The Mavericks Called. They Want their Name Back.

I had not known that the word maverick comes from someone's name — and the Mavericks are fire-breathing Texas liberals who are pissed at John McCain.

Bérubé is Back

Michael Bérubé is blogging again.

(And there was much rejoicing.)

We're Doomed

Time to move away from the coasts: Arctic Sea "Foaming" with Methane?.

(I think I just figured out why the fundies "don't believe" in global warming -- they actually do, but they want it to happen so that godless, degenerate, "elitist" coastal cities are inundated.)

Why We Should All Love Dan Savage

Because he wants to be Sarah Palin's Gay Friend.

UPDATE: other people also want to be Palin's GBFF.

Can We Trade in Biden?

Can we trade in Biden for Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)? To see what I mean, watch this.

Has the LHC destroyed the World Yet?

Here are a few answers.

 

For the curious, the HTML on those is quite funny.

(By popular (sic) demand.)

Agreeing with the Rude Pundit (again)

The Rude Pundit[1] exhorts Obama to crush McCain over the recent "Obama wants to teach kids about sex before they learn to read" ad.

I couldn't agree more, but want to add that the right person to really take a baseball bat to these people is Bill Clinton. It'd also be a great way for him to get his mojo back.

And while he's at it, he should smack Lynn Westmoreland a few times.

Mr. Clinton, it's time to step up and serve your country.

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[1] NSFW. Strong language, mature themes. In other words, stuff that makes Republicans whine.

But She's a "Hockey Mom"!

So Sarah Palin is a racist and a sexist meanie.

Projected effect on the presidential race: zero.

(McCain making an incredibly nasty joke about Chelsea Clinton or laughing when a supporter refers to Hilary Clinton as "the bitch", hasn't seemed to hurt him. And Lynn Westmoreland [of "I can't name more than two of the 10 Commandments but I want to post them everywhere" fame] called Obama "uppity" on the record. So I'm not sanguine about any of this doing anything other than motivating the troglodyte Right.)

Best "Obvious" Upgrade Ever

You know how really amazingly smart inventions sometimes look blindingly obvious in retrospect?

Boingboing links to 3-outlet power plates.

Brilliant. And retrospectively obvious.

Is that what McCain's Vetting Process Looks Like?

McCain Eyes Sarah Palin.

Thanks but No Thanks, Coca-Cola

Consider this a product warningreview.

So Coca-Cola decided to make a bottled iced tea, Gold Peak Tea. It's slickly packaged (although their website has sounds playing, argggh), but the tea itself ... well, I couldn't actually tell, because the artificial sweeteners or the preservatives (or some Mystery Ingredient) make it have an incredibly nasty aftertaste. I found it undrinkable.

If I'm still drinking caffeinated beverages (I'm trying to get back off the caffeine) the next time I buy bottled iced tea, I'll stick with Nantucket Nectars or Honest Tea. They actually use sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, and it tastes like, well, tea.

Feh!

Does a Bear — in the Woods?

If — is "play with wolves", then the answer is yes.

In Case You Had any Respect Left for Cokie Roberts

Cokie Roberts is supposed to be one of our Serious Pundits, and yet she somes up with this steaming load of crap on ABC's This Week (Crooks and Liars has has the video):

ROBERTS: Yeah, that he has certainly come nowhere near closing the deal. As we've talked about before, in this year that should be such a Democratic year given all the other indices, he is tied in the polls and stage-sided in the polls and going off this week to a vacation in Hawaii ... this does not make any sense whatsoever. I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be in Myrtle Beach, and, you know, if he's going to take a vacation at this time.

Not that I've had a lot of respect for her in many years, but this really got rid of any remnant. "I know Hawaii is a state." Ye gods.

(Via a good snarky take-down by Hunter at Daily Kos.)

Scalzi Beats Me To It Again

Scalzi posits a Zombie Rhyming Contest.

This is a followup to this post, which links to this image. I've been meaning to do this:

egrep 'r(ain|ane)s?$' /usr/share/dict/words

and come up with my own version, but Scalzi beat me to it.

My favorite is favorite poem format: "QUATRAIIIINS!"

Kathy Griffin = Alice from Dilbert???

Wait. What? Kathy Griffin did the voice of Alice on the short-lived 1999 attempt at an animated Dilbert series?

I blamecredit raven for hooking us on Kathy Griffin.

Does this mean I can't snark about Paris Hilton any more?

Paris Hilton mocks the McCain ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton.

Mental Whiplash

Thinking one is starting to play Evanescence's Fallen, and missing by one slot on the iPod, and accidentally playing Enya's Watermark.

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(Yes, I have some Enya on my iPod, and not just on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Want to make something of it?)

Bad Actor, Smart Parent

Via Salon.com's "Broadsheet" blog: Amanda Peet isn't as annoying as I thought. I may have to start categorizing her as "smart person, bad actor".

The issue? She smacked down Jenny McCarthy (okay, perhaps an instance of using an elephant gun on a mosquito) over the issue of childhood immunizations (McCarthy blames them for her son's autism). Peet apparently said that people who don't immunize their children are "parasites" because they're taking advantage of the fact that nearly everyone else has immunized their children. She has since apologized for the use of the "parasites" word, but hasn't backed off her basic point.

I believe that people who do not immunize their children are freeloaders (my choice of word is a little less nasty than "parasite" but perhaps meaner in terms of judging intentions) — they can only get away with this because the nasty diseases are kept at bay by everyone else being immunized. Yes, there are risks associated with immunizations (autism, though, has been shown again and again to not be one of them); but those risks are very small in absolute terms, and they're even smaller when compared to the alternative: if enough people don't vaccinate their kids (and "enough" may be as small a number as 15%), then we could easily see epidemics of diseases that we thought were conquered in the US during the 1950s.

I predict that within the next ten years, some hyper-crunchy (Waldorf or similar) no-one-here-is-immunized school will be laid low (or worse, wiped out) in a viral outbreak that would have been prevented by simple immunization. I just hope that that event will end this anti-immunization fad once and for all.

Oral History of the Internet

Vanity Fair has a big article with interview snippets from Internet luminaries from the 1950s through the 2000s: "How the Web Was Won".

They talk to a lot of the obvious (to geeks) people like Vint Cerf and Paul Baran, so they clearly did their homework. I just wish someone had mentioned Jon Postel and W. Richard Stevens.

My favorite quote from the article:

Marc Andreessen:When Al Gore says that he created the Internet, he means that he funded these four national supercomputing centers. Federal funding was critical. I tease my libertarian friends—they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding.

I Always Wondered About Jesse's Collection of Little Shoes...

Jesse Helms is finally dead. And good riddance.

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For those of you who don't know the reference in the title, please go listen to Bill Hicks — the good stuff is about 01:50 to 02:50.