- Montana GOP Rep. Defends Drunk Driving. Yep, that’s sure what it sounds like he’s doing.
- Inexplicably famous Perez Hilton is writing a children’s book. I don’t usually like to toss around phrases like “end times,” but… [via]
- Even Billy Joel doesn’t want to read his own memoir! Okay, that’s unfair. I actually do like Joel, or at least much of his music — I think I’m obligated to as a Long Islander — but I don’t think I’d want to read his memoir even if he hadn’t canceled it.
Though I do find it weird to think that he’s been “retired” from writing new music for almost twenty years now. [via]
- This really puts things in geographical perspective: European cities overlaid on a map of the U.S. at an identical latitude (and the other way around).
- And finally, It’s not a crime to be poor. Yet. [via]
crazy
Thursday various
- I was sad to see that J.D. Salinger had passed away. I think John Hodgman said it best: “I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”
- I’m much more sad to hear the terrible news about Kage Baker, who has apparently lost her battle with cancer and has only a few weeks to live. I haven’t read a lot of Baker’s books — just the first two in her Company series — but she’s a real gifted talent taken much too soon.
- Today in banning: first, a Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons:
Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons “promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,” according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said. [via]
And a California school district bans the dictionary. [via]
- In much happier news, a story of a Haitian man rescued from beaneath the rubble 11 days after the earthquake — “and hours after the government declared search and rescue operations to be officially over.”
- And finally, Zack Handlen watches the horror movie Orphan so the rest of us don’t have to:
…just playing creepy music and panning over a room isn’t creating mood, it’s giving the production designer a clip reel…
Tuesday various
- Kurt Busiek: “[L]et’s face it, you never know when someone Peter Parker went to high school with is going to turn into a super-villain.”
- “The gold-coloured convertible turns heads on impoverished Cambodia’s roads — not least because of creator Nhean Phaloek’s outlandish claim that it can be operated telepathically.” Okaaaaayyy…
- Patrick Stewart on the legacy of domestic violence. [via]
- What if you went in search of your birth parents and one of them turned out to be Charles Manson?
- And finally, Toyota develops its own flower species. [via]
Monday various
- Regender.com is an interesting experiment, although obviously imperfect. In its regendering of this site, for instance, it changed Billy Joel’s “Don’t Ask Me Why” into “‘Donna’t Ask Me Why’ by Billie Joyce.” [via]
- This raises the troubling possibility that some of our authors are in fact cats: Cat registered as hypnotherapist [via]
I posted this earlier today to Twitter, and Nyssa23 replied, “Perhaps that explains the number of manuscripts you’ve been receiving concerning mice and cheeseburgers.” Still, as I told her, say what you will, Cheeseburger-Focused Brief Therapy works!
- “A car crash victim who was believed to have been in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.”
- Matt Taibbi on Sarah Palin [via]:
And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.
- And finally, speaking of, god bless parody. [via]
Tuesday various
- J.R. Blackwell on high school:
If my life now was like high school, if my “real life” as they say, was at all like the lack of freedom and harassment I experienced while in high school, then things wouldn’t be going well for me at all. Perhaps then, that is how high school prepares you for real life – but showing you what you have to work hard to stay away from – how your earning power gives you freedoms that if you lost, you would lose your freedoms as well. Perhaps high school is a warning for the young mind – fail, and you will go someplace very much like here, except in that place, there isn’t a prom.
- Frederik Pohl, who at 89 was just awarded his high school diploma would seem to agree:
Pohl speculates that perhaps, if he had finished high school, he might have gone on to spend the rest of his career at American Car and
Foundry, instead of writing multiple science fiction classics.”Just quit school, kids!
- A contest to pick the funniest joke and, surprisingly, none of them are terrible? What are the odds? Obviously your mileage may vary, and some — like the winner, I think — are maybe more drolly amusing that laugh-aloud funny, but in any “ten best” list, you expect at least some real clunkers. [via]
- Just how ridiculous are the “birthers”? Well… [via]
- And finally, while I debate buying this
G.I. Joe Complete Collector’s Set (no, seriously. I am honestly tempted), here’s…