The Santaland Diaries

On This American Life this week in Real Audio is David Sedaris' The Santaland Diaries -- a verbal essay first broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition, which became the most listened-to piece ever from Morning Edition. Sedaris has expanded it, much longer than could have been broadcast in the limited Morning Edition format.

Specter's sceptre

Recall, if you will, the last time Sen. Arlen Specter (R - PA) lost his penis. In the immediate aftermath of the Presidential election, Sen. Specter - who will acceed to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary committee unless something unfortunate happens to his leadership prospects before January - declared that he would not be supporting any anti-abortion nominees put forward by the President. Despite the fact that this position was consistent with the views of those Pennsylvania constituents who voted him into office, and to whom he is chiefly accountable within our "representative" system of government, he was later persuaded to change his mind and now rejects any such "litmus test" for judicial nominees. In other words, he lost his manhood.

Remarkably, comes the NYT today with evidence that the entire episode made very little impression on the Senator. Just two days ago, President Bush announced his intention to re-nominate 12 judges, originally nominated during his first term, who were blocked from confirmation by Senate Democrats. This amounts to a declaration of war, since the only way it is even interesting to re-nominate these candidates is if the President, Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, and the Senate Republicans intend to repeal filibuster on judicial nominees. Just to give you a sense of the bipartisan spirit with which this plan is conceived: In the past, this parliamentary maneuver has been termed "the nuclear option."

And what does Sen. Specter think about this looming battle-to-the-death with the Dems?

It has been my hope that we might be able to approach this whole issue with some cooler perspective. I would have preferred to have some time in the 109th Congress to improve the climate to avoid judicial gridlock and future filibusters.

That's right - he's just put his Wee Willie on the chopping block, again. Stay tuned for what is sure to be a very thrilling conclusion.

Assault on Donald Rumsfeld Continues

After we heard from senators McCain, Chuck Hagel -- among others -- that they no longer have confidence in Donald Rumseld, we had Republican Senate leaders Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell saying all was well. Earlier this week, President Bush took questions and answers at the White House, saying that Rumsfeld is doing a fine job.

All background to today: a coalition of groups had sued the US Government under the Freedom of Information act, regarding detainee deaths, abuses and transfers after Sept 11, 2001.


Frankly, compared with Abu Ghraib, the abuses are not as bad.


However, what they do is undermine Rumsfeld's insistence that Abu Ghraib was due to "a few bad apples". Clearly, the problems were widespread, systemic.

The kind of thing which happens under bad leadership. I don't expect new indictments, but it make Rummy look bad in a week where he needs spit-shining.

Slate sold to WaPost

Just so that we know who owns what, Slate today announced that they're being sold off to the Washington Post.sold off to the Washington Post.

Frist and McConnell leap to Rumsfeld's Defense

Somebody must have got on the phone.


Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist and Republican whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky came out swinging for Rumsefeld, saying they expect him to be leading for some time.

I suppose Frist and McConnel can explain why their constituents in the Tennessee and Kentuck National Guards aren't home for Christmas this year because of Rumsfeld's Stop Loss programs. If so, they were talking about that yesterday, but that he is "fully capabale of leading the Department of Defense and our military forces to victory in Iraq and the war on terror" (Frist) and that he ''is an excellent secretary of defense, and we are fortunate to have a man of his courage and vision serving the president at this critical time." (McConnell).

Afterwards, Frist and McConnell did backflips for biscuits.

And in the distance.... you can faintly hear....

The drums begin to beat.

They go like this:

rums felds head
rums felds head
rums felds head
rums felds head

come, they told me
rums felds head

a new born king to see
rums felds head

MIT: The Missle-Defense Propoganda Arm of the Department of Defense?

A missle defense sensor was tested at MIT Lincoln labs in 1998. The trumpeted result: the sensor works, it can sense incoming missles. Forward with missle-defense.

Later, a contract engineer came forward with documents she said proved the classified data had been tampered with. The sensor doesn't work.

MIT's mission is research of unimpeachable integrity. Faked data don't square with that. MIT launched an investigation in 2002. They put together a committee of outside academics with secret security clearances.

The Defense Department says: clearances or no, you can't look at the data. Full stop. MIT has now given up on investigating.

[Nature Article, subscription required]

Critics could say that, if MIT can't police its own research, then MIT is simply part of the propoganda arm of the United States Department of Defense.

Canada Says: MP3, for free.

