GOODMANIA

Changing Mores, As Seen Through advertising

2010-03-30T15:53:00.002-04:00

This is a great Post about how advertising has reflected what we as a society find aceptable.

As it says, watching this ad is one minute of your life you'll thoroughly enjoy.

Why medical research isn't as useful to you as it could be

2010-03-26T19:28:00.000-04:00

LA Times health blog: Only 32% of medication studies compare the drug in question to already available treatments, rather than just placebo. And only 11% compared the drugs to non-pharma based treatments, like surgery or lifestyle changes. For evidence-based medicine (let alone cheaper healthcare) to work, stuff like this has gotta get fixed. (Via Steve Silberman)

What we were all thinking

2010-03-25T19:26:00.000-04:00

via Texts From Last night

2010-03-24T19:24:00.000-04:00

(248):

Bring your kids so they can distract our kids so we can drink beer in peace.

HCR

2010-03-23T19:14:00.001-04:00

Welcome back!

2010-03-09T20:13:00.000-05:00

I Am...The Internet!

2010-02-13T15:16:00.000-05:00

Schooled! Pwned! In your face!

2010-02-12T14:35:00.000-05:00

No matter how you say it, she gave it to Bourdain so hard.

Dick Cheney in a Bumpercar c. 1976

2010-02-12T12:51:00.000-05:00

Empire Propaganda

2010-02-11T19:02:00.000-05:00

We Should Try These Fuckers.

2010-02-09T18:58:00.000-05:00

Because we are a country founded on the rule of law. And because we shouldn't be GIANT FUCKING PUSSIES WHO CANNOT CROSS THE STREET WITHOUT WETTING OUR PANTS.

Putting Things in Perspective

2010-02-08T18:48:00.000-05:00

I like looking at stars, because it helps re-orient me to the world, and reminds me of my place in the universe. This sort of does the same thing.

Engage!

2010-02-07T18:34:00.000-05:00

He will get you your money.

2010-02-06T09:38:00.001-05:00

I think he's the lawyer that represented Dirty Harry and John McClane.

Hand Ninja.

2010-02-05T19:59:00.000-05:00

EMBED-Asian Chick's Awesome Hand Ninja - Watch more free videos

This is the entire Tae Kwon Do White Belt test and more...

How To Win the World Cup

2010-02-03T19:48:00.001-05:00

Field a team of these things.

As The Awl notes:

Frustrated by the fact that their country has never won a World Cup soccer championship, Japanese scientists have developed a robot that can kick a soccer ball over 200 kilometers an hour. (That’s about 125 MPH in American.) Japan hopes to field a team of these motorized super-players in this year’s tournament, which kicks off in South Africa in June. As demonstrated in the horrific video above, the potentially lethal machine can blast appendages off any defender foolhardy enough to try to defend the net. “Do not stand in the way of our soccer robot’s power,” warned Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Tatsuo Kawabata. “We will achieve a World Cup victory. We will stop at nothing.”

homage to tarantino

2010-02-01T19:43:00.000-05:00

Ibraheem Youssef: “Inglourious Basterds” & “Death Proof” & “Jackie Brown” from his “Quentin Tarantino tribute” series.

Limited edition (500) signed + numbered 12” x 18” screenprints, as well as a smaller number (200) of 24” x 36” posters, are available for purchase here.

Bad Picture.

2010-01-31T19:35:00.000-05:00

Via Wonkette: This is just how Germans make announcements.

Dinosaur Ballet

2010-01-30T19:27:00.000-05:00

Have a Great Weekend everyone.

2010-01-29T18:36:00.000-05:00

More here.

God's Ice Cube

2010-01-28T20:23:00.000-05:00

From ToothpasteforDinner.

A letter to the Conservative movement.

2010-01-27T20:21:00.000-05:00

Read this now.

We need more intellectual debate about the ideologies behind our ideologies, than we do about the ideologies themselves.

It's a Trap!

2010-01-27T10:48:00.002-05:00

This tee shirt by Matt Leyen sold out on Woot today

Yes, I also just have a Whipped Cream maker at home. For cooking.

2010-01-26T20:01:00.000-05:00

Media Companies Are INCAPABLE Of Adapting.

2010-01-25T19:56:00.001-05:00

Fuck You NBC.

