When you stop at the dealer for your scheduled oil change, why not multi-task and get a mani-pedi? You can even enjoy a latte while they’re buffing those nails: Fletcher Jones Mercedes in Newport Beach has both an in-house Starbucks and its own nail salon.
— From a Los Angeles Times report, Where car lovers idle.
Dan Neil takes a replica of the world’s first automobile for a spin. A good report, with history, technology and appreciation. An excerpt:
Fettled in his modest workshop in Mannheim, Germany, Benz’s Patent Motorwagen didn’t look much like a car as we know it today. To the town’s mildly alarmed burghers, it didn’t even immediately suggest a horseless carriage, whatever that was. With its spoked rear wheels and tuck-and-roll upholstered seat, it looked rather more like a park bench gone walkabout. But it was, in all the ways that matter, the first proper automobile. This was the life-evoking lightning stroke in the primordial pond, the rudimentary sorting of nucleotides from which a new species would arise. It was only a matter of time before real estate agents driving three-ton Escalades would overrun the Westside.
Automotive history begins with the 1886 Benz Motorwagen. And here I am, driving it down the quiet streets of Pasadena.
New Mexico, though 37th in population, is 17th among the states in the number of “assets” in the Department of Homeland Security data base. Presumably, there are, according to data submitted to DHS by New Mexico, 1,348 targets in the Land of Enchantment.
But 553 of these were information technology assets (73% of the national total). The next highest state (Virginia) had just 68 information technology assets.
In another anomaly, California listed the Bay Area Rapid Transit (1 asset). New York listed subway stations (739 assets).
Nationally 1,305 casinos were listed and 34 Coca Cola plants.
Source: DHS Inspector General’s report [pdf]
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Girl: He took me to a Japanese restaurant. I got the chicken karaoke.
–78th & Broadway
Overheard by: E HAGEN
20-Something girl: So, is Alabama in Kentucky?
–27th & 1st
Overheard by: interlard
Early-20’s woman: The Himalayas aren’t a real place. They’re like Narnia.
–1st & 1st
Ghetto girl: In British Whose Line Is It Anyway?, do they speak English?
–75th St
All from the world’s greatest website, Overheard in New York. Thank you V, thank you, thank you.
Whiskey Bar hits one out.
In case you missed the pre-game show from the World Cup final — and if you watched on ABC you did — here’s what the rest of the world saw. How many musical traditions can you hear in Shakira and Wyclef Jean’s performance? (Shakira has a Lebanese father and Colombian mother. She grew up in Colombia. Wyclef Jean is Haitian via Brooklyn and New Jersey.)
It happens so quickly you may have to watch more than once. Yikes!
Found at Andrew Sullivan.
In Belgium, the wheat beer is often flavored with orange peel and coriander. But in Bavaria, brewers developed a particular kind of ale yeast that imparts a most unusual flavor to the beer: clove, citrus, smoke and, you’ll taste for yourself, banana and bubblegum. As odd as it sounds, it’s tremendously refreshing and goes well with a wide variety of spicy foods. The beer is called hefeweizen; weizen for wheat and hefe for yeast. It is almost always unfiltered, which gives hefeweizen its characteristically cloudy, hazy appearance.
— From a review in The New York Times
They liked the Brooklyn Brewery Brooklyner Weisse the best (3 stars) and the Flying Dog In-Heat Wheat Hefeweizen, Samuel Adams Hefeweizen and Magic Hat Hocus Pocus next (2½ stars).
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
— Walden, Henry David Thoreau, who was born on this date in 1817
From a report in The New York Times:
WASHINGTON, July 11 — It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”
But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.
The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.
The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.
“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”
“Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the most unstable region of the world, and to bring it here and burn it in ways that destroy the habitability of the planet. That is nuts! We have to change every aspect of that.”
— Al Gore in an interview with Rolling Stone.
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“As you know, we finally found those weapons of mass destruction. The bad news? They’re in North Korea! Boy that Saddam Hussein is sneaky isn’t he? Had them hidden over there.”
“The Japanese prime minister joined the United States in condemning North Korea’s missile policy. The Japanese prime minister was really upset when he found out that they had missiles that could reach Graceland.”
Jay Leno
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