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

 
TARIFFS: Thomas Nephew has the posting equivalent of a monster dunk over a seven-foot-two center on the whole Nick Denton-inspired tariff non-issue issue.
posted by Justin at 8:23 PM

 
GIANT ROBOT TEST RESULTS: I am completely jealous of Monkey's results. And Damian Penny has his up. This is my favorite test yet, every result appeals to my dorkish fannishness and my childhood identification with giant robots, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was true of a lot of us out here in warblogspace, thus the robot test (like the gun test) is something we all can enjoy without shame --unlike say the Muppet test. Though Emily Jones has no problem publishing her results for both. Giant Robot, by the way, is a fine fine magazine that's not about giant robots.
posted by Justin at 6:22 PM

 
ROY: Peter Briffa has more. And he makes the counter-intuitive argument for Russ Meyer, Conservative Filmmaker.
posted by Justin at 6:05 PM

 
BARKLEY: Oliver on Sportsfilter started a thread on that Sir Charles interview. I think the weirder thing about that story is that Jack McCallum (who wrote it) claims that the Ernie-Kenny-Charles TNT show is the best studio-produced sports show ever and I find it hard to disagree with him. He compares it favorably to the Fox NFL show, saying it comes off as forced sometimes and I completely agree; those guys are forcing themselves into laughing at their own jokes and being all buddy-buddy all the time. No four grown men can possibly enjoy each other the way those guys do, but I guess Fox puts some kind of premium on attitude. Whereas the TNT show you get what you get and It Is Good.

Jack McCallum needs a blog.
posted by Justin at 6:02 PM

 
I KEEP FORGETTING TO MENTION THIS: But the DVDVR Playaz have the road report up of last Saturday's ECWA Super 8 up. The Super 8 is an annual tournament held in a church meeting hall in Newport, Delaware that showcases some of the best talent on the indy wrestling scene; it was as great this year as ever. Even the battle royal was good --won by Prince Nana, who has a pompous African prince gimmick and was totally funny throughout in the cowardly heel role, he spent most of the match avoiding the other competitors and won by having his manager distract the last guy in the ring, last year's Super 8 champ Low-Ki, while Nana came around and dumped him out of the ring-- though the Scoot Andrews-Billy Fives ladder match for the title was laughable. Low-Ki sure beat the crap out of idiot-gimmick king Japanese Pool Boy though. The Xavier-A.J. Styles match was top of the line. People say jazz is the only native American artform but professional wrestling is surely another one.
posted by Justin at 5:47 PM

 
MOVIES: What if you made a movie and nobody came? Would said movie still be said to exist? Gawd this looks stinky:

Running late to meet his wife and young son at a downtown high-rise, he witnesses a catastrophic bomb blast kill his family before his eyes. The explosion is credited to "The Wolf," an infamous rebel leader in Colombia's decades-long civil war. The intended targets were members of the Colombian consulate and American intelligence agents. Gordy's wife and child are considered "collateral damage," innocent people who lost their lives for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gordy's only consolation is the hope that justice will prevail for the loss of his family.

Of course justice isn't happening and Arnold has to track down The Wolf, who I doubt will replace the Harvey Keitel version from Pulp Fiction in the public consciousness. Give it up Arnold clap clap clapclapclap. If this movie was popular we'd see endless criticisms as it probably plays fast and loose with the facts in Columbia and our presence there and the War on Drugs and all, but it isn't so we have nothing of that nature to read. This probably qualifies as a conservative movie too, just not any you'd want to watch on purpose. But I proably shouldn't pan it just because Eraser was terrible so no more.
posted by Justin at 12:51 PM

 
OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS POST OF THE DAY: Greatest emoticon ever right here.
posted by Justin at 7:14 PM

 
MARK CUBAN WATCH: Little post from Alice this time linking to an actual free Wall Street Journal article about how Mark made his fortune and how he's keeping the fortune afloat now. Pro lacrosse on high definition TV? Sign me up.
posted by Justin at 7:09 PM

 
IN A PARALLEL BLOGGERVERSE: Two science fiction writers who happen to be bloggers debate "The Death Of Scarcity" at a tech festival. In our bloggerverse Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus talk about "My Life As A Blog" at a public university. This isn't a parallel universe in a Crime Syndicate kind of way, it's more of a Justice League versus The Avengers kind of thing where fans of both can endlessly debate their respective merits. This is a good thing --it's good to have more than one frame of reference. And apparently I can only argue metaphorically and never with an airtight logical argument. So be it, Jedi.
posted by Justin at 6:50 PM

 
RUN RUN AWAY: Jubal Harshaw, Robert Heinlein's alter ego, refers me to this Chicago Tribune story about William Heirens, who may or may not be a serial killer. Harshaw says:

William Heirens, then a bright high school student, and since the first prisoner in Illinois to get a college degree behind bars, was charged with triple murder in 1946. He was injected with sodium pentothal, and, WHILE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE PENTOTHAL made a “confession” that eventually led to his conviction. There were “inconsistencies” in the physical evidence presented, and prosecutors admitted that they would have had a hard time convicting him without the “confessions.” Though another man had already confessed to the murders, Heirens is still in prison, now 78 years old.

For those of you who haven’t seen someone injected with sodium pentothal, let me try to explain the problem here. Sodium pentothal, aka “truth serum” makes people tell the truth only in the comic book world. Here in the real world, it does NOT make people tell the truth. In low doses, sodium pentothal can make people babble incoherently, and frequently repeat whatever they are told (an event called "echolalia"). Imagine being bone-tired, drunk, and stoned, all at once. What someone says under the influence of sodium pentothal has as much relation to the truth as what you would expect to come out of the mouth of someone who’s been awake for 48 hours, just finished with a fifth of scotch, and on his tenth doobie.

There does seem to be a real divergence of opinion regarding this guy though, about whether he did it or not. But Harshaw's point about a sodium pentathol confession being evidence is obviously right. There's a point here about the limits of science, and about a bygone era where people could believe there was a clear test, like an injection or the polygraph, that would prove if people meant what they were saying beyond a shadow of a doubt. But that never happened and we still have to make up our own minds about what people are really thinking based on their words and actions until we all evolve giant brains and vestigial legs and have super-monkeys build us wheelchairs. So it goes.
posted by Justin at 6:14 PM

 
WAR STORY: That Don't Be A Shamed fella provides the link to this story about a soldier (from New Jersey) who risked life and limb to get the right position on a bunch of Al Qaeda types who kept jumping out of their cave and taunting him and his troops. It's a neat little story, reminding me of the kind of thing I might have read in G.I. Combat when DC was still publishing an honet-to-god war comic. Or some of those EC Frontline Combat reprints, or the Wayne Vansant stuff I read during the eighties black and white comics craze. Something where it took actual wit and ingenuity to solve a problem, like Batman in his Sherlock Holmes mode but at war. Those G.I. Combats were great because they were cheap, they were 80 pages, and they involved a tank in World War II that was haunted by the ghost of Jeb Stuart. Very great, if I remember it all right.
posted by Justin at 5:50 PM

 
TINY NUKE IN NYC FOLLOWUP: CNN says the guy who was talking about a missing Russian nuke is "a fabricator" and a charlatan too, no doubt. Via Dave Tepper.
posted by Justin at 4:29 PM

 
BLOGIC OF THE SPHERES: Or Music Of The Blogs, whichever bad joke you prefer. Stacy suggested I get the Rate Your Music comment service and so I have. And so now you can rate my music, since music is an artform and Steve den Beste in his manifesto says his blog is a work of art so maybe mine is too or at least it's blurring the line between art and criticism. Or whatever; it's called Rate Your Music and it makes comments for my posts. Fin.
posted by Justin at 3:21 PM

 
TESTING TESTING: Here's Jacob Sullum on those dern tariffs.
posted by Justin at 3:02 PM

 
TESTING AGAIN: Linking to the latest Jim Treacher.
posted by Justin at 2:46 PM

 
TESTING: My new comments dealie by linking to this fine Kolkata Libertarian post about giant death robots. I'd love to have the one that looks like the head on the Pringles can from the Giant Robo opening. Or Omega Supreme, I'd have my own fortress. Enough.

UPDATE: My test results are back and I'm proud of them.


Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?
posted by Justin at 2:26 PM

 
SILLINESS: Blogatelle sends the news that the correct color of the universe is more of a beige that a turquoise, now that they look at it. I never understood the point of this study to begin with --I mean, it's the average color of the universe, not what the actual color of the universe. I mean, what would the point be of getting the average color of the Mona Lisa or any other painting you care to mention? Well, if you were an art scholar you could take the average color of the various paintings of various eras and see how that has changed over time if it has and then make grand pronouncements based on that data. Which you can't do with the average color of the universe as we only got one of those that we can really examine. This is, like, cute science. Right?
posted by Justin at 1:19 PM

 
HOLY CROW: The Editor sends word that the Midwest Conservative Journal is ad-free. You may now click fearlessly.
posted by Justin at 12:57 PM

 
FUNNY: That pugnacious Pundit 21 has the Frank & Ernest strip that incensed the Libertarian Party enough to comment on it. They sound like NOW or somebody in their fearless humorlessness:


But the problem is that the comic distorts what Libertarians believe, said Winter.