Time was, in Canada, you had to pay a fee for every media bought on which you could save an MP3 -- iPods were an extra $25C, CDs had a tax. This was to collect money which -- supposedly -- goes back to the recording industry for losses due to illegal copying.

And they still do this.
But not for iPods anymore. Turns out the legislative act giving the Copyright Board power to levy these fees specifies disks and casettes, but not hard drives or embeddable memory.

So, your Canadian iPods are now $25 cheaper.

Lincoln: The First Log Cabin Republican?

A new book, "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" -- reviewed today in the NYTimes -- claims Lincoln was gay.

So, my first reaction to claims about homosexuality is a sarcastic "yeah, right." How do you prove something like that?

It appears uncontested between historians that, as a young man, Lincoln slept in the same bed with another man, Joshua Speed, for a period of four years. Carl Sandburg, in his biography, described the two as having "streaks of lavendar, spots soft as May violets." A dissesnting historian, David Donald, says in frontier times, space was tight and men shared beds. Really? For four years? And this wasn't occaisioned with emotional intimacy, and wasn't visited by physical intimacy?

Also, there was wide commentary on the fact that, while Lincoln's wife Mary Todd was not at home, Lincoln regularly slept with the captain of his bodyguards, David V. Derickson. As described by Derickson's commanding officer: "Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him and - it is said - making use of his Excellency's night-shirts!" Donald doesn't comment if space was a premium in the White-House, too. But, he does say that if Lincoln and Derickson were so intimate, then Derickson would not have separated from Lincoln as he did when he left Washington in 1863 - apparently ignoring the fact that sometimes, relationships end. The article relates other comments which demonstrate that the sleeping arrangements were widely known.

The book, by A. C. Tripp, charts numerous relationships between Lincoln and men, including one Billy Greene, whom Lincoln is supposed to have shared a bed with, and who described to Lincoln's law partner Lincoln's thighs: "as perfect as a human being could be." I'm a bit taken back at what situation could have brought Mr. Greene into close inspection of Lincoln's thighs which did not involve physical intimacy.

I don't really know how you get to the bottom of evidence like this, and conclude that Lincoln couldn't possibly have had sexual relationships with men. A more suitable conclusion is that it seems pretty likely that he did.

The review states that no one ever described Lincoln at the time this way could be due, in part, to the fact that the word "homosexual" didn't enter the English language until 1892.

Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients

President Bush awarded Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom today for the work they did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's usually handed out in a batch, in the summer (for the past few years). Bush handed out 11 in July this year.

Is Bush politicizing the medals? Maybe, but I can't get too exercised about it, because the award has aleady been given to Rita Moreno. If Anita from West Side Story gets the Medal of Freedom, then, yeah, sure, add Franks, Tenet and Bremer to that list.


Medal of Freedom Website.

Gay Marriage Debate Rages in Canada

You may have heard that gay marriage is a hot button issue in Canada, as it is in the US.
(Here's a recent article).


By "hot button issue", I mean that the Supreme Court has already found that it must be allowed, and Parliment is voting it into national law early next year.

The debate here is huge: the Conservative party is saying that churches cannot be forced to perform gay marriages, while the Liberal party says "no duh". Conservatives also say they want to make sure men and women can still get married -- that allowing gay marriage doesn't exclude the possibility that men and women can still marry each other, if they should want to (Liberals: "no duh"). Finally, the Conservatives demand, explicitly, whatever rights conferred upon marriage between a man and a woman, these *same* rights must be given to gay couples in marriage (Liberals: "Oh, for chrissakes, can we go home now?").

Sometimes these debates come off as Monty Python sketches.

O'Keefe, He Gone

And who can blame him, with the shuttles still grounded, the ISS accumulating garbage and running out of food and water, and those seductive LSU sirens calling. Whither NASA now? Bush will signal his feelings on the matter with the person he nominates in replacement. If rumors that he wants to nominate General Kadish - lately of the anti-ballistic missile initiative, aka "a wing of missiles and a prayer" - are true, then Bush will be showing that he believes military, corporate, and civilian uses of space are all of a piece - similar to the approach he and his Vice President have taken towards, for instance, the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge ("Why can't the ABMs, the oil derricks, and the caribou all just share the wilderness?").

If he instead nominates a NASA insider - preferably a lifelong engineer/manager and contrarian thinker - then give him credit for striking out on his own this time... and maybe, just maybe, being serious about doing something interesting with NASA during the next four years.

