Best line of the day, so far (piling on Packer edition)

“[B]ut ‘good manners’ and [Billy] Packer are not frequently mentioned in the same sentence.”

SportsProf

Beware the Ides of March

Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March in 44 B.C. A group of Roman senators led by Cassius and Brutus thought Caesar was becoming arrogant and tyrannical, and they devised a plot to assassinate him at a senate meeting on March 15. Many of the conspirators were close friends of Caesar, including Brutus. At the meeting, the group of senators circled around Caesar and pretended to submit a petition. Suddenly, one of them grabbed Caesar’s robe and yanked it off his neck, which was the signal to begin the attack. All of the conspirators were hiding daggers, and they each stabbed him as he staggered across the floor.

The Writer’s Almanac

American historians, official daughters of NewMexiKen, reenact the assassination of Julius Caesar with a ballpoint pen on the steps of the Roman Curia (Senate) 1997.

My other car is a plane

The always delightful, always on target Dan Neil:

Mercedes-Benz executives offer this wholly meritless defense: Many of its customers leave the brand because the company does not offer a full-size SUV that meets their needs, which is to say, a seven-passenger, 17-foot 4×4 with a 9,300-pound towing capacity. At this point in the presentation in Napa Valley last week, execs showed slides of the GL pulling a 30-foot boat. So there you have it: Mercedes’ audience of water-skiing polygamists is underserved.

Needs? Did the man say needs? OK, then. I propose needs testing for the purchase of such a vehicle. You must have a Chris-Craft and three or more school-age children in the yard to qualify. Your vehicle must do double-duty as, um, a bookmobile.

Need has very little to do with it. This segment is about want, naked and unquenchable, I-got-mine-you-get-bent appetite. It’s well established that the vast majority of these vehicles never touch gravel, never carry more than a couple of people, and never tow anything heavier than the weight of their owner’s childhood traumas.

Why We’re All Jesus’ Children

At Slate, Steve Olson tells us Go back a few millenniums, and we’ve all got the same ancestors.

It gets even stranger. Say you go back 120 generations, to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants living today. And if you compared a list of your ancestors with a list of anyone else’s ancestors, the names on the two lists would be identical.

This is a very bizarre result (the math behind it is solid, though—here’s a brief, semitechnical explanation of our findings). It means that you and I are descended from all of the Africans, Australians, Native Americans, and Europeans who were alive three millenniums ago and still have descendants living today. That’s also why so many people living today could be descended from Jesus. If Jesus had children (a big if, of course) and if those children had children so that Jesus’ lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth. True, Jesus lived two rather than three millenniums ago, but a person’s descendants spread quickly from well-connected parts of the world like the Middle East.

Beware the Ides of March

And, as we’re also saying around here this morning, “beware snuggling the two-year-old with a tummy ache.”

(The bed linens you launder may be your own.)

Bird brain

“In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans store canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds for when bird flu hits. What? This ranks right up there with ‘duck and cover’ during a nuclear attack. In case of radiation wear a hat.

“Powdered milk and tuna? How many would rather have the bird flu?”

Jay Leno