As this article in the NYTimes alludes, businesses should be adapting to consumers; consumers don't need to adapt to a company's business model. NBC starts off with a big fail in the oncoming generational shift.

I suppose not...

2010-01-24T19:48:00.002-05:00

Link: giagantor.com

From R. Sikoryak envisioning an existentialist superhero.

A Decade, As Seen On the Printed Page

2010-01-23T19:53:00.000-05:00

Scott Brown or Why the Dems are Going to Hell in a Handbasket.

2010-01-22T19:26:00.000-05:00

A Political Post:

So Massachusetts voted for a Republican. Surprising, but not like: Oh my god the world is ending, exciting. The Democratic candidate said she wasn't a Red Sox fan. She was doomed to lose.

But the problem that's exposed to me at least, by this is threefold, exposed by the reaction of the Democratic party to the loss as represented via the effort to reform health care. (By the way Scott Brown's position on this was disgusting. See here.):

1) Democracy in this country is no longer rule by majority. The Democrats have a bigger majority still than anyone has had in the Senate since the 70s, but they are worried they can't get their policies through. That's because rule in this country is now by the supermajority. That's a problem.

2) The Filibuster has become an abused tool in the Senate. Which is why you need a supermajority. In the 1960s, 11% of bills that came to the floor in the Senate were threatened to be filibustered. By the 1990s that had jumped to 80%. Now I think the Filibuster is probably a useful tool within our democracy, but politics has become so partisan and so win at all cost, that it actually prevents anyone from governing the country.

3) The agenda of the opposition is neither to present new or different ideas, but to obstruct the President's agenda. Thus making it impossible for the governing party to, well, govern.

stillness is the move

2010-01-21T19:04:00.002-05:00

I've wanted to post that for awhile. I loved "Bitte Orca" last year's Dirty Projectors album. And this song was all over the place. It's a great cover Solange has. The reason I post it now is because of this interview which is awesome and fascinating about music racism and the navel gazing nature of music (and really all criticism). Check it out.

Let us have more and better fucking, fighting and bulls.”

2010-01-20T19:56:00.000-05:00

“To hell with delicate studies of the American scene. Fuck the American scene. Fuck moers [sic], manners, customs all that horse shit. Let us have more and better fucking, fighting and bulls.”

- Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to Ezra Pound

Leno Vs. Conan

2010-01-19T17:31:00.001-05:00

Thank god someone explained it in a way I can understand.

We're just different.

2010-01-17T19:44:00.000-05:00

Little asian PC girl vs. MAC parody - watch more funny videos

One

2010-01-15T17:40:00.000-05:00

Jimmy Fallon and a handful of Muppets, breakdown into an impromptu version of “One” (not Bono’s, the “loneliest number” verzh) before the actual show started taping. Cameramen assured the blogosphere that this was impromptu, but they probably lie.

Still.

Brilliant.

2010-01-14T19:30:00.000-05:00

USB Wall outlet.

Fuck Pat Robertson.

2010-01-14T10:49:00.002-05:00

There's no reason to go into how despicable Pat Robertson's comments regarding the recent disaster in Haiti were. I'm not even going to link or put up a clip where he insinuates the earthquake was a blessing in disguise and the result of Haitians "pact with the devil." You can Google that.

What I would direct you to are two stories: One in BoingBoing explains Haiti's real "deal with the devil" :

Pat Robertson thinks that Haiti is poverty stricken (and earthquake-stricken) because the country made a deal with Satan to help them overthrow the French.

Back in May, the Times Online provided some slightly better insight into Haiti's past. Beyond a vague assumption that Imperialism had probably screwed Haiti somehow, I didn't know much about the country's history. Reading this story has been nothing short of nauseating.

Summary: Haiti was forced to pay France for its freedom. When they couldn't afford the ransom, France (and other countries, including the United States) helpfully offered high-interest loans. By 1900, 80% of Haiti's annual budget went to paying off its "reparation" debt. They didn't make the last payment until 1947. Just 10 years later, dictator François Duvalier took over the country and promptly bankrupted it, taking out more high-interest loans to pay for his corrupt lifestyle. The Duvalier family, with the blind-eye financial assistance of Western countries, killed 10s of thousands of Haitians, until the Haitian people overthrew them in 1986. Today, Haiti is still paying off the debt of an oppressive dictator no one would help them get rid of for 30 years.

