... you can talk all nig...
Sunday, 30 September 2018
Kanye West wore a "Make America Great Again" cap on SNL, and he said some pro-Trump things and got booed and cut off.
People reports:He started off by singing, “I wanna cry right now. Black man in America, you’re supposed to keep what you feel inside right now. And the liberals bully you and tell you what you can and cannot wear, where you and they can’t not stare. And they look at me and say, ‘It’s not fair. How the hell did you get here?’ Well…”Wearing a Make America...
"They know they got a problem tomorrow."
Jesus Aguilar, after the Brewers won today and (assuming the Cubs win today), speaking about tomorrow's tiebreaker game for winning the National League Central Division.The Cubs are up 10-5 in the 8th inning. If somehow they lose, the Brewers win the division outright. That seems unlikely, and the game tomorrow will be at Wrigley Field (because the...
A closer look at my sense of humor.
As you can see in the previous post, I saw a George Bernard Shaw play — "Heartbreak House" — at a lovely outdoor theater yesterday. The excellent cast gave a fine performance and got quite a few laughs. I laughed. It was a comedy, based on the style of Anton Chekhov and also...
"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."
Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday. The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and...
Was Lindsay Lohan simply mistaken in believing she needed to save these children from sex trafficking?
I'm reading "Lindsay Lohan gets punched in the face after accusing refugee parents of trafficking, trying to take the kids" (Fox News)(video of the incident at the link). I know it's easy to make fun of Lindsay Lohan, but what does she know, and shouldn't we care?“Guys, you’re going the wrong way, my car is here, come,” Lohan is heard yelling at the...
"The Queen's first openly gay footman has stood down after reportedly being demoted for 'courting publicity.'"
The Daily Mail reports. What a fantastic job:Ollie Roberts, 21, was required to accompany Her Majesty on all her carriage rides and carry out other duties like collecting her mail at Buckingham Palace and walking the Corgis.But you're not allowed to call attention to yourself in this fantastic job!The former airman was told he would be bumped down...
"And the Chicago Cubs have company at the top of the National League Central."
First place mood. #LetsGo pic.twitter.com/4fwwlDgwMO— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) September 30, 2018...
"Saturday Night Live" does a fantastic cold open with Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh.
I've watched this and I still have not read what anyone is saying about it, so let me sketch out a few thoughts before I read what people are saying.1. Matt Damon was great. For a moment there, I thought he was channeling Chris Farley, with the idea of raging and amping up the rage, but that association left my mind as Damon continued and used a lot...
"Sorry, Democrats, but America is unlikely to have a Democratic president before 2025...."
"[I] you look at historical patterns from the end of the 19th century to now, you’ll see that a party (Republican or Democratic) almost always holds the presidency for at least 8 years. Notice I’m saying a 'party,' not a 'president.' For example, Ronald Reagan was a Republican president for 8 years, followed by another Republican president, George...
Saturday, 29 September 2018
"Her neon mouth with the blinkers-off smile/Nothing but an electric sign/You could say she has an individual style/She's part of a colorful time..."
The colorful time was the 1960s and Marty Balin was a transcendent voice...Marty Balin, dead at 76. Here's the the NYT obituary by Jon Pareles.[Grace] Slick was often singled out for attention, and she sang lead on “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” the 1967 hits that made the band national headliners. “I always let everybody else take the credit,”...
The Global Crop Map
RTBMaps shows the distribution of different crops around the world. You can use the map to see where potatoes, bananas, sweet potatoes and other root vegetables & tubers are grown across the globe. The map also includes a number of socio-economic layers which allow you to view such things as population density alongside where the different crops...
Now, I am getting email from the Democratic Party soliciting donations based on Brett Kavanaugh.
Yesterday morning, I blogged about getting an email solicitation from the party, under the name of Cory Booker, that didn't mention Kavanaugh. I speculated about what that might mean. But yesterday evening, I got this email, from the party, with the subject line "Brett Kavanaugh" (signed by Seema Nanda, the CEO of the Democratic National Committee)....
The University of Wisconsin won a big patent case against Apple in 2015, but it has now lost in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
"We hold that no reasonable juror could have found literal infringement in this case" said the unanimous court, reported in U.S. Ne...
Extreme Heat = Less Greenery
There have been a number of maps which have attempted to visualize the extreme weather that much of the world has experienced in 2018. In Mapping One Hot Summer Maps Mania explored weather visualizations from the Berliner Morgenpost, the BBC and the Washington Post. Another stark effect of the extreme heat in Europe this summer is the sharp drop in...
Elena Kagan won't talk about the Kavanaugh controversy, but she will talk about how the Court functions with only 8 Justices.
Kagan was speaking at UCLA law school on Thursday night, and she spoke with experience about the problem of an 8-Justice Court's vulnerability to 4-4 splits, since that is the situation her Court confronted for the year that passed between the death of Antonin Scalia and the swearing-in of Neil Gorsuch."None of us wanted to look as if the court couldn’t...
