So let's do it, just get on a plane and just do it

Motor City Rocks just pointed out that in addition to my mini-list of artists shunning Detroit, our hometown heroes The White Stripes have not announced a Detroit date yet either.

Well boo to you Jack White!

Sanctimonious, fear-based, and probably overweight

"No, you've got to believe me! God told me that you need to renew Joan of Arcadia for another season!"

Orders of magnitude

"We have a cherished symbolism about the 'sanctity of a single life.' But perhaps our morality has gone astray when it comes to numbers. Emotionally we get choked up about a little girl getting killed -- especially if we can see her picture -- but we do not feel emotionally touched by thousands of people being wiped out by a tidal wave or an earthquake. Somehow we must learn that our grief should rise monotonically with the magnitude of a catastrophe. Numbers are important.

"Charles Fried (1970) pointed out that as a society, we are romantic sentimentalists. We're willing to spend a lot more money on rescue than on prevention -- more to save trapped miners and marooned astronauts than to save many more statistical anonymous lives. If we conjure up a face, we can empathize with the victim.

"If a public official acts to save lives, he gets more kudos if he can point to 10 specific identifiable persons who have been saved than if he can prove conclusively that 1000 lives have been saved but can't identify who these people are."

Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Tradeoffs
Ralph L. Keeney and Howard Raiffa, 1976

Banga lore

An interesting customer service tale:

After what I have gone through today, I vow that I will NEVER buy another Dell computer again. I have a 4th gen. 15" powerbook, and two Dell desktop computers, at my home. One of the Dells had both of its cd/dvd drives quit working. I have a 3 year service contract, so I called, and called, and called, Dell. After five tries, and waiting over 30 minutes on each call, I finally connected with a human being. After much trouble shooting, without success, he finally advised to reinstall the operating system, and see what happens. He then said he would call back tomorrow night.

Well, I don't know how to reinstall the operating system if the cd/dvd drives DON'T WORK!!!

Horseplay

I may have never taken a moral philosophy class, but I used to be pretty sure that all bestiality was immoral.

Silly me! Turns out that only homosexual bestiality is immoral, according to Oklahoma legislator Sally Kern. Thanks for setting me straight! (so to speak)

The Tokyo suplex hold

This video shows that you don't need to be a gun owner, or even male, to inflict grievous bodily harm on an attacker.

Disgustingly tolerant

If M.C. Barsenas were still running his Hardline blog, he might have called this bishop an American liberally-biased pretender Catholic. I'd prefer to call him an ordinary decent human being.

Motor city disappointment

None of the musicians I really want to see this summer are coming to the Detroit area (so far).

I mean, come on Rufus! You'd rather play Tulsa than Detroit? What the fuck?

With sweet despair

Based on Eric Alterman's recommendation, I checked out some songs sung by Maude Maggart. Based on those samples, I bought her albums, and I am very happy with my purchase.

Embrace the marketplace of ideas

Atrios:

Tim Noah suggests a brilliant idea -- the NYT's new pricing plan should offer a "pay per columnist" feature. We could add to the fun by, say, every 6 months or so canning the columnist with the fewest number of individual subscriptions. I'm sure it's an idea John Tierney would embrace, even though he'd probably find himself seeking new employment soon...

Back of the envelope

"But since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple’s market share does provide us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society."

Roger Ebert, Macworld, February 2004

[Via Random Eyes]

Tiger Finder duration bug

Here's a weird bug I keep noticing: the Tiger Finder overestimates the duration of MP3 files. I've provided one such example after the fold, where the Finder thinks an MP3 is three times as long as the correct length (provided by QuickTime). The ratio is not always 1:3.

Read the rest of "Tiger Finder duration bug"

I hope you're wearing radiation suits

Kevin Drum on the nuclear option:

...[R]egardless of what you think of blue slips, Republicans were delighted to use them when Bill Clinton was the one nominating judges but then suddenly reversed course and ended the blue slip tradition as soon as their own guy was in office. Ditto for "Rule IV," another way that the minority had long been allowed to influence judicial nominations until the Republican party decided to do away with it last year. And ditto again for "up or down votes on all judges," a decidedly newfound rallying cry among Republicans. You can find more details on this tawdry and cynical manipulation of the rules here and here.