"Libertarianism is a philosophy that defines the proper relationship between individuals and government," he said. "According to the Bible, the Ten Commandments are instructions from God. It's not our job as Libertarians to tell people what is or isn't a proper religious belief. That's why a Libertarian wouldn't 'go bananas' about the Ten Commandments.

"A Libertarian may or may not agree with your particular religious beliefs. But a Libertarian would respect them, and allow you to practice them in peace. That may not be as funny as a Frank and Ernest comic strip -- but it's the truth."

So, are Libertarians going to "go bananas" on artist Bob Thaves?

"Of course not," said Winter. "If I ever met him, I might have a frank and earnest conversation about what Libertarians really believe. Then I would congratulate him for creating such a consistently funny and clever comic strip."

"Frank and earnest conversation." He must be the last person in America reading Frank & Ernest, by the way. Bill Winter must've missed the Family Circus where Dolly told Bil Keane, "You can't make me clean my room, I'ma libertarian." I swear that's funny, Family Circus jokes are comedy gold; whenever Bill Griffith wants me to laugh at a Zippy, he'll throw in a Family Circus reference. Or he would if my local paper still carried him. Maybe I can get some back issues from Fantagraphics...
posted by Justin at 12:54 PM

 
STEEL TARIFFS: Nick Denton has the links and links and the tempered outrage we were all looking for.
posted by Justin at 12:19 PM

 
KRISPY KREME: Net income doubles. Within the past year we've just been getting them in the stores here in South Jersey, but there's still no actual Krispy Kreme stores like I've seen in my trips to Richmond. All we got is Dunkin Donuts around here, which is fine with me, their coffee rules and who doesn't like a nice Boston creme? Entemann's also makes a fine fine variety pack --cinnamon, coffee crumb, chocolate-covered. Out-standing.
posted by Justin at 12:12 PM

 
HEFNER WATCH: Hef made this chick a Playmate?
posted by Justin at 12:07 PM

 
PSEUDONYMOUS BLOGGER WATCH: Jubal Harshaw posts. That's so great. Via Fevered Rants. But why are there so many Heinlein dorks in blogspace and hardly any Dick dorks? If I'd known there was going to be such a dearth, I'da billed myself as Mr. Tagomi or Horselover Fat or Leo Bulero or somebody. Or "The Three Blogmata Of Palmer Eldritch."
posted by Justin at 11:41 AM

 
HANDEDNESS: Photodude links to the news that left-handers have different brains. I will withdraw, like he did, the meat of the article:

People who grow up left-handed have a different, more flexible brain structure than those born to take life by the right hand, say researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who used twins to study heredity.

The reason is that right-handers have genes that force their brains into a slightly more one- sided structure, according to research published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Left-handers appear to be missing those genes.

"There really is a difference in brains that results in a more symmetric brain in left-handers, where the two sides are more equal," said UCLA neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind, who led the research team. "There is more flexibility, and that is under genetic control."

In Toynebeean terms lefties are the creative minority driving civilization. I'm sure this is the consensus opinion of modern history and biology.
posted by Justin at 7:02 PM

 
OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS REFERENCE POST OF THE DAY: Ooh! I have been zinged and I love it!
posted by Justin at 6:44 PM

 
DILFER: Excess Bloggage has news and an appreciation.
posted by Justin at 3:58 PM

 
IDIOCY WATCH "WHERE ARE THEY NOW?" REPORT: Arundhati Roy is spending a night in jail for saying bad things about the Indian Supreme Court. The AP piece adds:

A two-judge panel said she was guilty of "scandalizing it and lowering its dignity through her statements." It said freedom of speech does not grant anyone license to do that.

Roy faced up to six months in prison for contempt. The court said that in sentencing her to one day, it was "showing magnanimity of law by keeping in mind that the respondent is a woman."

You might remember Roy from her appearance in the TNR Idiocy Watch with these comments:

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy... Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.

She actually had the honor of appearing twice there. And her brother is goalie for the hated Avalanche.
posted by Justin at 1:41 PM

 
THAT CHARLES BARKLEY INTERVIEW: I don't think it's online anywhere, but you can get what was left on the cutting room floor here. Choice snippets:

"The only team in my era that could beat the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq was the 1985-'86 Boston Celtics. First of all, Robert Parish couldn't stop Shaq, but he would make him work on defense. Then they'd come back with Kevin McHale and make Shaq work harder. Dennis Johnson could body up and make it hard for Kobe. And McHale and Larry Bird would absolutely kill the Lakers forwards."

"ESPN has made the game a highlight reel, and it's been a detriment. If you make three spectacular dunks that's all the fans see. Dunks or flashy plays -- that's what kids today think of as good basketball because ESPN tells them that. Kids have no fundamentals, and, worse than that, they have no coaching. Any kid who becomes the star of his AAU team gets no instruction because the coach is afraid to coach him. That is screwed up."

My fave, as a Sixers fan:

"If I'm lucky enough to go into the Hall of Fame, I'll go in as a Philadelphia 76er. I don't think I was always treated well there, but you should go into the Hall with the team you had your best years on, even though I was the MVP in Phoenix."

Watching Charles last night on TNT made me think of what Ken said about Howard Stern in his response to me, in particular this part: "The show has a raw honesty completely unheard of in any form of media, and it's incredibly refreshing." You could say the same thing about Barkley on TNT. Or I, at least, would say it.

Ken sticks by his Howard-love and so does Jeff Jarvis. Ken adds: "Okay, the show's still largely made up of topless dancers and the retarded, but it's slightly more complicated than most people think." It's definitely complicated, and I would never want to match wits with Stern myself. If Stern is a painter, topless dancers and the retarded are his brushes, the American radiosphere his canvas. Ah yes. I'm not saying I don't like him, just pointing to the fact that his mode involves tearing apart people who don't realize how goofy they are. Trying to train the cold eye of armchair psychology on the Stern phenomenon, is all.

Meanwhile it seems that what should really be in every market is jazz radio stations. I love mine.
posted by Justin at 12:27 PM

 
HOUSTON BLOGFEST: Went off fine, it seems, without a lot of hoopla, or fanfare, as one would expect from good-natured and plainspoken Texas folk.
posted by Justin at 11:51 AM

 
MORE TARIFF COVERAGE: Jason Soon links to this article, which theorizes the tariffs are evidence of Bush's pragmatic nature:

So Bush is a hypocrite, right? Not exactly. In fact, the contradiction is explained by politics. The Bush administration wants freer trade, but it has to manage this goal around a number of roadblocks in the US political system.

Bush sacrificed free trade principles in regards to steel to win over Congress so he could get that whole fast-track trade negotiating power later:

To secure trade negotiating authority, Bush either has to buy support with pork barrelling or make concessions. He's working to secure that authority. Before Christmas, he won that authority from one branch of Congress, the House of Representatives, with a one-vote majority. But it was costly. He had to agree to consider imposing temporary restrictions on steel imports, to come back to Congress for separate approval for sensitive agricultural items and to restrict access to textile imports from developing countries. And he still has to win the support of the other branch of Congress, the Senate, for the negotiating authority. This is expected in April. More concessions may have to be made.

That Victorian weirdo Chuck Dodgson has more.
posted by Justin at 11:31 AM

 
RALL DEFENSE: Found here, from a self-proclaimed friend of Rall. Via Sulli. The Rall strip down the bottom there I don't think anyone can have a problem with. Rall is a wildly inconsistent cartoonist, ranging from funny to completely offensive; he does not pick his targets too well, methinks. There's a good debate at The Comics Journal message board on the strip, where Rall himself posts sometimes.
posted by Justin at 11:18 AM

 
MCJ: The Editor reports on the long-standing imperialist designs we have had on Canada. I dig the Journal, even if I have to click through those dang popups to read it.

