Hmmmm

“My mother is from the South. One of the things I learned is you can’t plant a watermelon seed and grow oranges. You cannot get right out of wrong. . . . We cannot continue to play Bush roulette. It used to be Russian roulette, now it’s Bush roulette.”–Al Sharpton

“Gen. Boykin has confused the heck out of the White House with all this talk about the Almighty, because when he talks about the Almighty, the president thinks he’s talking about Cheney, Cheney thinks he’s talking about Halliburton, . . ., and John Ashcroft thinks they’re talking about him–so they don’t know where to go.”–John Kerry

“We blew the place up; we have to fix it back.”–Carol Moseley Braun

It’s not perfect

Eugene Volokh comments on Amazon’s new search:

How quickly we take things for granted: Kevin Drum (CalPundit) praises amazon.com’s book search feature (“I am now willing to worship the ground that Jeff Bezos walks on”) but notes:

However, at the risk of seeming churlish about this gift from the gods, it turns out there are a couple of hiccups. First, Amazon has available only 120,000 books so far. This sounds like a lot, but when I started experimenting by typing in random titles from my bookshelf, it took me nearly a dozen tries to finally find one that was searchable. When they get up to a million books or so, it will probably be more useful.

Yes, he’s right. Yes, he acknowledged that this is still a very cool feature. Yes, it’s my reaction, too.

But still, think about it: “Amazon has available only 120,000 books so far” for full-text searching. Only 120,000 books so far. Until 10 years ago, the Internet in its current form didn’t really exist. Until a few weeks ago, we couldn’t even search through one book in full text, unless it was one of the relatively few and generally quite old books (a few thousand, perhaps) available on some computer archives, which weren’t always the easiest things for people to track down, search, and read on the screen. Now we can search through bleeping 120,000 books. From our bleeping living rooms. For bleeping free. And we still complain (don’t blame Kevin, you know you thought that, too) that they haven’t gotten it up to a million books or so.

No wonder it’s so hard for humans to be happy.

The Opt-Out Revolution

Interesting, informative article by Lisa Belkin in the The New York Times Magazine on women’s choices. “Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the 50’s, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.’s.”

The Gunfight at the OK Corral…

was in Tombstone, Arizona, on this date in 1881. Three dead — Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury — and three wounded — Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday. Wyatt Earp, Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne were unharmed.

The Earps and Holliday were charged with murder but found not guilty.