exist apart from the pictures of nekkid ladies. I mean, Penthouse tries to be the magazine about sex (or one version of sex), Hustler tries to be the girlie MAD magazine, Club does porn entirely from within the adult industry and has no qualms about being anything but a dirty magazine. Playboy never does anything consistently well and I suspect its time as a viable cultural entity has long past, much like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Where I disagree with Natalija is in her assessment of Playboy: the porn sucks too. I don't have a problem with the cheesecake soft-core porn Playboy specializes in --their specials are really great examples of this: excellent production values, good variety of women. But the magazine's formula --centerfold, idiot para-celebrity, group-of-women-related-by-profession where half the pictures are too tiny and cropped to fit the page-- is stale beyond measure, and the magazine itself seems only to exist to advertise the Playboy brand name. And I think Hefner has gone insane. Have you seen him lately? He's always wearing that "iconic" bathrobe. And he lives with like seven identical --I mean i-den-ti-cal-- looking women (blonde, big hooters) who he insists on making into Playmates to the detriment of us, the magazine-purchasing public. Creepy, in an odd way I don't usually associate with creepiness. Hugh Hefner is going Howard Hughes in a way only Hugh Hefner could. That will be my only clever comment for the day.
posted by Justin at 2:41 PM

 
AND: Good Washington Post review of a book on evolution and religion and futurism. It's the top review. But I think good science fiction always trumps good futurism, as it puts ideas in the hands of (fictional) people and gives you something to indentify with.
posted by Justin at 12:47 PM

 
SPEAKING OF JUNG: From that same Yahoo list, an interesting London Review Of Books piece on evolutionary psychology explanations for religion, found in this book by Pascal Boyer. I don't get why Jung is never mentioned in these biology of religion things; wasn't Man, The Religious Animal the major plank in his platform? Maybe sociobiologists are nervous about referencing him, for fear of association with some of the goofier Jungians. The title of said book --Religion Explained-- turns me off right away as it reminds me of the we-got-all-the-answers-right-here-right-now snottiness of Consciousness Explained --I mean, come on, make your case and move on. The reviews from the Amazon page say the book suffers from not making its case right away. I still want to read it, though. Anyway, the London Review thing is highly worth reading; here's some speculation on the future of religion:

The future of gods, spirits and ancestors is, however, more problematic. We may not be witnessing the universal trend towards secularisation which was mistakenly predicted by many 20th century sociologists of religion. But there has, all the same, been a good deal of the Entzauberung - 'disenchantment', or literally 'demagification' - which Max Weber took to be one of the defining characteristics of the modern world.

This may run contra that speculating of a Secular North, Religious South found in that Atlantic article I mentioned. Maybe modern life just makes religion a little more comfortable, like it does with the rest of one's life:

Human beings may continue to believe all sorts of things, both metaphysical and ethical, that Boyer is unable to share with them, and to define themselves in relation to those beliefs to the point of being willing to kill other human beings who refuse to share them. But supernatural agency is no longer quite what it was. To put it no more strongly, Hegel had a point when he remarked that 'before the statues of the gods we no longer bend the knee.'

So maybe religion doesn't have the force it once did just because we humans aren't as all red-in-tooth-and-claw (or however that goes) as we once were. And I think having less to worry about to insure one's survival is, on balance, a good thing.
posted by Justin at 12:42 PM

 
ET TU, ME? THEN FALL ROMANCE: Intriguing little Salon review of the final book by psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell. His theory --which sounds all grand and hifalutin in the best Jung-Freud traditions; thank god the salvationist instinct within within psychology has not completely disappeared-- is that we, consciously, end our more love-like feelings and replace them with steadier ones out of fear:

Why, Mitchell asks, should romance so inevitably wane, to be replaced -- and this is if you're lucky -- by something solid, steady ... and slightly-to-excruciatingly dull? Popular explanations are thick on the ground: Romance depends on mystery, but long-term relationships depend on understanding. Romance gets its fizz from sexuality, but partnership demands tenderness and caring, not lust. Romance is based on idealization of the other, and idealizing anyone is asking for trouble. Freud described his yearning patients neatly: "Where they love, they have no desire; where they desire, they cannot love."

The problem is real, and all the explanations are true, Mitchell says, but only partly, inadequately true. His own view, both warmed and deepened by a 30-year clinical practice of what came to be called "relational psychoanalysis," is that romantic love doesn't die a natural, inevitable death: We kill it, out of fear. It's just too dangerous, he says, to experience erotic currents toward somebody you actually know, somebody who shares not only your bed but the chores and the cable bill. What if he or she stopped desiring you? Compared to the emotional risks of long-term domestic passion, Mitchell observes, the zipless fuck is as daring as oatmeal.

Via the Yahoo evpsych list. Meanwhile I saw Kate & Leopold this weekend voluntarily. I am such a sap.
posted by Justin at 12:10 PM

 
MORE STERN STUFF: Here's a little AP piece wrapping up Stern comments from the weekend. The big news is possible European expansion, which could work due to much of Europe being basketball-crazy. But would they compete with local Euro-leagues or attempt to work with them? He didn't say. I'm still waiting for one of the major leagues to have a successful franchise in Honolulu.
posted by Justin at 11:34 AM

 
MARK CUBAN WATCH: His third-party reviews the officials idea got shot down by Team Stern (Team Stern copyright Bill Simmons.) Quoth Cuban:

"No one is saying I'm dead wrong on any issue, that the league is doing all these things right and that I should leave them alone. No one in the league office or outside of it. They only question me doing it publicly, which tells me I am on the right path."

