the best thing you'll see today

Unless you're looking at ME, that is.

Pictures of cities from the mid-20th century

Little Larry, patron saint of the blog

crime

Sunny Florida is home to many criminals. Most of them, like me, restrict their activities to traffic violations. Oh, how we speed. For the more serious criminal there's burglary, and for the foolhardy, doing it while people are home.

Last night someone attempted to get in here, no doubt to steal my passwords and sabotage my blog. How heinous. Little do they realize there is no insult to which I have not already subjected it. Who's laughing now, burglar Bill?

My lovely wife discovered the damage to our deadbolt this morning when her key didn't fit on her way out the door. Neither did mine, and since locks are notorious for the sameness of function and idiosyncrasy our deduction of the cause was quick; today I have to dick around and get the stupid property company to call a locksmith and tell me how to program our burglar alarm, which has been sitting on the wall doing nothing for months except reminding me what a lazy ass I am for not knowing.

Maybe the would-be burglar saw how awesome I am and wants to hang out with me. To them I would say as I say to you all, email me and make an appointment like a civilized person. Breaking in in the middle of the night does not confer good discretion.

No children roam about my home; hence the gun at my bedside is loaded. I doubt getting killed by myself is the goal of anyone, because I'm the exact guy you wouldn't want to be the one who killed you. I'm too friendly, too genial. I brush my teeth twice daily, make introductions, pick up tabs. It would be a disappointment. Besides, there are quicker ways to die that that don't involve breaking in places, and humans tend to follow the path of least resistance. I don't want to kill anyone a lot, but I don't want to die even more.

something's not right at Forepaugh's

Next time you're out to a fancy dinner at Forepaugh's in Saint Paul, know that the people doing the dishes off of which you dine are meth addicts, nearly toothless zombie-people who have scratched almost all the skin off their arms. Please pass more of that delicious gravy. Where broad smiles gleam and photographs of governors grace the walls, mere feet below tweak the living dead, shakily, uneasily, and with declining possibilities of any future at all. Bon appetit!

The moral of the story is, the more complete a class separation succeeds in being, the more dehumanized all involved become. In a society that isn't deeply sick, you might not want to have dinner with the dishwashers, but is it too much to expect not to be afraid to?

10 rules for dealing with the police

1. Don't Talk.
Do not say a word to the officer. Just shut up! I cannot stress to you the importance of this rule. Do not talk! Do not attempt to convince the officer of your innocence. Everyone is innocent, no one should be arrested and no one should be in jail and that is all the officer hears all day every day. He / she does not care generally whether you are innocent or guilty and there is nothing that he / she can do at this point. Most times, when people speak to officers they say something that makes their situation far worse. Keep your mouth shut, there will be plenty of time to talk later.

2. Don't Run.
I said above to listen to the officer and follow his / her instructions. Do not be scared and do not let the liquid courage, aka alcohol, convince you that you can outrun the twelve officers and helicopter that will track you down. Also, police become highly suspicious that someone running has a weapon and may be quick to draw their weapon. Additionally, when they do run you down expect much stronger force used to subdue a fleeing suspect.

3. Never Resist Arrest.
Perhaps the most important thing not to do is touch the police officer at all! Again, sober up quick and follow what the officer says. Many people attempt to bump the officer or swat an officers hands away. This often falls under the assault statutes and now a minor misdemeanor arrest becomes a FELONY. Thus a reckless driving charge leads to a year or more in state prison. Additionally, touching the officer in any way can lead to a baton in the mouth.

4. Don't Believe the Police.
It is perfectly legal for the police to lie to get you to make an admission. The police frequently separate two friends and tell one the other one ratted him / her out. Because of the lie, the other friend now rats the first friend out. Police and detectives also state that "it will be easier" to talk now...LIES!!! DON'T BELIEVE THIS BS! It will only be easier for the police to prove their case!

5. No Searching.
Do not allow the police to search anywhere! If the police officer asks, they do not have the right to search and must have your consent. If you are asked make sure you proclaim to any witnesses that "You (the police) do not have consent to search." If they perform the search anyway, that evidence may be thrown out later. Also, if you consent to a search, the officers may find something that you had no idea you had placed somewhere, ie: marijuana left by a friend. Remember, that denying the police consent to search DOES NOT give them the probable cause they would need to conduct a search.