The rest of the world refuses to forgive this debt.

So, in a way, maybe Robertson is right. Haiti is caught in a deal with the devil, and the devil is us.

Update: mgfarrelly points out another thing I didn't know—the U.S. Congress is currently considering a bill called The Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation. Part of what this bill would do is help countries like Haiti get their debt canceled, without making that cancellation conditional on things like closing down free schools or raising the cost of fresh water. Maybe a good time to contact your representatives about about this bi-partisan measure.

The second link is from TheAwl:

Pat Robertson's ability to use any natural disaster as the springboard for a provocative and deeply ignorant remark that expresses his own blinkered and bigoted worldview of "morality" is so commonplace and predictable by this point that it usually seems unworthy of noting. His comment yesterday about Haiti having caused its own massive tragedy by making "a pact with the devil" falls well within this category, and ordinarily I'd ignore it, but this response by Haitian ambassador Raymond Joseph is so perfect—direct, intelligent, filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening—that it deserves as much currency as it can get. It's a shame that we live in a world where something like this is both necessary and remarkable, but there you are.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Alma

2010-01-13T19:35:00.001-05:00

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.

Worth putting on full screen,

(Get well soon AG-M).

WTF?

2010-01-12T19:46:00.001-05:00

Cianci Mulling Comeback in Rhode Island

from Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

Former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci -- who served more than four years in federal prison for running a criminal enterprise out of City Hall -- says he is "taking a good look" at challenging Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), the Providence Journal reports.

Cianci "also says that a legal argument could be made to allow him to run for mayor of Providence in November, but he's not saying whether he'll test it."

Amen.

2010-01-12T19:22:00.001-05:00

Who knew the Amen Break was created here in DC? Who says DC hasn't contributed anything to Hip-Hop?

It Made My Day

2010-01-12T19:17:00.005-05:00

IMMD.com is sort of the reverse of FML.com.

Here's some good ones of late:

I was driving down the highway and there was a sign in front of a fireworks store that read: “Even Creationists appreciate a Big Bang” IMMD.

I was at the store and there was a kid bouncing and rolling down the freezer sections doors. After a moment I heard his mother say "How many times have I told you we don’t play Katamari in public?!" (Thanks to NC for this one).

011110

2010-01-11T14:50:00.003-05:00

Today's date is a Palindrome! It's the second palindromic date this year (01022010)!

Wikipedia has these examples of Palindromes, but there are many, many more!

A dog! A panic in a pagoda!
Ah, Satan sees Natasha.
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Do geese see God?
I prefer pi.
If I had a hi-fi.
Ma is as selfless as I am.
Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.
Never odd or even.
No devil lived on.
No lemon, no melon.
No, sir, away! A papaya war is on!
Red rum, sir, is murder.
Rise to vote, sir.
So many dynamos!
A man a plan a canal, panama

To celebrate, watch this!

What on Lost

2010-01-10T13:22:00.001-05:00

Can't wait til the season premier, which may get bumped by the Presiden'ts State of the Union Address. I mean seriously, who does Obama think he is?

UPDATE: Looks like the State of the Union is getting moved. Hooray White House!

O'Biden

2010-01-09T07:31:00.000-05:00

Via Taegan Goddard's Politcal Wire:

The forthcoming book, Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, reports that McCain campaign aides had Sarah Palin refer to Joe Biden by his first name in the vice presidential debate because she had the unfortunate habit of calling him "O'Biden" when using his last name.

In fact, a Political Wire reader sends over a clip from the debate where she slipped and actually called him O'Biden.

Here's the video clip from the 2008 vice presidential debate:

UP!

2010-01-08T14:45:00.000-05:00

UP was great, and this remix is great too. I've posted other stuff by this guy on the blog before.

Interestingly, there was an article in the NYTimes recently about UP, and how it is angling for an academy award for best picture. This in spite of the fact that there is a best animated feature category.

UP would end up competing in the animated category with Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. As much as I enjoyed UP, I enjoyed Fox a whole lot more. UP is the perfect example of why Pixar makes kick ass movies (though my favorite is still The Incredibles), but it definitely wasn't the best movie or the best animated movie I saw last year.

