My Virginia belt.
Lady Bird ate my belt just a few weeks after she came to live with us. By “my belt,” I mean my one and only belt. I wore it every day since I don’t know when. Certainly since eighth grade. It was just a strip of brown leather with a silver nickel buckle—simplicity itself. Years [...]
I passed the Goodling test.
Using the Justice Department’s asinine applicant-screening terms, I’ve just done a quick vanity search on LexisNexis. As it turns out, I could get a job at the DoJ. That means I’m not trying hard enough.
Promises gone by: a Bush budget retrospective.
There’s bad news on the economic front: Bush’s budget deficit will hit the half-trillion dollar mark next year, which is precisely the opposite of what President Bush has been promising since he first sought the office.
Let’s take a look back at each year’s budget news since 2000, the year before President Bush took office.
March 2000, [...]
Spam assassin.
Spammer Eddie Davidson broke out of prison, murdered his family, and killed himself. Spammers are inherently sociopaths; I suspect this sort of thing was only a matter of time.
Evolutionary forms.
Olivia Judson provides some delightful example of creatures caught in the act of evolving over the past few decades. The generation-to-generation natural selection of Galápagos finches is particularly fascinating—it shows evolution as a process that isn’t always slow, and anything but steady, but something very much alive.
Replacing Twitter with a .plan.
Twitter is famously unstable, routinely going down for hours at a time. Jason Kottke has, jokingly, established a decentralized, ASCII-based Twitter. I got a kick out of this because, seriously, this is basically what we all used to do in the days before the WWW. We’d maintain .plan and .project files in our home directory, [...]
Murat Williams’ 1966 forecast of Virginia politics today.
I recently stumbled across an article from the Spring 1966 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, Murat W. Williams’ “Virginia Politics: Winds of Change.” The author—a Rhodes scholar, WWII veteran, and U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador—argues that Virginia’s conservatism (fiscal and otherwise) cannot hold in the face of the changing demographics of the state. Williams’ prescience [...]
Michael Savage: Autistic kids just need to snap out of it.
Anybody who has spent more than two minutes listening to Michael Savage’s talk radio program knows that he’s a hateful, horrible little man. Savage (real name: Michael Weiner) is the worst of the genre, and every time I hear him on the radio I have to wonder how it is that a network is willing [...]
Confirmed: Iraqi PM endorsed Obama’s plan.
Caught on tape: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki endorsing Sen. Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal plan. So what does McCain do now? Go all paternal and say that he knows what’s best for Iraq, not Iraqis? Pretend this never happened? Or admit that Obama’s plan for a withdrawal timetable is apparently the right one?
On Amtrak.
Ben Jervey writes in Good Magazine (motto: “For people who give a damn”) about his Amtrak trip across the nation. I enjoy taking Amtrak, but only because flying is so bad. Jervey’s experiences are about the same: the train is chronically late, the food is terrible, and the services are sparse. I’ve been thinking about [...]
Trying to put the timetable genie back in the bottle.
After Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki endorsed Sen. Barack Obama’s plan for withdrawing from Iraq (”U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”), Iraq is now desperately backpedaling, presumably after coming under intense pressure from the [...]
RNC, NRSC ignoring Gilmore.
Gilmore’s latest contribution report shows that he hasn’t received a penny from national Republican committees. That’s embarrassing.
Christopher Cerf’s “The World’s Largest Cheese.”
Today I discovered in my mailbox Christopher Cerf’s “The World’s Largest Cheese,” a bizarre and occasionally brilliant book (Jorn Barger called it “a wonderful bit of fluff”) that I ordered used for a few bucks recently. Far and away the best portion of the book is the “See The Merinos” series of illustrations, which I’m [...]
“Boggs: A Comedy of Values.”
This week I read Lawrence Weschler’s “Boggs: A Comedy of Values,” his book about J. S. G. Boggs, the guy famous for drawing his own versions of nations’ currencies and getting businesses to accept them at face value. His beautiful, currency-like artwork is actually worth a great deal more to collectors than the faux face [...]
VDBA’s new director.
Congratulations to my friend Lynda Sharp Anderson, who has been appointed director of the Virginia Department of Business Assistance.
Baarle-Hertog’s borders: stranger than Kentucky’s.
It’s not just the U.S. that has crazy borders. Consider the town of Baarle-Hertog. It contains tiny fragments (dozens of feet on a side) of the Netherlands embedded within only slightly larger fragments of Belgium, which are in turn completely surrounded by the Netherlands. There are houses that span nations. The story of how this [...]
Fundraising numbers.
The latest fundraising reports are in for state and federal campaigns. (State campaigns file with the State Board of Elections, federal campaigns file with the Federal Election Commission. The two types of campaigns are held to entirely different laws, file different forms, and generally bear little resemblance to each other. TMYK ★.) Tim Craig runs [...]
The wars so nice, we fought them twice.
I’ve always assumed that reenacting civil wars is a uniquely American pursuit. (There ain’t no way that Vietnamese guys get together and go through the motions of the Tet Offensive.) And it’s not just the American Civil War that people are reenacting—they do the Revolutionary War, the Korean War and World War II, too. There [...]
It’s funny. Laugh.
As Bill Maher asks, “If you can’t do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?”
Birthday pile in a sadness bowl.
Joanne McNeil at The Tomorrow Museum writes about the social awkwardness of grown-up birthdays, particularly in the era of Facebook, and how that’s emblematic of a devaluation of social interconnectedness and, indeed, friendship itself:
Were there a Getting Things Done-style book for keeping up with friends, well articulated methods how not to alienate ourselves from the [...]
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