6. Don't Look At Places Where You Don't Want Police to Search.
Police are trained to watch you and react to you. They know that you are nervous and scared and many people look to the areas that they don't want the police to search. Do not react to the search and do not answer any questions. LOOK DOWN AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!!!

7. Do Not Talk Shit to the Police.
I don't care if you have been wrongly arrested and the true culprit is standing in front of you. Don't talk shit! Police hear all day that my dad is the the Governor's Assistant's Intern and I will have your badge for this! Police have a lot of discretion in the upcoming charges brought. Police can add charges, change a misdemeanor to a felony, or even talk to the prosecutor that is ultimately prosecuting you.

8. If Police Come to Your Home, Do not Let Them In and Do Not Step Outside Your Home.
If the police are confident you have committed a felony, they are coming in anyway, because they generally don't need an arrest warrant. Make it clear to the police by stating: "No you may not come in", or "I am comfortable talking right here", or "You need a search warrant to enter my home." If they return, your attorney can arrange for you to turn yourself in should that be necessary and you will spend no time in jail between the hearings.

9. Outside Your Home Arrested, Do Not Accept Offer to Go In Your Home for Anything.
The officer may say to you, how about you go inside and change, freshen up, talk to your wife, husband, get a jacket, or any other reason. The police will graciously escort you in and then tear your home apart searching through it. Also, do not let them secure your car. Your car is fine. Remember they are lying to you. They don't give a damn if you are really cold or if you need to talk to your wife or husband.

10. Speak to a lawyer before discussing your case with the police.
It's incredible how many people feel that they can convince the officer, the booking officer or a detective (if your case reaches that stature) that they are not guilty. YOUR CASE IS NOT DECIDED BY THESE PEOPLE. They have no affect on your records. Wait to speak to your lawyer! The courts give enormous weight to "confessions" during this stage. A suspect is almost NEVER released after being arrested.

why it's not my job to come up with science fiction story ideas

Bad guys party down after building awesome weapon that triggers superdupernova which later blows up the universe.
The whole universe passes through a huge black hole which freezes everything forever at the moment the protagonist is stuck in traffic and the guy he hates most is having an orgasm fucking the girl he was always in love with.
Blue people from another planet try to "fit in" in high school.
Three brown haired boys find a meteorite, it turns two of them albino. The third has a terrible secret!
There's a time machine that only travels backward. The main character tries to figure out how to use that to his advantage, fails by arriving at historically opportune moments in dreadful microcosms. Eventually arriving in prehistory, he's totally fucked.

green morning

For Nobel laureate Francis Crick, of the Salk Institute in San Diego, dreams are nothing more than random attempts to clear from the brain unneeded or even harmful memory. Crick claims this clearing activity is a necessary step to reset the brain for the next day, much as one erases old data from a floppy disc before reusing it.

That's like saying "...much as one erases pesky dinosaur stains from your finest wooly mammoth rug before reusing it." I'm not sure what the rules are governing the use of an analogy to describe another analogy, but my logic doesn't stray into the experimental. This article's about ten years old, still during the lifetime of Francis Crick, a man who as much as anything was in the right place at the right time; a circus clown and a midget could have discovered the structure of DNA in the conditions Watson and Crick did. But it was them, and as a result they would be cultural touchstones, elevated to the rare pedestals that allow the description of impenetrable phenomena like dreams as "nothing more than" whatever they like.

"Hi. I'm Francis Crick. You may remember me from such events as, oh, I don't know, THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT OF ALL MANKIND! [A small, overworked brass ensemble wearily plays Crick's chosen triumphant theme music. One of them coughs. Crick looks over his shoulder disapprovingly.] And I am here to tell you that these, these DREAMS as you call them, are nothing more than a mere trifle! I cast off your old ideas as a molting crab sloughs off its shell; they are to me the mouldering and withered failure of the past! Pah!"

Nonetheless I woke up thinking about the above dream theory, having just had a series of dreams "starring" people I've known from different times. What I'm wondering is, according to this theory, is the information in your dream what the brain's trying to get rid of, or is it representative of other information that the brain's trying to get rid of? Because that second option has to be one of the great cop-outs.

