Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
A Chinese fund manager just paid $2.11 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett. Money goes to charity, which is nice. Imagine being so famous/successful that you could auction off getting something to eat with you and people would pay thousands of dollars to do so. via
From the New Yorker (via Kottke natch):
FROGS
“Hey, can I ask you something? Why do human children dissect us?”
“It’s part of their education. They cut open our bodies in school and write reports about their findings.”
“Huh. Well, I guess it could be worse, right? I mean, at least we’re not dying in vain.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, our deaths are furthering the spread of knowledge. It’s a huge sacrifice we’re making, but at least some good comes out of it.”
“Let me show you something.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s a frog-dissection report.”
“Who wrote it?”
“A fourteen-year-old human from New York City. Some kid named Simon.”
(Flipping through it.) “This is it? This is the whole thing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Geez. It doesn’t look like he put a lot of time into this.”
“Look at the diagram on the last page.”
“Oh, my God . . . it’s so crude. It’s almost as if he wasn’t even looking down at the paper while he was drawing it. Like he was watching TV or something.”
“Read the conclusion.”
“ ‘In conclusion, frogs are a scientific wonder of biology.’ What does that even mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Why are the margins so big?”
“He was trying to make it look as if he had written five pages, even though he had only written four.”
“He couldn’t come up with one more page of observations about our dead bodies?”
“I guess not.”
“This paragraph looks like it was copied straight out of an encyclopedia. I’d be shocked if he retained any of this information.”
“Did you see that he spelled ‘science’ wrong in the heading?”
“Whoa . . . I missed that. That’s incredible.”
“He didn’t even bother to run it through spell-check.”
“Who did he dissect?”
“Harold.”
“Betsy’s husband? Jesus. So this is why Harold was killed. To produce this . . . ‘report.’ ”
(Nods.) “This is why his life was taken from him.”
(Long pause.)
“Well, at least it has a cover sheet.”
“Yeah. The plastic’s a nice touch.”
Click through to the article, the Free Range chicken one is also good.
Bunim-Murray , the producers of Real World, are about to become the producers of Project Runway. I guess this might lead to more drunken hookups and fake fights?
Proving once again that being demonstrably and disastrously wrong on the most important national security questions of the day is no barrier to influence in American politics — provided, of course, that one is always careful to err on the side of war — the Washington Post gives Richard Perle yet another opportunity to be wrong again, this time on Iran.
–Matt Duss on the Washington Post allowing Richard Perle to say dumb things about Iran on their op-ed page.
Gruber says these sculptures are “astonishingly” real. I say more like creepily.
In my top 5 reasons why I hate watching cable news (also in my top 5 reasons why I don’t watch cable news) is when I see some fool who doesn’t know what they are talking about but is helpfully labeled “Democratic strategist”. I don’t mean to generalize but 86% of the time, the people who show up on cable news with “Democratic strategist” appearing below them, are morons (note, this is 99% of the time on Fox News).
Daniel Libit helpful has written an article about the “strategist” phenomenon which explains that, as I thought, most of these people have no idea what they are talking about.
Among the things that the proliferation of TV cable news has wrought is slackened standards for what constitutes a political strategist. Now used as a catchall tag for a whole host of people with varied — and often peripheral — backgrounds in electoral politics, the term has all but lost its meaning.
“I think it’s absurd,” says Ed Rollins, a bona fide strategist who has held high-ranking positions in numerous Republican presidential campaigns. “Everyone calls themselves a strategist. I have been doing this for 40 years, I know most of the players, and I go on these shows and think, ‘Who are these people?’”
Preaching to the choir my man. Give me more.
“Many of these sort of more junior folks who have sort of made it into the ranks of analyst/commentator/strategist,” says one high-ranking cable news executive, “are only too happy to talk about things they don’t know about. Part of the problem is that because, again, they’re very glib, they’re good on TV. And if you ask someone the question and they give you a good-sounding answer, you might not know by asking them that it’s not their area of expertise.”
Others concur that the fractured nature of cable news time, particularly midday, allows almost anyone who’s articulate and politically inclined to act like a campaign insider. Rollins, who often appears on CNN himself, blames the cable news networks for “dumbing down” good analysis in the name of multitudinous voices. “I think the networks are idiotic in that they have capable people who have been around, but they want 12 panels,” he says. Independent TV analyst Andrew Tyndall thinks the “mislabeling” is also the product of the media’s unyielding “bid to seem as though they are inside the horse race.”
Here’s a great quote from a Republican strategist (a real one I assume):
“What’s frustrating for people who worked on campaigns is seeing these folks second-guessing decisions every day,” says one Republican strategist who has been a veteran of several presidential campaigns. “It has to be like an astronaut who spent their whole career and life trying to get to space, and you’ve got somebody who has never been there giving you an opinion of what it’s like on the moon.”
Again, I hate to generalize…but if you’ve appeared on TV with the label “Democratic strategist” (I could care less about the Republican ones) then you should have to apply to get back on to TV and you should probably never be allowed to work for a Democratic cause again.
Unless of course someone wants to put me on TV as a “Democratic Strategist”. I was an intern in 2004 afterall.
Below, via Kottke, is the alternative ending to I Am Legend. It is, in my opinion, 100 times better then the one they showed in theaters and, I think, much closer to the spirit of the book the movie was based on. Why on earth did they not make this the ending?
Via the DCist, I guess my only excuse for not noticing this behavior when I use these stops (and I use both almost every day) is that I’m really not a morning person:
A Metro station manager and a Metro custodian were arrested on prostitution charges after an undercover transit police investigation found they arranged sexual trysts for money from inside the Dupont Circle Metro station.
At one point the employees used the Metro loudspeaker system to facilitate an illicit sexual arrangement, according to police who arrested the pair last week.
Sharon Waters, a Red Line station manager, told an undercover police officer at the Dupont Circle station June 4 that she could arrange meetings with local prostitutes for him, according to court documents.
The officer returned to the station at 11:45 p.m. June 11 and met with Waters, who told him she was organizing a “sex” party in the Washington area for a $100 cover charge, court records show.
Waters said she also could arrange for another, unidentified Metro station manager to meet the officer for sex, but that she couldn’t find her at that time, according to the affidavit.
Waters then used the Metro loudspeaker system to page Pam Goins, a Metro custodian who Waters said would be interested, and the officer and Waters went to the Farragut North Metro station to meet her, according to the documents.
Goins told the officer she would have sex with him for $200, and the two agreed to meet in the officer’s hotel room later in the week, after Goins grabbed his crotch and made several references to sexual acts she wanted to perform with him, records show.
Who knew? All this time and they were running a prostitution service right under my nose.
Players from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.