Circus over big nobody is about to end

I can't tell you how much I didn't care about the Scott Peterson trial. Somehow, a guy from Modesto was making headlines, and basically sucking up a lot of news space on the local news stations. Every single day there was a new twist: "the concrete was used for putting in posts in the back yard", "Here's what Scott wore today:...". I would frequently have to change radio stations because this would come up every 15 minutes or so.

It's a lot like the OJ trial, except that OJ was famous AND he got away with it. I also didn't give a rats ass about OJ.

Scott Peterson is guilty. He's either going to be in jail for a long time or he's going to die. Either way, at 1:30 I won't have to hear about him ever again.

FOX TELEVISION REALITY SHOW LOOKING FOR ASTRONOMERS

It's no joke. On December 9, AAS Electronic Announcement #144 was emailed out. Unfortunately it's not archived on the web though I'm holding onto a copy. The announcement had a table of contents with seven items:

---------------------------------------------------------
1. THE ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL EDITORIAL OFFICE MOVING TO
MADISON, WISCONSIN
2. AAS SAN DIEGO MEETING
3. 2005 MEMBERSHIP RENEWALS
4. IMPRS PH.D. PROGRAM
5. 1.8-METER PERKINS TELESCOPE OBSERVING TIME
6. LARGE OBSERVING PROGRAMS ON THE ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN
TELESCOPE
7. RADIO & SUBMILLIMETER ASTRONOMY REVIEW BY AUI
---------------------------------------------------------

However, the body of the email contained an eighth item:

___________________________________________________________

8. FOX TELEVISION REALITY SHOW LOOKING FOR ASTRONOMERS

Fox Television's hit new reality show "Trading Spouses" is
currently casting for the third season and is looking for
a family of astronomers! There must be two parents and
children over six living at home. If interested, please
contact Kate Currier.

Kate Currier
Assistant Talent Supervisor
Rocket Science Laboratories
8441 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Phone: 323-802-0489
fax: 323-802-0599
email: katec@rocketsciencelabs.com
___________________________________________________________

Sadly, none of us qualify.

How to Sink the Department of Homeland Security

It turns out, politicians have some pride. They don't like being used as body armor for someone else's political purposes. And they don't like coming in second behind someone nobody knows.

The previous Secretary of Homeland security, Tom Ridge, was the former governor of Pennsylvania -- a major state -- and was sometimes mentioned as a possible President or Vice-President. When Bush named him first Secretary of DHS, it was clear some stature was being put into the office. However, not much has come through DHS which is memorable, as all the political capital Bush had handed to him on a silver platter by 9/11 was spent invading Iraq. Ridge is being remembered as the man who played with colors. He leaves the office a weaker politician than when he came.

So it's no surprise that Bush couldn't find a politician bigger than the former NYC Police Commissioner Kerik. Who wants to see their career cratered as Bush's Hillbilly Body Armor?

Ignore these comments that possible replacements for Kerik are former Democratic VP candidate, and current Senator Joseph Liberman, or Assistant Secretary of State Asa Hutchinson. These are serious men, with real, and as yet unrealized, long-term political ambitions.

DHS will be filled by someone of the stature of, say, a former Congressman, now retired or a businessman. Someone who, on command from Cheney-Rummy-Bush, will run out there, take the hits, make the ridiculous statements that Cheney-Rummy-Bush can duck behind.

However, this fact should freak y'all out. Secretary of DHS has real powers, just not the political will behind it. If you put someone with no political maturity into that chair, if something were to occur which put political will behind him, we can look forward to stupid, anti-consitutional mistakes being made.

It's not good for the country to have politically weak cabinet members.

Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator, To Retire

Apparently going to become Chancellor of LSU.

So what will change? The Mars-plan priority? The no Shuttle-to-Hubble decision?

Let's watch.

Nobody Nobody Again, Blames Nannygate

Kerik took a roundtrip back to obscurity by withdrawing his name from consideration for Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Why? Seems he never paid social security taxes for a former nanny/housekeeper. Tax evasion is illegal. The identical situation has felled executive appointments in the past -- most famously in 1992 to Zoe Baird, Clinton's first nominee for Attorney General, and then immediately again to Kimba Wood, Clinton's second nominee for Attorney General.

My big question: who can Bush find who won't mind being known as runner-up to this Kerik?

NYTimes Article.

Armored Hummers

When an army soldier asked Rumsfeld why they had to scrounge in scrap heaps for extra vehicle armor Rumsfeld was temporarily knocked out of his onsetting dementia to answer 'Hell, I'm an old man and it's early in the morning. I'm just gathering my thoughts here.'

