Good morning, everybody. Beckham’s Achilles’ tendon is really torn, Ovechkin is out for two games, and Spencer Pratt is taking some time off to fight cyber crime. Now, enjoy your morning constitutional: California felt some tremors this morning as a 4.4 magnitude earthquake hit about a mile away from Pico Rivera. The Los Angeles Fire Department has received no reports of damage so far. Is Rand Paul the wrong shade of blue? The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has released their State of the News Media 2010 report. It claims to be the most interactive it...
Continue reading...Poplicola
Saving daylight
Over at Greater Greater Washington, Matt Johnson seems to accidentally make a argument for Daylight Saving Time: In 1895, George Vernon Hudson first proposed Daylight Saving Time, the idea was to make use of an hour of morning daylight which people tended to sleep through. In the modern era, this was thought to save energy by reducing the need for household lighting in the evenings (the lights would not have been on in the mornings because residents were still asleep). Studies by the Department of Transportation and the National Bureau of Standards in the mid-1970s indicated that...
Continue reading...Meet me at the combination doughnut shop and Chinese joint
Over at the Atlantic, Katie Robbins explores the mystery of the Californian combination doughnut shops and Chinese restaurants: Like any good investigator, I searched for patterns, and a few quickly emerged. The establishments tended to be in working-class neighborhoods. As I’d noted at that first sighting in LA, most of the restaurants kept the Chinese food and the donuts in separate counters, and while I occasionally spotted someone with both a chocolate-glazed orb and a plate of Kung Pao on his table, patrons tended to stick to sweet or savory. According to the folks behind the counters,...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Monday, 15 March 2010
Good morning, everybody. Alice is still number one, Jennifer and Jamie broke up, and Jack might be heading over to NBC. Now, enjoy your morning constitutional: Kansas, Kentucky, Duke and Syracuse take number one seeds in NCAA men’s basketball tournament. One of us is officially cheering for a 16-1 upset of UVM over Syracuse. In an op-ed to the Times, Michael Gorbachev defends perestroika and ponders Russia’s future. San Francisco is experimenting with augmented reality with their BART mass transit system. For instance, hold up your iPhone to a BART station and see when the next trains...
Continue reading...Look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice"
As basically an introduction to Q’s letter, here’s the story about how Glenn Beck has advised Christians who hear the words “social justice” or “economic justice” to leave their churches.
Continue reading...Walking around the Garden of Eden moaning about the lack of mobile reception
While PM Gordon Brown has yet to officially call a general election in Britain, it is widely assumed that it will happen 56 days from today when the English local elections are scheduled. For two years, the consensus has been that a Tory victory is inevitable. After the failed experiment that was the Iraq War, a faltering economy and a falling pound, fortunes have slightly turned for Labour in the run-up to the Gordon Brown’s first contest as leader. While even now few think Labour will garner enough seats to maintain an outright electoral majority, there is...
Continue reading...And you thought YOU were lonely
In the ridiculously awesome movie Red Dawn, a small, rag-tag crew of red-blooded American high school kids (featuring, yes, Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen) experience a Soviet invasion and are forced into the woods, far away from home and alone. They decide to form a group—the Wolverines, named after their high-school mascot—and fight back against the invaders. They dwindle in number, but no matter how small they become, they end up successful, and, one would expect, lonely. I mention this excellent metaphor of the pride of individualism in American popular—nay, spiritual—culture to introduce yet another. See, a...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Friday, 12 March 2010
Good morning, everyone. Idol’s down to a dirty dozen, Corey’s heart was just too big, and Leno’s back at number one. Now, on to your morning constitutional: From the bad-ass files: In New York state, a 91-year-old pharmacy cashier gets punched fending off a thief, refuses medical attention, says she doesn’t want to just “sit there and be bored.” From the “Science is freaking crazy” files, NASA says that the Chilean earthquake may have actually shifted Earth’s axis. Yesterday, Sens. Dick Durbin and Jeff Sessions announced they had reached a compromise on eliminating the 200-1 sentencing disparity...
Continue reading...A two-party system
If the recent debate over health care reform has taught us anything, it is that the U.S. does still have a functional two-party system. The two parties, however, are not the Democrats and Republicans, but the Democrats and the Democrats. This is not to suggest that his is necessarily a bad thing—for the Democratic Party or America. The Republicans may have a substantial 41-member minority in the Senate, but being tied to their strategy of obstruction, just saying no, and refusing to cooperate or even compromise, have rendered themselves utterly and completely irrelevant. Consequently, the two teams...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Thursday, 11 March 2010
Good morning, everybody. Charlie Sheen says it never happened, and A.C. Slater is having a baby. Now, enjoy your morning constitutional: The Virginia General Assembly has moved to make it illegal for the government to require people to buy health insurance, a move clearly in response to current health reform efforts in Washington. Girl in Mississippi wants to bring her girlfriend to the prom. School’s response: Cancel prom. Ezra Klein gives an interesting history of the filibuster. It even involves Aaron Burr, a personal hero of mine. Chile inaugurates a new president today, conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera....
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