I’ve needed a new phone for some time now. I was thinking about something really cool like an iPhone, but a friend who’s more into techie stuff than I am has been singing the praises of this new Dutch multi-function phone. Have any of you had any experience, good or bad, with this unit? It looks quite promising to me, but what do I know about phones.
[Hat tip to Roland Smith]
The University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga VI (Uga for University of Georgia, VI because he was sixth in the line of Ugas) has died of congestive heart failure at age ten. Uga VI, extremely handsome (a veritable matinee idol by bulldog standards), was the son of Uga V, the only college mascot to have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. I don’t care about Georgia’s basketball or football teams, but I used to look in on their games in hopes of catching a glimps of Uga. While I was growing up, my family had two bulldogs, and they were “really” mine and, of course, my mother’s. Bulldogs are a noble breed, and although their looks scare off some people they’re wonderful companions if you can put up with all their snorting, drooling, and gas-passing, which I could. But they do tend to die young.
Long live Uga VII!
Rice, in Sweden for a conference on Iraq, ended up in the Sheraton hotel where the band Kiss was staying the night before a concert. Negotiations between State Department aides and Kiss’s manager resulted in a rendezvous between the two.
During the gathering, Kiss leaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley tried to recruit Rice, a talented classical pianist, to join the band.
“I don’t rock,” she told them.
“I’m sure you can rock,” Simmons replied.
[From the Washingtonian magazine. See also here, which has a picture. I could have used it, but who wants to see Kiss without their make-up on?]
[P.S. Detroit Rock City.]
This photo is the document most requested from the National Archives, topping requests for copies of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And rightly so, of course.
Following up on my earlier post that featured this photo, reader John Shelton Lawrence has kindly forwarded this link to the correspondence between The King and All the President’s Men, from both before the historic December 21, 1970 meeting and after Elvis had left the building. Included are Elvis’s handwritten note requesting a get-together, several internal White House memos, and numerous photos memorializing the occasion..
Teaser: In a memo to the guardian of Nixon’s door, H.R. Haldeman, recommending that Presley’s request for a meeting be granted, White House aide Dwight Chapin writes:
…if the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside the government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with.
Haldeman’s scrawled response:
You must be kidding.
And here, for your reading pleasure, is White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh’s hilarious first-hand account of the meeting. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.
And now you know … the rest of the story.
Back in February, I posted on the left-handedness of recent presidents, here. That posting captured the fancy of the entire nation — well, maybe not, but it did spark an unusually high number of responses (some speculative, some research-based, some confessional, as in “I’m left-handed”).
Now that both the Democrats and the Republicans have done the right thing (er, the left thing) by naming portsiders Obama and McCain as their presidential candidates, the media are beginning to catch up to “The Monkey Cage,” as evidenced by this newspaper story.
The story quotes Daniel Geschwind, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at UCLA, to the effect that left-handers’ tendency toward bilateral brain function could enable them to visualize problems more broadly and with more complexity and could relate to the social and interactive skills needed to be successful in politics.
That’s pretty speculative, but the story goes on to note one well-established difference between left-handers and right-handers. According to Amar Klar, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute, “Handedness is related to the way the hair spins on the back of your head.” The whorl for right-handers curls clockwise in 92% of cases. In left-handers, the distribution is random, with half exhibiting a clockwise whorl and the other half spinning counterclockwise. (Sort of like toilets flushing counterclockwise in Australia, I guess.) The relevance of the whorl phenomenon to presidential politics is not immediately apparent, but perhaps one of the new generation of political scientists studying the physiological bases of political behavior can forge the link.
P.S. I know of no evidence that Bob Barr is left-handed, but it really doesn’t matter.
UPDATE: In response to popular demand (see the comments below), I launched an extensive research effort to find an answer to the vital question of “Is Ralph Nader left-handed?” Here’s what I found in my landmark three-second Google search:
[Hat tip to Erik Voeten]
From the obituary page of Saturday’s Washington Post comes the sad news of the passing of Charger, age six, distinguished member of the Fairfax County Police Department:
Beloved Bloodhound Charger Dies of Cancer
By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2008; Page B04
Charger could be bumbling.