Rose-colored contact lenses must be necessary to be a dotcom billionaire turned NBA owner, I'm guessing.
posted by Justin at 11:28 AM

 
ALL-STAR GAME: The West smacked the East, with Kobe being a man on a mission to get that MVP. And the Philly fans booed him, like when they booed Destiny's Child during the finals, and when Jim Gray asked him if his feelings were hurt, he was just like "Yes. Yes, they were." Which I found amusing, like that Simpsons episode where Daryl Strawberry was crying after being heckled by Lisa and Bart. Almost as amusing as Michael Jordan missing that open-court dunk.
posted by Justin at 11:14 AM

 
UTAH WATCH: Boing Boing brings the story of Salt Lake City's hipster mayor. Meanwhile Best Of The Web has a link to this Washington Times story on Mormon bashing by outside media types. D'ya suppose Best Of The Web would ever link to a piece sympathetic to Moonies? Or are newfangled Christian denominations only cool when they're Americans or Republicans or something? Just asking.
posted by Justin at 4:25 PM

 
AFRO-GAELO HISTORY MONTH: Muhammed Ali is one-eighth Irish.
posted by Justin at 2:37 PM

 
COMMERCIALS: Jacob Sullum has the rundown on those incredibly manipulative anti-drug commercials I first saw during the Superbowl. He closes with this line: "The war on drugs supports terror. If you support the war on drugs, you support terror too."
posted by Justin at 12:24 PM

 
EVOLUTION EXPLAINED, MAYBE: The Scientific American has a little story that suggests that scientists may be figuring out how evolution, you know, actually works:

The fossil record contains numerous examples of dramatic evolutionary change in animals through time. Exactly how genetic alterations brought about these macroevolutionary changes, however, has proved difficult to ascertain. Now new research into the developmental biology of brine shrimp and fruit flies could throw light on the matter. According to a report published online today by the journal Nature, mutations in genes that guide embryonic development allowed insects to develop a radically different body plan from that of their crustacean-like ancestors some 400 million years ago.

Via Ian Pitchford. Of course, not everyone is convinced. Then there's this rebuttal.
posted by Justin at 12:17 PM

 
MORE MAGAZINE WATCHING: Gawd, pick up this month's Atlantic Monthly, there's a really great article about the scientific study of religions and the tracking of New Religious Movements, or NRMs. Or you can buy the article here, it'll set you back two bucks though. Here's a quote from within the article by David B. Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia:

"The main thing we've discovered," he said, "is that there is enormous religious change going on across the world, all the time. It's massive, it's complex, and it's continual. We have identified nine thousand and nine hundred distinct and separate religions in the world, increasing by two or three religions every day. What this means is that new religious movements are not just a curiosity, which is what the people in the older denominations usually think they are. They are a very serious subject."

The article also suggests that the future of Christianity may be in Africa, and we may be approaching a secularized North hemisphere defining itself against a religious South. They also introduce me to Cao Dai, which is a Vietnamese religion whose Three Saints are Sun Yat-Sen, a sixteenth-century poet named Trang Thinh, and Victor Hugo. Cripes, sign me up. Check it out, if you can. The article, I mean. Matt Welch is right about The Atlantic being a fine fine magazine.
posted by Justin at 8:02 PM

 
NO THANKS: To Missy Schwartz for introducing me to Metacritic, an amazing way to waste time. What they do is collate links to movie reviews throughout Old Media webdom and get a composite score based on all the reviewers opinions. I could wander around for days. Here's the Impostor page.
posted by Justin at 3:01 PM

 
WE ALL GO PORNO: Christian Science Monitor article called "Erotica runs rampant." It's more straight coverage than that recent William F. Buckley thing in National Review but clearly is down on porn legitimacy. The Monitor story mentions that Hustler is lending its brand name to makeup kits for teenage girls. Is that true? I dunno my own exact thoughts on mass pornification, but they're probably of the "if you don't like what's on TV, change the channel" variety.
posted by Justin at 2:53 PM

 
MAGAZINE WATCH: I don't know if anybody reads the print version of National Review besides me, but there's a big article this month --I think it was by Ramesh Ponneru-- calling out Virginia Postrel and Ron Bailey and some other Reason magazine folks. Maybe the National Review editorial types are serious about making libertarians the next big Threat To Society that conservatives are sworn to undermine. Meanwhile, I know it'll be on their website eventually but Reason has a great defense of vulgarity this month by Charles Paul Freund. Freund's point if I remember it right is that vulgarity is the thing that truly brings the winds of change to old conservative cultures. Reason has the neat cover of an Arab guy drinking Pepsi this month; the Arab love of American goods was one of the neat touches I loved in Three Kings.
posted by Justin at 12:59 PM

 
MORE UTAH STUFF: Salt Lake City is the number one per capita consumer of Jell-O in the United States, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Says the curator of the Jell-O museum (which is in upstate New York): "The invention of Jell-O democratized an elitist food. Before Jell-O, only the very wealthy could afford gelatins." More tidbits from the article:

--They call it "Mormon Soul Food."
--The Bill Cosby-Jell-O relationship is probably the longest-running pitchman-sponsor relationship ever.
posted by Justin at 12:21 PM

 
BIG COUNTRY: Good Ken Layne post on country music, one of the many musical genres I am way too ignorant of.
posted by Justin at 1:01 PM

 
NATIONAL WEIRDNESS RADIO: Mark Byron brings the partial transcript of the bizarre Terry Gross Gene Simmons interview I overheard on Monday night. Simmons in the transcript comes off like an unfunny Jason Mewes, but on-air what struck me was his complete lack of a sense of humor. Come to think of it, that's the same thing that's always bugged me about Ayn Rand. Huh. So why is the lead singer of Kiss taking himself seriously now? Perhaps he's only telling the truth and the whole Kiss thing was a facade to bag chicks, and now that he's older and ma-toor he's rationalizing it with quasi-philosophical doodoo and a serious tone of voice --he talked almost elegantly, I noticed, of his desire for Terry Gross. Hey --psychobabble. Shnoogans.
posted by Justin at 12:58 PM

 
FEAR MY DREADED PURPLE MASTER STYLE: Daniel Taylor picks up on the Mark Crispin Miller article. Dan picks up on Miller's Hitler/Bush comparison which --as any Internet user knows-- is the hallmark of a goofy argument.
posted by Justin at 12:39 PM