Rumsfeld paused long enough to answer: "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want." Why didn't he just cut to the chase and say "You're about to go to war! Quit your bitching!"?

Probably because he wanted to make another salient point: "If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up..."

So the entire point was "You're going to war, it doesn't matter how much armor you have, you're gonna die ANYway." Rumsfeld is apparently really candid in the morning.

He could have told them the real reason why they don't have enough armor: They didn't expect to have such a large number of troops in Iraq this late in the game. The fact that they don't have enough of the correct equipment (and that they are only now dealing with that oversight) is further proof that they haven't fully thought through their gameplan.

A Shuttle for Hubble

A National Academy of Sciences panel has recommended that, instead of preparing a costly $2b+ robotic mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that (if it flies at all) may arrive too late to save the facility, NASA should just go ahead with its original plan to dispatch a shuttle mission: NYT Story.

This is but one of the dozens of ways in which open-minded and politically forgiving scientists - including yours truly, natch - find themselves on the wrong side of this Administration. The article mentions in passing some NASA science missions that may be postponed if their budgets are affected: "other projects like the study of black holes and dark energy." What they are referring to here are the LISA, Constellation-X, and JDEM/SNAP missions.

LISA will detect the gravitational-wave signatures of colliding black holes in the distant universe. It represents the only near-term way to test Einstein's General Relativity in its strongest form, near black holes. If we care about learning anything about black holes, this is the way to do it.

Constellation-X will be the successor to Chandra and XMM-Newton; it will allow detailed investigation of accreting black holes in the distant universe, and will also be crucial for learning about the properties of neutron stars in our Galaxy (just ask Bob). If we care about the properties of the black holes that lurk in the centers of nearly every galaxy - and which are our universe's most powerful energy sources - then this is the way to study them.

JDEM/SNAP has been designed to reveal the next level of information about the Dark Energy that pervades our universe and is currently driving an acceleration of the cosmic expansion. There is no more important question for those seeking to understand the origin and destiny of our universe on the largest scales.

The shuttles are currently being prepared for launch next spring, when they will begin their final series of flights to "complete" construction of the International Space Station (ISS). Shuttle flights to Hubble have been judged marginally more risky than flights to the ISS. We're not talking about a dramatic difference, however - chances are, if we lose another shuttle, it will be to a launch failure (which is generically fatal) or to a new failure mode during descent and landing, not to the lost tile(s) problem which doomed Columbia (and which are potentially fixable at the ISS).

If the Administration nonetheless chooses, against the advice of the NAS panel, to forbid shuttle flights to Hubble, restrict shuttle flights to the ISS alone, and push forward with the robotic repair mission at the expense of LISA, Constellation-X, JDEM/SNAP, and like missions, then they will not just be choosing the ISS over Hubble. Rather, they will effectively be admitting that they judge the welfare of NASA's aerospace contractors to be more important than every major question in astrophysics.

Wine America!

The Supreme Court is hearing cases today which can change the restriictions on interstate commerce of wine.


In-state liquor distributers have held in place laws which don't allow direct mailing of wine from out of state. That meant that, if you lived in NY, you couldn't get a nice Rex Hill Pinot Noir from Oregon sent to you by the winery. You had to buy it from an in-state liquor distributor. Bad for vintners, bad for consumers, spectacular for distributers profits.

Let's hope this changes.

The Mexican-American War

I recently read something that sparked my interest in the Mexican-American war so when I was at my local Borders bookstore in Sherman Oaks, California looked for a book about it. Finding none, I asked a salesperson. She looked on the computer and told me no, not a single one. It's gotta be something like a fifth of the land in the 48 contiguous states, including the land that this bookstore occupies, that is part of the United States because of this war and while they have shelves of books on World War II, books on individual battles of the Civil War they haven't a single book on the Mexican-American War! In fairness to Borders, I doubt that this lack is peculiar to this bookstore. I think it's just that this war occupies a miniscule part of our national consciousness. Despite it's clear relevance to the foundation of the American California, the Mexican-American war seems simply not be part of our foundation myth here. Think about it, especially those of you who, like me, went to high school in California. What do you know about the Mexican-American War? I certainly don't know much and especially didn't before some web research an hour ago. Why is this? Is it because we, the Americans, appear to be the bad guys in this one?