When Fairfax County Police Lt. Patrick Ronan first brought him home, they’d take walks with his German shepherds. After their walk, the others would file straight into the house. Charger would run smack into the half-open screen door.
“Bloodhounds are dumb as a box of rocks unless they’re sniffin’,” Ronan said. But give Charger a whiff of human scent from a holdup note or from the hat of an Alzheimer’s patient and he’d wend a sniffing, drooling path in the right direction. “Their ears, when you look at them, are actually longer than their nose,” he said. “The ears are kicking up scent.”
When a woman who lived in an apartment building off Richmond Highway was raped, Ronan gave Charger a whiff of the attacker’s knife. Charger led Ronan to an apartment on the third floor.
There was no way the suspect would be dumb enough to attack someone in his own building, Ronan thought. So he led Charger back down for another go-round.
“We went right up to the third floor again, and he jumped up on the door,” Ronan said. The apartment’s resident was later arrested.
But being a bloodhound in a 399-square-mile county with a million people was sometimes frustrating. Trails go cold when criminals jump in cars, and that means many fizzled endings.
Other times, Charger would head off excitedly after a scent. Taking the cue, cruisers would rush ahead of him in the same direction — and find the target first.
Ronan and his wife and kids spent many hours setting off for hikes miles ahead of Charger, then hiding and waiting, to keep up his searching spirit.
“The last thing you want them to do is say, ‘This isn’t fun anymore,’ ” Ronan said. “The whole family’s got to be in there with you helping out, or it doesn’t work.”
Two weeks ago, Charger’s leg swelled, and Ronan thought it might be a snakebite from a copperhead in his Springfield yard. Charger was given antibiotics but was still lethargic and wouldn’t come out of his kennel. That’s when the cancer was discovered. He was dead in days.
Charger and his sister, Molly, were the county’s first bloodhounds. Molly is still at work. Two puppies, Cody and Shnoz, are in training.
The police department sent out a press release that was a departure from the typically sparse prose describing suspects and victims.
“For all of the great things he did, he was still a dog and chewed everything in sight. Somehow, that was OK with Lieutenant Ronan,” the release said.
“Charger was a very special friend, companion and dedicated police K9, he will be missed.”
Charger was 6.
Richard Nixon was, among other things, not a people person. Because he was often ill at ease with others, his staff contrived to put him in positions that would have the effect of humanizing him — attempts that typically backfired because he was so obviously uncomfortable or out of character. For example, trying to come across as one of the boys with the young male members of his staff, he once asked them, on a Monday morning, whether they had “done any fornicating over the weekend.”
The pictorial record is full of evidence of this side of Nixon’s multi-sided personality. For example, there’s the famous photo of Nixon out for a casual stroll at the beach — wearing a suit and tie:
Or Nixon, in obvious discomfort, feigning delight while being hugged by Sammy Davis, Jr.:
Or, most famously, Nixon solemnly posing with The King, looking like “How soon can I get out of this?” was foremost on his mind:
But now, from the unlikely venue of Lisbon, Portugal, comes evidence of a wild and crazy, fun-loving Nixon previously unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
While we were vacationing in Lisbon last week with friends, a member of our party espied the following in a restaurant review in Frommer’s Portugal, 19th edition. I faithfully record it here to provide future Nixon biographers a glimpse into a previously unrecognized dimension of Nixonian behavior:
A Severa. *. Good food and the careful selection of fadistas make this a perennial favorite. Every night, top male and female singers appear … As difficult or unsettling as it might be to imagine, before Richard Nixon became U.S. president, he came here with his wife, Patricia, and led a congalike line between tables while warbling the refrain, “Severa … Severa … Severa.” After midnight, tourists seem to recede a bit in favor of loyal habitues, who request and sometimes join in on their favorite fado number (though not usually forming Nixonian congo lines).
This changes everything.
For those too young to remember him, Tom Lehrer, an MIT mathematician, wrote and recorded some wonderful songs in the 1950s and 1960s satirizing various aspects of life, politics, and society.