Do recurring dreams verify the recycle bin theory inasfar as harmful/unneeded goes, and if they don't, are they only seeming not to? Is this gap in what can be said and what can be measured created by a logical leap which can't be neatly laid over a thing as impossible to assimilate as dreams are? Exactly how hard does one have to work to make this theory make sense before they have tried too hard?

Maybe it's the theme, not the characters, that is the "problem", maybe the characters themselves are "it"; but any theory that's unassailable is also untestable, and science without experimentation is, well...

I'll grant you this, the theory definitely would explain my recurring nightmares of being in a TGIFriday's and not being able to leave. For those of you that are just tuning in, I once worked in one of those restaurants, the worst one in the world, and to this day I dream I try to leave out the front (the only way out) and it opens into the back of another TGIFriday's. This generally goes on until I wake up in a panic. It's a hilarious, foolish place, yet it terrifies me to the core.

The dreams I'm thinking about are the ones with people in them that I haven't seen in a long time, and I resent the notion that these people, whose images are very real and contain many useful lessons, are kicking around in there unneeded and harmful.

I think that things that bother us bother us for a reason, and that we need to be vigilant in our self-affliction and steady in our doubt. Just because something's harmful doesn't mean you need to ignore it, like a bear beyond the light of your campfire, and as acceptable as is any theory that casts broad assumptions about what's unneeded and harmful and floppy discs, I would think just as valid any theory encompassing the brain's tendency to cultivate itself in its own terms. All brains, however unusual, consider themselves to have a system that's working so far.

Who's to correlate dream imagery, which may be the faintest trace of anything in the entire universe, with one reason for being rather than another? I'd hope people would try, and they are, but if we could keep the focus on the measurement of continuous variables instead of grandiose proclamations about the nature of everything I'd feel better about it.

57 bits of wisdom that anyone can pick up simply from playing video games

QVC disasters

Falling off a ladder

the famous samurai sword incident

ham vs. jewelry

another ladder

A handful of awesome stuff:

brain milk

Every time I see this:

It makes me think of this:

The revolution will be televised, and will end in time for Wheel of Fortune.

Just once, I'd like to see the person walking a dog, only the person's naked and the dog's wearing a jogging suit. Then the person could squat and crap, and the dog could smile politely at me. That's a dog I could really be friends with.

the good old days

Oh hello there. Didn't see you sneak up on me. As long as you're here, why not step into a magical time machine, and read some quotes from back when President Clinton was committing troops to Bosnia...

"You can support the troops but not the president."--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)"

American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."-- Governor George W. Bush (R)-TX

Stolen from some site called young turks

read read read

Good photography

Why is the systematic refusal of evidence-based, reason-fuelled conclusions about human and natural realities - from genocide and 9/11 to global warming - so persistent? Keith Kahn-Harris investigates.

Britney Spears gets her titty stuck in a paper shredder. Link missing.

László Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer. He is marching directly against what the age is about: that literature should become part of the entertainment industry. He is failing to adapt smoothly to what is going on. This art is powerfully pitched against the intention to skim through life laughing or just sticking it out as best you can without taking any particular risk.

Which leads us to this:
The central image of The Melancholy of Resistance is an enormous truck that moves at funereal pace through the half-lit streets of an obscure town in eastern Hungary. Contained within the truck is what is proclaimed to be The Worlds’ Largest Giant Whale...

Wal-mart shoppers rejoice as god opens northwest passage to cheaper shipping from China.

snapshots

Remember "where were you", my post two days ago about how the question itself has taken on a life of its own?

Check out this document: http://www.scribd.com/doc/282415/Awesome-Military-photos-of-the-Twin-Towers

I quote the last page of it for those who have gotten burned when clicking links from here:

Yep, some people just want to forget. I think it's "high time" these memories were re awakened. How about you? Ron Burch, August 8, 2007

These amazingly familiar images of destruction have little to offer my imagination. I'm far more interested in this slideshow as an example of what actually affects my life, which is the mindset of those millions of true believers who dependably react to shock in predictable ways. Like the guy who wrote this and hasn't spent enough time doing fancy book-learnin' to construct any kind of coherent argument, or even to use the language (I will give you, yes, you, ten bucks if it's not the only one he speaks) correctly.

