This is the plain and simple truth: the gin and tonic is a good drink and all, but it's really a shame that it's driven the poor tom collins near to extinction.

A tom collins would go pretty well with this, especially if you do as I have done and figure that, since you have half again as much lamb as is called for, you should triple the amount of ginger, use two green garlic bulbs and a lot of the stalk, bump the turmeric a bit, and interpret "a sufficient amount of genuinely hot green chilis" to mean seven serranos, one jalapeno, and one habanero, since in that case it will be rather hot.

So I've been reading Heads In The Sand by one Matthew Yglesias (in stores now!) and a lot of the book is about the liberal case for intervention in places like Bosnia, which got me thinking: why hasn't the case been made for the UN invading Myanmar? If there's one place where I think people would be greeting us with cheers and flowers in the street as liberators, that would be it. It might not be genocide, per se, but the evil going on there rises to that level. (I was just floating this idea by Armsmasher and he astutely said "there ought to be a word for genocide by negligence", an idea with which I totally agree.)

So why not? And how much, I'm wondering, is because America no longer has the moral authority to support this after Katrina?

(title and image credit to Sifu Tweety)

Perhaps not all of you have seen this clip of Bill O'Reilly and his anger management issues back when he was on Inside Edition.

Definitely a man committed to open dialogue.

Bonus different anchor dropping the F-bomb (as we hipsters call it) below the fold.

Now that we're moving into the general election, amateur Democratic racism ("Hang that darky from a tree!") has to cede ground to Republican professionals.

Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain's candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people.

...

One experienced, credible activist in Christian politics who would not let his name be used told me that Huckabee, in personal conversation with him, had embraced the concept that an Obama presidency might be what the American people deserve. That fits what has largely been a fringe position among evangelicals: that the pain of an Obama presidency is in keeping with the Bible's prophecy.

via yglesias

Doesn't this kid look like he should be doing something like shuffling his feet and silently mouthing words in the back row of the school choir?

Other plans!

The murder began when Orlewicz lured his friend Daniel Sorensen to a Canton home on Nov. 7. Once they entered the garage, Orlewicz slit Sorensen's throat from behind and stabbed him 12 more times. He then beheaded Sorensen with a hacksaw and burned his fingertips with a blowtorch.

The defense argued, naturally, that it was all done in self-defense. I'm pretty sure they didn't mention the kid's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/skullsmakemesmile

Oh noes! They're banning clove cigarettes! How can the powerful Theater Geek and Goth Kid lobbies let this happen?

Michelin makes condoms, right?

Possible PR problem: Bibendum's name might suggest that the company endorses getting women drunk to take advantage of them.

What the hell, people? Cyclones? Earthquakes? Maybe Obama is the Antichrist.

The much-linked Walkscore is a neat idea--you type in an address and it tells you how walkable the neighborhood is--except that it doesn't really gauge walkability at all, but falls back on proximity to shops, which really isn't the same thing.

We'll be the first to admit that Walk Score is just an approximation of walkability. There are a number of factors that contribute to walkability that are not part of our algorithm:

* Street width and block length: Narrow streets slow down traffic. Short blocks make it easier to navigate the grid.

* Safety: How much crime is in the neighborhood? How many traffic accidents are there? Are crosswalks well marked and streets well lit?

* Pedestrian-friendly design: Are there walking paths? Are buildings close to the sidewalk with parking in back? Are sidewalks shaded by trees?

* Topography: Hills can make walking difficult, especially if you're carrying groceries.

* Public transit: Good public transit is important for walkable neighborhoods.

* Freeways and bodies of water: Freeways can divide neighborhoods. Swimming is harder than walking.

* Weather: In some places it's just too hot or cold to walk regularly.

Sometimes "first to admit" doesn't exhaust the requirements of intellectual honesty, folks. What you've got here is google maps with a misleading numerical score attached. Just as veryfying anecdata, I popped in my mom's address, and they have things included in the walk area that only a very fast, very fit, somewhat suicidal person would ever try to walk to.

Edward Luttwak, as outsiders to a faith often do, mistakes naive doctrinal purity for the "truth" of a religion. And gets it published in the New York Times.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother's Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is "irtidad" or "ridda," usually translated from the Arabic as "apostasy," but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim's family may choose to forgive).