New York Times Blows my Cover

I signed up with Jdate --- a jewish dating site -- about a month ago. It's been going pretty well -- a lot of interest, and a lot of interestingness. Sure, I'm not Jewish, but I put this on my profile. It doesn't seem to have detered many from writing me first.

And now, the NYTimes totallly blows it open by writing a style piece on: You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love JDate.

Fun with Spaces

Over at BoingBoing they've been poking around Microsoft's innovative new blog-hosting service, "MSN Spaces":

• The Scorched-Earth EULA
• Bot-censored (and uncensored) blognames

Fun stuff.

Frist's Re-Election Campaign Speculates in Stock Market, Loses Half a Million Bucks

Associated Press reports that his re-election campaign has lost $524,000 in the stock market since 2000.

Frist might want to look into T-Bills.


AP Article

Those Silly WaPost Photo Editors

This ran tonight at the WaPost website -- Bush at the annual Christmas tree lighting. Is that fair? Is that right? As Steve asked, "Where's the codpiece"?

Bush Taps A Complete Nobody To Replace Former Penn sylvania Governor Tom Ridge as Secretary of Homeland Security

CNN.comis saying: "President Bush to tap former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik as next homeland security chief, administration officials say. Details soon."

No details yet, but who the hell is THIS nobody?

Banning abstinence only programs will be the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century

In The Washington Post today, they talk about some talking points of our federally funded abstinence-only programs that are currently taught in schools. Among these points are:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."
• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

First of all, what the heck is a 43 day old fetus thinking? Gee, it's comfy in here. Now, this could be a debateable point and we could go on forever about it, but it is nothing compared to the mis-information in point #2:

AIDS can be spread through sweat and tears. Why is this even MENTIONED in an abstinence program? Are they trying to frighten kids from even touching each other? This is just the first step in declaring HIV positive people as modern day lepors. "Don't touch them son! You could get leoprosy AIDS!" The next step will be putting them all on an island until the scourge is cured. Doesn't anyone remember in the early 80s, the bathhouses being closed in San Francisco because people believed that AIDS was spreading through the hot water. In retrospect it was probably because of a lot of unprotected sex, but the implication was that the baths themselves were unsafe. These "facts" have gone right back to those old uninformed opinions.

Teaching our kids lies should be illegal, and teaching them these lies using federal funds should be a federal crime. I'd be mad, but I expect this under an "ends justify the means" administration.

Banned In Greece! Oh, the days of censorship.

Well, not yet.

But two Greek lawyers are viewing the film ALEXANDER to see if the main character is portrayed as gay.

And if it looks like Alexander is portrayed as having had sex with men -- something which the lawyers say there is no official document saying ever happened, mind you -- they will sue to keep ALEXANDER off of Greece's screens.

All 80 of them.

Really. 80 screens.

And, apparently, the Lawyers have never heard of DVDs or BitTorrent. Proverbial pissing in the wind.

Remember when we used to worry about censorship? Now we just worry about stupidity trying to enforce censorship with draconian and ultimately fruitless laws.

What Is A Dictionary Useful For when the Most Looked-up word isn't in it?

Dictionaries are points of language contention. New inclusion of a word can be seen as conferring legitimacy. Those who advocate a dead language bristle at this -- stick to what we have! they say. Others see dictionaries as reflections of usage --- our langauge as we use it. Oh, and the former are wrong, the latter are right.

But what does it mean when the most looked-up word in the Merriam-Webster's online dictionary this year isn't even in it? Look-up frequency probably follows something like a Laffer-curve for tax policy. A word which is never used is never looked up; increasing usage means an increasing number of look-ups, until the point where the word is so common, everyeone knows it and, again, it is never looked up (does anyone question what the meaning of "is" is?).

But now, thanks to the web, we have a whole new class of words -- ones which reach near universal usage immediately, and when that happens, everyone at once needs to know what the word means.

So, the year's most looked-up word, which wasn't even in Webster's?

Blog.

Making Movies is REALLY Expensive 2: The $200M Movie

Further to Derek's relating of the 3-day set-up for a 20 second-shot in the coming Shaggy Dog picture, I have my own recollection of how big movies get to be really expensive.

In a previous incarnation, I dated an independent producer. "Independent" in Hollywood parlance means she didn't have a 3-picture deal with a studio with a $4B market capitalization. The movie she produced was a huge $120M budget thing, starring one $20M star, directed by an A-list director, and had an ensemble cast of no less than 3 already well known actors, plus 2 new hot-faces of the year, and the up-and coming beauty love interest. The movie was shot largely in Hawaii which ain't cheap, but movie people love to work in because -- hey, it's Hawaii. It's kind of like the Keck Telescopes for us astronomers -- also in Hawaii -- it's where you can do your best work, because the facilities are the best and, hey, beaches on the off-hours.