What interests and terrifies me is what this man's mind looks like. How can he think anyone's goal is to forget something? Take me for example, a person who complains about the repetitious parading of the same images, an endless exhibition that never becomes a discussion about what it means and what ought to be done about it? No, I'm not trying to forget anything, I'm just frightened by the monolith of resistance to do anything but worship every decision the military makes to go git 'em, regardless of who they are. So where has he been getting his information from?

Ok, now for a little us and them from my side of the street. People like me are sick of people like him sticking his flagpole in a national disaster like it's something to be proud of. He thinks somebody's winning something, or maybe losing it, if they don't pay heed when HE SAYS SO. How can one explain the appalling subhuman leap that equates this man's satisfaction with rubbing "their" face in 9/11?

My only theory: the world of a paranoiac is full of "thems." In the case of nine eleven, the first "them" was the people who had done this awful thing. The second wave of "them" was the unpatriotic ones whose reactions didn't match up with their own. So is the country full of paranoid people who are suffering from an inability to conceptualize what other people might be thinking? It can't all be that simple, but it's still a decent guess.

Aside from this theory, my astonishment and incomprehension is complete.

I can't abide being wheedled by someone who has nothing to say. Ron Burch can't read and write and yet he's preaching at me, just like a bumper sticker arrests the attention of anyone literate and unfortunate enough to look at it. This kind of oversimple tagging and branding serves to shred mental fabric, to stunt potential growth, and to therefore subdue and prevent mature, thoughtful discussions about anything. Ron Burch is what makes stupid happen. Way to go, dickhead.

Now I'm going to go think about something other than September eleventh. If it's all right with Ron Burch, intellectual midget.

life is complicated

In far away lands that suck, women have to put on ridiculous getups so that men with poor impulse control won't want to fuck them.

In America we have our own forms of man repellant that are just as effective.

The title of these remarks consists of the two terms that bring us together in this Workshop, "Religion" and "Media", and in the middle, not the "media" but a third term: Repetition. A term that is not usually associated with the other two but which, perhaps, contains a key to their enigmatic and yet indissoluble relationship.

Religion, Repetition, Media

the cognitive neuropsychiatry of religious belief and experience

The claim that religious belief is delusional is evaluated using a current cognitive neuropsychiatric model of delusion formation and maintenance. This model explains delusions in terms of the conjunction of two cognitive deficits—the first a neuropsychological deficit giving rise to an anomalous perceptual experience, the second a deficit in the machinery of belief evaluation.

Hallucinating God, pdf

where were you

This morning, someone asked me where I was. They didn't even say "You know", even though not saying it was even worse than saying it. I realized I was dealing with someone who was just trying to be nice and say the right thing, so I spared them my most cynical and cruel rejoinders, merely replying as was the case...

I was asleep. I was going to buy the Bob Dylan album that day and my psycho girlfriend called me and said "America's being attacked!" I asked her what she wanted me to do about it and hung up, then went to Figlio for Joe's eggs (one of the great dishes of that part of town), and watched the planes crash about eighty times, then went home. The year after that where I was was somewhere being asked where I was that day. And then you know what? The year after that, the same thing happened. And the next and the next and so on.

Then I stopped talking, just short of saying "eventually, today, six years later, I'm starting to think I'm going to be answering that question every September eleventh for the rest of my life, and that maybe we ought to just call it WHERE WERE YOU day", because that would be, you know, mean. But really, and you can tell I mean it because of the pitiable note of hope, maybe making the asking of "where were you" what's expected is the only way to get people to realize how OBNOXIOUS and REPETITIVE and ULTIMATELY MEANINGLESS it is. Yeah, some fanatics knocked a building or three down. Did ANYONE learn anything from it that made anything better AT ALL? That would be worth celebrating, but as a nation, our reaction was a million pejorative adjectives you can read anywhere on the internet. Not the least accurate of which is cowardly.

Also, this is the birthday of my mother-in-law, so Happy Birthday, Sue! I'm having a beer for you right now. Looking forward to having you down. And I promise not to ask you where you were.

This post brought to you by Pabst Blue Ribbon, selected as America's best in 1893, back when standards weren't what they are today.