 
I HATE YOU DEARLY: Interesting Reuters piece on scientists --after lengthy investigations into what people find attractive in one another-- who are now studying what causes us to reject one another in a romantic sense. The big gender gap revealed itself here in the fact that women have trouble rejecting somebody solely because of looks, where men have no problem doing so, and that women were more discriminating than men in all categories besides the looks department. So okay then. Via the Yahoo evpsych eggheads.
posted by Justin at 11:05 AM

 
THAT LEVIS SUPERBOWL AD: USA Today has a story on the guy who was in that Levis commercial --the one where the guy's legs were dancing but his upper body was straight. Via rc3.org. For me, the obvious computer-generated superimposition they used completely ruined it; the whole time I was thinking they should had him just do the lower body dancing, upper body serene on his own, in a vein similiar to the John Cleese Ministry Of Silly Walks sketch. But perhaps that wasn't the effect they were looking for.
posted by Justin at 10:57 AM

 
MARTZ, CRETIN WATCH: Here's Ralph Wiley on how Mike Martz lost the Superbowl.
posted by Justin at 10:47 AM

 
IMPOSTOR: Was perfectly competent and enjoyable science fiction, worth the 3 dollars spent at the discount theater. I haven't read the Dick story it was based on in a while, but this seemed like a completely straight adaptation. Neat stuff.

And those jokesters at The Christopher Hitchens Web are linking to the upcoming movie version of Dick's Minority Report, which is not to be confused with Hitch's Minority Report. And Hitch is not be confused with the other Hitch. Okay? Okay.
posted by Justin at 10:41 AM

 
MORE ON UTAH: Ed Mazza links to this story on the money Utah socks away from state-run liquor stores. He also linked to this parody site of this official Utah site awhile back, but he doesn't have any archives so I can't figure out exactly where he mentioned it. But there you go.
posted by Justin at 9:24 AM

 
ANYBODY UP FOR A ROAD TRIP?: There's a ton of motel rooms still unsold for the Olympics, Ananova reports. Via Drudge. We could hang out with Ken's sister. The article blames the hideous security checks, the sheer distance between events and the complete lack of alcohol. Read this paragraph in the nerdiest voice you can find in your head:

George Van Komen, chairman of Utah's Alcohol Policy Coalition, told broadcaster MSNBC: "Many people associate revelry and partying with alcohol, but that's simply not necessary. Drinks may not be as available as freely as some people might like. But it's a compromise we feel is important to keep drinks away from our young people and to keep the public safe."

But all is not lost:

Bars are banned from selling anything but watered-down beer which has a maximum of 3.2% alcohol, and drinkers wanting anything stronger have to join "private clubs" at a cost of five dollars (£3.50).

Restaurants serve drink, but only to people buying food - and until last year, could not even put alcoholic drinks on the menu, meaning wine lists were banned. And people are not allowed to bring alcohol across Utah's state borders, as its sale is controlled and taxed at 78.l%.......

To get round the restrictions, diplomats from Germany, Italy, Austria, Slovakia and Switzerland have set up temporary consulates which can sell alcohol tax-free.

Our Friends The Europeans is finally a non-ironic and completely true phrase. EUR-OPE! EUR-OPE!
posted by Justin at 9:14 AM

 
NO IS NO: Interesting, complicated date rape story from the Denver Westword. Via the Daze Reader. This definitely falls into the "fuzzy lines" Ginger Stampley was talking about in regards to the existence of date rape. Ginger also isn't a big Katie Roiphe fan but when someone (who is Roiphe) sums up her article with:

If someone asks you to marry them, just to be safe, you might want to give the idea some thought.

They can't be all bad.
posted by Justin at 8:52 PM

 
THE ONE NATURAL WORKOUT: Rand Simberg brings the story about the new legality of jogging naked in Maine:

Ms Ballou, 20, asked officer John Ewing whether he saw her genitals during the incident.

"Not that I recall," he replied.

"That's all I have," Ms Ballou told the court.

After he made his ruling, Judge Jesse Gunther, of the 3rd District Court in Bangor added: "I would assume the legislature will probably be addressing this issue."

The judge has been reading too much Playboy and not enough Club, if you catch my drift. And you might.
posted by Justin at 8:17 PM

 
INTERNET USE IN AMERICA COIN FLIP-ESQUE: The Wall Street Journal reports American internet use is about 54 percent. Via the h20boro lib log. We still have to catch up with the Koreans, who are at --let's see-- 25 million users out of 47 million people-- that's about, um, 53 percent. Never mind.
posted by Justin at 8:13 PM

 
THOMAS NEPHEW: Reports on German bloggers following the Superbowl. Could that be because of the World League --I mean, NFL Europe?

Golly, did you know Adam Vinatieri is a former Amsterdam Admiral?
posted by Justin at 7:57 PM

 
MORE FANTASY WRITING STUFF: Good American Prospect appreciation of C.S. Lewis plus coverage of recent flap where paranoid Christian groups thought HarperCollins was going to remove all Christian references from The Chronicle Of Narnia --not that there are any overt Christian references in The Chronicles Of Narnia-- when instead the company was just changing their marketing of the septulogy.
posted by Justin at 7:51 PM

 
BEYOND BEHE: This Amy Welborn post about Michael Behe (of Darwin's Black Box fame) reminds me that there are actually quite a few respectable books out there that try to raise questions of orthodox Darwinism; check out this Todd Stark list on Amazon. Go through all his lists if you have the time, it's amazing how much the guy reads.
posted by Justin at 5:38 PM

 
HITCH: I missed this Hitch piece from last week. He makes the point that Enron was paying everybody off --it's been made before, of course, but Hitch does it with Hitch style. Accepting money from companies is where Ralph Nader was right about there being no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, by the way. Via The Christopher Hitchens Web.
posted by Justin at 5:25 PM