(Sprinkling a few foreign words in these bulls on other people's religion is also a common strategy for appearing credible.) So we have Obama's Muslim-by-birth-atheist-in-practice father giving birth, by an American Christian, to a son who is in every sense a Christian, but Luttwak is sure that to real Muslims, Obama remains forever a Muslim. After some fear-mongering about those crazy Muslims and their wacky laws, he says this.

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama -- not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law -- another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama's conversion to Christianity once it became widely known -- as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

After that, this "to be sure" bit is just insulting.

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be.

I wonder if it would have been too much to have an actual Muslim cleric opine on the status of Barack Obama's soul in Muslim eyes. But, as I keep telling my serially outraged mother: get used to it, we've got several months like this, and much worse, to go.

I should send Berube a check.

My free-floating hate is now directed at Holy Joe, who said,

But the fact that the spokesperson for Hamas would say they would welcome the election of Senator Obama really does raise the question, "Why?"

And it suggests the difference between these two candidates.

So we have a few months of this to look forward to, with McCain telling us he's not going to engage in negative campaigning, only to let the erstwhile Democrat sling slime.

Long have I wanted to be able to embed videos locally, because I often find funny and otherwise safe for work stuff on not safe for work sites. Now, thanks to Flowplayer and some troubleshooting help from the Wolfson, I do believe I can do just that. I inaugurate my newfound powers with a bit of harmless fun.

From West Virginia.

Recent opinion polls indicate that Mrs Clinton would narrowly beat Mr McCain in the state but Mr Obama would lose by nearly 20 percentage points.

They give reasons.

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist," said Mr Simpson

And,

Josh Fry, a 24-year-old ambulance driver from Williamson, insisted he was not racist but said he would feel more comfortable with Mr McCain, the 71-year-old Vietnam war hero, in the White House. "I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president," he said.

And Bill Clinton gets way down with the gente.

He told them his wife represented "people like you, in places like this", and urged voters to turn out in record numbers on Tuesday to send a message to the "higher-type people" who were trying to force her out of the race.

I know, I know, the race is over and this doesn't matter, but there it is.

Don't read today's Mother's Day Modern Love, about a woman trying to plan her wedding after the loss of her mother, if you don't want to get a little misty. Or maybe you'll be fine and it really sucks and I'm just a pushover for stories like this.

I'll admit that that's my soft spot -- I really enjoy my life right now and don't feel a huge rush to settle down. My only fear about the decisions I've made is that something will happen that will mean that people I care about won't be around to share important events in my life. I know if I ever brought it up with my parents or grandparents, they'd surely reply that they'd rather see me happy and living the life I want but that doesn't stop me from worrying about memories or pictures I might never have.

Ah, disingenuousness, desperation, and a dollop of stupidity. Obama clearly only misspoke, and meant forty-seven, not fifty-seven. If the folks at the linked page have an agenda beyond advancing the cause of stupidity, or taking cheap shots at Obama, it's to lay the ground for excusing McCain's flubs, past and to come. But McCain's flubs haven't been instances of misspeaking, they've been either truth-telling gaffes ("100 years") or revealed genuine ignorance (who are we arming, anyway?)

Here's a pretty short and very interesting piece by Clay Shirky with the catchy thesis that television watching over the past few decades in America has hoarded a lot of mental energy that could have been expended more productively and this "cognitive surplus" is just now being tapped by the advent of interactive technologies. It's short enough that you can read it for yourself and decide what you think. NickS sent me the link and his thoughts are posted below.

Now tell us what you most regret about having children.

A friend of my mother's thought the movie of Starting Out in the Evening was kind of hard on the graduate student; I, having read the book, concur, mutato medio. Of course there are such trivial (one gets the distinct impression that the origin of her interest in Schiller's books is held against her by the narrator, and Casey's somewhat analogous interest in his third book, when he rereads it, is small comfort) and self-obsessed (constantly looking at herself from the outside, even her big realization at the end is an attempt to bestow on her a status only appropriately bestowed by another, as she acknowledges) persons, but it seems churlish to dwell on it.

