GARY FARBER IS MY AROUSAL CENTER: Gary finally responds to the ranks of the ignorant who have no idea what an amygdala is. He's far too modest to go into detail about such a sensitive portion of his anatomy, but I have no such qualms:

1. An almond-shaped neuro structure involved in producing and responding to nonverbal signs of anger, avoidance, defensiveness, and fear. 2. A small mass of gray matter that inspires aversive cues, such as the freeze reaction, sweaty palms, and the tense-mouth display. 3. A primeval arousal center, originating in early fishes, which is central to the expression of negative emotions in man.

Usage: Many gestures reflect the amygdala's turmoil. In an anxious meeting, e.g., we may unconsciously flex our arms, lean away, or angle away from colleagues who upset us. Lip, neck, and shoulder muscles may tense as the amygdala activates brain-stem circuits designed to produce protective facial expressions (see, e.g., TENSE-MOUTH) and protective postures (see, e.g., BOW and CROUCH). The amygdala also prompts releases of adrenaline and other hormones into the blood stream, thus stepping-up an avoider's response and disrupting the control of rational thought.

There ya go.

HOLY SMOKES: Stephen Jay Gould is coming out with a 1400-page book. He must be trying to smite his enemies with sheer tonnage. Me want read now.

RELAPSED CATHOLIC: Gives us the popup-laden hosted-on-Angelfire Christians Evangelizing Catholics page, confirming your worst fears about Born Again Christian types. Remeber that Peter Bagge Reason cartoon? Remember that panel with Bagge talking to an otherwise sensible evangelista who says "I was a Catholic before I found Jesus." "?!? But, aren't Catholics--" "What, Christians? Of course not." It's like that. Read here why the Church is, in fact, an anti-Christian cult.

AMY WELBORN: "Bizarre Times. Pretty Stupid People." On people leaving tributes to the 9/11 dead at the New York, New York complex in Vegas.

GONE FISHING: Or studying benzene rings. Be back in a few days unless I start slacking. In the meantime here's Project Gutenberg, there's probably something worth reading in there.

PUBLIC REMEMBERING: The LA Times runs this story on the Towers Of Light/Tribute Of Light memorial. Excerpt:

"Tribute of Light" is that rare public art project that, when announced, immediately captured the popular imagination. It just seemed—right. Its cause was taken up at once, in press accounts and magazine stories. Dozens, even scores of other proposals for memorial projects have been floated in the aftermath of the towers' collapse. "Tribute of Light" is the one that always seemed inevitable.

The article, written by Christopher Knight, makes the point that the Light project is sort of a first draft as far as a permanent 9/11 memorial goes. He goes into the potential dangers any lasting tribute will face:

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote not long ago, years from now, when a memorial to the tragedy of Sept. 11 does rise from the rubble, one thing is almost certain: Someone will be unhappy. Memorials, because they touch deeply personal emotional chords, are extraordinarily difficult to design.
The worst-case scenario is a fiasco like the design for the World War II Memorial on the National Mall. Although that world-changing event ended a half-century ago, and a certain degree of unanimity might be said to prevail over its outcome, the memorial currently being built in Washington has proved to be sharply divisive. On one side stand those who applaud its vocabulary of triumphal forms, as well as its insertion between powerful memorials to presidents Lincoln and Washington. Lined up on the other side are those who believe the turgid bombast of the design is ill-suited to the ordinary citizen-soldiers and civilians at home who secured the victory, and they lament an imperial monument arising on ground where generations of disenfranchised Americans petitioned their government in the cause of civil rights.

Knight goes into successful memorials, like the Lincoln or Vietnam ones, and who will decide the final shape of a WTC memorial. Interesting read.

REMEMBERING: Sean McCray has some links to various bloggers' reactions on 9/11. And Ken has his up. My local paper, the Inquirer, which has a terrible website, has a story on a survivor who was on the 78th floor of the South Tower when the plane hit. My own memories are of my co-worker telling me the UPenn station reported a plane crashing into the World Trade Center and her saying "it must be serious, this station never puts any news on." I took out the black and white tv from under my desk that I keep there to listen to March Madness coverage once a year and put it in the office and watched. It was the only tv in my office so people were filtering in all day to catch up. And then I went to class that afternoon and had Howard Stern on the radio since he was right there, and I remember noticing for probably the first time the huge American flag flying over the Flower World in Pennsauken. Driving to class I pictured the other people on the road with me, no doubt fixed on the radio coverage like me, but still driving to class or to lunch or whatever. It felt weird, because it was weird --everything had been disrupted.

