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 from Bob “Day Job” Hebert, who in his column “The...

Continue reading...

Morning Constitutional – Tuesday, 3 August 2010

Good morning, folks. Susan Boyle might be on Glee. Now, your morning constitutional: Lebanese and Israeli soldiers have exchanged fire on their shared border; each side has reported casualties. In the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry on Tuesday, an Irish Republican Army splinter group detonated a bomb in a hijacked taxi outside of a police station. Buildings were damaged but nobody was injured. According to the newly released USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, President Obama’s approval rating has dropped to 41%. According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, his approval rating stands at 45%. The ethics charges against Reps. Waters...

Continue reading...

Weddings

Sure, Chelsea may been made an honest women on Saturday, but more importantly, Lisa’s wedding was the next day. Sadly, Lisa’s didn’t work out. (This actually came up in conversation yesterday while we were grillin’, but none of us could remember what date it was supposed to be. A strange coincidence that some idiot kids would probably incorrectly call “ironic.”)

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 Paul “The Little Professor” Krugman, who in his...

Continue reading...

Morning Constitutional – Monday, 2 August 2010

Good morning, everybody. After 14 days, Lindsay’s finally out of jail. Now, your morning constitutional: Rescuers having trouble reaching 27,000 people still stranded after Pakistan suffers some of the worst flooding it has experienced in decades. The floods are already responsible for over 1,100 deaths. An ongoing famine in Niger threatens millions of people who already suffer from food insecurity. A rocket that was likely aimed at an Israeli resort actually hits a nearby Jordanian resort, killing one and injuring four Jordanians. On the leaked Afghanistan documents and “war crimes.” According to a new national poll, Wyoming...

Continue reading...

What happened to cap and trade?

David Roberts at Grist places the blame on the Senate’s failure to pass climate legislation not on environmentalists, but on the broken political situation in the Senate itself: But step back for a moment and think about it. Climate and clean energy are incredibly difficult issues for any number of reasons. Yet environmentalists pulled together a huge coalition of businesses, religious groups, military groups, unions, and social justice groups. They got a majority of U.S. citizens on their side, as polls repeatedly showed. And — here’s the kicker — on the back of all that work, they...

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 from Paul “The Little Professor” Krugman, who in his column,...

Continue reading...

Morning Constitutional – Friday, 30 July 2010

Good morning, everybody. Ellen’s leaving American Idol, and Diddy wants in. Now, your morning constitutional: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are meeting in Beirut to work together to help stabilize Lebanon if a UN tribunal indicts members of the Hezbollah movement for the killing of Rafik Hariri. Republicans succeeded in filibustering a Senate bill that would create a $30B fund for small business lending. July has been the deadliest month for American troops since the beginning of the war nine years ago. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to 2.4% in the...

Continue reading...

Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), or Welcome to the "No-Spin Zone"

Filed under “Science is freaking crazy.” Witold Fraczek from Esri ran some models using ArcGIS on an interesting—but unlikely—question: What would happen if the world actually stopped turning? The answer is actually rather fascinating: If earth ceased rotating about its axis but continued revolving around the sun and its axis of rotation maintained the same inclination, the length of a year would remain the same, but a day would last as long as a year. In this fictitious scenario, the sequential disappearance of centrifugal force would cause a catastrophic change in climate and disastrous geologic adjustments (expressed...

Continue reading...

Poem of the Week

Have you ever before encountered a poem with a camel in it? I hadn’t. Man and Camel by Mark Strand On the eve of my fortieth birthday I sat on the porch having a smoke when out of the blue a man and a camel happened by. Neither uttered a sound at first, but as they drifted up the street and out of town the two of them began to sing. Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me— the words were indistinct and the tune too ornamental to recall. Into the desert they went...

Continue reading...