At MIT, Lehrer regularly taught a quantitative methods course for political scientists, and based on that experience he composed a song about political science. (Are there any other songs about political science?) Yes, yes, I know: the name of the song he bintroduces a half-minute or so into this YouTube clip is “Sociology,” not “Political Science,” but it’s really about political science, as he explains.
If this brings back old memories for you, good. If you’re hearing it for the first time, even better.
[Hat tip to Harvey Feigenbaum]
I recently went to my favorite restaurant in the States, Per Se, and as usual just had an exceptional experience. While very few restaurants are on par with Per Se, Manhattan offers an extraordinary range of culinary delights such as Nobu, WD-50, Bouley, etc. Other major cities, such as Chicago, San Francisco (even though some friends from the area lament the decline in SF dining), Los Angeles, and Boston, also offer a great number of fantastic culinary choices. Which brings me to DC. Besides a handful of exceptions, such as CityZen, DC just doesn’t have a restaurant scene comparable to other major cities. Why? Why don’t up and coming young chefs want to open up restaurants in DC like they do in Chicago? The potential client base in DC has to be comparable to Chicago, and the rents should be less in DC. So why the lack of exciting culinary choices in DC?
Some assorted one-liners about the life of the graduate student that I found floating around the internet, unattributed…
The Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students
10. It doesn’t bother me at all that my college roommate is making $80,000 a year on Wall Street.
9. I’d be delighted to proofread your book/chapter/article.
8. My work has a lot of practical importance.
7. I would never date an undergraduate.
6. Your latest article was so inspiring.
5. I turned down a lot of great offers to come here.
4. I just have one more book to read and then I’ll start writing.
3. The department is giving me so much support.
2. My job prospects look really good.
1. No really, I’ll be out of here in only two more years.
Top Five Lies Told by Teaching Fellows
5. I’m not going to grant any extensions.
4. Call me any time. I’m always available.
3. It doesn’t matter what I think; write what you believe.
2. Think of the midterm as a diagnostic tool.
1. My other section is much better prepared than you guys.
You just might be a graduate student if…
…you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read.
…you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar.
…you rate coffee shops by the availability of outlets for your laptop.
…everything reminds you of something in your discipline.
…you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
…you look forward to summers because you’re more productive without the distraction of classes.
…you consider all papers to be works in progress.
…professors don’t really care when you turn in work anymore.
…you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.
…you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.
…you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
…you find yourself explaining to children that you are in “20th grade”.
…you start refering to stories like “Snow White et al.”
…you look forward to taking some time off to do laundry
I’ll get back to serious — or at least semi-serious — posts soon, but having spent the last few days convalescing with the able assistance of my beloved 19-year-old orange stripey blind Gooseberry, I figure it’s time for another post about cats. This one has been around for a while, but perhaps you haven’t seen it.
If you count a state’s congressional delegation not as the number of senators and House members currently representing that state but rather as the number of members of Congress who grew up there, you immediately encounter a striking fact: Easily the two best represented states, in terms of the number of native members of Congress per capita, are North and South Dakota:
“No other state even comes close to North Dakota’s 3.7 exported members of Congress for every 400,000 current residents, nor, for that matter, does any other state even come close to South Dakota’s 1.6 exported members per 400,000 current residents. Moreover, … in both North and South Dakota representation begins at home: every member of the two Dakota delegations was home-grown. Thus, in terms of all members of Congress (that is, natives of a state plus exports to other states) rather than just exports, the very same pattern holds: North Dakota, with 5.6 members of Congress per 400,000 residents, and South Dakota, with 3.2, stand out far above the rest.”
That’s from a piece by my colleague Garry Young and me, in the latest issue of PS: Political Science & Politics (HERE, gated). Garry and I decided to have some fun with these factoids, so we summoned up our social science tools to help us answer two basic questions about the “Dakota effect”: Why, and so what?
