Good morning, everybody. Elton John sang at Rush Limbaugh\’s fourth wedding. Now, your morning constitutional: BP announced Monday that its response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has cost $1.25B so far. Seven killed over the weekend in Ohio as severe storms and tornadoes swept the Midwest. Slovenians voted to support a new border treaty with Croatia, a step towards resolving a decades-long dispute that will make it easier for the Balkan states to enter the European Union. The cost of doing business in China is going up and will likely lead to higher...
Continue reading...June 2010
Mea Copa – Group C: Days Late, Dollars Short
One of the simultaneously great and awful things about being a soccer fan in the US is that the games are on early Saturday morning. Matches from England and Germany have replaced Captain Nintendo and Saved by the Bell in my life. I wake up, make coffee and settle down in front of the TV to watch a game taking place in a different country, featuring players from all over the world (though rarely the US). I’ll sit there from 745 until — on some glorious Saturdays — 4 or 5, taking in not only matches from...
Continue reading...This is what happens when you teach kids that condoms don't work
AP (emphasis mine): About 17 percent of sexually experienced teen girls say they had used the rhythm method –timing their sex to avoid fertile days to prevent getting pregnant. That\’s up from 11 percent in 2002. They may have been using another form of birth control at the same time. But the increase is considered worrisome because the rhythm method doesn\’t work about 25 percent of the time, said Joyce Abma, the report\’s lead author. She\’s a social scientist at the CDC\’s National Center for Health Statistics. … The increase in the rhythm method may be part...
Continue reading...Lesson: Racial slurs are totally fine, so long as they're in a joke
Noted this morning in the Morning Constitutional: “We already got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion,” said State Sen. Jake Knotts, of South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley. Knotts backs Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer in a four-way Republican primary race. Today, Knotts “apologized.” By “apologized,” of course, I mean, he’s sorry nobody got the joke: Unfortunately, the show was not recorded as was intended. If it had been recorded, the public would be able to hear firsthand that my “raghead” comments about Obama and Haley were intended in...
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 “Friedman\’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, 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 David \”Yawny-Pants\” Brooks, but only because everybody else...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Friday, 4 June 2010
Good morning, folks. Hold on to your childhood, because Warner Brothers is making an anime restyling of Thundercats. Now, your morning constitutional: \”I simply misremembered it wrong,\” explained Rep. Mark Kirk, who is running for the Illinois Senate seat once held by President Obama, of how an award for the unit he headed became an award just for him. The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued a new restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, the first such revision of sulfur dioxide rules in 40 years. Sulfur dioxide is a major component of the exhaust from coal-burning power plants,...
Continue reading...A little alma mater pride
While I was in Ohio over the weekend, my brother showed us this YouTube video of Ohio State’s very own flash mob, which took place a few weeks ago. He’s a sophomore there and happened to be walking through the (new, gorgeous) student union at the time, when all of a sudden: choreographed dance routine to music from Glee! My brother turned to the girl next to him to ask what was going on, and she expressed similar bafflement but then jumped up to join in a few minutes later. Look, I know it’s kind of cheesy,...
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 “Friedman Ain’t Free” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, 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 Gail \”The Colander\” Collins, who in her column \”Palmetto Political Passions,\” writes about South...
Continue reading...Mea Copa – Group B
Yesterday, I wrote about the incomprehensible moments of success amidst the drudgery of failure that make up a game of soccer (or baseball, it’s very difficult for me to separate the two games, which is its own incomprehensible moment). And, indeed, those moments make for transcendent moments, when strangers will leap from their chairs and embrace a stranger, simply because they happen to also be standing. Case in point: In October 2007, Spurs and Aston Villa played a match in which Spurs went down 4-1. It was a Wednesday afternoon match in Boston, so I was at...
Continue reading...F-Yeah, Science: "Of course, what we're seeing here is salvation to zero-gravity heartburn"
What happens when you add an Alka-Selter tablet to a sphere of water under micro-gravity? (March 22, 2003) — Expedition Six NASA ISS Science Officer Don Pettit performs a series of microgravity experiments with water spheres and effervescent antacid tablets. In the second of four videos, Pettit inserts a tablet into a 50-millimeter sphere and observes the fizzy results.
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