My favorite fictional body part....

Unfortunately, there are no news about the crockus, that part of the brain that makes females more verbally skilled than males.

Even though it doesn't exist, the name is just so damn funny this item should be kept in the news as much as possible.

Kelo in retrospect....

The Kelo decision thoroughly established the principle that a municipality can force you to sell your home for only the flimsiest of excuses (i.e., that the person they want to transfer it to is likely to stimulate the local economy in some nebulous way).

The principle is somewhat at odds with the facts, though.... in reality, for all the money they spent on legal fees, the town achieved only a huge vacant lot and a lot of outrage.

I don't know where Susette Kelo currently lives.

Quote of the Day

Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the patterns of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion. Contrariwise, the unceasing rush and turmoil of human existence came not from mathematical necessities of time but from the frantic urgency implicit in human sexual bipolarity.

Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land"

Quote of the day

For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

P.J.O'Rourke

My clean mind

Anybody who reads this and has seen my "study" in my basement will appreciate my inner purity.

"Young housewives having figures that will turn you on"

A serious scientific journal learns the dangers of meddling in things they do not understand.

I got 100% on this

Civic Literacy Quiz. But I do detect just a hint of libertarian bias.

Quote of the day

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T.S.Eliot (ending The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock)

Quote of the day

I'm sick of the insipid bourgeois neuroticism in current, careerist American poetry. Bring back the psychotics!
--Camille Paglia, via Language Log

4.0!

That was the text my son sent me just now.

I had to text back to confirm that was for the whole semester.

Wow. It's not easy to impress a dad, but if you can't impress him with perfection, it would be a pretty lost cause!

Life is good.

Quote of the day

I used to think the brain was my most important organ. But then I thought: Wait a minute, who's telling me that? ~Emo Philips. (via McArdle)

Quote of the day

When one linguist says to another "Was that good for you?", at least in a professional context, the phrase usually means "was that sentence consistent with your personal grammatical norms?"

Language Log

What I see when I wake up in the morning before I can leave my bedroom....

And in case you were wondering....no, since Sam has been coming over I am sure she has never seen me without my pants on.

Quote of the Day

"He smokes like a fish!"
-- an InDUHvidual from Dilbert.

Quote of the Day

That's right....I might not have one every single day, but if I try to keep it to one a week they just keep piling up!

On the other hand, "Lyric of the Week" is pretty much a dead feature....sure, there are songs I haven't posted yet, but almost all of them are by Leonard Cohen. OK, here goes:

"When Dad agrees to something with a smile on his face, we have learned to reconsider our request."
- some 12year old

My mother is alive and well....

But this is still the only fat mama joke that ever made me cry.....

My favorite spam....

This is unlikely to be a weekly feature, or even a yearly one. Spam rarely makes me smile. Sometimes, maybe, in a grim way....like when my mother-in-law died and they had me clean out her email (99% spam) in case there was something in there, and one of her spams promised to "increase the distance of ejaculation" as though this were some kind of Olympic event.

Today one got caught by the google mail spam filter, but as I was hitting delete it still caught my eye "we think you deserve more than simple spam".

I'm gathering it must have been rather complicated spam. I didn't read it, but the subject line still made me smirk.

Definition of the week

Maverick: somebody who makes decisions independently of peers.

Said to be an eponym based on a rancher that refused to brand his cattle - since everybody else did brand their cattle, this let him claim any unbranded cattle in the area.

Our two-party system

This article points out some of the difficulty of competing with the major parties. If you've had the feeling that the United States must have some people that would make more inspiring choices for leader than the ones we actually get to vote here, Balko points out:

The system we have now selects for the sorts of people who want to make a career of politics. If, in order to successfully run for high office, you have to spend years culling favors and working your way up through one of the two major parties, the winners in this game are going to be the party loyalists and power-hungry climbers who couldn't hack it in the private sector — frankly, the last personality type we want governing.

Bailing Out Republicans

This item struck me as amusing, in a grim way.

Actually, there is something to be said for it, or going even further. If they could only get enough Republicans into one of the houses so that Obama would have a reason for not being able to get things done, this might stop him from having to do anything harmful.

Hey, it worked for Clinton!