So I made it to class but don't remember what we did, I just remember wanting to get the lab over as soon as possible. Like a lot of us that day I had a real thirst for information, which is my explanation for the warblog explosion, a lot of people just trying to get as much information as possible and sort of cope. The central horror for me of that day remains people who were getting coffee one minute and the next having to decide between death by fire and death by jumping. That's what sticks with me, for whatever reason.

UPDATE: Fred Pruitt has his rememberings up too.

THE FROMEGA CODE: Neat little NYT piece by Sherry Turkle (who wrote this) about the relationship between Lord Of The Rings and computer progamming and progammers. Sample:

In many ways, Middle Earth, the universe of "The Lord of the Rings," is like a computer program, rule-driven and bounded. In the early 1970's, the computer scientists at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory were so enamored of the books (they were first published in the 1950's, but did not gain popularity in America until a decade later) that they designed three elfin fonts for their printers. Two of the researchers wrote a Tolkienesque, single-player quest game that became known as "Adventure"; it spread worldwide via the nascent Internet.

The personal computer movement of the 1970's and early 1980's was deeply immersed in Middle Earth and translated it into hugely popular (and enduring) role-playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons." When the pioneers of personal computing organized their conferences, they used the metaphor of medieval "faires." In 1993, a computer science student who now works for Microsoft put up the first Web site about Tolkien. Today there are about 856,000 sites devoted to the author and his work.

Via the null device.

AND: The Rallying Point has the complete lyrics for the Uncle Fukka song from the South Park movie up. That song must've set a record for sheer amount of profanity per second.

MARCH MADNESS: Gonzaga got shafted. Penn got a pretty good draw, playing in Pittsburgh and all. And thank you, Pundit21, for bringing the opening salvo of Duke hate.

LOVE STORY: How can you not want to read a book called A General Theory Of Love? Lynn O'Connor at the Human Nature Daily Review gives it a good review; it sounds intriguing for those of us intrigued by psychobabble:

Therapists from contemporary, “relational” persuasions concern themselves with the patient’s unconscious interacting with the therapist’s unconscious. In A General Theory of Love, Lewis et al. demystify this phenomenon; they describe the patient's limbic system connecting to the therapist’s limbic system, its that part of the unconscious mind interacting. The authors, in their discussion of the limbic system, the center of the emotions, and the unconscious mind make clear that they are not referring to the Freudian unconscious, that maladaptive “cauldron” of aggressive and sexual impulses. Nor do they give credence to the Freudian theory of personality development, psychopathology or psychotherapy. Instead they are speaking of the highly adaptive and prosocial cognitive unconscious, including both the cortex and limbic system, both of which are interacting in therapy and all other intense human relationships, and most centrally in mothers and children.

It sounds like some kind of retro-Freudianism in blaming your childhood for your problems, but they locate the source differently, in the limbic system. More:

Second only to the mother and child connection, they focus on the adult marital or partner bond. It may be that we have far more limbic connections going all the time than is suggested. In recent research on women's use of one another to reduce stress and in reaction to external difficulties, it is demonstrated that this leads to less stress hormones than are found in men in reaction to for example, job stressors. While men tend to withdraw, isolate and suffer from a surge of stress hormones, women congregate and bond. It is suggested that this may lead to longer lives, as well as to more immediate comfort to say nothing of less stress related neurochemistry. I would imagine that in some cultures in which romantic love is not what brings people together in the marriage union, and where strong attachments are to more than a marriage partner, the need for limbic attachment is still being tended to. I'm suggesting that love exists in a myriad of human relationships. While our culture may be sick in its denigration of limbic attachment between for example, female platonic friends, or men who like to talk about feelings with their buddies, nevertheless many women and men find ways to get around this, or simply ignore it.

One more book for the "read this" list. One of the Amazon reviewers sums it up thusly: "An attempt to bring neuroscience to bear on love. Not particularly rigorous, but charming in its efforts. One of its main points- that love is very much a physical (body to body) phenomenon, is not very original but well told. And I find the phrase 'limbic brain resonance' strangely poetic."