The Editor also has a short post on the steel tariffs. Dang it, Editor, I want outrage.
posted by Justin at 10:52 AM

 
STEEL TARIFFS: Follow the story along with The Financial Times. I second Matthew Yglesias with the "where's the conservative coverage?" comments. Glenn Reynolds has recused himself, I should add.
posted by Justin at 10:36 AM

 
NEW DVDVR: Greatest wrestling review on planet found here.
posted by Justin at 10:28 AM

 
HE DID RESPOND: Josh Marshall crushes my odds by responding to Natalija Radic. Man, I can't believe I bet the company payroll on that. Not tonight, not to Gil. Josh still refuses to use the word "blog" (he's used it exactly once). Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan is linking to Patrick Ruffini and Derek Lowe. Thus endeth the journalist-blogger gossip report for today.
posted by Justin at 10:24 AM

 
DC BLOGFEST: Rescheduled and rechristened. Details here.
posted by Justin at 1:13 PM

 
MORE ON CRYTPIC MILLER COMMENTS: Max Power has the dirt. Apparently Kobe's had certain relationship problems over the past few seasons, though, as Max wisely points out, it's all rumor and innuendo at this point.
posted by Justin at 8:45 PM

 
MORE THAN PORNO: The Andreas Hofer sideblog introduces me to the Sensible Erection blog. He says it's a NC-17 Unablogger but I consider it more of a Boing Boing where they have no qualms about posting pictures of people in the act of physical intimacy in addition to the other weird stuff. For an actual warblog with the occasional bit of smut I recommend Links I Like --and Cheesecake!.
posted by Justin at 8:33 PM

 
SPELLING BEE: Schadenfreude: schadenfreude \SHAHD-n-froy-duh\, noun: A malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others. It took a whole Google search but now I get this.
posted by Justin at 8:14 PM

 
ARENABALL NEWSBITS: Jay Gruden is sticking with the Predators. I though he was going to coach and play quarterback, but apparently it's just the latter. And did you wonder what NBC is replacing the NBA with? Yep, the AFL. Both those items via Arenafan. I can't wait for Ahmad and Costas to sit around analyzing Sunday's Grand Rapids Rampage game. Meanwhile I can't figure out what national channel the AFL is going to be on this year. Maybe there isn't one.
posted by Justin at 12:56 PM

 
NETS ON TEEVEE WATCH: This schedule is kind of okay --Nets play the Raptors next Tuesday, then the Sixers, and then the Lakers and Magic in April. Somehow the Knicks visiting the Lakers is on NBC this Sunday. That better be a typo.
posted by Justin at 12:15 PM

 
RIME OF THE ANCIENT DONKEY: Like I've said before, The Donkey's poetry makes you want to weep openly --it just gets to you. Follow it up with a little asparagirl. For roughage.
posted by Justin at 12:01 PM

 
WORD ON THE LAKER GIRL STREET: Has it, Instapundit Yay, Drudge Nay. Read all about it here.
posted by Justin at 11:56 AM

 
KING OF ALL BICOASTAL MEDIA: Jeff Jarvis has the Howard Stern appreciation comments:

There's all this hubbub right now about David Letterman going or not going to ABC from CBS for $20 or $30 million, depending on whom you believe (Howard says he'll stay at CBS and he leaked the ABC story to put them in a bind). I like Dave.
But Howard is bigger than Dave. He captivates America -- mostly male America -- every morning. I first discovered him when I watched his show for TV Guide and I was surprised how much I liked him. I wrote then that contrary to what you'd think, Howard is best taken in large doses. He's a taste you acquire quickly. So I started listening to him. I quoted him to my friends in the office after my morning commute. They all started listening to him. We all listen to him. Howard is a media virus. He spreads.
Howard should be making at least what Dave and Jay make; he should be in every market; he is bigger than his competitors or detractors want to admit.

I dunno --can he be in every market? You look South and you get nothing, Stern-wise; advertisers won't buy his time and maybe Southerners just prefer other people. Stern, like Rush Limbaugh (another guy who is bigger than his competitors or detractors would like to admit), should not be dismissed out of hand. He's really funny sometimes, but the criticism Harvey Pekar had for David Letterman can be applied to Stern as well: a smart guy who puts some real morons on the air. Of course Letterman has to take his morons winkingly serious, while Stern mostly makes fun of his morons, but there you go.

The Stern phenomenon must be addressing something that's not being covered by mainstream pop culture --probably a guy's perspective on sex free of caring what girls think about sex. The Limbaugh phenomenon probably addresses the secret conservatism of a lot of people, so I wonder if his numbers will/have gone down in the O'Reilly era. Maybe not; they're on at different times, different media and everything. I don't think Limbaugh and Stern compete with each other either (do they? Does the one ever acknowledge the other?) Having carved out distinct empires out of the American mind, they're probably content to leave the other alone, like Rome and China or something. Stern is probably the king of all he surveys; it's just that what he surveys has its limits. Like anything else.

And he isn't king of anything until he releases a few albums. Nimoy: The True King of All Media.
posted by Justin at 11:48 AM

 
OH YEAH: New Hitch. Thanks, Bruce.
posted by Justin at 10:49 AM

 
WARHOL THE COLLECTOR: Little piece on the subject. They might be talking out of their butts a little bit at this point:

By presenting a focused, carefully selected group of objects from Warhol's collection, this exhibition aims to demonstrate that for Warhol, collecting was not merely a leisurely pursuit, but in fact represented a vital form of artistic practice. Through collecting, Warhol found another forum to explore his ideas about history, nostalgia, popular culture and consumerism, themes that are central to other areas of his work.

Or else, you know, the neat stuff a famous artist collected is valuable because it belonged to him. You think? Speaking of obsessives, Derek also had a link to the on-line Kooks Museum, maintained by Donna Kossy. No Szasz, though. Donna should hook up with DC and produce The Big Book Of Cranks. I'd buy one.
posted by Justin at 9:07 AM

 
COLD FUSION: Derek Lowe brought the news yesterday; I read the papers now and find followup in The New York Times and The New Scientist. The New Scientist one won't load right now; the Times story is already pouring cold water ("Claim of Small-Scale Fusion Produces Early Skepticism") but you know what a bunch of killjoys they are.
posted by Justin at 8:51 AM

 
DC BLOGFEST: Just announced. Join Messrs. Henley and Nephew for an afternoon of sophisticated adult entertainment. I may have thrown in that adult part, but whatever --it will be sophisticated.
posted by Justin at 10:57 PM

 
BLADE RUNNER: Is on the SciFi channel right now. Blade Runner is one of those movies I have to watch whenever it is on. I'm drawn to it, because of its PhilDickian origins, its sense of importance and tragedy, its whole pace. I go to bed at eleven now, unless my hideous blogging addiction takes over.
posted by Justin at 10:49 PM

 
MORE NBA: What does Reggie Miller know about Kobe Bryant? As in when he says ""Kobe has other issues he has to deal with. This had nothing to do with me or the basketball game played on Friday evening." Well, maybe nothing, says Ray Ratto:

This is not to say that Miller has some sort of goods on Bryant. One, we don't know to what Miller is referring, and two, we don't know that whatever it is Miller is referring to is actually true.

We just know that it is cryptic enough to cause mischief, which we suspect was probably the whole idea to begin with.

Also on ESPN: Sixers still the team to beat in the East. I believe it.
posted by Justin at 4:38 PM

 
RANDOM THOUGHTS FROM YESTERDAY'S SIXERS-RAPTORS GAME: Is Derrick Coleman actually playing well? He looked like it. It seems like that complete houseclearing is paying off now for Larry Brown. The Sixers really choked out the Raptors in the fourth quarter, Iverson went crazy making steals; I know the Raptors have lost like ten in a row but it still was impressive. Vince Carter isn't impressing me, though.

Thinking of the Raptors makes me wonder why they succeeded while the Grizz failed in Vancouver. Is it because Toronto isn't really a part of Canada and nobody goes to Argos games anymore and they're secretly self-hating and wanting an NFL franchise? And, likewise, did Vancouver push out the NBA for patriotic reasons? Jim thinks we should break up Canada to give us Americans an Olympic hockey edge; I say we let Toronto secede and join the States as they clearly want to do so they can get the NFL franchise they've always wanted. It's only patriotic.
posted by Justin at 1:44 PM

 
INSTAPUNDITTED: Again. He might respond now, maybe.
posted by Justin at 12:52 PM

 
MORE JIM SHOOTER: By Bill Sherman via Jay Zilber. Bill seems Shooter-neutral, and his explanation for the origins of widespread Shooter-hate sounds reasonable:

But if the larger-than-life myths that have grown around the man are unfair, it’s clear from the testimony he’s made on the issue of creators’ rights that Shooter’s vision of the role of writers and artists in a mainstream comics company conflicts with the views of many hard-working comics folk. Nothing wrong with that – but in that dichotomy lies the groundwork for plenty of bruised feelings. . .

And, y’know, Marvel's New Universe really did suck.

A quick appreciation of the New Universe: you can find them in the four-for-a-dollar bins at conventions and comics stores and put them in every bathroom in your house so you're never at a loss for reading material. You can probably make this claim about old issues of Micronauts and ROM: Spaceknight too.
posted by Justin at 12:21 PM

 
SHOUT OUT: Thanks to Tony Pierce for the mention. He also provides the link to the winner of the great ebay link auction, Max Power. Hey, he's got more on the Bugs Bunny Crushed By Political Correctness thing, and days before me.
posted by Justin at 12:11 PM

 
NEXT UP, THE RICHARD FEYNMAN BOOGIE NIGHTS SEQUEL: Missy Schwartz hips us all to the existence of a play starring (actors playing) Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. She says it's not just for geeks, but I'm sure being a geek will only deepen the experience. She adds:

Two overarching themes are uncertainty and complementarity. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to have full information about the location and momentum of a particle, that the act of observing it changes its momentum. Bohr's complementarity principle says that the behavior of an electron can be understood completely only by descriptions in both wave an particle form, that these seemingly paradoxical interpretations are necessary to understand a system. In an observed world, we can only talk about the probability of a given outcome. Moreover, I can make one observation about the universe from one moment in my own space-time, but someone else in the universe could do the same, from their own perspective, and observe something different.