Church services always started off quiet enough with the organ playing and parishioners quietly whispering greetings and shaking hands. But among the kids, there was a kind of electricity in the air. Half of the time, we could barely contain ourselves. We knew that if things went well, it was likely we’d see some crazy ass shit.

Miracle at Pentecost

Depressing documentary about heroin in San Fransico

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

defining life

There are smart people working very hard to say for sure what can and cannot be known. They deserve credit for this effort, and since Glenn Beck is busy doing other things (maybe trying to invent a meat popsicle!), I'll just give them a mention here.

One of the chief problems with the modern world is deciding what is credible. With every side being treated equally so as not to say, insult someone's irrational belief that they will vanish from their bumper sticker-bedecked Astro van, it's easy to imagine a young mind that looks around it and wonders what secret currency it is that allows so much fractious logic. Is this the force of history bearing down like a heavy stone?

The part of credibility I find most fearsome comes in the form of a question: are these questions resolved in young minds before they can be properly comprehended? And I have to assume based on what people grow up into that the answer isn't no. Before I knew the word "cloying", I just had a vague bad feeling sometimes. Later I found out that it was because the music of Air Supply is not the natural state of things and I could sense the disconnection between it and my life, and it was bad, but in a way that wasn't personal; it just made me want to destroy radio stations. This is a great example of how destruction and blaming others is semi-positive and healthy, and also that words mean something. And without a modicum of intellectual rigor to navigate meaning in different senses and situations, all that's left is a vague bad feeling. I have no love for anyone who chooses the latter over the former, but can they be blamed? This is as yet unresolved, but what's not unresolved is right here in this 2002 paper which was news to me. The abstract:

There is no broadly accepted definition of ‘life.’ Suggested definitions face problems, often in the form of robust counter-examples. Here we use insights from philosophical investigations into language to argue that defining ‘life’ currently poses a dilemma analogous to that faced by those hoping to define ‘water’ before the existence of molecular theory. In the absence of an analogous theory of the nature of living systems, interminable controversy over the definition of life is inescapable.

...interminable controversy over the definition of life is inescapable. We can send the parade of ethics panelists and commentators from news "shows" (the new 64,000 dollar pyramid?) back to the cow states from which they so enthusiastically barnstormed.

The paper

cleaning off my desktop

stuff that sucks

Buy a statue of a Klansman!

Unidentified human remains covered in clay to make them more nightmarish I mean lifelike! Help identify them!

If no sissy PC social scientist who drives a hybrid's going to tell YOU how to view global warming ;) maybe you should join the conservative book club! High five!

What do Yoda, Tyler Durden, Gandalf, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard have in common? This person wants to have sex with them! (The only scenario that makes any sense is the person writing this has no idea what sex is or is for.)

Senator Craig tells it on the mountain

In the effort to retaliate against terrorists who hijacked planes six years ago with an arsenal of $3 knives, this year’s overall defense budget has been pushed to $657 billion. We are now spending $3 billion a week in Iraq alone, occupying a country that had nothing to do with the tragedy that sparked this orgy of militarism. The waste is so enormous and irrelevant to our national security that a rational person might embrace the libertarian creed if only for the sake of sanity. Clearly, the federal government no longer cares much about providing for health, education, hurricane reconstruction or even bridge safety, as the military budget now dwarfs all other discretionary spending, despite the lack of a sophisticated enemy in sight.

Why Is Bush Smiling?

"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,'" writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."

Former Reagan aide

In the administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has achieved the greatest combination of idiocy and evil in human history.
Why this is.

essay

Porn is vital to freedom, by Salman Rushdie

sure would be nice if we could read it

and another one's gone

Just the usual. Not really worth reporting even. Senator Larry Craig, Idaho republican, has resigned his post amid allegations that he's a gay guy. He was caught trying to hook up with a dude in a bathroom in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. It was a sting operation being staged just to to catch guys who try to pick up other guys in airport bathrooms.

What this means is, someone's job is to sit in the airport bathroom all day and see if the guy next to them nudges their foot. Think about that for a minute.