Dude in Speedo Dancing.

2010-01-07T11:07:00.000-05:00

Nope, I don't get it either.

Is America losing the free world?

2010-01-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

From the Financial Times:

America is losing the free world

By Gideon Rachman

Published: January 4 2010

Ever since 1945, the US has regarded itself as the leader of the “free world”. But the Obama administration is facing an unexpected and unwelcome development in global politics. Four of the biggest and most strategically important democracies in the developing world – Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey – are increasingly at odds with American foreign policy. Rather than siding with the US on the big international issues, they are just as likely to line up with authoritarian powers such as China and Iran.

The US has been slow to pick up on this development, perhaps because it seems so surprising and unnatural. Most Americans assume that fellow democracies will share their values and opinions on international affairs. During the last presidential election campaign, John McCain, the Republican candidate, called for the formation of a global alliance of democracies to push back against authoritarian powers. Some of President Barack Obama’s senior advisers have also written enthusiastically about an international league of democracies.

But the assumption that the world’s democracies will naturally stick together is proving unfounded. The latest example came during the Copenhagen climate summit. On the last day of the talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India – but failed each time. The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport.

So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India. Symbolically, the leaders had to squeeze up to make space for the American president around the table.

There was more than symbolism at work. In Copenhagen, Brazil, South Africa and India decided that their status as developing nations was more important than their status as democracies. Like the Chinese, they argued that it is fundamentally unjust to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of poor countries at a lower level than the emissions of the US or the European Union; all the more so since the industrialised west is responsible for the great bulk of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

Revealingly, both Brazilian and Chinese leaders have made the same pointed joke – likening the US to a rich man who, after gorging himself at a banquet, then invites the neighbours in for coffee and asks them to split the bill.

If climate change were an isolated example, it might be dismissed as an important but anomalous issue that is almost designed to split countries along rich-poor lines. But, in fact, if you look at Brazil, South Africa, India and Turkey – the four most important democracies in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the greater Middle East – it is clear that none of them can be counted as a reliable ally of the US, or of a broader “community of democracies”.

In the past year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has cut a lucrative oil deal with China, spoken warmly of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, and congratulated Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad on his “victory” in the Iranian presidential election, while welcoming him on a state visit to Brazil.

During a two-year stint on the United Nations Security Council from 2006, the South Africans routinely joined China and Russia in blocking resolutions on human rights and protecting authoritarian regimes such as Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Iran.

Turkey, once regarded as a crucial American ally in the cold war and then trumpeted as the only example of a secular, pro-western, Muslim democracy, is also no longer a reliable partner for the west. Ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq, opinion polls there have shown very high levels of anti-Americanism. The mildly Islamist AKP government has engaged with America’s regional enemies – including Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran – and alarmed the Americans by taking an increasingly hostile attitude to Israel.

India’s leaders do seem to cherish the idea that they have a “special relationship” with the US. But even the Indians regularly line up against the Americans on a range of international issues, from climate change to the Doha round of trade negotiations and the pursuit of sanctions against Iran or Burma.

So what is going on? The answer is that Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and India are all countries whose identities as democracies are now being balanced – or even trumped – by their identities as developing nations that are not part of the white, rich, western world. All four countries have ruling parties that see themselves as champions of social justice at home and a more equitable global order overseas. Brazil’s Workers’ party, India’s Congress party, Turkey’s AKP and South Africa’s African National Congress have all adapted to globalisation – but they all retain traces of the old suspicions of global capitalism and of the US.

Mr Obama is seen as a huge improvement on George W. Bush – but he is still an American president. As emerging global powers and developing nations, Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey may often feel they have more in common with a rising China than with the democratic US.

gideon.rachman@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/rachman

Post and read comments at Gideon Rachman’s blog

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ef8f012-f969-11de-8085-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Baby Badass

2010-01-05T16:34:00.001-05:00

I get weally, weally sweepy when I rock out too.

Tape Measure Master!

2010-01-04T13:09:00.000-05:00

I like how proud of him his friends/co-workers are.

Bartitsu

2010-01-03T18:51:00.000-05:00

I've been waiting until the new Sherlock Holmes movie came out to post this, which was on BoingBoing months ago.