This sounds like science fiction of a very literal sort, where scientific ideas are metaphors for human problems and not objective phenomenon the way they are in straight-up science fiction. Cool, it's coming to Philly in April.
posted by Justin at 11:44 AM

 
WHAT I WARBLOGGED OVER SUMMER VACATION: By Justin Slotman Age Eight. Joanne Jacobs adds:

I enjoy being part of an anti-idiotarian community of bloggers who share certain values, such as the idea that freedom, democracy and dynamism are good things and that self-respecting people and nations fight to defend themselves when attacked. For me, the warblog label is too restrictive. But I respect the right of Bjorn, Blogistan, Rantburg and others to define themselves as Bellicose Bloggers.

She also links to this Bjorn Staerk post:

Me, I feel kind of attached to my warblog. That's how I got started in the first place, 11 days after September 11th, and if you like you can still interpret it figuratively. Even better, calling it warblogs signifies opposition to the political tradition that has its center in the 60's peace movement, a dislike of which is perhaps the only thing every friend-of-Glenn has in common.

I think Bjorn's right about that; dislike of the old 60s models of world peace is probably what all of us who started blogging in the wake of Instapundit have in common. It's the closest I can think of to a common thread.
posted by Justin at 10:55 AM

 
NEW TREACHER: Right here. This clip art stuff is tons of fun.
posted by Justin at 10:44 AM

 
NEAT: Amy Welborn on these Spanish bishops' attempt to canonize Queen Isabella despite a few character flaws:

She kicked out the Jews, banned the Muslims, provoked genocide in Latin America and, to cap it all, set the Inquisition loose on her Spanish countrymen - but now, 500 years later, Spain's bishops want Queen Isabella, "La Catolica", made a saint.
The country's Roman Catholic bishops' congress has argued that, despite a fondness for burnings at the stake and an obsession with religious and racial purity, Isabella I of Castille should be beatified as a step towards canonisation.

The genocide thing is of course a little over the top --it's blaming Isabella for her people's germs-- but still. Amy has words on the double standards of making you a saint or not: if you're a sex offender, you're screwed; if you're a murderous politician history made you do it. Well great.
posted by Justin at 10:43 AM

 
TEE HEE: Shadow Newspaper Is at Work in Secret.
posted by Justin at 10:28 AM

 
MORE DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS: Dr. Manhattan reads Time magazine, apparently, and send us here, which is about the scary shit that's still out there:

In the days after Sept. 11, doomsday scenarios like a nuclear attack on Manhattan suddenly seemed plausible. But during the six months that followed, as the U.S. struck back and the anthrax scare petered out and the fires at Ground Zero finally died down, the national nightmare about another calamitous terrorist strike went away.

The terrorists did not. Counterterrorism experts and government officials interviewed by Time say that for all the relative calm since Sept. 11, America's luck will probably run out again, sooner or later. "It's going to be worse, and a lot of people are going to die," warns a U.S. counterterrorism official. "I don't think there's a damn thing we're going to be able to do about it." The government is so certain of another attack that it has assigned 100 civilian government officials to 24-hour rotations in underground bunkers, in a program that became known last week as the "shadow government," ready to take the reins if the next megaterror target turns out to be Washington. Pentagon strategists say that even with al-Qaeda's ranks scattered and its leaders in hiding, operatives around the world are primed and preparing to strike again. "If you're throwing enough darts at a board, eventually you're going to get something through," says a Pentagon strategist. "That's the way al-Qaeda looks at it."

The article also details how hard it is get intelligence on al-Qaeda, but then makes the point that if Taliboy could get in, why can't the CIA? It could just be Time messing with our heads and trying to sell copies, but it's still worth reading.
posted by Justin at 10:23 AM

 
WHADDAYAKNOW: Those Swiss characters, in that Swiss nation, ended up joining the U.N. after all. Huh. Via dangerousmeta.
posted by Justin at 10:12 AM

 
CHUCK JONES BULLSHIT WATCH: Read the neocon crap here. Via Kloognome. The article blathers the usual blather about Jones creating Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, blah blah blah blah blah. The guy then tries to tie it all together into some ideological anti-political correctness point that only reveals his ignorance on matters animated; furthermore he adds:

The one other thing I would have liked to ask Chuck Jones is what he thought of "The Simpsons." It may be no accident that where once Bugs Bunny rollicked madly through the human condition, today Bart Simpson batters and satirizes the endless pretenses which now encumber that condition. With Bart, we laugh to keep the bile down. With Bugs, we just laughed.

That's true and all if you're talking about the Clampett Bugs or the Tex Avery Bugs but the Jones Bugs didn't rollic madly through anything --he more made fun of Daffy when he tried to rollic madly through the human condition. And this man has obviously never seen an episode of SpongeBob, the closest we have these days to the super-energetic cartoons of the Warners war years.
posted by Justin at 10:08 AM

 
THE BLUE COYOTE: Explains the shadow government concept to us all. He likes it:

Is this a good idea? HELL YES. Can you even imagine what could happen to our country if the head were cut off it's body? No clear cut boss, no standing orders, no co-location of general and specific knowledge required to make things work. Without some form of a governing body, our country would writhe in self-inflicted agony as every tin-pot general or crime boss fought over who gets the biggest cut of cake.

This "shadow government" deal is sort of science fiction-sounding; in an earlier era it would've provided great nightmare fuel for some of the more paranoid writers out there. Now it just seems like it makes sense, and thinking up doomsday scenarios isn't as off the wall as it once was. Getting a taste of doomsday is probably a reason for that.
posted by Justin at 9:58 AM

 
SICK: Via The Corner comes the story of a male Andrea Yates, who of course gets no debate concerning his sanity in the press and no diagnosis either --because he's a guy. Thus we get no deeper insight into his character or his wife's, unlike the Yates case where we can kind of tell that her husband was nutty too. The article brings in an academic to explain it all:

Michelle Oberman, a law professor at DePaul University in New Jersey, argues in her recent book Mothers Who Kill Their Children that juries rarely assign murder convictions to mothers accused of killing their own offspring, or request tough sentences such as the death penalty. This, she speculates, is because these cases are almost always matters of deep clinical depression, generating considerable sympathy rather than rage.

"Throughout common-law history, juries and judges have tended to agree on one thing: When a mother kills her child, it is generally different from other forms of homicide," Prof. Oberman wrote in an opinion article on the Yates case this week. "Different because these cases are not only about the horror of dead children, but also about desperate and deeply troubled women."
posted by Justin at 9:48 AM

 
LAY ODDS WITH ME: That Josh Marshall ever responds to Natalija Radic. 30-to-1? 50-to-1? Not good odds.
posted by Justin at 11:47 AM

 
NHL ALTERNATE JERSEYS: ESPN has a whole page of 'em. Talk about them with the fashionistas on Sportsfilter. I like the Shamu Canucks third jersey myself. The Oilers jersey is just messing with a good thing; the Oilers logo is one of the more iconic in sports, I think. I just like the idea of the Oilers, that this team from Middle of Nowhere, Canada could win all those Stanley Cups. Good on them for actually staying in Canada, unlike the Jets and Nordiques.
posted by Justin at 11:42 AM

 
NOW PLAYING, THE JOHNNY WALKER SIX: Rantburg brings the news that there are possibly five more American Talibans in custody. "Possibly" because they're not saying if their passports are legit or not, and because there's only one Pakistani lawyer making the claim. My guess is there's not another born-and-bred American in that group.
posted by Justin at 11:12 AM

 
GREATEST SEARCH THAT FINDS ME YET: Number 5 for "jarome iginla nude". Yeah, you and me both --WAITAMINNIT.

By the way, Kiana Tom is in Playboy next month. We'll see if they turn her into a female simulacra or not, but it's possible she's already done that to herself.
posted by Justin at 10:54 AM

 
WURTZEL WATCH: All kinds of comments here. And of course the continuing Jim Treacher adventures are here.
posted by Justin at 10:40 AM

 
ENRON AFTER THE APOCALYPSE: The tower emerges from the Houston skyline like a corpse's finger, frozen at the final moment. Its structure remains firm --the windows gleam in the morning sun-- but even from a distance there is a sense that a vitality has left the tower. The huge energy that possessed it once has been consumed, a voracious appetite that ended up feeding on itself; the tower's burnt-out husk and a few lonely souls are all that remains. And those souls? You don't wanna know:

Interviews with current employees and those who survived the initial layoffs only to leave later depict a workforce that is depleted and demoralized, as employees scavenge office supplies and duck superiors for fear of being the next to be terminated.

Further, because not all of Enron's many divisions are in bankruptcy, a two-tier caste system has emerged. Employees who work for bankrupt divisions are prohibited from receiving retention bonuses or severance pay beyond the $4,500 ordered by a U.S. bankruptcy judge. This has created a sink-or-swim workplace as employees jockey for transfers to non-bankrupt divisions and maneuver to eliminate competition from rival workers.

Oh, pink slip, where is thy sting?
posted by Justin at 10:22 AM

 
CULTURAL PREFERENCES WATCH: Neat Economist article on the fact that the most popular fast food restaurant in the Philippines is a native one: Jollibee and its founder Tony Tan. They just make better food, if you're a Filipino:

His palate, indeed, seems to have been Mr Tan's greatest source of confidence throughout his struggle against McDonald's. Modest in every other respect, he never once doubted that he could make better food—or at least “better” to Filipinos. To this day, he still attends the weekly three-hour meetings of Jollibee's “new products board”. The decisions made there find their way into “the commissariat”, a top-secret spice kitchen and the nerve centre from which Jollibee outlets are supplied.