The judicial filibuster is indeed an obstruction of last resort. But I'll repeat a deal I've suggested several times over the past couple of years, most recently in January: return all the other rules to the state they were in when Bill Clinton was president and Democrats would probably be willing to forego use of the filibuster. Republicans have no one but themselves to blame for the current game of nuclear chicken they find themselves in.

Never walk in another man's shoes

The Catholic Church and its new Big Brother continue their prosecution of thoughtcrime...

[Via Andrew Sullivan]

Lick my reed

A commenter on Metafilter:

When I was a kid trying to learn how to play a musical instrument and get girls, a wise old man told me women go out with trumpet players, but they go home with harmonica players. [comma added for clarity]

It's just an inkblot

The fact that I need to point out that Dennis Miller's show on CNBC was cancelled probably means something.

I'll leave you with this quotation from a rare Tom Lehrer interview in 2000, before Miller's show started:

O: What new comedy do you like?

TL: I don't really keep up with it, I'm afraid, so I can't really name anybody. Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff. I like Jon Stewart. He's not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, whom I really can't stand. The people who are sort of, "Aren't I funny?" It's that Chevy Chase school of comedy. "I'm funny, aren't I?" I hate that. Just do the job.

Drink it up

I had better not hear even one feminist complain about this story.

Ripped from the headlines

Here's a heartwarming story about a man successfully defending his home with his shotgun. [Via Obscure Store]

The House always wins

I previously remarked that the show House was good, but formulaic.

It's only fair to note that the show has made great strides since then. They had a multi-episode story arc about a moronic new chairman of the hospital's board, which worked pretty well. But tonight's episode was really fantastic -- comedically and dramatically. It didn't fit the usual formula, plus it revealed some important bits of House's history.

All in all, House is a show you're either watching and enjoying, or not watching and missing out. Give it a try!

Bizarro-nature

Harvard philosophy grad Matthew Yglesias has a great blog post today called "Nature and Super-Nature".

May I have some more?

I love this new article at Unsanity.org, because I know it's about to stir up a lot of controversy. After all, the folks over at MacFixit and such would have you repair your permissions as often as you brush your teeth. Unsanity takes a very contrarian position, and I expect it will be discussed a lot today.

Making sausage

A reader of mine suggested I point out some cool new features of NetNewsWire 2, such as its ability to synchronize between machines. Right now I'll focus on its cool ability to highlight differences, or in other words, to track the modifications made to a blog entry. Let's try it out on "George Kaplan's" latest post to the Hardline, shall we?

Read the rest of "Making sausage"

Fertile ground for new television shows

Oh, now come on!

NBC will air three new dramas: ..... and "Inconceivable," a medical show set in a fertility clinic.

No love for white trash

I would think that Detroitblog's latest post about the Hoe-Down is very offensive to people who live downriver. After all, there are a lot of aspiring rednecks and pseudo-rednecks in that area, and they all get ignored! Detroitblog seems to imply that if you want to be a true redneck, you need to live north of I-69.

Concentration!

When I run the extended hardware test on my Power Mac, it gives the following notice in the middle:

Attention! A thorough test of your memory has begun.

Incentivizing cancer

The culture of life barrels on:

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof. Not so fast: We're living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

I remember when people rolled their eyeballs if you suggested that opposition to abortion was less about "life" than about sex, especially sex for women. You have to admit that thesis is looking pretty solid these days. No matter what the consequences of sex--pregnancy, disease, death--abstinence for singles is the only answer. Just as it's better for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it's better for a woman to get cancer than have sex before marriage. It's honor killing on the installment plan. (emphasis mine)

Threes

We're up to six! Yay!

You know, we're getting so good at killing off al-Qaeda's number threes, maybe we could try for number one sometime?

Push and pull

Since I was a member of the beta testing team, I suppose I should help plug the release of NetNewsWire 2. I love this piece of software; I keep it running all the time. I'll let Brent describe it:

Spend less time surfing. Let NetNewsWire do the work for you, as it gathers your news and tells you which items are new. Subscribe to feeds from all over the web—and from the built-in list of thousands of feeds in the Sites Drawer.

