Good morning, folks. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the brains behind South Park and Team America: World Police, are writing a Broadway musical about Mormons. We\’re bringing you your morning constitutional: Ash spewing from an Icelandic volcano has shut down all flights in U.K. It also caused shutdowns in Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and has had a ripple effect of shutdowns and cancellations in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It\’s tax day, so, naturally, the tea partiers are out. The 2010 tax day could the best tax day of your life. And, sure, maybe...
Continue reading...April 2010
Polltracking the Revolution
Here’s a handy little interactive widget to play with to see how everybody’s doing in the horsey-race that is the upcoming U.K. election: http://cloud.del.co.uk/clients/betfair/betfairelection/tmg-tracker/tmg-election-chart.swf The important thing to know, for those not completely fluent in U.K. electoral politics, is to get a majority and build a majority government, a party needs to win 325 seats. Current polling seems to suggest that the Tories are closing in on 333-335, while Labour + Lib Dems are only at 286 (317 if you count all the “others”). Of course, Labour and the Lib Dems may not, or even probably won’t,...
Continue reading...Poem of the Week
As we all now know, April is being celebrated in some parts of the country as Confederate History Month. Luckily for those of us who enjoy four-week-long observances but prefer not to glorify the losers of the Civil War, April is also host to a number of other holidays. A quick Google search revealed that April is: National Volunteer Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, Facial Protection Month (what? yes. “Facial Protection Month can target anyone from construction workers to families to professional athletes.”), and the ever-important National Car Care Month. However, my favorite April occasion, aside from my...
Continue reading...Romeo, Juliet, and Twitter. Wait…what?
Mudlark and the Royal Shakespeare Company have joined forces to present Such Tweet Sorrow, a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that takes place in real time on Twitter. Actors are given a scripted outline and character diaries, and they generate original tweets based on what the character would be thinking or feeling at any given moment. I assume that the goal of this project is to use social media to attract younger audiences, and I applaud them for that. If students become interested in Shakespeare after seeing these tweets and pick up a copy of Romeo...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – 14 April 2010
Good morning, everybody. Richard Dawkins may want to arrest the Pope, but here\’s your morning constitutional: Hundreds have been killed by an earthquake in western China on Wednesday. The earthquakes hit China\’s Qinghai province, home mostly to ethnic Tibetans. Another sign the economy is rebounding: Retail sales rose for the third straight month in March by 1.6 percent, a higher rise than economists expected. In the first congressional election since the health care reform bill passed into law, Florida state Sen. Ted Deutch, Democrat, easily beat the Republican, Ed Lynch, who had tried to make the special...
Continue reading..."This is my timey-wimey detector. It goes ding when there's stuff."
In honor of the upcoming premiere of Doctor Who‘s fifth season (Saturday, April 17 @ 9PM on BBC America), I thought I’d up the nerd quotient on this blog with my first Arts & Culture post. I’m a fairly new fan of the show, and I must admit, I haven’t seen a single episode of the classic series, which ran from 1963 to 1989. What I’ve seen from the new series, however, is unlike any TV show we have in America. The story follows the Doctor, who is the only survivor of a race called the Time...
Continue reading...Juggalos: How do magnets work?
Jonah Weiner at Slate, for some reason, brings us a review of the new Insane Clown Posse video “Miracles.” It’s a rather grand review, comparing this particular posse of clowns to a rap-rock Wordsworth “dropping f-bombs aplenty in praise of the natural sublime,” for example. The song is a catalog of whoa-dude epiphanies, the sort that teenagers in movies enjoy while lying on the hoods of subcompacts, passing joints, and gazing up at the stars. Wide-eyed and wondrous, rappers Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope hail a variety of phenomena that will “blow your brain,” from “the Milky...
Continue reading...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day
If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas \”Fried at Last\” Friedman, Gail Collins, \”The Colander\” Nicholas \”The Dark Crystal\” Kristof, &c. Well, I’ve decided to devote a daily feature to these folks, by daily pointing out one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. I hope you enjoy. Today\’s is from Roger \”Life of the Party\” Cohen\’s excellent column, \”The Glory of Poland,\” in which...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – 13 April 2010
Good morning, everybody. The \”brains\” behind the the Jersey Shore have concocted another legend, only this time: Massholes. Well, then, on to your morning constitutional: The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 11,000 yesterday for the first time since September 2008, a hopeful sign that Wall Street believes that the economy is on the right track. Bloomberg reports that the trade deficit widened in February because Americans are purchasing more imports, another sign that the economy is rebounding. From Slate: How the U.S. economic recovery will be faster and and stronger than anybody expects. Buoyed by Ukraine\’s decision...
Continue reading...No hung parliament here
With the 6 May election coming up in the U.K., there have been a great many predictions of the outcome, and most of them entail either an outright Tory win, or, more likely, a hung parliament. Of course, the obvious next prediction to make, at least by those who are paid to predict outcomes, is how the hung parliament will be structured, and, most importantly, which side will the Liberal Democrats, the perpetual third party who have not enjoyed any power since World War II, will join. It’s pretty much accepted that, given a hung parliament, whichever...
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