Describing Mr Tan's recipes is not easy. Generally speaking, the Philippines is not famous for its food, and cardiologists consider it downright evil. In their own kitchens, Filipinos tend to cook meat with stunning amounts of sugar and salt, and to soak it in bagoong, a sort of brine. But no matter how poor, they like to splash out every so often on fast food. And then they like burgers that are sweet and juicy, spaghetti that is saccharine and topped with hot dogs (no Italian would recognise it), beef with honey and rice, and, for dessert, variations on the mango theme. All this Jollibee provides, whereas McDonald's, perhaps hidebound by its global standards, never quite seems to get it right.

Via the blogga from Manila cheesedip, who adds: "This is the only country where McDonald's doesn't dominate the fastfood market." In a related way, I'm still waiting for the article that explains to me why India is the only country where Hollywood doesn't dominate the movie market. There's gotta be reasons --right?-- why American pop culture can take over in some areas in some places but not always the same areas. Saying "cultural preferences" is an acceptable answer, just not as specific as I would like.
posted by Justin at 5:57 PM

 
READ THIS: Click here. I think you might call it a cultural document. Four lines to get you clicking:

Monica: Larry, I was a 22 year old foolish kid...

Larry: A victim, in a sense. I mean you're a figure of the 20th Century.

Monica: I don't want to use the word victim...

Larry: From flirtation to intimacy. (coughs)
posted by Justin at 5:38 PM

 
DRUDGE REPORTS THIS WITH BAITED BREATH: Britney Spears doesn't know who Yoko Ono is. Or anything about pop music history. I think this is all to her credit.
posted by Justin at 5:32 PM

 
NYC BLOGGERFEST: It sounds like they had a great time. Next time, fellas.
posted by Justin at 5:22 PM

 
HEFNER WATCH: Blogatelle has more. The part I liked best:

The procession of identical blonde Barbies has become so tedious that even I get moderately excited when I see that so-and-so is slated for a pictorial. But as this layout featuring 80s pop tart Tiffany shows they're more than capable of taking at least something approximating a real woman and plasticizing her into their founder's ideal.

She has comments on the decent Playboy articles too. There's a joke there but I don't think I want to make it.
posted by Justin at 5:09 PM

 
WHAT KIND OF FIREARM AM I?: This one:

Which Firearm are you? brought to you byStan Ryker

These tests are getting weirder. Is there some secret computer in the basement of a government building in Omaha recording all these tests so they can tell who gets to go on the big rocket to Earth Two once the asteroid hits? Probably.
posted by Justin at 5:41 PM

 
TO THE NYC BLOGGER REVELLERS: Have a good time tonight, you all. I am stuck with the dullness. But tomorrow --the sweet science of wrestling.
posted by Justin at 5:10 PM

 
SENSIBLE. BLUE. TEMPLATE.: Myself, Donkey, Hawkgirl, Hawksblog, Hokie, Gato, little, Blair, Vehrs, Adragna, Adragna & Vehrs, Sine Qua Non, Kuffner, HVAC, Jones, Sardonic, Ellis, Hlatky, Kashdan, Hawspipe, Newsrack, Alice. I know I'm missing some. It's a nice template, easy to read, text appears in big paragraphs, everything easy to find --but dang.
posted by Justin at 4:16 PM

 
JAY ZILBER: Rises to the defense of Jim Shooter. But what about Valiant, Jay? Broadway? Defiant? How many comics companies would he have to crash and burn before you take the keys away from him? He sounds half-crazed here. But he has apparently been rehired by Marvel.
posted by Justin at 3:40 PM

 
FOR YOU SCIENCE FICTION FANS: Here's Bruce Sterling on the Internet. Pretty much the whole thing, like that commercial where the computer says to the guy "You have now reached the end of the Internet." And he's not kidding, he does have a blog. Via Boing Boing.
posted by Justin at 2:33 PM

 
BOOKS: Here's this Christian Science Monitor review of The Muslim Jesus, a collection of the various ways Jesus has appeared in Muslim literature. Like this:

In Muslim writings, Jesus has a life of his own. His miraculous birth is emphasized, but there's no mention of the Passion. Here Jesus companions with ascetics rather than with sinners, as in the Gospels. The Muslim Jesus has hot words for scholars who advance themselves by working with the government. In general, this Muslim Jesus is for community over against the leadership. Of all the prophets, we learn, Jesus appealed to Muslims as an example of purity of heart, "constantly on guard against the temptation of haste and heedlessness."

Via the Christianity Today blog.
posted by Justin at 2:14 PM

 
AINTNOBADDUDEGATE: Continues to unfold.
posted by Justin at 2:03 PM

 
ON THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER APPRECIATION FRONT: We get this post from the eeeeeevildoers linking to the complete Enron cover story from the Enquirer of a couple weeks back. Not on the Enquirer's site, of course; the tabloids are smart enough to give nothing away for free. Well, maybe they take old stories down after a while; here's one on Olympics corruption. I have to disagree with Fred Lapides when he says "Once again, the National Enquirer has scooped the corporate media with real investigative reporting" because the Enquirer is part of one more corporation itself. A better line would be: Once again the National Enquirer has scooped the entrenched mainstream media by doing some actual investigative reporting.
posted by Justin at 1:54 PM

 
HAHAHA: Jim Treacher has his own website where all the Wurtzel strips are on one page. Via the Croooow Blog. You should also read this and this and this.
posted by Justin at 1:02 PM

 
BLOGGER WISHLIST: The most obvious one, of course, would be Camille Paglia. I'm thinking giant Steven den Beste-sized posts but completely rambling and weird. It would rule.
posted by Justin at 11:21 PM

 
SPORTS SECTION: Mario Lemieux is done for the season most likely. Michael Jordan might be too, but, according to Jim Henley, if the Wizards don't stink when he's away it will be due, in part, to Jordan's managing of the franchise. Says Jim "This year's team is very mediocre without Michael Jordan, which is way better than stupendously bad, which was what the Wizards were before Jordan put on his management suit."


posted by Justin at 11:13 PM

 
MORE METABLOGGING: Dan Hartung of the MIA Lake Effect offers these on comments in the midst of this discussion on blogging:

The 'warblog' community may have its faults, among them clearly being not knowing the history of the blog very well, and a tendency to snigger and self-congratulate, but it is not insular. I have been introduced to more new blogs daily by so-called warblogs, as well as continually being impressed with the collegiality and mutual respect of voices ranging from the Naderite left to the Randian right. (Chomsky left and Robertson right excluded by default.) Though the key binding principle has been a general support for the war in Afghanistan, critical voices regarding the expansion of the war, for example to Iraq, have not been excluded. At the same time the warblogs themselves have inspired more strong new voices to begin blogging. (Some of the faults of the community are simply lack of experience.) The luck of it is a smattering of semi-pros with links to paying journalism, which has given some of these folks a higher profile than a new blogger in any other sub-community could ever expect, even more than many respected bloggers who've been doing it for years (self included). There seems to be some envy directed that way that I can explain but not condone. All in all, I think it's an excellent example of the 'emergent community' factor. What I see is a wide range of people who are inspired to self-appointed punditry, which may be seen as a challenge to the 20th century trend of centralized, editor-controlled, old-boy-network mass media; but a century ago, at least, this type of writing and intellectual exchange was simply the norm. It's a return to earlier patterns of communication, only with technology that expands the audience far beyond anyone's imagination then.

Via Megnut again. Blogging on blogging is cool and everything, but I think I'm going to try and leave it to the professionals like Mike Sanders when I can. It looks like Mike is trying to cover the whole of blogdom, from the looks of his links and his articles. Good luck.
posted by Justin at 11:03 PM

 
PLAYBOY IMPROVING?: Blogatelle directs me to this report on this site --which is a rumor site about internet pinup girls, like a lowbrow Daze Reader; I love the Internet-- that Jennifer Love Hewitt will be in Playboy, which is kind of what I mean by having naked pictures of people when we want to see them naked and not years after the fact. Meanwhile the Tony Pierce blog points me in the direction of Internet Gossip which covers the whole world of online culture. Or at least the seedier side of it. It is a big World Wide Web.
posted by Justin at 10:56 PM

 
RANTBLOG: Fred Pruitt defends the term "warblog":

Rantburg is a warblog. It started out the evening of 9-11 as I obsessively started collecting things to try and make some sense of what had happened. I put it on Blogger at the beginning of November because it had some neato features that I didn't have the time to write into my own software, only to end up taking it off because of its reliability problems. I occasionally veer off-topic, usually because something is so laughably stoopid it deserves to be noted, but my primary focus is and will remain terror networks and their mechanics. It's a big enough subject to take too many hours out of my day that should be devoted to work, talking to the Little Woman or doing whatever else people do when not sitting in front of a computer - I'm not sure what that is, it having been so long.