Tough streets of the blogosphere, part 2

Here's another account from a non-biased, non-pretender Catholic -- the National Catholic Reporter:

Read the rest of "Tough streets of the blogosphere, part 2"

Healthy, life-affirming fear

Pope Benedict XVI knows how to work an audience:

In an off-the-cuff remark, Benedict recommended "fear of God" as a way to deal with the difficulties of the world.

"It is through the fear of God that we are not afraid of the world and its problems, we are not afraid of men because God is stronger," Benedict said.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Oh, and the almighty Lord." --Pope Benedict XVI

The Catholic Church is going to make a fortune!

Tough streets of the blogosphere

I've been reading and writing blogs since 2000. I've learned a couple of rules since then, one of which being, "When someone tells you to read an article for yourself, they don't really mean it." Well, M.C. Barsenas just invited everybody to check out this story at the Catholic News Service. If you do, it clears up a lot of things!

Read the rest of "Tough streets of the blogosphere"

Cohomology

How come no one ever linked me to this musical group before? They're awesome!

I is smart

As of today, it's official: I am full of BS.

All talk, no action

Motor City Rocks wisely recommends you watch Brendan Benson's latest music video "Cold Hands (Warm Heart)", but the link they provide is slow and crappy.

Here's a link to a faster, better-looking version. I love the juxtaposition of a happy-sounding song with very dark imagery.

Giblets is angry

I enjoy it when Dave Winer gets offended.

Notice that Ms. Huffington chose not to syndicate her site in Winer's RSS 2.0 format (or to link to Winer's blog), and thus he considers this a "problem". What an egotistical prick!

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit thinks Winer is a prick too!

Taking a number two on your number three

How many number-three-ranking operatives does al-Qaeda have? The website First Draft went into the memory hole and discovered that we've captured five (5) such people since 9/11.

That is, if you believe the Bush administration. According to European intelligence experts, the latest jackass we captured isn't even close to being an important al-Qaeda leader.

1600 2400

Everyone take the 2015 SATs over at The Poor Man!

Naughty widgets

MetaFilter just linked to a page that, for Mac users running Safari 2.0, will auto-install a widget into your Dashboard without your permission. However, it did not auto-install on my computer. All it did was automatically download a zipped file to my desktop, but lots of pages do that (e.g. when downloading files from SourceForge mirrors).

I think the trick to protect yourself is to turn off the "open safe files after downloading" option in Safari's preferences.

Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen

I saw a TV ad today for a product called "ProCede". It's one of the many products for balding men that "produces the appearance of thicker, fuller-looking hair". Note that they do not promise that your hair will grow back. (They do claim that the product will produce "results" and that you'll see a "dramatic difference".)

After making one of their boldest claims (which isn't saying much), the TV ad asserted:

We couldn't say it if it wasn't true!

Butter no parsnips

Josh Marshall:

In the context of Social Security, what exactly is ‘solvency’? And just what are we looking for when we say we want to find it? I pose these questions because the president's new ‘plan' has placed them in a much higher relief for the following reason. According the Social Security Trustees' rather pessimistic estimates, in 2041 or 2042, the Trust Fund will run out and benefits will have to be cut by just over 25%. President Bush calls that ‘bankruptcy’. On the other hand, President Bush's 'plan' cuts benefits by about the same amount. And he calls that ‘solvency’...

Keeping the faith

Andrew Sullivan:

Ratzinger has now fired [the editor of the Jesuit magazine "America"]. The magazine never campaigned against church doctrine; it merely aired serious, scholarly articles that raised both sides of many issues. But, according to this petty, prissy tyrant now running the Church, Catholics are not allowed to think through both sides of any issue. This is a signal that not even moderate, calm, balanced and respectful examination of Church doctrine or Church government will be allowed in future. The measures Ratzinger used as prefect will actually be intensified as Pope, until all free thought is extinguished. We were fed p.r. that the new Pope was humble, would be conciliatory, would be a pastor not a dictator. I never believed it. We have had the first sign. It's as dangerous as it is predictable. Message to Catholics: remove your minds. Message to Catholic thinkers: obey on everything - or we will fire you. One silver lining: If I were a Jesuit, I would take the hostility of this clerical tyrant as a badge of honor. Firing this moderate, quiet, modest man is really a call to arms for those of us who need to save our church from this disastrous choice for the papacy.

