Haven't wanted to write (or read) much about politics lately. That'd just make me too stabby. I have no idea how/if we'll survive August. That's usually considered "the silly season" but we're already at such a fever pitch of stupid fuckwittery that it's difficult (altho sadly not impossible) to imagine how it could get much worse. As usual, Ta-Nehisi Coates gets to the point in a manner and style I can only aspire to. The wide world of sport can be a welcome distraction. But today it was all buzz and howl about a spiked story on Le Bron James hanging out in Vegas. Here's what I don't get: I kept hearing people say that this story made James look bad, showed him in a bad light, etc. And I'm just not seeing it. He's 25 years old and he's got more money than most people will ever see in their entire lives. So he's hanging out in Vegas nightclubs and he's got an entourage and bodyguards and he's making crude remarks about naked women. No crimes were committed. No puppies were kicked. When did we start require multi-millionaire athletes to live lives of ascetic purity and have a repertoire of witty bon mots?

Probably y'all have seen this already, since it's been making its way 'round the internets (apparently by design -- more on that later): I Write Like. The idea is you enter a block of text and the program tells you what writer it's most like. I tried it with a bunch of blog posts and got a wide range of responses but the name most often returned was David Foster Wallace. Which, judging by comments I saw around, was what a lot of bloggers got. Makes me think there's something that's common to many blog posts -- something other than writing style, like sentence length or paragraphing -- that the algorithm is matching up with Wallace. Tried it tonight with some of my old short stories and they all returned Cory Doctorow. Who, oddly enough, I never got as a result when I was entering blog posts.
Not sure what that means. But, according to Making Light, it doesn't mean much. First Teresa Nielsen Hayden reported on (and did) some testing which seemed to indicate that the algorithm maybe wasn't all it was cracked up to be. A side note: ltho amusing, I'm pretty unimpressed by the folks who entered short phrases or gibberish and then carried on like they'd discovered something. Whatever this code is supposed to be doing, I'd expect it's result to get worse as the sample size decreased. Pointing that out does not strike as particularly clever or interesting. But I digress. Next up, Jim McDonald called bullshit on the whole thing, saying that it was really just a kind of viral marketing, trying to direct traffic to some vanity publisher.
My take is that it's an interesting bit o' code. It does less than advertised, tis true. But I think it's got more going on than those Facebook "which Simpsons character are you?" quizzes (some of which are actually random, I think, at least in the sense that I gave the same exact answers to the questions and got two different returns). The fact that it's an attempt to drive traffic to a vanity press doesn't really bother me. I barely noticed the linkage -- not that it's hidden or anything, I just have a pretty strong mental filter for intrusive ads on websites.

It's linkage cleanup time. Can't remember where I read this but I think it sums up the Twilight experience about as concisely as possible: "the dreary tale of a dreary girl inexplicably adored by vampires and werewolves."
On a more serious note, I saw this AP story updating the PA school district spying on students' laptops. It probably hasn't escaped your notice that standards at the AP, shall we saw, have gone way downhill. The headline on the laptop story was further evidence of that: Report: No spying in Pa. school laptops case. One might wonder, as I did on seeing this, just where the info came from. Turns out it comes from "attorneys hired by the district." Cos they have zero conflict of interest and there's certainly no reason they'd have to paint a falsely positive of events involving THEIR CLIENTS.
The stupid, it burns...
Well, that's the kinda news that makes me want to reach for a tasty beverage. And here's a new option for the tasty beverage crowd: Godless Imperial Stout. It's a Danish beer and brewed in partnership with Denmark's Atheist Society, which receives a percentage from each sale.

First up in adventures in getting off the fence and telling us how you really feel, guitarist Pat Metheny lets us know what he thinks about Mr. Kenny G. I couldn't agree more. In general, I don't much dig the style of musical necrophilia that involves dubbing yrself onto a track by an artist who's (usually) much better and (always) much deader than you. I didn't like it when Natalie Cole started it. I thought the Dean Martin undead duets CD from a couple of years ago was quite wretched. I hadn't heard anything about this Kenny G v. Louis Armstrong project and I hope I never have to actually hear any of it.
And next, Jim Lahey (of the famous no-knead bread technique) delivers a few choice words on the "new" and "improved" Domino's pizza.

Jim Lahey Reviews The New Domino's Pizza from Ozersky.TV on Vimeo.

And this morning's "what he said" award goes to John Cole, who would like (some of) his readers to step back off his neck. It is ever true that there's just some folks, and you can almost never guess which ones, who are not gonna be able to deal well with you saying that you're not interested in the things that they're interested in. Like somehow they think if the whole world doesn't care about the same things they care about, Tinkerbell is gonna die. I seen examples of it with all kinds of topics -- sports, movies, music, food. But those are usually pretty mild. It's no surprise that it's religion that can really bring out the crazy. I'm thinking that part of it is that professional provocateurs like P.Z. Myers who are openly contemptuous and mocking of much of religious belief have some of Cole's readers feeling a bit hyper-sensitive. Not, mind you, that I think that's a particularly valid response. Please. Religion and religious belief is the still the expected norm in most of society. Running into a few pockets of disapproval, however vocal, should not turn you into such a wilting flower that any statement of disagreement sends you to your fainting couch. Or your ranting box. Probably more likely is that Balloon Juice commenters, like a lot of online groups. have formed a community online and some of the bases of that sense of community is a shared interest in, agreement with, or sense of being entertained by the writing/thoughts of John Cole and the other bloggers on the site. So maybe when the big dog of the site says something they don't agree with, it cuts a little. But still, see previous mentions of fainting couches and Tinkerbell. Are people so epistemically closed (to grab last week's buzzwords from blogospheria) that we freak out at any mention of differing viewpoints? Srsly. If John Cole or I or who-the-hell-ever has no use for religion, why should that make any difference to you? My lack of interest in something is mine. It says nothing about what you should be interested in.
Wait... what was I just saying about ranting boxes? Mr. Kettle, is that you?