To address the first question, we tested an array of different explanations. Could it be, we wondered, that the Dakotas’ wholesale exportation of future senators and representatives to other states is simply an artifact of a broader depopulation of the Dakotas? Or how about the idea that because it’s too cold for children in the Dakotas to go outside and play and because they have no professional sports teams to sit in front of the TV and watch, by process of elimination they stay in their rooms and read and ultimately become little political science wonks? Or perhaps the superior intelligence of Dakotans (who, year in and year out, lead the nation in mean SAT scores) means that when they move to other states they automatically end up atop the gene pool and succeed in whatever pursuits they attempt, including winning political office? Our statistical analyses revealed that even when we took all these potential explanations into account, the Dakota effect survived. It seems that there’s just something about Dakotans that makes people want to elect them to Congress.
But what difference does this difference really make? To answer this question, we reanalyzed data from an earlier study of congressional earmarks for instituitions of higher education, adding one new predictor to the explanatory model: whether or not the district to which the earmarks were allocated was one of the Dakotas. The answer?
“During the period in question, the coefficient for the Dakota Effect was approximately $2.6 million per congressional district. This means that, with all the other factors that affected earmarks for higher education held constant, an extra $2.6 million was earmarked for each of the Dakotas’ two congressional districts – a tidy $5.2 million bonus for the Dakotas in all. And of course these were only the funds that Congress earmarked for institutions of higher education – a small slice of Congress’ overall discretionary spending pie.”
Other states, we concluded, have much to learn from the oft-maligned Dakotas:
“Taking their cue from the results reported here, states should begin providing college tuition support for promising high school seniors who vow to become political science majors at out-of-state schools. To be sure, this could prove costly in the short term, but these costs should be recouped in the medium to long run when the awardees get themselves elected to Congress while retaining their gratitude and deeply ingrained allegiance to their state of origin. To be sure, some states may not boast a critical mass of the wily stock capable of getting elected to Congress as outsiders – but many such states, e.g., Iowa, seem bent in any event on the ill-considered opposite strategy of encouraging their residents to stay at home.”
(Breaking news: Our tongue-in-cheek analysis doesn’t seem to be playing well in South Dakota. A reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader apparently visited the Cambridge University Press website, read the first page of the article, took umbrage at our slurs on the Dakotas, and contacted former South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who hadn’t read the article either but was only too willing to say some negative things about it. In one of those quotes, Senator McGovern alleges that Garry and I don’t know anything about South Dakota. I can’t speak for Garry, but of all the criticisms my work has ever received, this one cuts the deepest, for I am a veritable walking encyclopedia of South Dakota lore. For the Argus-Leader story, with the McGovern quotes, click HERE.)
Did you like that little ditty? Well, it’s become a cause celebre in France. Turns out that it’s that nation’s entry in this year’s Eurovision song contest. But — zut alors! — its lyrics are … are you ready for this? is the whole world about to come crashing down upon our heads? … in English. This, of course, is a crime against humanity and cannot be tolerated.
For the rest of the story, click here.
[Hat tip to Zsuzsa Csergo]
Click HERE for a “Rocky”-inspired video of the Democratic campaign.
[Hat tip to Matthew Yglesias]
The concept of “BIFFO,” long known to those of us from a small island on the western periphery of Europe, hits the political science blogosphere. As Matthew Shugart notes:
Ireland’s new Taoiseach will be a “Big ignorant fellow from Offaly.”
This explanation of the acronym very nearly accords with the more usual explanation that I’ve heard back home, with the prominent exception of the third word. More usually “fellow” is replaced by another word beginning with ‘f.’ Matthew fails to mention that the new Taoiseach, Brian Cowen1 is also a BUFFALO, or Big Ugly [Fellow] From Around Laois-Offaly. Important to know should you ever meet him and wish to preserve the diplomatic niceties of appropriate nomenclature &c.
1 No relation to Tyler, who was bemused when I told him a few years back that an Irish politician shared his surname; apparently it is a quite unusual name when it is spelled with an ‘en’ at the end rather than an ‘an.’
