‘The planet has a fever.’

Good brief excerpt from video of Gore testimony via TPM.

Best line of the day, so far

“There’s a dangerous culture of obedience throughout much of this country that’s worse in Utah than anywhere.”

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson quoted in The New York Times. Anderson supports the impeachment of President Bush.

Great read

NewMexiKen recommends Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont, which I am just finishing. It’s the story of the brutal rape and murder of a 62-year-old woman just a mile from Junger’s own childhood home — and on the very day that eventual Boston Strangler confessor Albert DeSalvo was working at the Junger home. Was the man convicted of the Belmont murder guilty? Did DeSalvo kill her instead?

In a review last April, Alan Dershowitz wrote that A Murder in Belmont “though nonfiction, reads like a novel. Its narrative line is crisp. Junger takes us through the trial and conviction of Roy Smith, the series of stranglings in and around Boston, and the arrest and confession of Albert DeSalvo. But there are threads left untied by the imperfect system of Massachusetts justice that Junger describes so well.” Dershowitz does find fault with the speculative nature of some of Junger’s conclusions: “But when a writer has a stake in playing down coincidences and emphasizing connections, his work must be read with caution, especially when it contains no footnotes or endnotes.”

Indeed, but it’s a great read.

Junger is best known for The Perfect Storm.

Thanks to Ken for recommending the book.

Jon Stewart vs. John Bolton

Crooks and Liars has the Jon Stewart exchange with former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton. Good television.

Stewart is quite right about Lincoln by the way.

Ever feel like these were the people in your hotel room last night?

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - Santa Cruz County authorities have confiscated more than two dozen animals from a couple who were hoarding them in their motel room they shared with two children. Staff of the downtown Santa Cruz motel went to the man and woman’s room on Tuesday because they had not heard from the couple in more than a month. Inside they found 20 domestic birds, a cat and a rabbit. There was one dead bird in a cage and three others stuffed in the freezer.

Yahoo! News

Dungy: ‘I embrace’ same-sex marriage ban

CARMEL, Ind. — Colts coach Tony Dungy said he knows some people would prefer him to steer clear of the gay marriage debate, but he used a speech Tuesday night to clearly stake out his position.

Dungy told more than 700 people at the Indiana Family Institute’s banquet that he agrees with that organization’s position supporting a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

“I appreciate the stance they’re taking, and I embrace that stance,” Dungy said.

IndyStar.com

Shut up Coach.

Apple TV

This silvery little $299 gadget is designed to play and display on a widescreen family-room TV set all the music, video and photos stored on up to six computers around the house — even if they are far from the TV, and even if they are all Windows PCs rather than Apple’s own Macintosh models. It can also pull a very limited amount of music and video directly off the Internet onto the TV.
. . .

Yet, in our tests, it worked great, and we can easily recommend it for people who are yearning for a simple way to show on their big TVs all that stuff trapped on their computers. We tried it with various combinations of Windows and Mac computers, with movies, photos, TV shows, video clips and music. And we didn’t even use the fastest wireless network it can handle. It performed flawlessly.
. . .

We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.

The Mossberg Solution

In looks, it sits at the top of the heap. Apple TV is a gorgeous, one-inch-tall, round-cornered square slab, 7.7 inches on a side. It slips silently and almost invisibly into your entertainment setup. (You can’t say that for, say, the Xbox, which, in comparison, is huge and too noisy for a bedroom.)

The heart-breaker for millions, however, is that Apple TV requires a wide-screen TV — preferably an HDTV. It doesn’t work with the squarish, traditional TVs that many people still have.

Apple defends its audience-limiting decision by saying that the future is HDTV; Apple is just “skating to where the puck is going to be,” as a product manager put it.

David Pogue

John McCain’s ‘Curved Talk’ Weiner Mobile

Crooks and Liars has Jon Stewart’s take on the new John McCain.

New NewMexiKen poll

Best line of the day, so far

“There’s nothing remarkable about [making music]. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”

Johann Sebastian Bach, born on this date in 1685, and quoted by The Writer’s Almanac in a brief profile.

How many of the world’s 245 countries can you type in 10 minutes?

Jill has it down to 238. Here’s the ones she missed last time:

Abkhazia
Akrotiri and Dhekelia
Kyrgyzstan
Myanmar
Nagorno-Karabakh
Pridnestrovie
Tuvalu

Be honest, how many of those countries had you even heard of?

NewMexiKen’s original posting for the countries item.

The actual challenge. When you click the clock begins to tick. 600 seconds, 245 countries.

The curse of Billy Packer

Bill Simmons doesn’t like Billy Packer:

“Like always with Packer, it wasn’t the opinion as much as the way he expressed it: He was condescending, stern, inflexible. In Packer’s world, he’s always right, and everyone else is always wrong. Unless they agree with him.”

There’s much more.

Houses cheaper than cars in Detroit

DETROIT (Reuters) - With bidding stalled on some of the least desirable residences in Detroit’s collapsing housing market, even the fast-talking auctioneer was feeling the stress.

“Folks, the ground underneath the house goes with it. You do know that, right?” he offered.

After selling house after house in the Motor City for less than the $29,000 it costs to buy the average new car, the auctioneer tried a new line: “The lumber in the house is worth more than that!”

As Detroit reels from job losses in the U.S. auto industry, the depressed city has emerged as a boomtown in one area: foreclosed property.

Yahoo! News

Detroit, a good place to be from.

March 21st is the birthday

… of Matthew Broderick. Ferris is 45.

… of Rosie O’Donnell. She’s 45 also.

The oldest of the Huxtable children, Sondra, is 49 today. That’s Sabrina Le Beauf.

Give ‘em food stamps to help ‘em out

What’s next, a cardboard sign with “Will Dunk For Food” scrawled on it?

Denver Nuggets center Jamal Sampson — who gets the NBA’s $106 daily road per diem in addition to making $798,112 this season — figures he pockets half his meal money, and he isn’t alone. “I’m the Subway king,” Sampson told the Rocky Mountain News. “I don’t do room service. I’d rather walk. … Subway, Quiznos, I’ll go to whatever sandwich shop.”

But Sampson says guard Yakhouba Diawara, who makes the rookie minimum of $412,718, is the Nuggets’ top penny-pincher.

“There’s nothing over a $10 meal for Kouba,” Sampson said. “Kouba will walk three miles. He’ll walk around the whole city just to save some money.”

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