I found this bit on p 229 kind of bemusing. Casey's 15yo son has a bow tie:

"Is that to make you look like Louis Farrakhan," Casey said, "or to make you look like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.?"

Stupid attempt at a joke, Casey thought. He's probably never heard of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Don't make jokes that require reasearch.

"You really sold me a woof ticket," William said. Casey didn't know what this meant, and that was the point: his sone was showing him taht he too could command an incomprehensible dialect, if that was Casey's game.

The reason for my bemusement: "woof ticket" isn't exactly new slang. (I only know it from Tom Waits' "Trouble's Braids", from his fine 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, though evidently he's also used it in a song from 1975—Starting Out in the Evening is from 1998). Urban Dictionary cites a newspaper article from 1992 describing it as "dated"; judging from its popularity online, that's probably not the best descriptor (unless, of course, its modern-day invocations are in the spirit of a self-conscious anachronism, which is quite possible), but it's certainly distinguished. So I'm not certain what the point of this passage is: Casey's been out of touch with african-american culture his whole life long? Well—not so implausible. Is William deliberately using older slang to mock his father for invoking those outdated figures? Doesn't seem in character. The entire episode sounds kind of off to me.

So, Jenna. What weirds me out is that watching her talk prompts me to see her face as sort of morphing into her father's, which is super-creepy because she's then simultaneously a moderately attractive young woman and that guy. Second, if one were hitting that, would this still happen? If so, would the effect be ardor-extinguishing or would the awesome power of sexual arousal merely transform the gestalt shift into something hot? And if the latter, would there still be a sort of meta-level awareness that something deeply unsettling is going on? Or would it be inexplicably alluring chimpy-faces all the way down?

So, the Greek guy who fell at the pool does indeed have a fractured hip and is facing months of rehab. He's a nice guy, and that sucks for him. However! According to people who saw him at the hospital, he's now saying that he wasn't really running when he fell. Oh my. He might have thoughts of a lawsuit brewing in his head, and sadly for him and for me, I was looking right at him as he ran and fell, and another guy two lanes over from me said "why was he running?" Don't do it, Greek guy! I don't want to testify against you!

Yglesias's Heads in the Sand is very much worth reading as a political history of the foreign policy debates during the Bush administration. It's a more substantive version of all of those "Democrats need to fight harder!" arguments, laying out exactly how congressional Democrats and our presidential candidates simply abdicated the foreign policy field to the Republicans by failing to offer any positive alternative to the Republican program of creating American hegemony through the aggressive use of our military power. The Republicans had a foreign policy plan, the Democrats had none, and any plan looks more serious than no plan, regardless of how lunatic that plan may be. For this alone, buy the book. You can still get a copy for a Mother's Day present if you go to a bricks and mortar bookstore, and there's plenty of time before Father's Day.

Now to start griping about it.

Someone really just argued (take-home exam, considered opinion) that the reason it would be bad to have some kind of market for transplantable organs is that black people's organs would be cheaper because less demand because fear of getting sickle cell anemia.

Somebody please explain the attraction of St. Elmo's Fire.

Sometimes six months seems like forever, and sometimes shorter than a single day.

Maybe I should move to Australia. They've spent a week discussing why one of their swimmers looked fat in a post-race photo. Not only that, but he's been forced to answer questions about it. Sweet. Anyway, the answer seems to be that spending a lot of time in salty water makes you bloated.

via scaq

I've had countless conversations where somebody has said that of course Iran is funneling weapons into Iraq. I always answer that I've not heard or seen a single shred of evidence outside of the Bush administration lackeys stomping their tiny feet and insisting that it's so. Now, given their performance since 2001, I've taken to assuming every word they say (including a, the, and God bless America) is not just wrong, but completely intentional, ass-backwards antitruth. Let's test that strategy.

There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner's introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word "Iran," or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen. [...]

A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.

Hmm, how 'bout that? Perhaps they should check under the couch and in the areas just north, south, east, and west of it.

Nobody else link to this, lest we inspire another sympathetic backlash.

Tony Karon says "Israel is 60, Zionism is Dead, What Now?"