Anyway, after that was all done, I was going to spoken-word nights round LA (mostly the ones hosted by Rachel Kahn ( website ) and I took the opportunity of an open-mic public confessional to express my regrets for done-done relationship. We all move on, but I still like the rhythms from rattling it off.

Comeback
June 2002

I want to die and come back
as a two hundred million dollar movie
Variety-headlined high-five payday
for the freshman team
three-studio deal sharing radioactive risk

to die and come back as a
two hundred million dollar
Woo/Lucas/Raimi/Spielberg film-by
twelve month pre-production, two hundred-day shoot

to die and come back
as a two hundred million dollar
inspired by true events
history never happened
story never told

my sets
bursting with producers
black as absence
my sets bursting with producers assistant
bursting with producers executive
producers associate
producers co-
four Titan producers vanilla plain
and a lonely line, loved by all

a two hundred million dollar
triple trailer double lear-jet stars
production companies that would bankrupt MGM I say
not far these days you say but wait a minute.

two hundred million dollar movie of
locations, locations and locations
Truola Valley Hawaii
Tunisia
New Zealand
Bali St. Basil’s Boise Burundi Big-Ben Bilbao Burbank Soundstage
locations
and a third team shooting three weeks in Columbian civil conflict
two P.A.’s dead.

two hundred million dollar movie of
kraft services with
four meat lunches
roving ice frappuccino
five AM egg-white omelet
thousand dollar daily budget of
Red Bull and Krispy Crème

Two hundred million dollar movie of
gasoline explosions brighter than a billion suns
phosphorus glinting fountains of
twenty million dollar stars tumbling off the tops of skyscrapers
faces disfigured
bubbling skin ripped like cloth from broken fibrous ribs and
beauty violated, beauty lost, beauty stripped like an ashen tarp
balletic violence, gorgeous violence, ultra-violence, anti-violence
p-PG-13 stripped from the folded arms of
Jack Valenti

Two hundred million dollar movie
ruins the Hollywood marriage ignored
the forty-five hundred crew members
all libidinous sweaty, muddy excitement
every night on days
every day on nights
and twice daily on set.

The pre-release buzz
the NPR history on the history of histories
and E!
Discovery Channel, People and Time
covers on the
history of histories.
She, on Madamoiselle
He, a quarterly for gentlemen
Television final week advertising saturation
Ice-cream cross promotion

release

promoted on the profits of
Your Whitest Teeth Tonight of
neck tendons swaddled in three percent body fat of
the newest star on the walk of fame of
Congressional Medals for wartime valor of
That Hollywood/White House screening of
that Hollywood marriage ignored re-fired like phoenix in victory of
that Hollywood marriage ignored exploded by
your whitest teeth tonight by
three percent body fat by
sweaty, muddy days and nights.

And a line, four months long, of 15-year-old cheerleaders
high pitched screeching in the blackest background
of the ten-o’clock live news broadcast.

Two hundred million dollar movie with
digital projection and fifteen thousand screens distribution domestic and

Oh! A one hundred and fifty million dollar opening
with five percent drop off,
legs stretched luxuriously from April to August,
teenagers sprinting into seats,
and seven months along, blue-hairs waddling into matinees, antiquarian
finding an audience hungry for fiction
all because they want to believe
eyes roiling in breathless titilation
true events.

Microsoft Innovates Again

Microsoft has entered the blog-hosting space.

Their big innovation, by comparison to the original Blogger? They've added the capability to host your pictures and music as well. See - it's like a total web home for the average user. So easy to use it will really "bring blogging to the masses". And it's going to drive tons of traffic and subscriptions for their MSN network of sites.

It's utterly amazing. The largest market cap of any company in world history, and they're pursuing ideas that would have been, like, pretty cool and advanced... for 1999... in late 2004.

Throw Novak in Jail

Eugene Volokh of the Volokh conspiracy agrees with Bob - throw Novak in jail.

Any journalists' privilege must extend to bloggers, but you can't give everyone with broadband access a get-out-of-jail-free card. So instead, condition the privilege on the nature of the leak. If the leak makes the journalist an accessory to a crime, then poof! No privilege.

From his NYT Op-Ed today.