COPENHAGEN FOLLOWUP: Jeremy Olson of We Are Full Of Shit. points out this Slate article by Jim Holt on what people get wrong about Heisenberg and his famous uncertainty principle. And some other things about him:

Heisenberg, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics, was the leader of Hitler's atomic bomb project during World War II. After the war, he claimed that he had deliberately sabotaged the Nazi bomb effort. Many believed him. But last month, his protestations of innocence (indeed, valor) were revealed to have been almost certainly a lie. Letters written by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, released to the public for the first time, make it pretty clear that Heisenberg was doing everything he could to produce a nuclear weapon for the Third Reich. His failure was due not to covert heroism but to incompetence.

Apparently Heisenberg was one of these genius-klutzes who knew what he knew but probably couldn't open a bottle of wine without hurting somebody. (I exaggerate.) Holt has a larger ax to grind though:

Those who, prior to last month's revelation about Heisenberg, wished to stress the supposed murkiness of his wartime motives often reached for a metaphor from his physics: the uncertainty principle. Michael Frayn did it in Copenhagen, his play about a mysterious 1941 encounter between Heisenberg and Bohr. Thomas Powers did it in Heisenberg's War, the 1993 book that defended Heisenberg's claim to have destroyed the Nazi bomb project from within. David C. Cassidy did it in the very title of his 1991 biography of Heisenberg, Uncertainty. They should all have known better.

And they're hardly alone. No scientific idea from the last century is more fetishized, abused, and misunderstood—by the vulgar and the learned alike—than Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The principle doesn't say anything about how precisely any particular thing can be known. It does say that some pairs of properties are linked in such a way that they cannot both be measured precisely at the same time. In physics, these pairs are called "canonically conjugate variables." One such pair is position and momentum: The more precisely you locate the position of a particle, the less you know about its momentum (and vice versa). Another is time and energy: The more precisely you know the time span in which something occurred, the less you know about the energy involved (and vice versa).

How could this principle of physics be applied to Heisenberg the man? In the postscript to Copenhagen, Frayn writes, "There is not one single thought or intention of any sort that can ever be precisely established." Well, maybe; but the uncertainty principle applies to pairs of properties. In Heisenberg's case, the relevant pair is motivation and competence. How willing was he to help Hitler? How competent was he to produce an atomic bomb? But notice that there is a positive relationship between our knowledge of one and of the other: The more certain we become that Heisenberg was willing to serve the Third Reich, the more certain we become that he was incompetent to produce a bomb. This is not the uncertainty principle, but its exact opposite. Evidently, knavishness and incompetence are not canonically conjugate variables.

Neat little read. I still want to see Copenhagen, tho'.

AND NOW THE WRAPUP FROM THE ECONOMICS-SPORTS NEXUS: Lessee here, the final medal count for the US of A was 34. They predicted us getting somewhere around twenty. So here's the box score: America 1, Harvard Economists O. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Insult to injury: Penn won the Ivy. They're the only Big Five team in the tourney this year.

UPDATE: Matt Welch has more Harvard hate on a completely unrelated subject.

DISORDER INSIDE AND OUT: The New Scientist has the story that some people can somehow read the structure of chaotic systems, and explains, if you were ever wondering, the difference between random action and chaotic action:

Richard Heath, who has now moved to the UK's University of Sunderland tried to identify people who can do this by showing volunteers a list of eight numbers and asking them to predict the next four. The volunteers were told that the numbers were maximum temperatures for the previous eight days. In fact the numbers were computer-generated: some sets were part of a chaotic series while the rest were random.

Random sequences are by their nature unpredictable, whereas chaotic sequences follow specific rules. Despite this, chaotic sequences are very hard to predict in practice because of the "butterfly effect" - even an unmeasurably small change in initial conditions can have a dramatic impact on their future state.

Nonetheless, Heath found that a quarter of the people he tested could predict the temperature for at least the next two days if the sequence was chaotic, rather than random, even though there is no obvious pattern to the figures.

"The $64,000 question is what is going on in their heads," says Heath. He is now planning studies to find out whether the skill is related to specific personality types, or to aspects of intelligence such as mathematical ability.

He thinks this is why some people are so good at playing the market --they have chaos decryptors as part of the architecture of their minds. Cool. I love these reports from the economics-physical sciences nexus.

