You left him, you left Chewie!

As you would expect, I spent some time this morning watching a public access rebroadcast of New Tong Dynasty Television's coverage of a comic book convention. Good stuff.



The book, I think, was Vector Prime, which of course I haven't read. I've only read one Star Wars novel ever, when I was about twelve, which I picked up from a younger cousin during a too long summer stretch at my grandmother's house. Nevertheless, I've been told by sci-fi heads at both Borders and Blimpy Burger that the newish novels are pretty good. Vector Prime's R.A. Salvatore, at any rate, is a perfectly competent writer of pulp fantasy. Still don't plan on reading the books.

Sotomayor messaging meeting (abridged)

GOP Thinker #1:Okay boys, we've got our nominee. Let's get to work. What have we got on...what's her name again?
GOP Thinker #2: Sotomayor.
GOP Thinker #6: I believe it's actually pronounced Sotomayor.
GOP Thinker #3: God help us, where do they get these people? Can't they just give us Garcia?
GOP Thinker #6: I wouldn't lead with that.
GOP Thinker #3: Did we ask you? Are you even in this meeting?
GOP Thinker #4: Cuervo.
GOP Thinker #3: What?
GOP Thinker #4: For her name. It would be funny if it were Cuervo.
GOP Thinker #6 (softly): Jesus.
GOP Thinker #1: Boys, come on now! What have we got?
GOP Thinker #3: She's a woman. Hispanic. Affirmative action hire.
GOP Thinker #2: Everybody hates affirmative action.
GOP Thinker #6: Her resume's a little deeper than that...
GOP Thinker #2: True.
GOP Thinker #6: Ivy League. Yale Law Review. It's not going to stick. We need to find cases. Who was on that?
GOP Thinker #11: I've got the summaries from the interns. Top line is solid work, unlikely to change the balance of the court.
GOP Thinker #3: What are you two even doing in this meeting? Jesus.
GOP Thinker #1: Guys! Let's get back on task.
GOP Thinker #2: That's right, back on task!
GOP Thinker #1: So what have we got?
GOP Thinker #4: I've got a speech where she says some things about how being ethnic makes her a better judge, a few other things like that.
GOP Thinker #3: There's the name. We can do a lot with the name.
GOP Thinker #2: Great ideas all around!
GOP Thinker #6: Are you people kidding? Do you understand that backlash politics won't work forever? The country is changing.
GOP Thinker #1: Really, how did you get into this meeting?
GOP Thinker #2: Yes, that's a good question.
GOP Thinker #3: Now we're getting somewhere!

Adding: Ta-Nehisi Coates has da rill shit.

On nutsack tattoo visibility, and the improvement thereof

Gillette does not condone use of a straight razor to clear the underbrush. Rather, follow their approved technique.

The best a man can get.

Empirical results to tatoo on my nutsack

Now a new paper, published by the journal Contraception, culls evidence from several studies to argue that withdrawal is actually nearly as effective as condoms in preventing pregnancy. The paper reports that couples who practice withdrawal perfectly over the course of a year -- meaning the male partner always pulls out before ejaculation -- have only a 4 percent pregnancy rate. More "typical" couples using withdrawal (those who sometimes mess up) have a pregnancy rate of 18 percent. |Dana Goldstein|

sunday quotes vs. the black eye peas

via colihouse again

I heard “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas while switching between radio stations in my car. The words “I got the that rock and roll, that future flow, that digital spit, next level visual shit” piqued my curiosity so I decided to listen to the rest. As the beat kicked in, I remembered sort of liking the Peas’ first album and dreamily wondered whether T-Pain and Kanye West have inspired an amazing new genre: cyber rap. Just as I was starting to smile at the prospect of a Funkadelic generation for the 21st century, Fergie’s brute battle screech crushed all my hopes of space-hop grandeur with just one verse: “I like that boom boom pow, them chickinz jackin’ my style, they try copy my swagger I’m on that next shit now”.
...
I like a little supersonic boom as much as the next guy, but until one of these Peas can be a little more specific about their zooming space shit I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. What exactly makes this song futuristic? Help me out. Until then I’ll try to avoid saying “You’re SOO two thousand and LATE” in my lexicon and look to the cosmos for answers.

I keep thinking Fergie is singing, "I got that fuchsia flow," which would be, you know, different.

How bad is the economy?

An actual real employment wanted ad published today in the Ann Arbor Business Review:

Mature Telemarketer / Interviewer SEEKS Hourly Job. Refs. avail. XXX-XXX-XXXX Leave msg.

In other news, AABR reports that Ann Arbor is slated to receive $300,000 in stimulus money to fight urban blight.

Hmmm

Called "Daisy," The RNC's new 30-second Web ad uses footage of the now-infamous 1964 Lyndon Johnson commercial by the same name that showed a young girl picking off the pedals of a flower as a nuclear explosion is heard in the background.

That ad, which only ran once but was widely criticized as being extreme, ends with the image of a mushroom crowd and Johnson declaring, "We must either love each other, or we must die."