Forthcoming from James Fowler in PS: Political Science and Politics
Stephen Colbert, the host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, claims that politicians who appear on his show will become more popular and are more likely to win elections. Although online discussions cite anecdotal evidence in support of his claim, it has never been scrutinized scientifically. In this article I use “facts” (sorry, Stephen) provided by the Federal Election Commission to create a matched control group of candidates who have never appeared on The Colbert Report. I then compare the personal campaign donations they receive to those received by candidates who have appeared on the program’s segment “Better Know a District.” The results show that Democratic candidates who appear on the Report receive a statistically significant “Colbert bump” in campaign donations, raising 44% more money in a 30-day period after appearing on the show. However, there is no evidence of a similar boost for Republicans. These results constitute the first scientific evidence of Stephen Colbert’s influence on political campaigns.
Update: See also Fowler’s LA Times op-ed for the popularized version with extra truthiness …
We have two designs for the cover of our book (I won’t say which one I prefer). Ignoring the content of the book (who cares about that), which book would you buy based on the cover? This cover, we’ll call this one A,
or this one, we’ll call B.
just added this option, C (also changed the subtitle as well)
Thanks for your input!
***The publisher didn’t think anyone would buy a book with five authors, so my name will be stuck inside the jacket.
It pains me to think that many readers of The Monkey Cage will not understand the world-significant importance of the news conveyed in the title of this post. Fafblog was (and now is) the funniest and most intelligent political satire blog of all time. It departed, to the grinding and gnashing of teeth of the plain peoples of the Internets, sometime in 2006. Whole generations of blogreaders have grown up in the interim who are thoroughly unacquainted with the wisdom of the Medium Lobster. Now it has returned. Read and enjoy.
Do the test. (And look out for cyclists.)
I’m a biker.
No, I’m not that kind of biker. I’m this kind of biker:
(Okay, that’s not me. Notwithstanding the amazing resemblance, it’s actually Mario Cipollini, The Lion King, the most stylish cyclist in the history of the world. My role model.)
Anyway, I’m a “cyclist.” And a racer at that. Why, quelle surprise!, here I am, so very splendid in my red team kit — though not quite so splendid, I am forced to concede, as Mario Cipollini.
(More pictures and the headlined scary video are below the fold.)
Continue reading "The Joy of Bike Racing -- A Photo Essay with a Scary Video at the End" »
Remember, in Barry Levinson’s movie “Diner,” the part where the Steve Guttenberg character required his fiancee to pass an extremely difficult Baltimore Colts trivia test before the nuptials could proceed? I put my wife, Carol, through a similar ordeal during our long-ago courtship, drilling her relentlessly on college teams’ nicknames until I was sure she could tell a Duck from a Beaver, distinguish various Bulldogs from various Wildcats, and pull out an occasional oddity like the Thundering Herd and the Demon Deacons.
In the same spirit, Josh Pahigian recently posted to espn.com his personal list of the best team nicknames in college basketball, and as a team-names afficianado I must say that I’m impressed.
Right off the bat, though, I’ve got to disqualify his #1 choice on grounds that it’s so obvious that we shouldn’t even deign to list it. (There’s an old story that a reporter asked Leo Durocher whom he would consider the strongest man in the National League. “Gil Hodges,” Leo the Lip instantly replied. The reporter, obviously taken aback, said “How can you say that when Ted Kluszewski is in the league?” “Ah,” came the reply, “Big Klu’s so obvious that he doesn’t even count.”)
Applying the Big Klu Rule, I’m disqualifying the University of California - Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, who would be Every Thinking Person’s choice if eligible. Thus, with Pahigian’s remaining choices upgraded by one rank apiece, here’s the list, with a few visual aids thrown in gratis:
If you’ve always wanted to express yourself by creating pictures of church signs (and I’m sure you have), then help is on the way: The other day I stumbled upon a website that enables you to do just what you’ve been dreaming about all these years. The sign pictured above is my creation; as far as I know, no real church has yet proclaimed the omniscience of “The Monkey Cage.” I’m sure you can do better. To try it out for yourself (and you can select any of four other Christian denominations if you wish — we are ecumenical here, within certain bounds), click here. If you decide to post your handiwork as a comment, please keep it clean, for this is a G-rated blog.
And — hat tip to John Sides, who knows all about such matters because he’s a minister’s son — to help get your creative juices flowing, check out this.