Ambiguity of the day (from GQ): "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"
The article, by Marian Bull, is "How to Talk to the Women in Your Life Right Now," and by "right now," she means:There's quite possibly a lot of good advice there. But what made me select this — out of everything — to blog was the absurd, grisly second meaning of "If your...
Belgium Air Pollution
20,000 Belgiums have taken part in a citizen science project to measure air pollution in Flanders (the northern region of the country). For the project volunteers installed air quality sensors on a street facing window of their homes. These sensors measured NO2 levels during all of May 2018.You can view the results of the project on the Curieuze Neuzen...
Friday, 28 September 2018
Walking in the corn today...
At the Pope Farm Conservancy, where there are no sunflowers this year.Talk about anything in the comments. This is intended as an open thread, even though I'm not saying "café." "Corn Café"... that would sound stup...
Effectual Flake!
I called him "ineffectual," but no! He was effectual. He was efflaketual."Senate GOP agrees to one-week delay on Kavanaugh confirmation to allow for FBI probe."Nice graphic depiction by Drudge. It's got a great-masters-oil-painting feeling to it. I'm thinking of Caravaggio.........
"But for her decision to come out about Brett Kavanaugh and to remake herself as a California surfing mom, [Christine Blasey Ford] is the archetypal Republican voter..."
"A wealthy, white suburban woman, married, with children. Her parents are Republicans. Her father plays golf with Brett Kavanaugh’s dad at Burning Tree. Her parents have been noticeably silent — stonily so, with no letter of support, only the most begrudging words. It chilled me to read what her father, Ralph Blasey, wrung from himself to offer the...
"I reported the Bloomberg article to Facebook as 'False News.'"
Writes John at Facebook, linking to a Bloomberg article with the headline, "Kavanaugh Wrongly Claims He Could Legally Drink in Maryland."From the hearing transcript:My friends and I sometimes got together and had parties on weekends. The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school, and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high...
"When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain."
Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings" (New York Magazine).A civilized society observes a distinction between public and private, and this distinction is integral to individual freedom. Such a distinction was anathema in old-school monarchies when the king could arbitrarily arrest, jail, or execute you at will, for...
The Tunnels Under Capitol Hill
Underneath the palatial government buildings on Capitol Hill lies an underground network of tunnels connecting the United States Capitol to the Library of Congress, the Senate Office Building, the Home Office Building, the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives and other government buildings.You can learn more about Washington D.C.'s underground...
Flake makes an ineffectual stand, but the Judiciary Committee votes to report the Kavanaugh nomination to the floor of the Senate.
The vote is on strict party lines. Senator Flake spoke just before the vote, and it seemed as though he was conditioning his vote on a one week delay, during which the FBI could do an investigation. But as his little speech wore on, it became apparent that he was only expressing the view that the Senate should delay its action for a week, but his committee...
"I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver."
"I felt very vulnerable, because I can work out, I can eat healthy, but I can’t change the fact that both of my kids enjoyed the left boob more than the right. All I wanted was for them to be even and for people to stop commenting on it."From "Gisele Bündchen Reveals She Got a Boob Job After Breastfeeding Kids — but Instantly Regretted It.""When I...
The Most Dangerous Places
The Most Dangerous Places interactive map visualizes the most dangerous locations in Africa and Asia. The map provides an overview of the number of fatalities from armed conflict that have happened since the beginning of 2017.The map uses data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) to plot the number of deaths from conflict...
I just got a fund-raising email from the Democratic Party, signed Cory Booker, and it says nothing about Kavanaugh or Supreme Court nominations.
That's a screen capture of part of the email. I'll put the full copied text below the fold. The letter tells me that the midterm elections are important — "the most important in our lifetime."Why? We need "to put a check on President Trump."That's the big issue this morning,...
Senator Whitehouse, just now: "I don't believe 'boof' is flatulence. I don't believe 'the devil's triangle' is a drinking game."
"And I don't believe calling yourself a girl's 'alumnius' is being her friend. And I think drinking 'til you 'ralph' or 'fall out of the bus' or 'don't remember the game' or need to piece together your memory the next day is more consistent with Dr. Ford's and other's testimony than his own. If Dr. Ford's testimony is true, I hope we can all agree...
The Committee vote on Kavanaugh is scheduled for noon Eastern Time.
I'm watching the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, voting along strict party lines. The Democrats moved to subpoena Mark Judge, and that failed. The Republicans voted to schedule the vote for noon, and that succeeded.Now, some Democrats have walked out. Three I think. They've found microphones out in the hallway, and others remain in place,...
Framing Brett Kavanaugh as an exemplar of masculine anger and aggression.
I'm reading "Brett Kavanaugh and the Adolescent Aggression of Conservative Masculinity" by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. Schwartz writes about Kavanaugh's "wildly emotional performance, in which he alternated between shouting, as he blamed the Clintons and the Democrats for conspiring to torpedo his nomination to the Supreme Court, and weeping,...