[Moriarity and I] tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of Bartitsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went.
-- Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House

Britain's most popular literary character of the late 19th century, Sherlock Holmes was well known for his towering intellect and need for constant mental stimulation. To satisfy his intellectual needs, he engaged in a number of trans-Golden Third activities including sword fighting, boxing, and stick fighting, as well as frequent recreational narcotic use.

Although better known for his reasoning ability than for his fighting skills, he was quite capable of defending himself when the chips were down. As the above quote suggests, the detective mastered a now little known but very effective fusion of British boxing techniques and Japanese martial arts called Bartitsu,. Bartitsu is a little known but ingenious self defense skill which I cover in my current book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers.

Bartitsu was invented by a British engineer named Edward Barton-Wright, who combined the martial arts skills he learned while building railways in Japan with the stick-and-sword fighting skills he mastered in Europe. Bartitsu drew heavily from French stick fighting techniques, English boxing, and Japanese jujitsu.) Upon his return to London from Japan in 1899, Barton-Wright set up a martial arts school to teach Bartitsu to Englishmen. Presumably that's how a Londoner such as Sherlock Holmes would have learned the technique. (FYI: There's a well done compilation of 1890s vintage Bartitsu instructions available on Amazon.)

Ancient Hebrew Universe

2010-01-02T18:45:00.000-05:00

Battlestar Rhapsody

2009-12-30T18:38:00.000-05:00

This is awesome in and of itself. But it's got more pop-culture references than you can shake a stick at. That makes it super awesome.

Menu Mind Games

2009-12-29T18:29:00.004-05:00

New York Magazine has a pretty neat article on how restaurants structure menus to drive customers to choose one thing or another.

Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, high-profit item—in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make,” Poundstone explains. “A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.” Poundstone uses Balthazar’s menu to illustrate these ideas.

1. The Upper Right-Hand Corner
That’s the prime spot where diners’ eyes automatically go first. Balthazar uses it to highlight a tasteful, expensive pile of seafood. Generally, pictures of food are powerful motivators but also menu taboos—mostly because they’re used extensively in lowbrow chains like Chili’s and Applebee’s. This illustration “is as far as a restaurant of this caliber can go, and it’s used to draw attention to two of the most expensive orders,” Poundstone says.

2. The Anchor
The main role of that $115 platter—the only three-digit thing on the menu—is to make everything else near it look like a relative bargain, Poundstone says.

3. Right Next Door
At a mere $70, the smaller seafood platter next to Le Balthazar seems like a deal, though there’s no sense of how much food you’re getting. It’s an indefinite comparison that also feels like an indulgence—a win-win for the restaurant.

4. In The Vicinity
The restaurant’s high-profit dishes tend to cluster near the anchor. Here, it’s more seafood at prices that seem comparatively modest.

5. Columns Are Killers
According to Brandon O’Dell, one of the consultants Poundstone quotes in Priceless, it’s a big mistake to list prices in a straight column. “Customers will go down and choose from the cheapest items,” he says. At least the Balthazar menu doesn’t use leader dots to connect the dish to the price; that draws the diner’s gaze right to the numbers. Consultant Gregg Rapp tells clients to “omit dollar signs, decimal points, and cents … It’s not that customers can’t check prices, but most will follow whatever subtle cues are provided.”

6. The Benefit Of Boxes
“A box draws attention and, usually, orders,” Poundstone says. “A really fancy box is better yet. The fromages at the bottom of the menu are probably high-profit puzzles.”

7. Menu Siberia
That’s where low-margin dishes that the regulars like end up. The examples here are the easy-to-miss (and relatively inexpensive) burgers.

8. Bracketing
A regular trick, it’s when the same dish comes in different sizes. Here, that’s done with steak tartare and ravioli—but because “you never know the portion size, you’re encouraged to trade up,” Poundstone says. “Usually the smaller size is perfectly adequate.”

On Being Secretary

2009-12-28T15:54:00.002-05:00

Meeting Of The Diplomats

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

NewsweekBy Jon Meacham

Two of the most prominent secretaries of state in recent history sat down with NEWSWEEK's Jon Meacham to discuss their relationships with their respective presidents and the difficulties of managing diplomacy during wartime.

Excerpts:

Meacham: What has surprised you most since becoming secretary of state?