 
SALON AND ON TIL THE BREAK OF DAWN: Salon today is following up on the whole Christina Hoff Sommers war-against-boys thing. It's kind of a state of the debate thing, overviewing all the competing opinions on the persistence of current gender gap which is tilting towards the girls. Sommers has not succeeded in shutting up arch-nemesis Carol Gilligan, but Gilligan is not the only one whose opinion matters anymore either. Worth checking out.
posted by Justin at 5:19 PM

 
LAUGH, DARN IT: Here, on Kesher Talk, is at least one version of the 72 Virginians joke.
posted by Justin at 2:31 PM

 
KMART COLLAPSE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel brings the link to this story explaining something Kmart did do wrong: it began investing in IT about four years too late. Finally, I was getting sick of stories saying that it's WalMart's patriarchal management style that gave it the winning edge.
posted by Justin at 2:20 PM

 
MONTANA RIGHT-WING HERMITS: Here's another article about imagined enemies within our borders: the citizens of the Mountain West. This one, thankfully, is examining Northeast elitists replacing the Deep South with Idaho and Montana as their Icon Of Backwardness, so the article has a little perspective. Via Reduction ad Absurdum.
posted by Justin at 2:08 PM

 
BOBOS: Then there's this Weekly Standard piece also brought to me by A&LD. It's by Peter Augustine Lawler. He gets a ton of mileage from David Brooks' "bobos" concept --bougeois bohemians who have "reconciled the modern conflict between bohemian self-expression and bourgeois productivity"-- a species of Americans who may or may not exist, like the anti-intellectuals below. Lawler wants us to think that human nature is dependent on the existence of death; take that away, we're insectoid animals. Or something. Watch him conjure up a dystopia:

As Walker Percy predicted in The Thanatos Syndrome, we may be able to free ourselves from all the stress of self-consciousness, becoming happy and productive animals who in the right environment are never in a bad mood. We could, in other words, make sociobiology's view of man true by eliminating all those perverse features of human nature that have made this view untrue so far.

Unbridled biotechnology could destroy human nature. The result would not really be a return to nature, but rather the human construction of an unalienated human environment. Biotechnological success would then be, from one view, the decisive evidence for and the final act of human freedom: We will make ourselves into what we imagined natural perfection to be. We will make ourselves fully at home in the world.

So his view is that the coming biotech future will be emotionally statist: nothing but happy, no unpredicatable moods, no emotional progress. But, obviously, opposing biotech and happiness-promoting and death-cheating is technologically statist. I guess agreeing with Lawler comes down to believing that your growth as an individual can be derailed by technology. Which is certainly possible --there are over-medicated souls out there-- but probably doesn't happen in a majority of people. He closes with this line:

Perhaps even our Bobos and our experts can come to understand that a distinctively human life, with all its suffering and limitations, is good, precisely because the longing to love others and God is not an illusion, nor does it finally go unsatisfied.

Why is he trying to convert the bobos? Are they laying siege to his house? If I have a beef with Lawler it's with him assuming we'll all go the same path to enlightenment; there's no reason his struggle-upwards-towards-greatness-until-death people can't exist under the same constitution as "bobo" health-and-beauty cultists, and the rest of us, for that matter. Maybe he's just doing his civic duty to prevent any one group from taking over the national consciousness.

Did you ever think neocons are nerds who thought science fiction was too nerdy to take seriously? And so they get all bent out of shape now because they can't psychologically place new ideas in fictional enviroments to sort of test where they might go? So we end up with weighty philosophical pieces that would probably work better as science fiction. Their writers lack a certain internal fiction-making apparatus. I am probably one step from making a science fictional exceptionalism argument --and I'm already making an unsupportable claim-- so let's nip that in the bud there for the moment.

Lawler also wrote a piece comparing libertarians and compassionate conservatives. And he has a book coming out that this piece seems like a primer for.
posted by Justin at 1:51 PM

 
ANTI-INTELLECTUALS: Here's this Mark Crispin Miller article Arts & Letters Daily linked to. He's trying to make a point about American anti-intellectual tendencies --a point that can be made, surely-- but comes off as paranoid sometimes, like when he's recounting his appearance on Bill O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: With us now is the author of the book, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. And in the New York Times, Prof. Miller is quoted as saying, "One of the reasons I reproduce such long exchanges with journalists such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly is to show their unthinking complicity in putting President Bush across."

MCM: You find that to be an outrageous claim?

O'Reilly: Well, not outrageous. I just think you're misguided, as many, many academics are these days.

That last shot was, of course, the intended subtext of my whole exchange with Bill, who kept on pointedly addressing me, with faint mock-deference, as "Professor"--an epithet synonymous with "jackass" in minds of many in his audience.

And then here:

Thus, for example, do the goon squads frequently bombard the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites with hostile fake reviews of books they obviously haven't read, to drive off as many folks as possible.

This from a guy whose book is averaging four stars on Amazon. It sound like he's guilty of the old confusing criticism with repression thing. He also quotes the head of Fox News on why Fox appeals to the red states (they're being ignored) without comment. I mean, tell me why he's wrong (the Fox News guy, I mean).

