Month: June 2006

And I have irrefutable proof. Behold what my Google start page presented to me when I got home this evening: Ardmore, PA 74?F Bryn Mawr, PA 122?F A difference of forty-eight degrees in only three miles? This truly is an inconvenient truth, as I must brave those temperatures in the morning to pick up and…

There’s nothing more degrading than debates over degrading definitions. And it’s especially degrading when the definition degrading the debate involves the definition of “degraded.” Up here in the Blue State of Pennsylvania, the Phildelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin thinks the degrading debate is “shameful.” That’s because for her, “degraded” means things that can be kept under…

I’ll be busy most of the day, and I’m pressed for time and suffering from a thought shortage . Coco, however, thinks. She plots. . . Why Coco can’t be more like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, I don’t know. I’ve tried to encourage her to blog. But what I’d really like would be for her to…

I hate to ruin a nice rainy day by straining Michael Corleone and the Sopranos’ quotation again, but EVERY time I engage in satire, reality draaags me back in! In this case, maybe it’s the other way around, but no matter. When satire and reality meet, there’s no telling them apart. Anyway, I have been…

Earlier, almost reflexively, before I had time to consider the political ramifications, I expressed agreement with Glenn Reynolds’ view that what someone does sexually really doesn’t matter: . . .Glenn really doesn’t care whether Kos is gay. Nor do I. It’s about as relevant to me as what he eats with his morning coffee. .…

Yesterday I speculated that the Inquirer was keeping recent WMD allegations under wraps, and Philadelphians in the dark. Well, a report on Santorum’s press conference is on the front page of today’s Inquirer. My apologies to the Inquirer. It’s all too easy for me to forget that online news moves at a much faster speed…

I’m having some trouble understanding something. When I was a kid, it was a smear to say that someone was gay. That’s because homosexuality tended to be frowned upon, and even if you didn’t care about someone’s sexuality, unless you were among close friends, making that assertion was inherently problematic. If made falsely, it could…

The New York Times reports an allegation that the State of Kentucky is selectively blocking liberal blogs: Jill Midkiff, spokeswoman for the agency that oversees Internet technology decisions for state government, denied any intention to limit free speech or to single out Mr. Nickolas or other bloggers of similar political leanings. “But using state computers…

Thanks to Justin, I had the pleasure of reading “RAFTS” — the introduction to Bill Whittle’s upcoming book about American civilization. He’s grappling with things that are as essential to understand as they are elusive, and he’s honest enough and self deprecating enough to recognize that he might just be wrong. And so might we…

The stuff I read. Sheesh! I don’t know where to begin with this gem from Paul Krugman: . . .in 2004, President Bush basically ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists. (Via Mickey Kaus.) I’ve been around for awhile, I spent decades in Berkeley and San Francisco, and in all my years, I have…

Via Pajamas Media, I’m glad to see something that I’ve wished for for years is likely to become a reality. James Hudnall links this Wired piece about factory-grown meat, which wouldn’t come from animals, but from live cell cultures: Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a…

Much as I hate to drag my poor dog Coco into the debate over WMDs, I’m wondering whether the attempt to ban using cell phones while driving includes a ban on using copycat devices that look like cell phones but which really aren’t. Like this ridiculous item: The reason Coco is in the background is…

Figuring that yesterday’s press conference announcing that a minimum of 500 chemical weapons had been found in Iraq might be considered newsworthy, I thought today’s Inquirer would be worth a glance. Surely, I thought, there’d at least be some carefully dissembled skepticism (if not outrage) over the announcement. I expected to see experts debunking the…

In an earlier post today, I said this: Frankly, if incontrovertibly clear evidence of WMDs were discovered tomorrow, I think there’d be a huge outcry questioning the timing — and a huge chorus along the lines of WHY NOW? Either Bush planted the evidence (BUSH KNEW, PART II?), or he knew all along but Karl…

Reading about how some sick maniac got his jollies by screwing a four month old Argentine dogo puppy really pissed me off. I lived in Argentina for a summer when I was a teen, and I remember the dogo breed. They’re in the Molosser group, and are closely related to the American Pit Bull Terrier.…

As regular readers know, I love conspiracy theories, whether they’re true or not. They reveal much about the dynamics of human thinking, not so much because they contaminate thought (which they do) but because they are manipulated in so many ways in order to contaminate thought. Or an idea. Or even a meme. A lot…

Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Christine Rosen (whose anti-Reynolds hatchet job I earned the logical right not to read) also has major, um, issues where it comes to videogames. My advice is to skip Ms. Rosen’s tendentious and pretentious essay, and instead read the Infocult review: “Playgrounds of the Self” is an odd essay,…

If you’re a fan of William Whittle, essayist, you’ll be pleased to hear that he’s writing again. It certainly has been awhile. There was a time, an age ago, where the differences between what we call the Left and the Right seemed more or less academic; maybe the distance from one high-rise tower to its…

Christine Rosen, it seems, does not like Glenn Reynolds. She also doesn’t like cell phones, but she does like the Leon Kass Commission on Bioethics. I say these things by way of background, because I’m looking for a way to escape having to write a long essay defending Glenn Reynolds. Not that I have to…

Last night Coco and I had our domestic tranquility disturbed when a large, strange-looking wasp zoomed into the living room. I’m quite used to bees and yellow jackets, but I’d never seen anything quite like this, as it was too large, and instead of trying to get out of the house, it menaced me aggressively.…