This XKCD cartoon which is sweeping the blogosphere describes the motivations of le moyen blogger sensuel with a distressing degree of accuracy.
Westminster’s “Best in Show.”
Not ncessarily the best dog — in dog shows, the standard is how close the dog is to its breed standard, so this beagle was a better exemplar of its breed than any other dog was of its breed. So if you think, say, golden retrievers are preferable to beagles, then you might want to argue that a mediocre golden retriever is better than a great beagle.
Anyway, although I’m not a great fan of beagles, which I tend to regard as basset wannabes, I must say that when I first saw Uno in the hounds competition, I immediately said “That’s the one.” For a beagle, he’s a great-looking dog, and he has that showmanship and feistiness that usualy stands terrriers in such good stead in dog shows. This year, being a great beagle was good enough to make him Numero Uno.
P.S. I wouldn’t have posted on this subject because I just did a cat post, but my co-bloggers expected it of me and I didn’t want to disappoint them.
Ever vigilant to keep our readers abreast of cutting-edge public policy issues, we here at “The Monkey Cage” have been keeping a close tab (a close tabby?) on the brouhaha over the employment of cats in the workplace. Although some traditionalists contend that a feline’s place is in the home or, better, in the alley, those of us who know better recognize the many vital services that cats perform for humanity, besides snuggling and purring. Indeed, it turns out that the viability of a sizable portion of the service sector of the American economy depends directly on the contributions of assorted little Fluffies and Bootses.
I’m referring, of course, to the use of our feline friends as mousers and ratters in grocery stories, delis, restaurants, and butcher shops, especially in urban settings. If you’re not familiar with how this process works, let me explain. Take a cat, like Holly, pictured below, and plunk her down in the aisle of a deli, like this one in Williamsburg, and presto, you have just solved your rodent infestation problem. No calls to Orkin, no poison, no muss, no fuss. Holly and her many counterparts love their job, they show up for work faithfully every day, they work for sub-minimum wage (a little tuna every now and then if it’s a slow day for mice and rates), and they bother no one except the mice, the rats, the occasional asthmatic who wanders in to buy some chopped liver, and the busybodies at the health department.
The policy issue arises from the conflict between the afore-mentioned health department busybodies, who are changed with enforcing regulations that ban live animals from such places, on the one hand, and the recognition that rats, if left unchecked, are likely to overrun these places. Enter the cat (or not), the world’s most efficient mouse- and rat-killing machine. And they’re green technology to boot.
What to do, what to do? Here’s a New York Times story that clarifies the basic issues, but not the resolution, of this public health dilemma. My own cats wouldn’t recognize a mouse or a rat if they happened to run into one (which the blind Gooseberry might do) — or if they did, they’d scurry off in the other direction. On the other hand, we shop at catless grocery stores, and I’m pretty queasy about eating the meats that they package.
[Hat tip to Gina Lambright]
Way too small to decipher above, so test your cultural literacy here. If you’re stumped, most can be identified by posiitioning your cursor over them; clicking will lead you to their Wikipedia entry.
Some of these dentifications look pretty iffy — Alfred Hitchcock, for example, doesn’t look much like Alfred Hitchcock. And it’s a poor likeness of The King, but it’s unquestionably The King.
The very first thing I ever noticed about Barack Obama was that he’s left-handed. I pride myself in my ability to pick left-handers out of a crowd. For us left-handers, laterality is more salient than it is to those who do things the other way around.
Anyway, in case you were in doubt, here’s proof of Obama’s left-leaning tendencies. (For those to whom such things matter, he’s a White Sox fan.)
But that raises a question — or at least it did for my niece Kim, who, knowing of her uncle’s fixation on matters having to do with handedness (and, I suspect, grasping for hopeful signs about Obama’s presidential candidacy), asked me whether any of our recent presidents have been left-handers. I immediately responded that in this respect at least, Obama should not be viewed as the candidate of “change,” for several recent presidents — indeed, most of them — have shared Obama’s leftward leanings. Here, then, is a little gallery of recent presidential portsiders.