It occurs to you to wonder why you became a cop, since today your assignment is to sit in a stall at the airport all day. Some of your other assignments have been bad, but never anything like this. You're wishing for a guy to play footsie with you; you can make this paperwork last a long time, if you could just get a nudge. Just a little one. If the guy sits down next to you and DOESN'T nudge your foot, just has an explosive stink-burst that sends ooghey gastric steam to settle into the creases of your integument, that's worse. Today it seems like there's an irritating surplus of normal people out there.

Have you been to a public restroom lately with lots of stalls? I don't know what people are eating, but it doesn't sound like that when I shit. I think it is because I am healthy and these people are not. It sounds and smells like these people's rectums are poking out their rear ends like two-foot tails that belch vinegar and fire and splash cheerfully around in a bath of rotten vomit. Eyes squint shut in there. Faces are red. In your mind's eye guts are literally busting. And even if that's not what's going on, you don't know what is; a Kafkaian state of terror prevails.

And then, as if Mariah Carey was singing sweetly in your skull (not the real, ghetto Mariah but the one that she wants people to imagine, the one that's perfect and angelic and wants you to know you can find love), a hero comes along. A foot nudges yours. You can get up now. It's not enough to have the desired effect, you think, as you swing the door open and tap your radio, but in a way, you kind of love this guy.

On behalf of some poor bastard from the Minneapolis Police Deparment, thanks, Larry Craig.

cool

top two news words, updated hourly

cryptome, the best website besides metafilter

I know what you're thinking: on someone's list of the ten weirdest diseases, does progeria makes the list? Yes. There could be a hundred of these and I wouldn't get tired of reading about them.

Sometimes when a girl licks something it's sexy. Other times it looks like this.

But when you're getting paid by the hour you do as you're told.

There are people who would kill for something and people who would die for something, and there are some who would do both for different reasons, but the point is that the lack of education and a suitable public forum is such that it's impossible for these multifarious groups to have enough time to talk over their respective differences and similarities. One thing that doesn't contend with this time dilemma is the machine of war, which always benefits from other people losing, dying, and maiming. Bring back the champions. Even if it didn't decide anything, it would buy us some time.

Experience has taught me that this is probably not made up, though there's no way to know for sure:

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

link

I should show this to my wife. Drive your car to death, save $31,000

ho ho ho

'Twas the night before war, and all through the house, not a creature dissented, not even a mouse.

All the men of war were sure as could be; they'd been willing to fight since about 1973.

The press corps stood mute by the press room with care, with hopes that big headlines soon would be there.

The graphic artists worked all through the night, so the splashy graphics would look just right.

The Americans sat in their dimly lit rooms, awaiting the pretty flashing lights and booms.

The troops got prepared for another dumb war, it was no big deal; they'd done it before.

On Blitzer, on Cooper, on O'Reilly, on Matthews! On Geraldo, on Couric, on Greta, on Paula! Happy mass murdering to all, and to all a pocket full of antidepressants and a clean conscience!

Why do I get the feeling the U.S. has already decided to declare war on Iran?

Andrew Brown on the pleasures offered by attack journalism:

Hunter Thompson was not just famous for his heroic consumption of drugs and production of expenses, but for the force and clarity of his hatred; in American television and radio, the way to power and influence is almost always now the mongering of hate. Sometimes, very rarely, the invective attains a quality of beauty almost independent of its object. But almost always the pleasure in reading it comes from pretending that you are the author and can be like Hunter Thompson, have that much fun and never be arrested.

Is this guy's expertise in how to appear to have expertise?

Double Flee A

Sunday

the best thing you'll see today

Saturday

Thursday

crime

Wednesday

something's not right at Forepaugh's

Friday

10 rules for dealing with the police

Thursday

why it's not my job to come up with science fiction story ideas

green morning

Wednesday

Monday

QVC disasters

Sunday

brain milk

the good old days

Saturday

read read read

Thursday

snapshots

life is complicated

Wednesday

Religion, Repetition, Media

the cognitive neuropsychiatry of religious belief and experience

Tuesday

where were you

Monday

defining life

Sunday

cleaning off my desktop

Saturday

stuff that sucks

Friday

Senator Craig tells it on the mountain

Tuesday

essay

Monday

and another one's gone

cool

Sunday

ho ho ho

Saturday

retina barbecue

eustachian justice league

many moons

toys