The New RNC ad splices the image of the girl with Obama's earlier declaration suggesting that closing Guantanamo Bay is "easy." This time the girl asks "To close it? To close it not?" as she picks off flower pedals.|CNN|

I don't see any way to read this except as an attempt to double-down on fear mongering. Maybe I'm biased. Anyhow, I tried to imagine what was going on in the room where they conceived the ad, but all I came up with was this:

GOP Thinker #1: We need a web ad for this Gitmo thing...
GOP Thinker #2: Got to drive home the message that the world will end if any of these guys are moved anywhere. Cuba, man, it's isolated. You can't even get a cigar out of there.
GOP Thinker #3: Man, all you have to do to get a cuban cigar is go to Canada.
GOP Thinker #2: Really?
GOP Thinker #3: Oh yeah. I've got a friend who crosses over from time to time and always brings a few back. Want me to get you a box?
GOP Thinker #2: Wow, that'd be...
GOP Thinker #1: Guys! On task, ok? We need fear, and the cigar angle isn't going to work.
GOP Thinker #2: Save the cigar angle for when Clinton runs!
GOP Thinker #3: Ha, ha, ha
GOP Thinker #1: Guys! Ah hell. Let's just recycle the daisy ad.
GOP Thinker #2: Chappaquiddick!

Bonus Content: Probably you'd like to watch the ad, so here it is.

For later

Surely someone, someday will have occasion to link to this. I'm looking at you, Mr. 3544.

New science turns people into lions

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair

Howard Schnellenberger coached the Oklahoma Sooners for just over a season in 1995, putting up a 5-6-1 record. Upon his hiring he predicted, "They'll write books and make movies about my time here." Instead, this:

Prince finished 17-20 in three seasons at KSU. It was the the second-shortest coaching tenure in Big 12 history behind the two seasons Dave Roberts coached at Baylor. |ESPN|

I'll take door number three, Greg

Greg Mankiw writes:

According to new research from Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson:

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

I am not at all sure how to interpret this finding. It sounds like either the women's movement was a mistake or subjective happiness is not the right objective.

Dr. Mankiw should have stopped at "I am not at all sure how to interpret this finding..."

Obviously the women's movement is not yet complete. Women are under intense social and financial pressures that men just don't have to deal with, and many of those are the result of continuing, pervasive sexism. So I think it's pretty ballsy ^* to claim that--because it hasn't achieved its goals yet--the movement is a mistake.

lame update: i forgot to quote mankiw! fixed now.
----
^* Get it?

I'm a fan

of WolframAlpha if only because I can plunk in all sorts of questions to see what its limits are. Some disappointment thus far: I asked what the distance from Earth to Saturn would be on a certain date and it could not calculate my answer. Nor "how many sonnets did Shakespeare write?" Nor "Year of Shakespeare's death minus 2009."

On the other hand, just guess what it spit out when asked what the answer to life, the universe, and everything was.

Check out this piece in the Times too. WolframAlpha is not mentioned but provides the same kind of mathematical information mentioned.

Oops

Probably this isn't really that funny, but it's got puppets so I'm posting it.

Future shock

C-SPAN advertised the show as either 'the future of the Republican Party' or 'Conservatism and the future of the Republican Party', but I would have gone with 'Richard Viguerie is batshit insane' and been done with it. You must watch the videos. Here's a short one about the place of conservatism in the world.



The thing that really sticks out is that he's chairman of a website. Which reminds me, can I be Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for thebellman.org? Does this humble blog of record even have a process for awarding offices?

Here's a longer clip about media bias, marketing, the guv'mint plantation and other stuff:



Insightful stuff, I think you'll agree. There are a few more vids youtubeward.

Let's do it!

"I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don't think the speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters," the [Gingrich] said in an interview with ABC Radio. |CNN|

The up-is-downism, the sheer chutzpah, the very idea of investigating Pelosi for allegedly lying about the content of secret briefings given during a period when the Bush administration was publicly lying the country into a war, well, you've got to admire it.

But since a thorough investigation will get more torture documents into the public record, I say go for it. And good luck arguing against those other investigations once the Dems prove willing to investigate their own leadership.

Adding: As long as I'm torture briefing blogging this morning, this is exactly right:

It can’t possibly be the operating assumption of the US government that members of congress and their senior staff are traitors. And if there’s something that genuinely needs to be kept secret for national security purposes, then you have to assume that honest and patriotic members of congress aren’t going to leak damaging information. But it’s clear that in the case of this waterboarding business, there was no real security need for all this operational secrecy. Instead, the Bush administration wanted to keep it secret because it was illegal and if people found out that it was happening they were likely to blow the whistle on the illegal torturing that was happening. But helping powerful people cover-up illegal activity is precisely what classification isn’t supposed to accomplish. |Yglesias|

Jeebus

From the freedom fighters over at The Union News. In native form it's an animated gif, but I couldn't download the file so I took two snapshots. Here's the first:



And the second:




Classy!

Computer, what is the nature of the universe?

WolframAlpha launches tonight. It will turn your computer into the magic "smarter-than-you" box you've been waiting for all these years. Well, maybe not tonight, but it really represents a new way of making computers work for you. A "computational knowledge engine", it won't just look up an answer, but will compute answers and correlating data.

Check out the demo here.