This site wouldn't qualify as a warblog under Fred's definition, but I still think those of us who turned to blogging as a result of September 11th should be called warbloggers --it's what brought us here.
posted by Justin at 7:12 PM

 
AINTNOBADDUDEGATE: Photodude theorizes.
posted by Justin at 6:57 PM

 
SMART MULTIPLIER: The Rabbit answers a letter from a Hostile Geek in the form of a list of things that he should be doing better, or more of, and this list should probably be read and e-mailed around, as well as the rest of the post. I won't blog the whole thing but just most of Heather's response:

Are you afraid of having too much fun? I don't know. I think that chances are, like many dysfunctional young neurotics today, you are merely bad at:

1. Feeling vulnerable
2. Following
3. Giving up control
4. Waiting (in joyful hope)
5. Watching
6. Not saying everything that's on your mind
7. Not getting aggressive in order to push away your vulnerability
8. Feeling instead of thinking
9. Being in the moment
10. Not falsely manipulating a situation so that it adheres to your prior notion of what it should be

In other words, you would make a very bad disciple.

Or, say you stumbled on John the Baptist, ranting and raving in the desert. Would you give up your previous life, go with the flow, and follow him to the ends of the earth, perhaps selling grilled cheese sandwiches or whimsical leather bracelets to fund your trip?

No. You'd have his head on a platter.

You're nervous not only because you don't like feeling out of control, but also because you're imagining some kind of intense silver-screen-style interaction, and you're trying desperately to squeeze reality into this preconceived vision you have of How It Should Look/Feel. But life is far more intense than a movie, as long as you're able to let go and allow each moment to unfold as it will. Stop letting your neurotic mind strangle the life out of everything.

Instead:

1. Yield
2. Let go
3. Follow
4. Stay open

And if you really want to seal the deal, I'd suggest pumping up until you have great big man-titties and an ass like a basketball.

I call her Rabbit sometimes because I can't always spell her last name. But I always look forward to her posts, which happen infrequently enough that you can follow them all.
posted by Justin at 6:38 PM

 
JAY ZILBER: Has his blogger wishlist up. Jim Shooter, Jay? You're kidding. Insert New Universe joke here. I mean, he'd never blog unless he thought he could make money off of it.

But I always liked Secret Wars.
posted by Justin at 5:56 PM

 
NORTH KOREA WATCH: Michael Wells has the shiznit.
posted by Justin at 5:38 PM

 
BATTLE OF THE PSEUDONYMS: Charles Dodgson punches Johnny Student right in the mush.
posted by Justin at 5:36 PM

 
HEFNER WATCH: Here's Oliver Willis on how to save Playboy, which I will counterblog:

No more airbrushing. Women's skin just shouldn't glow

Agreed. Women are not cars --though one of Hefner's achievements is the conflation of the two. And no more airbrushing private parts into mysterious shadowy areas. Either take another picture or publish what you have.

Get cartoonists with a sense of humor that have been out in the public since 1972 and aren't just adding boobies to the New Yorker's toons

Just get rid of the cartoons, nobody likes them there or in the New Yorker.

No more Pamela Anderson

Agreed agreed.

More non-Blondes. Barbie's all nice and good but you can only take so much

Agreed to the nth degree. Sadly, I don't think it'll happen until Hef's dead and thus prevented from forcing his "girlfriends" upon the rest of us.

Resist the urge to go "hardcore". That's Penthouse's territory. Do your thing, just do it right.

I dunno, I've said this before but I think Playboy might ultimately be a transitory magazine in the world of pornography, that made sense in the more prudish 60s but doesn't now. If we want cheesecake we got Maxim; if we want hardocore we got every magazine that is not Playboy. Playboy the magazine only exists for the distribution of Playboy the brand.

More imaginative photo shoots. Take a cue from Sports Illustrated and find amusing old buildings that look nice behind a naked woman. Yes, we know we get bubbles with the girl "washing the car" but frankly there's not a lot more you can do with that

Yes. The centerfold formula is worn out and predictable. So are the centerfolds.

Girls with glasses. Trust me.

I'd go for that.

Taller girls. Don't ask, do.

I think this is a lot to ask for. The neat thing about Playboy is that it gives jobs to girls who are highly good-looking but too short to be fashion models. This is a good thing.

Overall, just stop being such prudish stuffed shirts. You don't have to be unrepentant beer swillers like the frat boys at Maxim but you shouldn't emulate their fathers either. Aim for the frat boys' older cousin who has a job but likes to hang out with the guys ever so often.

Good idea but another that I don't think has a chance of happening until Hefner is dead and gone. He's spent his whole life living the idiot "Playboy philosophy" of naked ladies being one more trapping in a sophisticated gentleman's life and is always going to right up to the final Viagra-fuelled heart attack. That Hefner bashing article is making more and more sense to me.
posted by Justin at 3:34 PM

 
AINTNOBADDUDEGATE: Continues to unfold. I tried the same thing but I'm not Ken Bernstein --I mean, Ken Goldstein. Goldstein.
posted by Justin at 2:52 PM

 
LONG TYRANNY OF DENTISTS ENDED: The Dreaded Purple Master has the scoop. Sounds promising if you can live with mutant bacteria living in your mouth.
posted by Justin at 2:41 PM

 
COOL: Tracy Quan has a blog. Via Instapundit. Now there's even less of a reason to question one's self for being to cheap to buy Salon Premium. Unless Paglia still doesn't have a blog. Nope. But goll! --those are some interesting search results. Look, more on the Paul problem.

By the way, check out Ken Layne's blogger wishlist. I want Bill Simmons to start a blog so he can post his "telepathic rants" without fear of reprisal. And I want the Reason Who Am I? and Editors Links pages combined as one blog.
posted by Justin at 2:37 PM

 
LET US NOW PRAISE BJORN LOMBORGS: This gal gives the Lomborg treatment to the concept of six degrees of separation; it's the "Lomborg treatment" because the gal was actually a fan of the originator of "six degrees" --Stanley Milgram-- but once she did the research the numbers said something else:

Perhaps Milgram was right that we live in a world with six degrees of separation. Perhaps he had discovered a fundamental and universal truth about the human world. But the evidence was simply not there. The inescapable fact is that the great majority of chains were never completed. To put it another way, the vast majority of people could not reach the target person. Of the 296 possible chains in the technical research report , 217 chains were started, and 64 were completed--a success rate of only 29% (Travers & Milgram, 1969). Again, a careful reading of the technical report also shows that the starters had social advantages; they were far from a random or representative group. The three starter groups were: (a) 100 blue chip stock owners from Nebraska recruited from a mailing list, (b) 96 people from Nebraska designated as the "Nebraska random" group [quotations in the original] but actually recruited from a mailing list, and (c) 100 people from Boston designated as the "Boston random" group [quotations in the original] but actually recruited from a newspaper advertisement. All would have had a leg up in making social connections to a Boston stockbroker. The Bostonians lived in the same city. The blue chip stock owners were apt to have business connections to a stockbroker. The Nebraska starters were recruited from mailing lists apt to contain names of higher income people.

Milgram's subsequent study of acquaintance networks between racial groups also reveals not only a low rate of chain completion but also the importance of social divides (Korte & Milgram, 1970). White starters in Los Angeles, solicited through mailing lists, tried to reach both white and "Negro" targets in New York. Of the 270 chains started and directed toward "Negro" targets, only 13% got through compared to 33% of the 270 chains directed toward white targets. The results suggest again that, far from living in a small, inter-connected world, we live in a world with racial barriers.

Via Cursor.
posted by Justin at 2:08 PM

 
FASCINATING: The first Christian chuch in China was founded back in the 7th century? Wow. It's discovery changes what we thought we knew about Christianity and China, says Martin Palmer, the guy who discovered it:

"It immediately changes our picture of the church in China. Western scholars had said that it was a heretical church, that it had no impact on Chinese culture. And here we see that it was given an incredibly honored position."

Mr. Palmer has long been interested in this Church of the East, whose followers were concentrated in Persia and scattered across the ancient trading routes to China, from Baghdad to Samarkand. Little evidence of their existence survives. The Nestorian Stone, an eighth- century tablet in the Museum of Stone Inscriptions in Xian, tells the story of Christian missionaries arriving in the capital of Changan (now Xian) in A.D. 635 from present-day Afghanistan. And scrolls found in the caves of Dunhuang, on China's northwestern frontier, recount a version of the gospel in Chinese, melding Christian, Taoist and Buddhist imagery

"The scrolls describe a church in which men and women were equal and slavery was forbidden," Mr. Palmer said. "Its version of the Ten Commandments instructed Christians in vegetarianism and forbade the taking of any life. It taught the Taoist notion of original goodness, rather than original sin, and it said the answer to karma and the fear of perpetual reincarnation is Christ."

Palmer also wrote this book (read the reviews there too, they're interesting.) He says later:

He also plans to create a Museum of the West in China. "Just as, sadly, a lot of people in the West view China as a monolithic, totally foreign entity, so many Chinese feel the same way about the West," he said. "The purpose of the museum would be to challenge these views, to say the West has been in China for 1,400 years. It helped shape China and China helped shape the West."

