If I'm not yet destined to return to a full-time job, I might as well start to make a difference with my copious free time. Particularly when my nervousness about joblessness leads to sleeplessness. Ness.
• People I admire: Unsprung links to a NY Times overview of Barack Obama's late mother. Susie finds an amazing talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor about her experiences having a stroke. Mark Evanier passes along a report on a recent evening with Gene Wilder at SF's Castro Theatre. And I agree with Siva that this letter to the editor from Gene Kelly's widow is pretty cool. One thing she doesn't mention is Kelly's politics, which were solidly liberal back when "liberal" meant something special.
• Thanks Bully, I will never look at the '70s "classic" song Brandy the same way again, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
• Caught in the crosshairs: Curt Schilling on the behind-the-scenes negotiations concerning the Sox' trip to Japan, and Lloyd Dangle on being the evil cartoonist whose work graced the now-disgraced Airborne placebos.
• Everyone's linking to it 'cause it's so much fun: the liberal blogosphere's favorite curmudgeonly cephalopod-loving atheist describes being expelled from Expelled! here, here and here for good measure, while the perpetrators let in the far more famous atheist Richard Dawkins. It's the accent, PZ. You can't help being from from Minnesota, but let's face it, a Brit will always sound cooler.
• I hate to harp on it, but other people aren't letting it go and so it keeps on feeling like a picked scab. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are pretty much equal in terms of policy proposals, experience level, ability, ideology, etc. Why is a fawning old-and-new media so enamored of the Bill Richardson endorsement of Obama whilst completely ignoring the Jack Murtha endorsement of Clinton? And I'm saying this as someone who voted for the writer, as John Hodgman puts it. But crikey, enough is too much! I admit Keith Olbermann is often a hard habit to break, to the point where I've started sporadically tuning into his second half hour rather than the slam-Clinton-praise-Obama-worship-horserace-speculation first half hour -- but Robin and I were so stunned by his show yesterday that we couldn't look away. A full hour of breathless outrage that Obama was so personally violated, when it turns out the other major candidates were too. But hey, it was a great excuse to run continual video loops of Obama up on MSNBC for a good 50+ minutes, wasn't it? So, What Susie Says. And What Mark Says, as well. You cannot keep criticizing Fox Noise when your own station is doing essentially the same thing, only betting on a different horse than they are. It's not a friggin' game, we're talking about things that will affect millions of people's lives here. And there just isn't equivalent respect for (or critique of) the two Democratic candidates who are running on essentially the same things. Keith, you've utterly lost the moral high ground here.
• Great post from Sara about the power of television drama to effect positive change. I really teared up at this one, and if that isn't an effective about how stories can move us by showing conflict resolution rather than conflict, without having to be about hate and antiheroes, I don't know what is.
• Digby wonders when the usual political sex scandals start becoming about something more. If Obama regrets that much of the nation's media can't seem have a mature conversation about race, he doesn't want to even broach the subject of how we talk about sex!
• Lastly, yet another good post from Mark about Q&A sessions. I guess it doesn't do any meaningful good any more to just remind the audience that Q&A "isn't about you," does it?
Well, it's been a hard day's night, and I really ought to be sleeping like a log...
• People I admire: Unsprung links to a NY Times overview of Barack Obama's late mother. Susie finds an amazing talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor about her experiences having a stroke. Mark Evanier passes along a report on a recent evening with Gene Wilder at SF's Castro Theatre. And I agree with Siva that this letter to the editor from Gene Kelly's widow is pretty cool. One thing she doesn't mention is Kelly's politics, which were solidly liberal back when "liberal" meant something special.
• Thanks Bully, I will never look at the '70s "classic" song Brandy the same way again, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
• Caught in the crosshairs: Curt Schilling on the behind-the-scenes negotiations concerning the Sox' trip to Japan, and Lloyd Dangle on being the evil cartoonist whose work graced the now-disgraced Airborne placebos.
• Everyone's linking to it 'cause it's so much fun: the liberal blogosphere's favorite curmudgeonly cephalopod-loving atheist describes being expelled from Expelled! here, here and here for good measure, while the perpetrators let in the far more famous atheist Richard Dawkins. It's the accent, PZ. You can't help being from from Minnesota, but let's face it, a Brit will always sound cooler.
• I hate to harp on it, but other people aren't letting it go and so it keeps on feeling like a picked scab. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are pretty much equal in terms of policy proposals, experience level, ability, ideology, etc. Why is a fawning old-and-new media so enamored of the Bill Richardson endorsement of Obama whilst completely ignoring the Jack Murtha endorsement of Clinton? And I'm saying this as someone who voted for the writer, as John Hodgman puts it. But crikey, enough is too much! I admit Keith Olbermann is often a hard habit to break, to the point where I've started sporadically tuning into his second half hour rather than the slam-Clinton-praise-Obama-worship-horserace-speculation first half hour -- but Robin and I were so stunned by his show yesterday that we couldn't look away. A full hour of breathless outrage that Obama was so personally violated, when it turns out the other major candidates were too. But hey, it was a great excuse to run continual video loops of Obama up on MSNBC for a good 50+ minutes, wasn't it? So, What Susie Says. And What Mark Says, as well. You cannot keep criticizing Fox Noise when your own station is doing essentially the same thing, only betting on a different horse than they are. It's not a friggin' game, we're talking about things that will affect millions of people's lives here. And there just isn't equivalent respect for (or critique of) the two Democratic candidates who are running on essentially the same things. Keith, you've utterly lost the moral high ground here.
• Great post from Sara about the power of television drama to effect positive change. I really teared up at this one, and if that isn't an effective about how stories can move us by showing conflict resolution rather than conflict, without having to be about hate and antiheroes, I don't know what is.
• Digby wonders when the usual political sex scandals start becoming about something more. If Obama regrets that much of the nation's media can't seem have a mature conversation about race, he doesn't want to even broach the subject of how we talk about sex!
• Lastly, yet another good post from Mark about Q&A sessions. I guess it doesn't do any meaningful good any more to just remind the audience that Q&A "isn't about you," does it?
Well, it's been a hard day's night, and I really ought to be sleeping like a log...
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