Miller also wrote the introduction on that J.H. Hatfield book that got pulled when everybody found out Hatfield was a criminal. That book still looks fun.
posted by Justin at 3:29 PM

 
ON THE OTHER HAND: Count of Monte Cristo was entertaining for seven dollars. It was tinged with true romance, which I like, and it was pretty well-made. Hey, I forgot that Dumas' book was the inspiration for The Stars My Destination. We need a movie version of that.
posted by Justin at 2:18 PM

 
THAT LOOKS AWFUL: Little AP story about people saying the new Schwarzeneggar flick is anti-Colombian. So it's a drug war movie, at least we know now what it's ostensibly about. It just looks like a terrible movie from the previews, like Arnold has sunk to Seagal-Van Damme levels of B-movie making. Stinky poo.
posted by Justin at 2:13 PM

 
WAKE UP, TIME TO BLOG: I'm sure we all noted this but Ev posted this Time article on blogging on Blogger.com. The article says what we already know: blogging is easy and worthwhile. The author, Chris Taylor has one blog and then another. The second one hasn't gotten off the ground yet but it's going to be a futurist blog --THAT I would read.
posted by Justin at 12:18 PM

 
MY WEEKEND: Was spent in beautiful Richmond, Virginia. Saturday I watched the initial card of John Boy and Billy's WrestleForce America, promoted by former WCW guy Lodi (who has adopted a Perry Saturn look, quite a departure from his Billy Idol-lookalike amiable goof days.) John Boy and Billy, it was explained to me, are a pan-Southern radio show phenomenon who have lent their name to this thing, so maybe this is an attempt to get a Southern promotion going. I watched with the DVDVR guys and my friend Churi and had multiple Pabst Blue Ribbons. Churi kept falling asleep; poor lil fella was all tuckered out from being on call at the hospital the night before. Yet she sportingly came out to see the wrestling and we got Church's afterwards --their corn on the cob on a stick is really great. I also met (mul)Doomstone, The Confederate Mack and Acehole for the first time, which was pretty cool. The show itself was decent wrestling. Read the DVDVR report when they post it (the site is down now), they know their shit.

On Sunday Dean took me to McLean's to get fried eggs (Dean said he met Jerry Falwell there once) and then the Hollywood Cemetery, which is long and rambling and full of ornate and weird tombstones combining Christian and pagan symbolism. There's also a bunch of crypts and angels frozen in mourning for the moment of death. As Dean said: "Welcome to the South."

And of course the Patriots pulled off the upset. U-S-A! U-S-A! I really think Mike Martz is kind of a cretin. You've got Marshall Faulk; when the chips are down, just run the guy. How hard is that? And every Rams game I've seen this season there's always been one questionable challenge or timeout. So I'm not buying the Mike Martz: Supergenius arguments right yet.
posted by Justin at 12:08 PM

 
NORTH KOREA: AXIS MEMBER UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer suggests why North Korea got the big nod from Bush:

Thank God for North Korea. Mentioning it is the equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling. Right now North Korea is too destitute and too isolated to be capable of anything but spasmodic violence. But it has the virtue of being non-Islamic.

So we need North Korea in the Axis so we don't come off as un-Islamic --it's a public relations ploy. How amazingly cynical. He also explains the true message of this State Of The Union speech: Iraq is next. Via Best Of The Web.
posted by Justin at 12:40 AM

 
MORE ON IMMIGRATION: Instapundit has reader mail and comments on the future look of American people. Think current-day Hawaiians. I doubt it will happen in 50 years or ever even as Glenn suggests, as mass Hawaiification would almost have to involve forced miscegenation --bussing carried to some horrible extreme. But a rise in "wildly and overlappingly multiethnic" people is probably already occurring, and will continue.

By the way, did you know Hawaii has an af2 team?
posted by Justin at 12:33 AM

 
ONE MORE THING: Here's one more paragraph from the U.S.S. Clueless I wanted to talk about:

Each generation in America is strengthened by a new flow of immigrants. Now that flow is from Latin America, and Korea, and Japan, and the Philippines, and India, and Viet Nam, and China, and Taiwan; they will bring with them the best of their nations, and they will leave behind the worst, and America will change again. It will change for the better. And it will become even less like Europe. In fifty years, more than half the population of the United States will not be of European descent.

First thing: is anybody coming here from Japan anymore? I wouldn't think they'd need to, recession or not.

Second thing: the idea of new immigrants bringing the best of their nations, which is pretty true, especially in the case of India, which I think is suffering from brain drain as a lot of its best and brightest find better-paying jobs here. But it is quite a change from that whole wretched refuse yearning to breathe free, right? Not that Steven won't be right about things changing for the better, but we shouldn't think we're getting merely the cast-aside of the world anymore. We as Americans have become victims of our own success in that regard.
posted by Justin at 12:26 AM

 
REPORT FROM CAMP X-RAY: Ken Layne links to this report from Guantanamo in The Weekly Standard. Cripes, look at the freaks we got stowed there:

When I ask the Marines if they've seen anything weird, they laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. "They know they're being watched," he explains, "so they'll stare at you, and while they stare at you, they'll, uh, masturbate."

According to these Marines, they don't just pleasure themselves to freak out the snipers, but also to embarrass the female Army guards in the camp's interior. The weirdness doesn't end there. They've also eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. "The other day," says Westbrook, "one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel." In the most bizarre twist, Lance Corporal Devin Klebaur says a few have also been known to "put toothpaste in their ass." "What's the purpose?" I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, puzzled.

And then this:

Their restroom arrangements are pretty spartan. They get a white bucket for emergency squirts, while they are instructed to hold two fingers up for the alternative. At that time, a guard shackles them and takes them to the port-o-loo. While the military has spared no expense in construction costs (in three weeks, they built a completely operational field hospital staffed by 160 medical personnel--two more than there are prisoners), they've saved a fortune in toilet paper. It's the detainees' cultural preference not to use any. "We don't shake their hands," says one camp guard.

No toilet paper? The hey? The article claims these guys are mostly Saudis, by the way. Go read.




posted by Justin at 12:16 AM

 
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Go follow the debate between Steven den Beste and Iain Murray on the originality of America. Steven makes the point in no uncertain terms that Europe has no clue about America, Iain points out that America is more Anglo than Western European, then Steven follows up with comments on the Native American origins of our politics, among other points. My own personal take: I was raised in a pretty Ireland-sympathetic family, so I am naturally loathe to give Great Britain any credit at all. But Iain's points about Britain being a special branch of Western civilization (in the sense that Japan is a special branch of "Confucian" civilization, if I remember my Toynbee right) and thus America being an outgrowth of Anglo culture have merit. Maybe I should change the terms of my pet theory slightly: Americans are to British the way Romans were to Greeks.

