The biggest load of BS I’ve heard since John Edwards explained that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he started up with his affair:
At the time, I wasn’t being truthful with myself. How could I be truthful with Katie Couric or CBS?
That’s A-Rod’s explanation of why he lied about taking steriods when asked point-blank by Katie Couric about it.
[digg-reddit-me]I bought a jump rope today. Taking off the cardboard slip it came in, I noticed the warning:
Consult your doctor before starting any exercise program. Exercise programs of any kind present an inherent danger to the participant. Serious or fatal injury can occur. All equipment is intended to be used by adults and only in the manner shown/illustrated/described. Anyone under the age of 18 should have adult supervision. Always follow instructions (if included). Always use proper techniques and common sense when exercising. Always check your equipment thoroughly.
Clark Stooksbury over at The American Conservative seems to have noticed this warning first last week.
This could easily turn into a rumination about how “overlawyered” we have become as a society – beginning with the infamous McDonald’s coffee case to now warnings about exercise causing death. But instead, taking a step back, let me make a different point. The McDonald’s case is greatly misunderstood and the facts make clear McDonald’s was negligent in the matter. And as for this warning that exercise may kill me – I’m going to chalk it up to one of those silly things companies do out of an excess of caution. The warning doesn’t hurt me – in fact, it’s somewhat amusing. Perhaps it is yet another sign that we are on a slippery slope to being drowned by laws and litigation – but
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I was happily reading an interesting article on “Abraham Lincoln, The Physical Man” (found via reddit) describing our 16th president’s unique physical characteristics when I came across this disturbing image from William Herndon’s classic biography of his former law partner:
I would say he was a cross between Venus and Hercules.
WTF does that mean?
I have a feeling, if one combined Venus and Hercules it would have a similar effect to this.
The BBC proposes reintroducing a word from the 1930s into the current lexicon: bankster.
Readers of the blog – and friends of mine – know that I have a deep and abiding hatred of the Bank of America. Of course, this hatred was based on my own personal experience with that sorry institution. I did not know the back story – of a poor immigrant who used his bank to build a community, who financed the Golden Gate Bridge and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, who refused pay increases or bonuses, who helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake of 1906. This only makes me despise even more the institution that grew from this good bank – which perverted the bank Amadeo Peter Giannini founded.
At administering the presidential oath that is. (Yet another random webcomic from xkcd.)
Eliot Spitzer has some good ideas about how to spend the stimulus money, including this technology which I’d heard of but not understood until reading:
[Smart meters] would permit, with a smart grid, time-of-day pricing for all consumers, with potentially double-digit reductions in peak demand, significant cost savings, and consequential remarkable energy and environmental impacts. These declines in peak demand would translate into dramatic reduction in the number of new power plants. The problem with installation of smart meters has been both the cost and, often, state-by-state regulatory hurdles. Now is the moment to sweep both aside and transform our entire electricity market into a smart market.
However, Spitzer has another more controversial proposal which Matt Yglesias fears will lead to the end of the human race, “Provide funding for robotics teams at every school. Yglesias:
After the human race is enslaved by robots, there are going to be small rebel groups hiding out somewhere and Elliot Spitzer’s going to be writing op-eds about how “no one could have predicted” that the robots would rebel and overthrow their masters. And it’ll be left to DFH bloggers to observe that this is in fact one of the most widely predicted scenarios in all of science fiction. From the proto-SF of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein through to Karel Capek’s R.U.R. and The War Against the Newts all the way up through Terminator and The Matrix. Yes, yes, yes eventually the Butlerian Jihad will allow us to re-overthrow the Thinking Machines and establish human rule but do we really want to fall into that trap?
Just say no to robots. And certainly say no to robots in our schools.
You just know that Spitzer – for promoting this idea – would be on Sarah Connor’s hitlist.
Matthew Deacon in the Telegraph:
A long queue at the cash machine, being kept on hold when telephoning the bank, waiting more than 10 seconds to cross a busy road – it’s almost a reflex, these days, to take such trifles personally. A phenomenon of the Nineties was road rage. Today, I’m sure that more and more of us feel pavement rage. There are too many people and they’re in our way.
More than a million members of Facebook have joined a group on the website, called “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head”.
Although I have not joined that group on Facebook, I am already a member in spirit. I was so excited over finding out that others shared my “pavement rage” that it entirely undermined the point of Deacon’s piece. Giving voice to a thought like “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head” while imploring people to take a different message seems akin to describing in pornographic detail what a sex addict should not do.
[digg-reddit-me]Scott Shane in The New York Times describes this little known story now available as part of the freshly indexed archive of Kissinger telephone calls:
In April 1971, Mr. Kissinger accepted a call from the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who hoped to arrange a meeting between top Nixon administration officials and antiwar activists.
“Perhaps you don’t know how to get out of the war,” Ginsberg ventured.
Mr. Kissinger said he was open to a meeting. “I like to do this,” he said, “not just for the enlightenment of the people I talk to, but to at least give me a feel of what concerned people think.”
Then Ginsberg upped the ante. “It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television,” he said.
Mr. Kissinger’s reply is transcribed simply as “Laughter.”
[Picture courtesy of Linda Bisset licensed under Creative Commons.]
