Best line of the day, so far

“All season long football fans have asked the question: How would a team with the ninth-best record in the Southeastern Conference fare against a team with the seventh-best record in the Big 12?”

Steve Harvey lists the ten worst bowl games.

America’s best auto critic begins this week’s review

A couple of weeks ago, when the temperatures dipped into the 40s — or as we call it here in Southern California, the extremes of human endurance — I went shopping in West L.A. It was like base camp at Annapurna. High-heeled hotties had turned in their sex spurs for pairs of Merrell hiking boots. Guys were walking around in zero-degree quilted Marmot jackets. I’m sorry — I just don’t think crampons and bottled oxygen are necessary to make the traverse to the valet stand.

God knows, high-end technical gear is fun. Suunto watches, Adidas glacier glasses. I love it when people use Black Diamond trekking poles and Platypus hydration packs to assault the untamed reaches of Griffith Park. You sure don’t want Jon Krakauer writing a book about you.

Dan Neil

Holiday Survival Kit

A pretty cool (and useful) e-card from a lawfirm.

Cadwalader 2007 Holiday Survival Kit

Christmas political ads

I’ll include more ads if I find them (no more than one per candidate).

And if any more Democrats get into the Christmas spirit, I’ll add them to the poll.

Here’s the Republican Christmas ads

(One of two similar ads for Giuliani.)

[poll=1]

Polling the Democrats Christmas ads

Here are the Christmas ads that the folks in Iowa and New Hampshire are seeing. Take a look (30 seconds each) and then select your favorite. You’re voting for the ad, not the candidate (if you can make the distinction).

Bill Richardson is either a Grinch or thinks the war is serious. He gets NewMexiKen’s vote either way.

At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.

Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.”

Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.

New York Times

Follow the link to learn more about Professor Lewin and find links to his podcast lectures. An MIT education for free. Aren’t the internets grand?

A review that makes me want to hear the song

From the playlist of short-story author Jack Pendarvis:

8 ) God Moves On the Water, Blind Willie Johnson. I don’t care if you’re the most committed liberal secular humanist in the world, I don’t care if you’re Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Blind Willie Johnson will make you afraid of God. He will also make you afraid of Blind Willie Johnson. There are dozens of recorded songs about the Titanic disaster and what it means. This one is the best.

Update: Here’s part of what All Music has to say about Johnson:

If you’ve never heard Blind Willie Johnson, you are in for one of the great, bone-chilling treats in music. Johnson played slide guitar and sang in a rasping, false bass that could freeze the blood. But no bluesman was he; this was gospel music of the highest order, full of emotion and heartfelt commitment. Of all the guitar-playing evangelists, Blind Willie Johnson may have been the very best. … Not for the faint of heart, but hey, the good stuff never is.

But he has a big house and gets expensive haircuts

It is very striking how little Edwards’ substantive critique of our political system has penetrated into the national discourse. That’s because the centerpiece of his campaign is a critique that is a full frontal assault on our political establishment. His argument is not merely that the political system needs reform, but that it is corrupt at its core — “rigged” in favor of large corporate interests and their lobbyists, who literally write our laws and control the Congress. Anyone paying even casual attention to the extraordinary bipartisan effort on behalf of telecom immunity, and so many other issues driven almost exclusively by lobbyists, cannot reasonably dispute this critique.

Yet because that argument indicts the same Beltway culture of which our political journalists are an integral part, and further attacks the system’s power brokers who are the friends, sources, and peers of those journalists, they instinctively react with confusion, scorn and hostility towards Edwards’ campaign. They condescendingly dismiss it as manipulative populist swill, or cynically assume that it’s just a ploy to distinguish himself by “moving left.” In the eyes of our Beltawy press, the idea that our political system is “rigged” or corrupt must be anything other than true or sincerely held.

Glenn Greenwald

What Really Matters

… is that this guy not get elected.

Actually it seems to me that most of the television commercials I’ve been seeing aren’t about politics. They’re about erectile dysfunction.

Some say

… this is the best track on the best album of 2007.

M.I.A. from the album Kala with “Paper Planes.”

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make ‘em all day
I get one down in a second if you wait

All I wanna do is (BANG BANG BANG BANG!)
And (KKKAAAA CHING!)
And take your money

Me, it’s all about me

Hollywood, college football, Major League Baseball — it’s all just show business folks and the same considerations apply to stars everywhere.

Rodriguez had a graduate assistant hand in his official letter of resignation. When West Virginia athletic director Ed Pastilong read the letter, it said that Rodriguez is resigning “effective Jan. 3.”

West Virginia’s contract with Rodriguez has a $4 million buyout clause. The resignation date is Coach Rod’s way of telling the school that they either let him coach through the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2 or they let him walk — in which case the buyout clause could be voided.

And all this time we thought college basketball coaches were the slick ones.

Wendell Barnhouse

Oh, and I’d pre-ordered a copy

It appears that with the announcement that Britney Spears’s 16-year-old sister Lynne is pregnant their mom’s parenting book has been shelved. (People.com)