They also bring up the theory that Christianity was tolerated when it was as a bulwark against the spread of Islam. Short but good read. Via the Christianity Today Weblog.
posted by Justin at 1:36 PM

 
IRAN AND US: This has been blogged around a bit but I love that this happened:

It was during Meybodi's show in September 2000 that this story really begins. As always, calls were coming in from across the United States and Western Europe. And then a call came that didn't sound like the others; it clicked weirdly, like an Iranian phone line. The caller said he was in Isfahan, a city in central Iran, and that he was picking up NITV's satellite signal. Meybodi didn't believe him.

''Who am I?'' Meybodi asked.

''I don't know,'' said the caller. ''But I see you on my TV.''

Meybodi still didn't believe him; nobody did. He asked for the caller's phone number and said he would call him back. Still on the air, Meybodi phoned Isfahan, and sure enough the caller picked up. But Meybodi still didn't believe his story.

Meybodi held up an apple on TV.

''What am I holding?'' he asked the caller. Atabay and a few others drifted into the studio.

''An apple,'' the caller said. Now everyone who worked at NITV was in the studio. They were all Iranians; most of them were middle-aged men; most of them had not been home in more than 20 years; most of them assumed that they would never go home. They were not just physically but also imaginatively cut off from their pasts.

Meybodi picked up a pen. ''What am I holding now?'' he asked.

''A pen,'' the caller said.

''When he said it was a pen,'' Atabay says, ''that's when we began to weep.'' Men with faces that looked as if they had been carved from stone broke down and cried, oblivious of the fact that they were on live television.
posted by Justin at 1:14 PM

 
MUSIC BIZ: Dr. Frank --actual musician-- follows up on the Ken Layne music column and it could just as easily be published on a major media website:

I'd love to see the industry "shaken up." Maybe it would even be a good thing to get it all out in the open; something like this narrowing process has been occurring gradually for years anyway. (I listen to music all the time, yet like a lot of people I pretty much ignore what the mainstream industry offers. Not on purpose: I'm just not all that interested in being bored.) If artists enter into disadvantageous agreements, they have only themselves to blame. They should strike out on their own instead. But ultimately the economic logic applies to the non-mainstream, too. My small independent low-budget rock band usually spends around $15,000 to record an album. Since we're pretty sure we can sell at least 10-15,000 records, our small independent label can afford to give us an advance to cover this cost. We could reduce the recording budget by cutting corners, but we can't reduce it to zero. Obviously, Reebok isn't going to come to our rescue if such recordings lose their market value and become mere promotional items that can't pay for themselves. Ken's willingness to drive to Bakersfield to buy a CD from Buck Owens rather than buy one at a store or download it is touching. But it's not $15,000 worth of touching. And Buck has already recorded those songs. What about the Buck Owenses of the future?

Read the whole thing. The Dr. also reveals his ethical philosopher results. I'll spoil the joke if I say what they are, but I just want to say I never did quite understand that guy. Or Frank Zappa.
posted by Justin at 12:56 PM

 
CRIPES: I hate to speak ill of the dead but I'm sick of all the Chuck Jones appreciations. He did good stuff in the 50s and 60s but that's it; there's no reason based just on his work for him to be better known than Bob Clampett or Tex Avery. (Cartoon Network has done shows focused on both those guys, though.) My Jones misanthropy forces me to dig up this old Salon article:

Less enjoyable, perhaps, has been Jones' attempt to spread misconceptions about Clampett, who became a director a year before Jones did. Clampett's early cartoons, unlike Jones', were assured and hilarious; cartoons like "Porky and Daffy" and "The Daffy Doc" helped to define their characters, and their unprecedented pacing almost certainly influenced older directors like Avery and Freleng. Before leaving the studio, Clampett would create Tweety, as well as directing some of WB's best-loved cartoons (like Daffy Duck's stint as "Duck Twacy" in "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery," and the famous adaptation of Dr. Seuss' "Horton Hatches the Egg").

Clampett left the studio in 1946, after less than a decade of directing cartoons, but there's no denying his importance to WB cartoons. But Jones has certainly tried, reportedly resenting what he saw as the tendency of Clampett, in his own way as skillful a self-promoter as Jones, to claim a role in the creation of just about every WB character. The most infamous attempt came in Jones' 1979 compilation film "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie" (which mixed great clips from Jones' classic cartoons with tiresomely twee linking material in the later Jones manner). Near the beginning of the film, Bugs shows a portrait gallery of the directors who contributed the most to his creation. The gallery contains Avery, Freleng, Jones, Robert McKimson ... but not Clampett. It was a startlingly ungenerous gesture; even worse, it was a falsification of animation history, an attempt to erase Clampett from the story of WB cartoons.

Jones hasn't stopped trying to minimize Clampett's contributions to the studio. In "Chuck Amuck" he doesn't mention Clampett once; in "Chuck Reducks" he deigns to mention the name exactly once ("Clampett's Bugs was funny"). And in a 1998 interview with Mania magazine, he said: "As far as I'm concerned the one who mattered the least was Bob Clampett," adding, perhaps in response to the continued popularity of Clampett's cartoons, "Honestly, I think Bob is right in line with today ... Bob was the one who liked all that 'Three Stooges' stuff."

The article also points out how much Michael Maltese had to do with Jones' stuff being funny; you could probably write a good idol-smashing essay about that, like Pauline Kael once did with Orson Welles. Jones' prominence is like Bob Kane being better known than Bill Finger, or (this is less of a problem now) Stan Lee being better known than Jack Kirby. Or Disney being better known that Iwerks. Or Disney being better know than anybody who made cartoons (as opposed to Disney being better known than anybody else who made theme parks, he has it all over Six Flags and Cedar Point and Knott's Berry Farm and anyplace else you care to mention.) OK, I'm done.
posted by Justin at 12:38 PM

 
AS THE WORLD TURNBULLS: Here's Beauty of Gray on why those doomsday clock scientists are bullshitting you and me. Hint: it's all politics.
posted by Justin at 12:00 PM

 
CAL FLAP: CalStuff has the Daily Patriot's letter to the editors, which is a good read. I don't think even the most lefty of leftists can defend newspaper-stealing.
posted by Justin at 11:53 AM

 
LOUSY SITUATION: This article draws my attention to our own internal gulag archipelago:

The United States has achieved the dubious honor of boasting the largest prison and jail population on Earth. It reached this zenith by surpassing cash-strapped Russia -- long its only rival as a society of mass imprisonment -- after Russia released thousands of inmates so as to save money.

A few years earlier, as America rushed to lock up ever more of its population for ever-pettier offenses, the absolute size of its incarcerated population surpassed that of China -- despite China's population being more than four times that of America. According to research by the British Home Office, America now incarcerates over one fifth of the world's prisoners.

Well great. Via the Legion of Doom.
posted by Justin at 11:47 AM

 
MORE HEFNER WATCH: John Sladek is an under-read science fiction writer of the New Wave period --I mean, I haven't read his Roderick books which are supposed to be his best. But I have read The Muller-Fokker effect, which has a Hefner doppleganger named Glen Dale, who publishes Stagman magazine. The funny things about Glen Dale are 1. he's a virgin, and 2. he's never seen a woman naked, so he can't read his own magazine. Yet he has this empire:

Glen Dale's empire was accidental, like a famous pearl. It had begun with a small, quite ordinary grain of irritation --when, in youth, Glen had discovered that he could not, no matter what, get laid.
It was improved and rounded by a few coats of what Glen called "sophisticated seduction techniques". A better bottle of wine, a few more jazz tapes, four-star brandy, tickets to shows, dinner for two, oh yes, and smoking jackets, cocktail shakers...layer upon layer did this poor oyster of a man apply to his misery. Cars, a yacht, the magazine, money, clothes, more of everything, better of each, a glossier magazine, the Stagman Club...until the accident seemed deliberate and fine. I wonder whether the pearl ever ever chokes the oyster to death?
Eleven million Stagman readers opened their center folds each month to enjoy the twenty-two million well-photographed nipples of Miss Monthly. Then there were the dozens of Stagman Clubs, the thousands of bare-chested girls in buckskin ("Does"), the hundreds of thousands of moist men who, being strictly forbidded to touch the Does, except in the palm with crisp money, came to play. The grandest club of all was here in the Stagman Tower, in the scrotal end. The shank was devoted to magazine offices; the tip, a penthouse for the chief.

It's like Crisis On Infinite Hefners in the above there. But Glen Dale eventually does see the forbidden fruit booty:

A woman stood waist-deep in the water, her naked back squared to him as if posing for a Stagman calendar. She walked out of the water and out of focus. A tune, some tune was playing in Glen's head. He fiddled helplessly with the range adjustment; she has already turned toward him before he found her again. Rotating the little wheel, he turned her from a puzzle of light and shadow into a naked woman drying herself.
The tune wound up to a silent scream as he saw who she was. Then Bette dropped the towel and stretched her arms toward the sun. Glen saw what he had never dreamed existed, and everything else stopped dead. Mental transmission went off the air.
No rose, no eye, no cavern, no labyrinth of mystery --nothing but a patch of dirty hair!
"Like an armpit! Ugh!" It picked up his limbs and threw him into the lake; without movement he pushed back water and flung himself toward her. Across the quiet lake.

