“It was a perfect Ron Burgundy moment.”
Awful Announcing on ESPN’s Michelle Bonner getting the David-Goliath story backward while talking about last night’s Mavs-Warriors game. (In case you don’t know, David won in both instances.)
Nice clip from Hoosiers.
“Say what you will about Reagan — Let me know when you’re done. OK? Good. We continue. — but he was never as gloomy as John McCain, as transparently phony as Mitt Romney, as feral as Rudy Giuliani, as earnest as Mike Huckabee, as pious as Sam Brownback, as futile as Tommy Thompson, as Out There as Ron Paul, or as monomaniacal as Tom Tancredo. Put all of these guys together on a stage and they don’t add up to Jack Kemp, for pity’s sake, let alone the Gipper.”
Charles Pierce at Altercation
Via Crooks and Liars, watch as three out of ten of the Republican candidates for president raise their hands.
Dios Mio! What did we see at the original urban wholesale-type big box in San Francisco but Coca Cola straight outta Mexicali. The reason why Mexicoke has a cult following here in the U.S. is the use of old-school sugar from cane, as opposed to the sweetener used by American bottlers these days: corn syrup.
Via kottke.
“God God God God God God God Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan God…and, oh by the way, Reagan.”
Time‘s Joe Klein on what the Republican debate sounded like on the radio.
… would have been 78 today. (She died in 1993.)
Ms. Hepburn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role five times, winning the first time for Roman Holiday in 1954. (The other nominations were for Sabrina, The Nun’s Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Wait Until Dark.) She also received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, posthumously in 1993. Hersholt had presented the Oscar to Hepburn in 1954.
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston was born in Brussels, Belgium, daughter of John Victor Hepburn-Ruston, an English banker, and Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch baroness.
In 1963, it was Audrey Hepburn who sang “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy. Marilyn Monroe sang to him the year before.
From Ask the Pilot, a airflight jargon briefing. From the introduction:
The experience of air travel is unique in that people subject themselves to a long string of mostly anonymous authorities. From the moment you step through the terminal doors, you’re subject to orders — stand here, take your shoes off there, put your seat belt on, do this, put away that — and a flurry of information. Most of it comes not face-to-face, but over a microphone, delivered by employees, seen and unseen, in a vernacular that binges on jargon, acronyms and confusing euphemisms. There are people who make dozens of air journeys annually and still have only a vague understanding of many terms.
So, to help the baffled flier, what follows is Part 1 of a glossary. This week, we’ll concentrate on those expressions you hear while aloft or otherwise on board an aircraft. Next week, we’ll cover terms you encounter in the terminal and at the gate (plus any on-the-plane items that have managed to escape me). Not every word or phrase is included — some, as you’ll see, are presented tongue-in-cheek — but I’ve focused on those most easily misunderstood, or not understood at all.
The Sanguine Sex by Caitlin Flanagan, as good a piece as I’ve ever read about abortion.
Click the image; be sure to read the instructions.
Four very short, but amusing short stories.
“Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.”
Peter Morgan, writer of “The Queen,” “The Last King of Scotland” and “Frost/Nixon,” quoted in a profile by John Lahr.
NewMexiKen believes we are all damaged in some way and ambition can be an indicator of that damage.
Anyone else have an opinion?
“I’m far too lazy to read an entire book, so I went to Wikipedia and read what strangers with no credibility had to say about him.”
These were provided by commenters to my item The spirited ghost town but I didn’t want them to be missed.
“There are no traffic lights or stop signs in the entire town, because they don’t want to be in the position of telling someone else what to do.”
“MA – drid doesn’t have any traffic lights YET…there is one in the works, they just haven’t decided what colors they’re gonna use…”
Best Laptop: MacBook. It runs both the virus-free Mac OS X as well as Windows, making the world’s entire library of commercial software available to you. It’s loaded (built-in video/still camera, Wi-Fi, DVD burner, Bluetooth). Its magnetic power adapter means you’ll never drag this thing off the table by accident. And its design is light-years cleaner and smoother than Windows laptops, which are covered with so many flaps, panels and stickers, they look like quilts. (The base price is $1,100, but you should get it installed with more memory than the ridiculous 512 megs it comes with.)
I’d have said the MacBook Pro, but I find those 15- and 17-inch models too big for convenient portability; I know this is a matter of personal choice, but I always feel like I’m carrying around a serving tray. The 13-inch, extremely bright MacBook screen is just right.
But, meanwhile Walt Mossberg has some hesitation:
Apple’s two laptop lines, the MacBook and MacBook Pro, are very good. They have better built-in software than any Windows laptop I’ve seen and don’t suffer from the security issues that plague Windows. And they can even run Windows software, if you need that.
But the Mac laptops lack some features that are common on Windows portables, such as slots for camera memory cards and built-in cellular modems. And the MacBook even lacks an ExpressCard or PC Card slot.
Windows or Apple, overall Mossberg says, “First, you may want to wait to get that new laptop until later this year or early in 2008. There are a number of interesting new hardware features coming.”
It’s Derby Week in Louisville and FunctionalAmbivalent is excited. It includes this, but you really do need to read it all.
The most beautiful women in the world are at Churchill Downs on Derby Day. There are thousands of them in beautiful spring dresses and flowery hats, and you can tell from their glow that every one of them feels beautiful, right down to her bones. Most of the time, when women go all-out, they’re dressed in evening wear: Dark dresses and glamorous makeup. For Derby, the theme is spring: Billowy dresses and skirts, bright colors, girl-next-door blush on the cheeks and hats that would make Carmen Miranda scream no mas. My wife, who is not a girly girl, has been enjoying the hunt for the perfect dress and accessories for a month, and she will look spectacular in the sunshine.
Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments — the dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard — receive almost no attention.
While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the President’s will, our media still barely discusses those issues.
They write about John Edwards’ haircut and John Kerry’s windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation’s dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny — that “liberties are dangerous and law does not apply” — is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.
Today Greenwald has published an even stronger take on “our broken political press.” Yesterdays column quoted above was about an essay in the Wall Street Journal and the “right’s explicit and candid rejection of ‘the rule of law’.”
“As you know, my position is clear – I’m the commander guy.”
George W. Bush
Michael Agger asks, Are you addicted to e-mail? It includes this:
The idea behind emptying your inbox is to convert all those e-mails into actions. You’re allowed to deal with any mail that will take less than two minutes to answer. Otherwise, you should file your outstanding messages into folders such as “Pending,” “Reply To,” “Archive,” and “YouTube Links” and deal with them as a unit later, when you’ve mapped out your day and polished off those urgent TPS reports.
Read about the 12-step program for curing your “e-mail e-ddiction.”
Thanks to Veronica for the link.
In honor of James Brown, born on this date in 1933, the only thing to say is this.
Exactly!
Read about unintended (but clearly predictable) consequences at Eye On Albuquerque.
As we noted here last summer, according to Santa Fe Sheriff Greg Solano, studies have shown that “accidents increase at intersections with red light camera’s due to motorists making abrupt stops in order to avoid the citation.”
Listen at least long enough to get the idea.
Then, the answer to my question is at BBC NEWS.
Oh, and here are some riddles.
Links via Discourse.net.
“Ashcroft supermoralistically draped the body of the department’s statue of justice to hide her contours; Gonzales amoralistically tore off her blindfold.”
“So big, in fact, that also playing the pro-am Wednesday was Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning. Hardly anyone noticed.”
SI.com in an article about Tiger and Michael being paired today in the Wachovia pro-am.
$38K for a birthday present and she’s upset about the color.