So how about that government shutdown?

Gaps in government funding have happened before. But in this case a majority in the House and Senate would be willing to pass a continuing resolution that President Obama would sign. A minority of one house of Congress (on account of being the majority of the majority party, with a Speaker who is ( Read more... )

From here:

Scott Brown will not run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by John Kerry, the former senator told the Herald first today.

"U r the first to know I am not running," Brown texted the Herald.

That just seems like a very strange way for a politician to tell a newspaper anything.

At the bus stop yesterday, I was approached by a drunk who asked me to call him an ambulance. There was nothing obviously wrong with him (aside from being a drunk), and he says this in a tone that doesn't indicate he's alarmed in the slightest. So I ask him, why's he need an ambulance? And he tells me I should call him an ambulance because "[he ( Read more... )

Sure has been a while since I did one of these, but here are a few recent tidbits.

Teach A Kid to Argue: On why teaching kids good argument skills is a better idea than you might think.

The Upside of Ugly: On plastic surgery and technological solutions to social problems.

Jay-Z’s "99 Problems," Verse 2: A Close Reading With Fourth Amendment ( Read more... )

Anime: Japanator's top 50 for the decade. An interesting selection. I've watched all of 22 of those and touched on 6 more.

Clothes: Ties! Also, the other kind of ties! umbrellas! Blue shoes! Double monks!

It occurs to me that I've gone from two pairs of shoes (running shoes, black oxford dress shoes; three if you include beach sandals) to ( Read more... )

Overthinking It has some rather excellent (over)thoughts on advertising in the wake of last weekend's Annual Television Commercial Grand Prix (and Football Match). First, there's an article on a particular genre of ads, the commercials for which have a message of "bad things happen to you when you use our product". But the real brilliance is in ( Read more... )

On January 6, Rudy Giuliani was interviewed on Larry King Live about the failed Underpants Bomber attack. In the interview Giuliani claimed that Obama took ten days* to respond to the Christmas Day bombing. Actually, Obama issued a lengthy statement on December 28, three days after the attempted attack; contrast with Bush's response to the Shoe ( Read more... )

If you're already up-to-date, please excuse my venting ( Read more... )

My mom forwarded this article, titled Yes, It's Anti-Semitism. Although the article starts, "Criticizing Israel doesn't make you anti-Semitic," and paraphrases this statement twice more, the article, from title down, argues just the opposite. I emailed a response, but after reading this (it's not really a response to that post, that post just ( Read more... )

Watching the economic situation is stressful, but actually being the ones who destroy the economy is way stressing. Which is why executives at AIG spent hundreds of thousands on a spa vacation. The resulting outrage caused them to cancel their second vacation (a weekend at the Ritz), but not the third (golf retreat) or fourth (hunting trip in ( Read more... )