GET YOUR GIANT ROBO ON: Mark Bowden in today's Inquirer is on the flying-under-the-radar cold fusion in a bottle of acetone story. Says he:

We can no more easily imagine a world of limitless low-cost energy today than a 19th-century person could imagine the Concorde. But cheap fusion would have a much more fundamental and far-reaching effect on civilization than the invention of the airplane and jet engine. It would shatter one basic, seemingly immutable law of economics - that energy is rare and, hence, valuable. Energy could become more plentiful than rain. Think of all the worldwide disaster scenarios that would ruin!

Right now, oil helps define the world's politics and economy. One deep cause of our current troubles in the Middle East is our need for an uninterrupted, low-cost supply of it. It's a finite source, so someday it is going to run out. As it dwindles, we can expect the price of oil to go up and up (both in monetary and political terms). Among other things, this would be likely to aggravate the existing, alarming, and growing gap between "have" and "have-not" nations. One might foresee more dark days ahead.

I will leave the question of what free limitless energy would mean to those better versed in economics, but Bowden does make a Romeresque point:

Just a hundred years ago, the primary means of transportation worldwide was the horse. An ambitious pessimist, charting the steady increase in horse ownership, might have projected a future horse overpopulation crisis and foreseen problems, say, in breeding that many healthy animals, or disposing of that much horse manure.

That is a silly example, but my point is that a vision of the future based on existing trends is almost always wrong. There are things we cannot foresee, both bad and good. And throughout human history one of the most consistent positive variables has been technology.

Science fiction has come up with the free limitless energy thing before; the two I'm most familiar with are the anime series Giant Robo and the Nancy Kress Beggars novels. In Giant Robo --well, it was more of a stylistic throwback to old Japanese adventure cartoons that happened to use limitless free energy as a plot mover. The Beggars novels depicted a world where, yes, everybody lived without want but there were class divisions between the vast unwashed masses and those who maintained the free energy. Both are worth your time and effort to seek out.

And speaking of the predictive value of science fiction, Blogatelle reports that puzzling X-rays are coming from Jupiter every 45 minutes and not from where X-ray pulses should be coming from. Get Your Space Odyssey On indeed.

DRUNKEN BASTARD AT ONE IN THE MORNING POST: I love you all, my fellow bloggers. TTHPT --as Bill The Cat used to say.

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.

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.

ROY: Peter Briffa has more. And he makes the counter-intuitive argument for Russ Meyer, Conservative Filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.

OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS POST OF THE DAY: Greatest emoticon ever right here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TESTING TESTING: Here's Jacob Sullum on those dern tariffs.

TESTING AGAIN: Linking to the latest Jim Treacher.

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?

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?

HOLY CROW: The Editor sends word that the Midwest Conservative Journal is ad-free. You may now click fearlessly.

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...

STEEL TARIFFS: Nick Denton has the links and links and the tempered outrage we were all looking for.

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.

HEFNER WATCH: Hef made this chick a Playmate?

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."

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.

OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS REFERENCE POST OF THE DAY: Ooh! I have been zinged and I love it!

DILFER: Excess Bloggage has news and an appreciation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NEW DVDVR: Greatest wrestling review on planet found here.

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.

DC BLOGFEST: Rescheduled and rechristened. Details here.

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.

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!.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WORD ON THE LAKER GIRL STREET: Has it, Instapundit Yay, Drudge Nay. Read all about it here.

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.

OH YEAH: New Hitch. Thanks, Bruce.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

INSTAPUNDITTED: Again. He might respond now, maybe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NEW TREACHER: Right here. This clip art stuff is tons of fun.

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.

TEE HEE: Shadow Newspaper Is at Work in Secret.

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.

WHADDAYAKNOW: Those Swiss characters, in that Swiss nation, ended up joining the U.N. after all. Huh. Via dangerousmeta.

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.

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.

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."

LAY ODDS WITH ME: That Josh Marshall ever responds to Natalija Radic. 30-to-1? 50-to-1? Not good odds.

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.

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.

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.

WURTZEL WATCH: All kinds of comments here. And of course the continuing Jim Treacher adventures are here.

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?

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.

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)

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.

NYC BLOGGERFEST: It sounds like they had a great time. Next time, fellas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AINTNOBADDUDEGATE: Continues to unfold.

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.

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.