Mapping the 1848 Vienna Revolution
The 1848 Revolution in France, often known as the February Revolution, was followed by a number of other revolutionary uprisings across Europe. In Austria the authoritarian government was determined to quell the spread of the liberal ideas associated with republicanism and stop the rise of nationalist movements within its large Empire. The Austrian...
Impeaching Justice Kavanaugh? Senator Whitehouse says, "The hourglass is running on Brett Kavanaugh...."
I video'd this clip from "Morning Joe" just now. It's Whitehouse, prompted to talk about continuing the investigation after the confirmation and working on impeaching and removing the future Justice Kavanaugh:He's ready to go and endeavoring to sound ominous, even as he looks weary. We've heard a lot lately about witch hunts. Whitehouse — with his...
Norway's Secret Military Sites
Norway has released an interactive map of all the military locations where it is forbidden to operate a drone and some security experts are not happy. All the markers on the Innmelding av Sensorflygning map indicates an area where it is illegal to take aerial photographs or video using a camera or any other type of sensors. The map shows many of Norway's...
Thursday, 27 September 2018
"JUST IN: The Senate Judiciary Committee expected to vote Friday morning on Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court, according to multiple GOP congressional aides."
Tweets NPR.I'm also seeing this Trump tweet:Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him. His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting. Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!Here's Alan Dershowitz:The Senate Judiciary...
Global Warming is Here
Global warming has already increased temperatures around the world. You can find out how much temperatures have risen where you live on a new map from Carbon Brief,. The map shows how far global temperatures have risen since 1850 and how much they are expected to rise by the end of this century.If you click on your location on the map you can view...
Let's watch the Kavanaugh hearing.
1. It's about to start. I'll update this post as we go.2. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has taken her seat. She's nervously looking around, getting patted on the back. She's wearing a dark blue jacket over a dark blue top and has her hair done in a way that allows it to fall over her face and to need to be pushed back. Senator Grassley begins by apologizing...
"What exactly is Saint Laurent saying about female sexuality and empowerment here?"
I'm reading Robin Givhan in the Washington Post. The post title is the headline. There are lots of photographs of glamorous clothes with an edge of trashiness. I clipped out part of one photograph. Not randomly selected. It's what caught my eye as I scanned the page with the...
A NYT illustration scoffs at the very idea of empathy for men... Is heartlessness now required to demonstrate #MeToo good faith?
What could justify this embarrassingly crude and desperate propaganda?The illustration reminded me of the sarcastic childhood rejoinder "Oh, boo hoo hoo" — aimed at someone whose tears are not worth sharing. It is a proper accompaniment to the column, which offers the coinage...
Wednesday, 26 September 2018
At the Twitter Prison Café...
... you're free to talk about whatever you like.The photo shows a storefront on the east side of Madis...
Julie Swetnick "said she witnessed Judge Kavanaugh... lining up outside a bedroom where 'numerous boys' were 'waiting for their "turn" with a girl inside the room.'"
"Ms. Swetnick said she was raped at one of the parties, and she believed she had been drugged. None of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated by The New York Times, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, declined to make her available for an interview.... Unlike two other women who have accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, one...
Tracking Nobel Scientists
Physics Today has tracked out the lifetime movements of every Nobel Prize winning physicist. Nobel Physicists on the Move allows you to watch an animated track showing the significant movements of any of the 206 Nobel physics laureate on an interactive map of the world. Select a Nobel physics laureate from the map's drop-down menu and you can view...
"#MeToo depends on the credibility of the journalists who report on it."
This is an excellent WaPo column by Megan McArdle.McArdle says she was ready to write "It's now clear that Brett Kavanaugh's nomination cannot go forward" if another sexual assault allegation came out, but she changed her mind when she saw that New Yorker article about Deborah Ramirez. McArdle had thought that "a second allegation would be stronger,...
"Anita Hill Says Kavanaugh Accuser Hearing 'Cannot Be Fair.'"
That's the headline at NPR (with audio). What's unfair about the Senate hearing? Hill says:"In a real hearing and a real investigation, other witnesses would be called, including witnesses who could corroborate, witnesses who could explain the context of the experiences of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh during that period in their lives, as well...
"I know that lying to the Senate is a crime just like lying to the FBI, but, culturally and politically, people do think the FBI actually is the super-serious police..."
"... and since doing background checks is part of its portfolio, having the FBI do a seventh or add an addendum to the sixth background check of Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t seem crazy to me. Lots of people reject all of this and say that the GOP should stop the circus and just vote right now.... But if [Christine Blasey Ford] passes the threshold of sounding...
"It’s like any witness preparation times 2,000. You come at them with the worst version you think the antagonists are likely to ask them..."
"... and you probe for their emotional stability: Can they take it?... This is pressure like you’ve never seen. … That’s why they call it 'murder boards.'"Said Georgetown lawprof Emma Coleman Jordan, quoted in "Democrats in the dark on eve of historic Kavanaugh hearing/Senate Democrats have had no apparent contact with Christine Blasey Ford — and have...