I find this den Beste paragraph enjoyable:

As long as Europe tries to see the United States as an outgrowth of European culture spawned in the New World, as long as it looks in the mirror when it thinks it looks west, it will continue to be confused by us as we keep acting in ways they cannot explain.

You could replace that first Europe with "The National Review" and it would still be true. I think.
posted by Justin at 12:09 AM

 
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION PROS: Here's Matt Welch on the good points anti-globalization protesters are making. He also pinpoints the political leanings of The Economist: neo-liberal. He puts it in quotes so I guess it isn't a term in heavy circulation, unlike neoconservative. Who are the neo-liberal bloggers, by the way? I've seen lots of different conservative and libertarian blogs, and much of the pre-9/11 bloggerverse seems pretty dyed-in-the-wool liberal. But neo-liberal? I'm not sure.

I dig Matt's comments on why we should all be reading The Economist:

If the protest kids ever read The Economist, they’d see that most of this six-point program is perfectly consistent with the editorial views of the world’s leading “neo-liberal” publication. If people who described themselves as “liberal” would actually embrace “liberalism,” the left 25% of the American Left wouldn’t strike everyone else as so ridiculous, irrelevant, and (post-Sept. 11) infuriating as all hell.

Well, he's not saying everyone should, just the protest kids who would benefit from it the most. But everyone should; I think I've said this before, but it's the best possible Newsweek.
posted by Justin at 11:12 PM

 
STAR TREK WRAPUP: I feel like doing this so I can get all the recent Star Trek posts in one place. I am one of those that feels that Next Generation was absolutely the best of the Trek shows. It boils down to the science fiction of TNG being way better than the original, though Voyager had good SF episodes too. And Patrick Stewart is a far far better actor than William Shatner. This, I think, outweighs any problems with the economics or politics of the 24th century.

Here's the article that got Ken Layne talking about Star Trek first here then here.

Then the Samizdata people jumped on it. You can read their stuff sequentially like this: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Ginger Stampley has a post but more on science fiction in general. She disses Voyager, which was always watchable once The Doctor and Seven were involved. She also refs the Penfield Mood Organ, I've got mine set to My Posts Appear Incredibly Witty And Incisive. Must need new batteries....
posted by Justin at 2:00 PM

 
MARK BYRON: Has the post on why Japan is so slow to recover in an economic sense. I am reminded of this book which, while a little out of date, gives an excellent overview of contemporary Japan.
posted by Justin at 11:27 AM

 
WAFA IDRIS: Did she mean to blow herself up? I am directed to this Salon piece via rc3.org:

It is still unclear whether Wafa intended to blow herself up or whether she was carrying the bomb for somebody else. An unofficial statement by Fatah's militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades only says that she was "martyred" in the operation. The Israeli police do not classify her as a suicide bomber, just a "bomber." It is possible that Wafa was acting as a courier and that the intended bomber was actually nearby when the device exploded prematurely. The man rumored to be her contact is said to have been lightly wounded and is receiving treatment at an Israeli hospital.

Rafe offers these comments:

The chilling thing about the profile is that there's nothing to suggest that this woman was an extremist of any kind -- she didn't wear a head scarf, and spent her time volunteering as a paramedic for the Red Crescent Society. Were I an Israeli, I think the question that would be haunting me is whether some of the suicide bombings are committed by people who are driven to suicidal depression by their day-to-day lives immersed in violence and poverty rather than by delusional Islamists on a hurry to get a one way ticket to paradise.

Catallaxy Files echoes those comments with his comments on Idris:

She was with the nationalist Fatah rather than the nutso jihaddists. Nonetheless ... Try as I might, I really can't understand the mentality and culture of death underlying all this, it is something that I just can't tap into or enter into. Am I too materialistic? Too individualistic? I don't know.

Those Ralph Peters comments about a freakish equilibrium we can't understand are seeming pretty much right on, the more I hear about Israel vs. Palestine.
posted by Justin at 10:47 PM

 
KEN LAYNE: Has seen the Unablogger. Whoever he is, all we know about him is he's one of the warbloggers in the links on the side of his page. But we all love the Unablogger and consider him our spiritual leader. If he ever gets exposed it'll be like Spartacus, we'll all stand up and say "I am the Unablogger." "No --I am the Unablogger." Because, in a sense, we're all the Unablogger. Is that not so?
posted by Justin at 10:22 PM

 
NEW OLD PAGLIA: I was checking out Arts & Letters Daily (it's like a highbrow Boing Boing) and I came across this Paglia speech from back in May. It was new to me, so maybe it's new to some of you too. She's talking about multiculturalism and people not knowing their history.
posted by Justin at 6:24 PM

 
DON'T TEASE THE MORONS WATCH: New York Times article on why Bush's shout out to North Korea is making South Korean and Japanese officials kind of nervous. Meanwhile Drudge linked to this story about Iran being actually honored to be called out. Their comments amount to, "Of all the Great Satans in the world, America, you're the Great Sataniest."
posted by Justin at 5:31 PM

 
MUSIC SCENE: Neat little TNR article on the rise of indie rock and how famous band Mission of Burma is finally profiting from the alternative music scene they started.
posted by Justin at 5:05 PM

 
MEANINGLESSNESS OF RACE UPDATE: There's a good article and another about the scientific community's internal debates on the objective biological existence of race or the lack thereof. It's on BioMedNet which requires registration, so if you don't feel like doing that, I'll try and blog the gist of it here. Here's a clip:

Far beyond defining races as "people who do not fit," opponents in the London debate this week spent much of their time arguing whether races even exist at all. Kealy, who is a clinical biochemist, was unequivocal that they do, speaking genetically. Strong evidence exists for the selection of certain genes during human evolution, he argued, such as those for skin and eye color.

Not so, riposted David Goldstein, professor of population genetics at University College London. From the point of view of population genetics, he asserted, "race doesn't exist in the human species."

