You know, let’s skip turning Haiti into a nation-building exercise. We’ve got our hands full, we helped Aristide out once or twice before, and of course they don’t have any oil. So on the whole, you know, we should probably just leave it to fester until it becomes a real emergency.
And in bizarre medical news
Chewable contraceptives. Of course. What are they, for children? I hear they plan on making them with cute shapes. Wait til someone’s child actually does eat a box of these spearmint-flavored goodies.
Vaguely related Volokh post about government-imposed bias in scientific research, notably related to forcing additional delays to study the effects of emergency contraception, even though it’s been proven effective.
Nausea
I was feeling better, ate a banana, drank some tea, quit shivering. And so I started browsing Orkut and now I’m doing that thing where you look up people you used to know and wonder where it all went wrong and I feel sick to my stomach again.
Sick sick sick
My least favorite pastime: emesis.
What a way to spend a holiday.
Rawk
NYT article on a snowmobile race where a few years back “a snowmobile racer was rushed to a hospital when his corneas froze. And then there was the year the temperature dropped to 31 degrees below zero, and the portable toilets filled with ice.”
Race motorcycles get up towards 150, maybe 200 mph with six or seven hundred cc’s, but they’re on asphalt and are (relatively speaking) stable because of the gyroscopic action of the wheels. Snowmobiles are on ice with skis and treads, so they’re much less stable, and they’re doing 70-100 mph with 1000cc engines. Did I say the treads are spiked? This is a sport where there are almost as many injured spectators as participants. Wicked pissah.
Ongoing: ___ is the new ____
Meth is the new crack: LV Weekly covers the scene in Vegas. Sample line, describing the people who are reduced to stealing to support their habits: “I’ve seen people steal someone’s stuff, forget they did it, and try to help them find it.”
What happened to Carrie?
My uncle’s been in the hospital again, and spent a couple days more or less unconscious. When he came to my mother was sitting in the hospital with him, and he looks over at her and says, without any warning, “So, what happened to Kerry?”
My mom says “Carrie?”
“Did he win in Virginia? How about Tennessee?”
“Oh! That Kerry, yes, he’s really out in front now. I haven’t really been paying attention for the past couple of days, but there’s an article here if you want me to read it to you…”
So she ends up reading him the New Yorker profile of Kerry, and an in-depth article about military privatization and Halliburton, and so forth, for the better part of the afternoon. Later, he had to tell my grandmother (again) how to print email from his computer to bring in to him, and he was feeling well enough to be annoyed at her. Theoretically he’s got under a week to go. I’m betting more because he’s as stubborn as my grandmother is.
Maiwwage
The Phoneix, not the world’s greatest alt-weekly, has really good coverage of the marriage debate around these parts. My favorite is the woman who had a commitment ceremony and says weddings are a drag when you have two bridezillas. That and the poster “My Pedophile Priest Supports Traditional Marriage.” Happily, we’re now describing the debate in terms that take control of the debate: pro-marriage (people who are in favor of love, kindness, and all that is good) and anti-marriage (homophobic benighted forces of darkness who can’t stand the idea of true love or goodness).
I sometimes wonder how it is that people who disagree with me can exist. I mean, sure, there’s people with whom I have honest and reasonable disagreements about, say, Ben Stiller, or trade policy, or religion or what have you. But there are some basic cultural issues that I feel that it’s important to share, like plurality and the separation of church and state. I’m willing to imagine that people think homosexuality is a disgusting sin, but I’m not willing to think that reasonable human beings can’t understand that their opposition to it is a religious opposition.
And then it occurs to me that there are people with a radically different worldview: Middle America. Which is why I have to read blogs like Koolgrrrl’s Guide to Life. She keeps me in touch with the mass of humanity that isn’t in major coastal cities:
We were supposed to see Mystic River, but that was before I realized that Julia Roberts is NOT in this version! Somehow I got it confused with Mystic Pizza. I can be a dimwit sometimes–in fact, that’s the hub’s “pet name” for me. Dimwitted Deb. Or Double-D’s.
I’m still trying to decide if she’s a Jean Teasdale-style joke or not. I mean, it’s not like I’m such an incredible snob that I would be unable to imagine someone saying “what a true artist” about Celine Dion. No, in fact, I am that big a snob, and it was her admiration of Celine Dion that really made me think it’s an elaborate joke.
Carthago Delenda Est
Did you really have to sow salt in the fields? Well, maybe not. It’s not like I want it to die. I just want it to fade into insignificance. Not the literal Carthage, of course, which is already long gone and replaced with another city, but my metaphorical, personal Carthage. We all have one, or several. And I want mine to go away and never bother me again. All the Carthage-sympathizers around here need to realize that they’re either with us or against us, and that Carthage is not us.
Book. Dwarf. Bookdwarf
My dear Bookdwarf has gotten her own domain now, via the hoster with the moster, Sharp Hosting.
I was kind of waiting for him to post about it, but my buddy Dave told me this dream he had, where he Howard Dean was hanging out with him and his friends. Dean had just lost some primaries, and was just being generally annoying, and they couldn’t figure out a polite way to ask him to leave. Hmmmm.