Continue reading "The Left Side of the Political Spectrum" »
Several years ago, I canceled my AOL account. Fine. Then, months later, they began billing me. After many phone calls, they stopped. Mysteriously, several months later, they started again. After many more phone calls, they stopped. Then, a year later, they started again. And so it went until, fed up, I simply began ignoring their attempts to get me to pay for services neither desired nor received. Then a collection agency began dunning me for payment. I ignored them, too. Ultimately they threatened unspecified “action” that would cause me much pain and discomfort. I told them to bring it on. They haven’t brought it on. Yet. Probably I will hear from them again.
And that brings me to the following.
Yesterday, while roaming the Internet in my spare time (which for an academic is the same as work time), I stumbled upon the saga of one Vincent Ferrari, pictured above and profiled here, and his attempt to cancel his AOL account.
Give a listen. For me, it was deja vu all over again. Maybe for you, too.
Just when I think I’ve gotten caught up, along comes something new.
Or, in this case, something derivative and not nearly as good as the original. But something inevitable. We should have seen it coming.
Click here to find out for yourself.
Could “McCain Mama” be next? Nope, not next — it’s already been done.
And here, as a Hit Parade Extra, is yet another “Obama Girl” wanna-be video, this one (“You’re So Lame”) focusing on George W. Bush.
[Hat tip to Paul Gronke for Hillary Boy; I found the others by myself, though I’m not sure why I bothered]
Those of us who detest professional football nonethless have a vested interest in the outcome of the upcoming Super Bowl. A victory for the New York Giants should line our pockets with money — or at least help keep our TIAA-CREF accounts solvent.
That, at least, is the implication of the Super Bowl Predictor of Stocks, which has correctly called the direction — up or down — of the following year’s Dow Jones Industrial Average 33 of 41 times, an 81% success rate.
The logic of the predictor is simple: If a team from the original NFL wins, the market is destined to go up; if one of the old AFL teams wins, the Dow is about to sink.
The Patriots of New England, one of the old AFL teams, are heavily favored. Even though I’m a devout non-fan of the sport, I’ll be pocketbook-cheering for an upset.
[Via William Power, “Win for the Patriots Is Win for ‘Da Bears,’” Wall Street Journal, 29 January, p. C2]
Until a few days ago I had never heard of “Obama Girl.” I knew that Barack Obama has a wife and a couple of daughters, and if you’d have asked me, I would have guessed that one of them must be “Obama Girl.” Wrong again. This momentous political-cultural phenomenon had completely passed me by.
This video debuted on YouTube back in June, and I recently became the 5,333,341st person to watch it, which tells you how oblivious I’ve gotten in terms of what’s happening in popular culture. If you’re as out of it as I seem to be, as a public service here and here and here and here and here and here are some catch-up materials.
Last summer PBS ran a series of four films by Mark Lewis on the theme of “Passion, Ambition and the Pursuit of Excellence in Unique Fields” (click here for an overview). That probably sounds like something that you’d prefer to miss, and that’s exactly what I did until my wife cajoled me into watching one episode in particular. It took more than the usual amount of cajoling, for the show in question was titled, incongruously, “Ferrets: The Pursuit of Excellence.”
Now, as my ever-popular canine and feline posts have indicated, I am an unabashed lover of furry animals. Not ferrets, though, which I’ve always thought of, on those rare occasions when I’ve thought of them at all, as nasty, dirty little rat-like creatures.
That said, I consider “Ferrets: The Pursuit of Excellence” to be easily the most enjoyable TV offering I’ve seen in years and years. It is to show-ferrets (I know, I know — the whole idea of a “show-ferret” is bizarre) and their people what Christopher Guest’s mockumentary, “Best in Show,” was to show-dogs and their people. Only much better, because these are real people.
A DVD version is available for purchase. As a prudent consumer, you may prefer to try it before you buy it. Here and here and here and here, then, are some snippets for your consideration. Try this movie and you’ll be charmed by the sheer looniness of it all. So will your kids, if you have any, except they may end up whining for a ferret. If they do, bear in mind that acceding to their wishes would put you in the same category as the ferret people in the program.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, you were either a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan. Your parents drove either a Chevy or a Ford. You preferred either Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. You liked either Elvis or …well, you liked Elvis.