Goldstein is interested in how the evolutionary histories of populations can be used to increase our knowledge of genetic diseases. From his studies of the statistical associations between candidate genes in natural populations (linkage disequilibrium), he said he cannot draw sharp genetic boundaries between groups. "Over 90% of the genetic differences among humans are due to differences between individuals" and not differences between groups, he said, however you classify them.

There are differences in people from different countries, he conceded. For example, African-Americans respond differently to heart failure drugs than do Americans of European extraction. But these are not racial differences, he said, and are modest in comparison with differences between individuals.

They don't give Kealy a lot of space compared to Goldstein in either article, so I don't know if that reflects the strengths of his arguments or the biases of the author or neither. Just sign up and read the whole thing if you're interested, otherwise I'll end up blogging the whole thing up here. Via Yahoo Evolutionary Psychology, as usual.
posted by Justin at 4:19 PM

 
THE 49ERS: Have signed another Garcia, Aaron Garcia of the AFL's New York Dragons. He'll compete for a spot backing up Jeff Garcia, who of course is a CFL refugee. Take that, NFL talent scouts. Via the great yet incredibly slow-loading Arenafan.
posted by Justin at 12:06 PM

 
WOMEN PLAY BASKETBALL, PEOPLE WATCH: ESPN reports on the rising attendance at women's college basketball games. Also note that despite the Hornets moving to New Orleans, the Sting are staying in Charlotte.
posted by Justin at 11:54 AM

 
UMMMM: In a completely perverse way, is the female suicide bomber evidence of the Palestinians being way more enlightened than the rest of the Arab world? I mean, this is probably a completely inappropriate episode with which to make this point, but I've always heard that the Palestinians are more industrious and entertaining than the rest of the Arab world. Which is why no other Arab country wants to let them in. I am reminded of Ralph Peters' hard-nosed and probably counter-intuitive analysis of Israel-Palestine:

A functional compromise between Israelis and Palestinians was impossible when the fanatics were merely on one side, and now they compose the decisive elements on both sides. Barring cataclysms, an Israeli born as this essay is written is likely to wade through his or her entire life in an ebb and flow of conflict. Meaning well, and behaving foolishly, we plunged into the Arab-Israeli conflict as an "honest broker," although neither side can accept the compromises required by such brokering, while our baggage as both Israel's primary supporter and the long-time backer of many of the most reprehensible Arab regimes is a debilitating handicap to mediation. We declare that stability in the Middle East is critical, no matter if it is impossible without a Carthaginian peace imposed by one side or the other.

The Israelis and the Palestinians can coexist. They already do. But their coexistence is of a different, dynamic nature that belies the meaning we attach to the term. Their struggle fulfills both sides. The Palestinians will never be satisfied, no matter how much they might regain, and the siege mentality Israelis affect to deplore may be essential to the continued vigor of their state. For both factions, struggle and the self-justification it allows may be the most fulfilling condition.

Americans assume that violent disorder is an unnatural state that must be resolved, but high levels of violence in a society or region may simply maintain a different kind of equilibrium than that to which we are accustomed. At the very least, periods of violence may be lengthy transitions that cannot be artificially foreshortened. We need not condone violence to recognize that it is not an artificial imposition upon human nature, nor will insisting that violence is unnatural make it so. We know so little about the complex origins of violence that our beliefs about it are no more than superstitions. Whether in regard to the violence of the man or the mass, our theories attempt to explain it away rather than to understand it. The Middle East may be inhumane, but it is one of the most explicitly human places on earth.

posted by Justin at 1:20 PM

 
SPEAKING OF NORTH KOREA: I understand Bush knocking Iraq (evil dictator, paranoid Stalinist state) and Iran (they've been on that Death-To-America kick for years, it's only fair we return the favor) but isn't North Korea only a danger to itself, what with that weird state religion and poverty and everything? Isn't it obviously about to teeter over --just like that hotel in Pyongyang? Which, of course, is a problem; if North Korea collapses, as this article suggests, it might drag down South Korea, which in turn will drag down Japan. (Though perhaps some people in Pyongyang are smartening up.) But unless they're worried about the North Korean state going out in a blaze of glory or something, I don't see how it can rank very high on our radar, unless they know something we don't. Weren't people eating their shoe leather there during the last famine?
posted by Justin at 12:55 PM

 
THE SAMIZDATA STRIKES BACK: Your favorite secret-master-of-the-world and mine, the Samizdata Illuminatus, has revealed himself. He does not have a giant God-hat like I thought he would. He did, apparently, star in the original D.W. Griffith version of Stargate. I'm sorry --that was TERRIBLE. That joke, I mean.

And I did always kind of think of myself as the North Korea of the bloggersphere; you know, nice uniforms, cult of personality, delusions of grandeur, giant unfinished hotels --aww yeah, that's where it's at. All I need is a small thermonuclear device and I'll have INSTANT CREDIBILITY. Like Pakistan. I think.
posted by Justin at 11:04 AM

 
GEEK ECONOMY: The null device leads me to this New Scientist article about an online roleplaying game called EverQuest. Apparently the community of EverQuest players have created a legit economy by trading items valuable within the context of the game on eBay. A quick google search yields the original paper. This struck me as interesting:

Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. The entire dollar-based economy is underground, since the owning company, Sony, considers everything created in the world to be its intellectual property. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money -- with annual revenues expected to top $1.5 billion by 2004 -- and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may be the next step in the evolution of internet (and possibly human) culture.