Ex post facto, part 2

I'm glad to see that my spidey-senses did not deceive me the past few years:

A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy....

...The memo said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy..."

...A former senior U.S. official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during the senior British intelligence officer's visit to Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

The state picks the wrong time to get involved

Oh no! Someone smeared black shoe polish all over the Virgin Mary's vagina! Unscrewing the Inscrutable asks a good question:

How is the words "big lie" painted across a salt runoff stain under an underpass considered "criminal damage to state property", but the gigantimongous collection of (Dangerous! Fire hazard!) candles and other religious paraphenelia isn't?

Malkin balkin'

For one short second, Michelle Malkin and I agreed:

Just put it to the other-shoe test: If it were Teresa Heinz Kerry standing up on the dais telling the same jokes [as Laura Bush], the conservative commentariat would be buzzing for the rest of the year about what a tasteless skank she is.

(For the record, I thought Laura Bush's speech was hilarious and not-at-all inappropriate. What I object to is the double standard so blatant that Michelle Malkin can see it.)

Operation Leather-Bar

Jeff Gannon/James Guckert is a sexy gay mystery!

Gannon says that some of his harshest critics - "radical gay activists" - have actually come on to him...

Gannon also hints at doing secret work for which he needed White House security clearance, although he refuses to elaborate: "My history isn't exactly linear."

(I'll be here all week!)

Ex post facto

Crooked Timber cuts through Instapundit's crap:

However, it’s impossible to make as straight-faced argument that democratization was the main argument, or even an important argument, behind the Bush Administration’s case for war.

Over and over again, Bush insisted that we were giving Saddam the chance to avoid war. He assured his audiences that Saddam could prevent an invasion by disarming. Not by democratizing, not by ceasing his brutal tactics, and (until hours before the invasion) not by leaving power. In fact, Bush makes this promise in just about every speech linked in Reynolds’ “link-rich refutation.”

If the U.S. was willing to cancel the overthrow of Saddam’s brutal, undemocratic goverment in the event that he could show proof of disarmament, then neither democracy promotion nor human rights could have been the reason for the invasion. I can’t see any way to square this circle.

Never work with animals or First Ladies

Wonkette gives some valuable advice to aspiring comedians:

...You know the old stand-up comedy maxim: never follow a president's wife who cracks jokes about her husband giving hand-jobs to a horse...

Social Security round-up

Matthew Yglesias is doing an awesome job as Talking Points Memo replacement blogger:

...Now I'm not sure where Fred Hiatt lives, but here on the planet earth Democrats have very much been engaged in a debate over Social Security. There's a debate on about whether we should have Social Security or whether it should be phased-out and replaced with something radically different. The White House initiated this debate by proposing that we get rid of Social Security, and Democrats have engaged by saying we should keep it. So far, Democrats are winning this debate...

Senator George Allen (R-VA) may have gotten in a bit over his head, this morning, on Meet the Press. On private accounts, he suggested that Americans might have to sell their homes to survive in retirement. But, that would be a good thing, because they wouldn't have to trim hedges and cut grass, he noted...

There was so much bamboozling going on tonight in that press conference that it was easy to miss one essential contradiction in the president's argument. You don't have to worry about private accounts, he said, because if you want you can fill your account with US Treasury bonds which have no risk at all. They're backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. But he says that the very same Treasury notes, when they're in the Trust Fund, are just worthless IOUs.

Crazy little thing called

Just wanted to remind everyone that today is the first of May.

And that my calendar is open.

It's obvious now

Ever since Mac OS X 10.0, if an application crashed, a little dialog box would come up to tell you so, and let you know that your other running applications were unaffected.

It took until Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) for that dialog box to get a "Reopen" button.

UPDATE: An image of the new crash dialog is after the jump.

Read the rest of "It's obvious now"