Month: May 2006

Once again, the name data is released

U.S. Baby name data was updated on May 12 and there’s been a predictable uptick (I want to say “flood” but it’s not that many) in baby-name news stories. My favorite so far is also one of the most emailed NYT stories, and the headline is: And if it’s a boy, will it be Lleh?, about people naming their daughters Nevaeh: heaven spelled backward.

Equally funny but not baby-related is this list of aptronyms, names which coincidentally describe the jobs people have, starting with, of course, Wayne Schmuck, an unscrupulous used-car dealer.

World Beard and Moustache Championships: Holy Crap

Looking through Flickr’s interesting pictures I came across an incredible portrait labeled “World Beard and Mustache Championships.”

What, I asked, is this championship?

Only the most insanely awesome mustache (or moustache, if you insist) and beard related event ever.

Obviously, facial hair has replaced real estate as the primary subject of this blog. Hope that’s OK with both my readers.

DTMFA

People in the Times are horrible: “[The East Hampton broker] described the frustrated wife, shopping for a $3 million summer home, who turned to her husband and uttered one line that said it all: ‘I wish you had a good job so we didn’t have to live like this.'”

DTMFA, dude. Seriously.

Pleasing Nobody

Bush’s immigration speech seems to have pleased nobody. The right thinks it’s not tough enough, and the left thinks it’s a militarization of the border. Even Hindrocket of Pajamas Media doesn’t like it.

But honestly, it’s perhaps the sole reasonable thing he’s said in about forever. It isn’t actually feasible to deport every illegal immigrant. We’re going to have to face up to people wanting to come to the US, and we’re going to need some kind of legal program to bring them into the fold, and give them a path to citizenship. To stop people from being exploited and to stop wages from being depressed, we need to punish companies who hire undocumented workers. And yeah, we should probably put some more enforcement staff on the border– although the national guard is almost certainly terrible idea.

Anyway, it’s a harsh welcome to reality for Dubya: he’s squandered all his goodwill, and now, no matter what he does, nobody is going to trust or believe him.

I have rarely been so happy to say I told you so.

I don’t normally link to the Globe

But this is just really annoying. It starts out as a discussion of Jane Jacobs’ ideas of urban planning but rapidly devolves into a stock fear-of-gentrification rant about how childless yuppies and queers are ruining our city. Well, no. The poor quality of schools and the scarcity of decent family housing has driven families away, and the childless yuppies (gay and straight, not sure why they keep harping on the gays being childless, urban, and yuppies, since that’s such an obviously wrong stereotype) are the only ones holding the damn city together. If you want to bring more kinds of people back to the city, then build more housing and make the schools not suck.

I don’t know why I read the Sunday paper. It makes me mad every damn time. Don’t even get me started on the NYT style section. Ugh.

Robert Reich

Awesomeness: Former secretary of labor Robert Reich has a blog. It’s a shame a short man can’t get elected in this country, or he’d have made some real changes to the country. Good ones.

Correction– he ran for governor here in MA, but lost out in the primary. I voted for him.