So virtual worlds are the economic future of the Internet and the next step in cultural evolution. I think the former is a little more obvious, what with our own little community's recent forays into Blogger Pro. There's probably a moral here about modernity making people pay just to have human contact, for God's sake, and we're all just sitting around at our computers and we've been distanced by cruel technology. (I just read Player Piano.) But I'm not making that moral.
posted by Justin at 10:06 AM

 
I NOTE: Via AintNoBadDude Jay Zilber's excerpts from Michelangelo Signorile's attempt to Krugman Andrew Sullivan. I dunno. I can't read the article --nypress.com appears to be down-- but hasn't Signorile had a grudge against Sullivan for a while now?
posted by Justin at 8:35 PM

 
FUN WITH CHOMSKY: Flit after discussing Noam Chomsky's defense of himself in the Salon letters pages links to this Leo Casey piece deconstructing the old Sudan-pharmaceutical-factory-bombing-worse-than-9/11 argument. Casey points out Chomsky's love of the argument by authority. On Znet, of all places.
posted by Justin at 6:08 PM

 
DEEPLY SADDENED WATCH: "Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter was charged with prescription fraud today after she was arrested at a pharmacy drive-thru window while allegedly trying to buy the sedative Xanax. Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba, issued a statement saying they were "deeply saddened" by the incident involving their only daughter, 24-year-old Noelle. "This is a very serious problem," they said. "Unfortunately, substance abuse is an issue confronting many families across our nation."

From here. Did Jeba and his wife just admit their daughter has a drug problem and not even try to defend her? Maybe her prescription just ran out and she didn't feel like making an appointment to get a new one. Or maybe she actually has a drug problem. Oh yeah....

Speaking of drug problems, I'm reading Philip K. Dick's classic stoner novel A Scanner Darkly right now. It's as good as I remembered from back in junior high.
posted by Justin at 5:13 PM

 
FOOTBALL ARMS RACE: Interesting LA Times article about the increasing bulk of NFL linemen. There are about six times as many three-hundred pounders playing today than there were ten years ago. There is danger in getting that big:

In plain terms, if a 270-pound player adds 30 pounds of muscle, he significantly enhances his body's ability to generate heat, especially during practice or a game. But he has barely increased the surface area of his skin, crucial to dissipating that heat. "When you get these people who are 300 pounds and 6-foot-5, those are not good numbers," said Robert Girandola, an associate professor of kinesiology at USC.

Just playing in the NFL is going to cause you neverending grief:

And Scranton estimates that, in coming years, every player retiring from the NFL will suffer from arthritis or other ailments related to substantial joint damage in the neck, lower back and knees. He considers it inevitable with 300-pound men who can run faster and hit harder than ever before.

This Pierre Scranton has written a book on football injuries too.
posted by Justin at 4:59 PM

 
SPEAKING OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: Rambling around the World Of Dawkins I run into this cool little piece from a while back about Robert Wright stalking Stephen Jay Gould in an intellectual sense. The intra-Darwinist wars are always entertaining.
posted by Justin at 1:13 PM

 
RICHARD DAWKINS POLITICAL LEANINGS UPDATE: I ran across this post on CharlesMurtaugh.Com about the ideological leanings of creationists. Charles is arguing they tend to be neocons, which would render my earlier labelling of Dawkins as a neocon innacurate, because he's a confirmed atheist. Check out this ongoing discussion on the Yahoo evolutionary psychology group for further information. I don't know what you would call Dawkins --he's not a liberal, but that doesn't mean he's a conservative. Anarcho libertarian? Atheist conservative?
posted by Justin at 1:07 PM

 
YOUR CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE DAY: Airstrip One has the link to this conspiracy theory about the secret U.S. military weather dominator. The author argues it's high time all our little United States went their separate ways. All right, but only if Jersey gets the Statue of Liberty.
posted by Justin at 12:48 PM

 
IT'S A BLOG ABOUT NOTHING, SEE: I am pleased that the Protein Wisdom collective is reading my blog; however, it appears I was speaking out of turn regarding Mickey Kaus, who attended the big Los Angeles blogger party over the weekend --so he can't be accused fairly of ignoring the bloggersphere. Josh Marshall, on the other hand, can't even bring himself to mention Rand Simberg by name when he's commenting on one of Rand's posts, so my comments may still apply to him, for what they're worth. And I don't think Andrew Sullivan ever acknowledged his Bloggie nod.
posted by Justin at 8:40 AM

 
THEY NEED A PAY SITE: Samizdata has gone picture-crazy lately, though the mysterious Samizdata Illuminatus remains unrevealed. I bet he looks like God as portrayed in Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
posted by Justin at 8:27 AM

 
TRAGIC: Bjorn has the Scandinavia local-interest story about a Kurdish immigrant who killed his daughter for dating a Swedish guy. He's got some good commentary there too, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of non-liberal cultures and multiculturalism's respect for them.
posted by Justin at 4:27 PM

 
WHILE WE'RE TALKING SCIENCE FICTION: Here's David Pringle's seminal 100 Best Science Fiction Novels list. The one problem is he did it back in 1984 so it ends with Neuromancer, but it's still a worthy list. Read the book version if you come across it.
posted by Justin at 2:21 PM

 
I'LL BE DANGED: Tom Tomorrow has a blog. Via Boing Boing, purveyors of everything cool in this world.
posted by Justin at 1:13 PM

 
WEALTH DOES NOT NECESSARILY BRING CORRUPTION: The opening sentence from this Nature article: "Solvent socialist economies could be more at risk from corruption than liberal ones, according to a team of physicists, mathematicians and economists." Check it out.
posted by Justin at 1:03 PM

 
MEANINGLESSNESS OF RACE UPDATE: Here's Steven Rose arguing for the concept of race having no biological value. If I remember my science wars correctly Rose is a Gouldian liberal and not a Dawkinsian neocon. Bioculturally, of course, race remains a pretty big deal.
posted by Justin at 12:11 PM

 
MORE FANTASY NOVEL STUFF: Via Reductio Ad Absurdum, here's a literary opinion piece saying Philip Pullman is doing for secular humanism what C.S. Lewis did for Christianity. Good stuff. Pullman's books are on the ever-growing Books I Need To Read list. My favorite philosopher C.S. Peirce said something about there being more books worth reading out there than any one person could read in their lifetime, and that was back in the late 1800s-early 1900s. If ever a mouthful was said, that was it.
posted by Justin at 12:43 AM