A prayer for Bradley Rees.
In the name of Bradley Rees, we pray.
Dear God, we thank you for your bounty of stupid. In what promises to be a lousy month for Virginia Democrats, you have been fit to deliver to us Bradley Rees. In your wisdom, you have arranged for Rep. Tom Perriello to win reelection, by creating this man-child [...]
links for 2009-10-30
OregonLaws.org
This fellow built a website to take Oregon's state code off their lousy website and mash it up with lots of goodness, displaying it in a humane way. (Like Richmond Sunlight, but for Oregon, and for laws, not bills.) The result is just great. I've been planning to do this for Virginia's code for a [...]
links for 2009-10-29
Kenton Ngo: Polls Show Suburban Voters Singlehandedly Destroying Creigh Deeds
Kenton looks into the regional internals of PPP gubernatorial polls and rightly worries that Democrats could lose the suburbs long-term. I've worried that suburban voters are too far left and too insulated for the good of Virginia (Democrats or otherwise), but perhaps that will prove to [...]
“Jobs governor”?
Can we all agree that the notion of either gubernatorial candidate being a “jobs governor” (as McDonnell has branded himself) is fundamentally bullshit? A governor has a very limited capacity to create jobs. I will buy that it’s possible that a governor, over the course of four years, can woo a couple of big employers [...]
links for 2009-10-28
Wikipedia: Wreck of the Old 97
On September 27, 1903, The Old '97—aka The Fast Mail—was speeding along the train tracks from Monroe, VA to Spencer, NC, trying to make up for lost time. Just outside of Danville, the engineer came around a sharp curve too quickly, and the train plummeted off a trestle into the [...]
Daily Progress: Cuccinelli uninterested in “agenda-driven change.”
There’s a little nugget in The Daily Progress’ unsurprising endorsement of Ken Cuccinelli for attorney general that I just want to post here, so that we can all look back on it in the years ahead, assuming that Cuccinelli wins next week:
Mr. Cuccinelli seems to have a better grasp that the attorney general’s office is [...]
Groundbreaking.
I’ve had considerably less time to write in the past couple of months, because we’ve finally started building our house. At right is a photo of the groundbreaking, yesterday morning. Leading up to that, though, was months of design work, driveway construction, loan negotiation, builder selection, arduous planning, etc. We finally signed the contract about [...]
links for 2009-10-26
Utne Reader: Home Canning—Pickles, Peppers, and a Dash of BPA?
The Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest, and Bernardin brand canning jar lids are coated with bisphenol A, Organic Gardening magazine reports. D'oh. (All four brands are owned by Jarden Home Brands.) The solution is to switch to glass-lidded containers, such as those made by Weck…but at $3.25 [...]
links for 2009-10-25
Jon Udell: A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database
Your computer has to be able to calculate times for a variety of places over many years, in order to accurately determine time spans in different locations. Simple proposal, but actually doing that is just ghastly. (I've tried, and surrendered, twice. It's terribly hard.) Your OS has [...]
links for 2009-10-23
AskReddit: What's the most unexpected thing you heard from a child?
There are some just hilarious comments from little kids here. Don't read this any place where you're not free to cry with laughter.
(tags: humor children)
New York Times: To Cut Global Warming, Swedes Study Their Plates
Some Swedish food manufacturers and restaurants have started to label the [...]
links for 2009-10-22
Chris Jordan: Midway
A few weeks ago, photographer Chris Jordan visited Midway Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific, and photographed the rotting corpses of baby albatross chicks. Thousands of them die on that island alone every year, a result of the parents scooping plastic out of the ocean and feeding it to the chicks, believing [...]
Bell accuses Perriello of negative campaigning.
Del. Rob Bell, quoted in today’s Daily Progress:
[W]e can all remember how negative mailings filled with innuendo and personal attacks helped defeat Virgil Goode in 2008.
Does anybody have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about? I’m not aware of a single such mailing going out. Rep. Tom Perriello ran a very clean campaign.
Profile of Eddie Cassidy, part 2.
The second part of Don Teschek’s two-part series on my great uncle Eddie Cassidy, for the The Andover (NH) Beacon. The prior installment was about his service in WWII, while this is about how he and his best friend built one another’s vacation homes when they got out of the service.
links for 2009-10-21
CNN: Study touts treating heroin addicts with heroin
A British study has found that giving heroin to addicts reduces crime and turns around the lives of addicts. On the one hand, this strikes me as awfully distasteful. On the other hand, these results are just brilliant, and sometimes government (and business) needs to do counter-intuitive things [...]
Medical marijuana is legal in Virginia.
Fun fact: medical marijuana is now legal in Virginia. With President Obama directing the feds to adhere to state laws in enforcement of anti-marijuana laws, that presumably leaves doctors free to prescribe it under §18.2-251.1, which the General Assembly passed in 1979.
links for 2009-10-20
Information is Beautiful: Left vs Right
I'm impressed by this visualization of the conflicting beliefs between those on the left and right. It seems fair and useful.
(tags: politics design data visualization)
Chicago Tribune: Uptown neighbors stand up against gangs—literally
Residents of one neighborhood, tired of petty criminals loitering en masse at a particular intersection, have started loitering there [...]
A profile of Eddie Cassidy.
My great-uncle Eddie Cassidy—my maternal grandmother’s brother—died Sunday night at the age of 93. The Andover (NH) Beacon recently featured a profile of his service in WWII, the first of a two-part series. (The second is still to come.) The author is the grandson of Uncle Eddie’s lifelong buddy, Don Teschek. Don’t miss the photo [...]
links for 2009-10-19
The Big Picture: Saturn at equinox
I'm amazed by this picture of the moon Saturn's moon, Prometheus, disturbing the planet's F ring gravitationally. As the the moons close to the rings orbit Saturn, they pull a wave of the rings along with them. I didn't even know that much, but seeing a picture is very different [...]
McDonnell doubts global climate change exists at all.
Bob McDonnell just doesn’t think that people have anything to do with global climate change, and the AP’s Bob Lewis asked him some hard questions about it. Climate scientists are unanimous: the temperature is going up, and human are doing it. But McDonnell says he merely “thinks” that global climate change is real, but says [...]
links for 2009-10-17
1001 Rules for My Unborn Son
Exactly what it says on the box. These rules manage to be classic without being musty or exaggeratedly masculine. I'll buy the book.
(tags: philosophy life parenting)
Letters of Note: I was ready to sink into the earth with shame
Back in 856, the Dunhuang Bureau of Etiquette put together a form letter [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAY-kwith) is a website developer and political pundit who lives in the vicinity of Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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