It's a good take on Hefner and the Playboy phenomenon, and one part of a real funny novel. Read it if you can find it.
posted by Justin at 9:59 PM

 
ALL YOU WEREWOLVES TAKE YOUR PLACES: Brightest full moon of the year tonight.
posted by Justin at 9:17 PM

 
WORST LILEKS EVER: Is here:

When you watch the old episodes from the first half of the Decade of Simpsons, you note two things: Homer, in the beginning, was much more malevolent, aggressively clueless instead of cheerfully & passively clueless, and 2) the show often had, gulp, heart. There are some wonderfully sentimental moments in the show. But that was when the people who did it still enjoyed themselves. Now you can smell the self-loathing.
posted by Justin at 9:14 PM

 
PROTEIN WISDOM: Have the latest mor on cartoon. And I think in the spirit of the BritneyBlog the creaticals have drafted Elizabeth Wurtzel to comment on their posts. Wurtzel is Britney-like in some highbrow way, isnt she?

Sidenote: If I wasn't an HTML boob I'd do one of those get your war on cartoons; the first panel would say:

"Damn man, I got fucking Instapunditted for writing about bearded Spock! Can you believe that fucking shit?"

The second:

"And you followed it up with some nonsense about the moral philosophy of Bizarro Superman! What the fuck were you thinking?"

The third:

Oh, I don't know. God has his reasons for keeping me an HTML boob.
posted by Justin at 9:11 PM

 
BILL O'REILLY: Has a surprising amount of common ground to stand on with Michael Moore. I don't know what this means. Via Boing Boing.
posted by Justin at 12:49 PM

 
NEAT: Bob Mould on pro wrestling:

Wrestling is the most dangerous thing I've ever been around in my life. Every night, invariably, somebody would get clobbered with a chair and it's like, get the Novocain, shoot him in the head, 25 stitches and he's good as new in the morning. There is real blood out there. The guys cut themselves. They take a piece of a straight razor and clip off a triangular corner and wrap it up in a piece of gauze, put it in the wristband. The moment they get ready to bleed, usually the bad guy's got the chair and the ref's struggling with him to get the chair out of his hands; the big guy takes the thing out of his wristband, the bad guy hits him, guy goes down, and as he's going down he takes a razor blade and drags it across his forehead.

Why don't they use blood pellets?

I don't know. Pride, maybe. It's weird. I've never seen anything like that in my life. Not in the music business. The music business is a bunch of wimps. And the drug and alcohol thing in wrestling -- I was not prepared for that. They're 300 pounds; they can absorb twice the drugs and alcohol that skinny rock guys can. It's frightening.

Via 13 Labs.
posted by Justin at 12:37 PM

 
HOLY CROW: Filipino tabloids. And another and another. Via cheesedip. They even picked up on Jayson Williams. It's weird, when they quote people they talk in English but the rest of the text is mostly in Tagalog (or what I think is Tagalog --like I have a clue.)

Things like this, by the way, make me think that whole Anglosphere thing might be a load of crap. Would you extend it to the Philippines? Or Singapore? Hong Kong? Jamaica? What are they --Anglosphere Ionosphere?

Actually, having read Cryptonomicon I think Neal Stephenson would include the Philippines. But that's just him. Or me.
posted by Justin at 12:24 PM

 
AND IN THIS CORNER: The Paul thing has sparked a ton of good debate and responses. Here's Kevin Holtsberry:

What Chris is guilty of is looking to the bible for comfortable pieces he can pick and choose from in order to satisfy his own personal preferences - this does not work. There are plenty of good works on the consistency of the entire Bible if Chris should choose to seek them out rather than look for guidance from Thomas Jefferson and Albert Schweitzer.

Can you recommend some of those good works, Kevin? But I wonder why you would need it to be consistent, or what's wrong with picking and choosing from the vast buffet that is the Bible. Isn't that a freedom of modern life, to be able to pick and choose as your personal preferences suggest?

HokiePundit has more, including a sort of pocket history of Paul:

On his was to Damascus to persecute the Jews, Paul, known then as Saul of Tarsus, was blinded. During this time, Jesus appeared to him and told him that he was chosen to spread his message. Paul was a very unique man. He was of both Jewish and Roman descent, and was thus a citizen of Rome. He had lived in Greece growing up, and was thus intimately familiar with Hellenistic culture and styles of argumentation. Finally, he was a Pharisee, and knew the Jewish techniques of midrash and parable. If not for his Jewishness, he would never have been accepted by the other apostles. If not for his Greek upbringing, he wouldn't have been able to begin the conversion of the Gentiles, a task the original apostles didn't want. Lastly, due to his citizenship, he was able to have the right to trial in Rome, saving him from his Jewish persecuters once, and allowing him time to write several letters while in prison. Paul was the instrument that allowed Christianity to become more than simply Neo-Judaism.

As I noted before, Mark Byron also did some work resolving doctrinal differences between Paul and Jesus. As for the historical problem Chris raises:

The Apostle Paul was not one of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth (Yahoshua Ben Yosef). Even by the earliest timelines, he didn't show up on the Christian scene till ten years after the execution of Jesus. He was, however, the father of Christianity. Without Paul there is no Christianity. Modern Christianity owes more to Paul than to Jesus. In this sense, most modern Christians are followers of Paul rather than followers of the example of Christ.

Tony Adragna has this to say:

Didn't Christ found the church? Yes, that's very true. But, that doesn't mean that the early church in Jeruselem knew what they were doing. In fact, the early Christians were just about as clueless about the church's mission as any Christian has ever been - so much for fundamentalism (in the sense of returning to the ways of the early church). For instance, we understand that Christ's message is meant for everybody, but the Jeruselem church couldn't get past Judaism. The very first council, held in Jeruselem, was all about dressing down Paul for preaching to the Gentiles. How did it happen that the Jeruselem Christians didn't get the point.

Well, that brings me to an apparent contradiction between Christ's message as understood by early Christians, and Paul's preaching. Reconcile (paraphrased) I came not to break the old law, but to deliver a new one, with Paul's clear break from Mosaic law. You can't do that textually, because where Christ himself does so (especially in an instance where he's confronted on breaking the Sabbath) he does it by proving to his inquisitors that he's not breaking the law (Matthew 12 : it can't be unlawful to do good on the Sabbath). Paul can't do that - he clearly breaks from Mosaic tradition by welcoming into the church uncircumcised Gentiles. Paul goes even further, arguing that Christians are set free from the law of Moses.

How does Paul reconcile the apparent inconsistency? He doesn't! Instead, he makes a logical leap to get at what Christ meant but never actually said:divine mercy and forgiveness are offered in Christ; baptism unites the believer with Christ; the believer is put into the right relationship with God, and good works advance the believer in holiness. Paul doesn't argue, as Christ teaches, that Mosaic law needs be tempered with love and mercy. Paul simply throws away Mosaic law!

Neat stuff all around. I love being Gavrilo Princip sometimes.
posted by Justin at 11:46 AM

 
ED MAZZA: Today has a report on the obnoxiousness of Russell Crowe and Theo Fleury. Ed thinks you're wasting your time if you go to the bottom of this story and read the poem Crowe wanted to read at an awards show --but I was amused.
posted by Justin at 11:01 AM

 
FUNNY THINGS READ OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS: To recap:

"What the fuck is Voltron talking about? Is this some religious thing? Am I fucking being baptized by Voltron?" --get your voltr on

"So, as I understand it, I'm supposed to find time to read a whole bunch of other people's off the wall opinons and then write about how I agree or disagree with them and do the thingie so people who don't know what I'm talking about can click on it to see what I'm talking about. IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!! and I'm sorry I'm yelling, but if I was to say I agreed with something Natalie Solent said, for instance, would other people write about how Stephanie agreed with Natalie but they disagreed and put things in so you could click on both of us? What does the next person do? Agree with the disagreement on the agreement? Is this some kind of internet click letter?" --Stephanie Dupont

"Once I witnessed the two sisters conversing about a party Zoe had given, at which she was outraged by the appearance of freshman girls -- 'and not ugly, dorky ones, either! Pretty ones!'

'And what exactly was the problem with that?' Wiseman asked.

'If you're gonna be in high school,' Zoe replied, with an attempt at patience, 'you have to stay in your place. A freshman girl cannot show up at a junior party; disgusting 14-year-old girls with their boobs in the air cannot show up at your party going' -- her voice turned breathy -- 'Uh, hi, where's the beer?'

Wiseman wanted to know why Zoe couldn't show a little empathy for the younger girls.

'No matter what you say in your talks and your little motivational speeches, Ros, you are not going to change how I feel when little girls show up in their little outfits at my party. I mean, I don't always get mad. Usually I don't care enough about freshmen to even know their names.'

Wiseman rolled her eyes.

'Why would I know their names? Would I go out of my way to help freshmen? Should I be saying, ''Hey, I just want you to know that I'm there for you''? Would that make ya happy, Ros? Maybe in some perfect Montessori-esque, P.C. world, we'd all get along. But there are certain rules of the school system that have been set forth from time immemorial or whatever.'

'This,' said Wiseman, 'is definitely a source of tension between us.'" --best part of that Girls Just Want To Be Mean article
posted by Justin at 10:44 AM

 
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