So once again the House has passed reconciliation. Hey, maybe the GOP can come up with some other obscure point of order and force another re-vote which they will lose. Clearly, as seen by their week-long hissy fit, they have not yet lost enough to understand that, hey, they lost and elections mean things and change things.

Speaking of meltdowns, here's the quote of the week:

Um, when, and really I mean, when is Twitter going to offer some sort of eyeball scan or keyboard stroke idiot meter? I'm thinking if you pound voraciously certain words some kind of pop up screen should appear that says, "Hey, nutbag, do you really want to say that stupid, fucking thing you just typed? For yes...slam your enlarged cranium onto the keyboard. For no...with all your might walk away from the computer now, no one will get hurt, and lay down quietly and we'll forget this ever happened

(from a commenter on this Gawker post)

Also right up there in the crazyass dept, this little gem:

Place a piece of bread in your toaster. "Cook" it until it is charred black. Place charred toast in a suitable envelope. Mail said envelope to your representative in DC.
They'll get the message...

(Actually found this via one of the food blogs I read, I guess because it mentions toast. It's from Freep which no way in hell am I linking to. A classic example of wingnut myopia. It's bear DNA all over again. Makes perfect sense to them and the rest of us have No Idea WTF They're Talking About)

I'm not generally a fan of knee-jerk contrarian BS (also known as about half of slate.com). Y'know, the kind of article that only exists to tell you that everything you think and that most everyone thinks and that basic common sense indicates is probably true is in fact completely wrong. It's easy. It's lazy. And it's often tricked out with sweeping statements of contrarianism that are wholly unsupported by any evidence. OTOH, it's always interesting to read someone dig into an issue and point out something that I might have missed, or find an angle on the issue that runs counter to what most people are saying. For example, here's Matt Yglesias on the vital role of Mitch McConnell in getting universal health care passed. Snarky? Well, yes, I guess so. But damn insightful while he's being funny.
note: title yoinked from this highly useful debunking of health care reform myths.

Stayed up way too late last night watching the vote on health care reform and then reading the wrapups and whatnot online. Apparently this ushers in a new socialist utopia (wait... what? they told me that was mutually exclusive). Which my only question is: if it starts this morning does that mean I don't have to go to work today? Cos if not I could really use the sleep.
Other than that, I have to wonder if some of the haters-from-the-left have noticed (or will any point) that they've made common cause with people who think spitting, yelling insults and slurs, and generally threatening violence are good political strategies. Yeah, yeah... I'm sure everyone at FDL has already internalized some bullshit about how they're not like that. Or the enemy of my enemy etc etc yadda yadda stfu...
ANYway, Balloon Juice and Great Orange Satan got out first with this but I couldn't resist. I read something last week, in response to all the Repubs concern trolling about how the health care reform battle was gonna be President Obama's Waterloo. It was by a British writer (can't remember where I saw this or I'd link to it) and he pointed out that, from the British perspective, Waterloo was actually a great moment in history. Either way, it's never a bad time to hear some Abba:

So I gotta say that I'm generally a pretty unapologetic food geek. But there are definitely times when I understand why some people hate foodies so much. Today's example is this quote I saw on Chowhound, from a thread discussing a new Indian restaurant opening in Chapel Hill: "why does every place have to make Sag Paneer? That's just so tiresome, I don't even make it at home anymore I'm so sick of it."
Oh where to begin. First off, is this not like complaining about Italian restaurants serving fettucine carbonara or sushi places serving hamachi? Why, yes, I think it is. Also, how in the hell do people get so spoiled and self-involved that they think the entire frakkin' universe is supposed to kowtow to their tastes. Everyone is different. And, hey, that's why there's lots of CHOICES on the menu. If you don't want to order saag paneer then how about not ordering it. Because the restaurant is there to make money by selling things that people want to buy not to satisfy someone's precious ideas of what is or isn't "tiresome."

There, I feel much better now.

Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Some more examples of food-related rantage: I love this takedown of a Time article on foods that can KILL you. I know, right... go figure, a Time article was stupid. Who could've seen that coming? But the rantage is still inspired, even if there is a bit of fish-in-barrel action going on. Also fabu, Gawker smacks down a particularly stupid NYTimes article. It's nice when the internets are there to validate my disdain. I read the stupid NYTimes article (again... a stupid first-person story in the NYTimes? Surprised I am not). My reaction went from "okay, he may have a point" to "what a cheap bastard" in about nothing flat. I'll allow that having a barista ask if you want change from $10 on a $5.75 check is a bit annoying. But getting change in singles from a bartender? That's not annoying. And getting 20% added for parties over 6? I'm sorry, that makes perfect sense. Anyone who complains about that (because they always tip 15% or whatever) is clearly someone who knows nothing about the restaurant business. And also a cheap bastard.