Most importantly, though, you were either an Oreos family or a Hydrox family, and you could tell a lot about families by which they were. The Oreo families were, or so my anthropological investigations in a small midwestern town suggested, waspy types — Episcopal church-going, country club-belonging, Republican-voting pillars of the community who preferred Oreos because, after all, that’s what was appropriate for people like them to prefer.
We were a Hydrox family, about which I harbored mixed feelings throughout my youth. On the one hand, Hydrox simply tasted better than Oreos, and that was a very good thing. (We didn’t know then that Oreos contained pork lard; that should have bothered my family, though I’m not sure that it would have.) But being part of a Hydrox family put one under a social cloud — it was another badge, as if more were needed, that one really didn’t “belong” among all those Episcopal church-going, country club-belonging, Republican-voting pillars of the community.
All of the foregoing is by way of context for my response today after reading here that the Hydrox cookie is no more. In fact, it turns out that it hasn’t been with us for some time now — since 2003, to be exact, except in mashed-up form in some packaged ice creams. Close to half a century has passed since I bit into a Hydrox after dunking it in a glass of milk (as noted in the Wall Street Journal article, one thing Hydroxes had in their favor, besides tasting better than Oreos, was that they held up much better than Oreos when dunked). And even though I hadn’t even thought about Hydroxes for decades, I note with melancholy the passing of yet another American icon from an earlier era.
Continuing the funereal theme of a couple of recent “Monkey Cage” posts — one a frivolous one by me about the death of Eddie Miller, “The World’s Greatest Trencherman,” and the other a somber one by John about the passing of psychologist William McGuire, I submit for your consideration two of my all-time favorite obituaries. The first one I can only excerpt because I can’t get a workable link to it from the archive of the Washington Post, where it appeared under Adam Bernstein’s byline on August 30, 2001. The second one, written by Douglas Martin, appeared in the New York Times, November 18, 2001.
What makes these two obituaries stand out for me is the combination of the inventiveness and the sheer weirdness of the accomplishments chronicled therein. Plus these stories are written so very well.
In any event, here, first, are excerpts from Adam Bernstein’s obituary of Frank V. Ehling:
Frank V. Ehling, who turned a childhood hobby of flying model airpolanes into a full-time career, died Aug. 21 at his home in Laurel of complications from a stroke a decade ago.
Mr. Ehling’s love of flight extended to designing an innovative model plane for children and selling exotic birds.
From 1960 to 1982, he was technical director of the Academy of Model Aeronautics.
…Some of Mr. Ehling’s handiwork is also on display at the National Air and Space Museum. He built what is reported to be the smallest flying models at the museum, two fly-powered balsa-and-tissue airplanes with a three-inch wingspan. The planes’ engines are houseflies attached to the wings with glue.
…to impress each ‘engine’ into service, Mr. Ehling honed an effective technique involving cupping a fly with his hands and then hurling it to the ground to knock it unconscious. He would then dab glue on its rear end, carefully avoiding its delicate wings, and attach the fly to the plane. He also was known to capture the fly, stick it in the freezer and glue it to the wood while it was immobile from the cold.
Either way — as the fly gained consciousness or returned to room temperature — the winged insect would lift the model plan into the air.
And here is Douglas Martin’s obituary of Melvin Burkhart, aka “The Human Blockhead.”
Throughout the year, 24-7-365 — from the pollen-laden spring season through the leaf mold-rich autumn and into the frosty winter — we political scientists, being human (no wise remarks, please), frequently sneeze. Like most other humans, however, the great majority of us just sneeze, letting it all hang out, so to speak.
In light of John’s earlier post and all the comments it sparked about what political science has to contribute to the world, I, as a political scientist, consider it my duty to present for your edification and, I hope, for your behavior modification, this vital, and potentially life-saving, information for sneezers and sneezees alike concerning the appropriate modality for nasal suspiration. It’s the least I can do.