Clinton: Well, probably the intensity of the work. It's just a 24/7 job. It sounds almost banal to say, [but] it's a really big world out there, and the United States has responsibilities practically everywhere. And the nature of the challenges we're facing are not only bilateral and multilateral, but they are transnational. One of the biggest challenges for me personally is to keep trying to present an affirmative agenda, not a reactive one, because you could end up being kind of an inbox secretary of state. You are never off duty. Because you land, you begin to work, and you go the next place and you land and begin to work. When you come back, your inbox is a foot high.

Kissinger : That is very comparable to my experience. I had been national-security adviser before I became secretary of state. So I saw the issues that reach the White House and the issues that reach the secretary. The issues that reach the White House are most frequently strategic, while as secretary of state, as Hillary has pointed out, there are as many constituencies as there are countries with which we have relationships. So at the end of every day you almost have to make a decision-whom are you going to insult by not dealing with his or her problems? [Clinton laughs.] Because there's no possible way you could get through. It's a job that requires 24-hour attention.One of the problems of government is to separate the urgent from the important and make sure you're dealing with the important and don't let the urgent drive out the important. Another challenge one has as secretary is that I think it's the best staff in town, but it's also the most individualistic staff ...

Clinton: Mm-hmm.

Kissinger: ... in town. With so many constituencies, to get them to work toward a coherent goal is a huge assignment for the secretary.

Clinton: It is.

Kissinger: Even though I had been in the White House for four years before, I didn't realize the magnitude of it until I actually got to the seventh floor [of the State Department].

Clinton: I would add to what Henry said that in addition to the urgent and the important, you try to keep your eye on the long-term trend lines because what is neither urgent nor important today might become one or the other by next year or the year after. And that's a whole different set of skills that is required. I'm always reaching down into the building and saying, "What are we doing on energy security and independence? What are we doing to work with Europe so that they will come up with a common policy through the EU on their own energy needs? What are we doing on food security?" There were riots last year. You look at changing climate patterns, migration patterns. Food is going to become more and more of an issue. What are we doing on pandemic disease with the H1N1 danger, with the problems that global health presents? An area that we're beginning to pay attention to, which is not in the headlines, is the Arctic. With the melting of the ice, with sea lanes opening that were never there before, or only-seasonal lanes becoming more all-weather, with five countries ringing the Arctic, which is an ocean, not a land mass like Antarctica. With Russia saying that they are going to have an expedition next year to plant their flag on the North Pole. With Canada saying, "No, you'd better not." This is an area that we have to pay real attention to, but it's not an area that I get called about by reporters or have to answer questions about at the White House yet. So there's a matrix of issues. It is exactly how I think about it: the urgent, the important, and then the long term.

How important is the relationship between the secretary and the president?

Clinton: Oh, I think it's critically important. First of all, it's critical to the formulation of policy and the giving of advice and having the perspective of diplomacy and development at the table when decisions of moment are made. Speaking for myself and I think other secretaries with whom I've spoken, including Henry, it is such a key relationship that you really have to invest time and effort in it. I work closely with not only [national-security adviser] Jim Jones but also [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates. But at the end of the day, it's that sort of funnel; the tough decisions end up in the Oval Office. And you can't just walk in and say to the president, "Here's what I think you should do." It takes a lot of thought and effort. I meet with the president one-on-one once a week. I'm in other meetings with him with the national-security team. It's a constant conversation.

Kissinger: I fundamentally agree-the relationship of the president and the secretary is absolutely key. The State Department has a tendency to insist on its prerogative that it is exclusively entitled to conduct foreign policy. My view is that when you assert your prerogatives you've already lost the bureaucratic battle. I saw the president every day when we were both in town because I felt it was absolutely essential that we thought along the same lines. I was lucky. I had extraordinarily close relationships with the two presidents I served. In fact, if one looks at the history of the secretaries of state, it's rare. If they don't have a close relationship, they don't last.

Clinton: What I have found hardest to balance is the amount of travel that is expected today. One would think that in an era where communication is instantaneous, you would not have to get on an airplane and go sit in a meeting. But, in fact, it's almost as though people are more desirous of seeing someone in person.

Kissinger: Because they have to have explained to them what is really being thought, which you can't put through cables.

Clinton: You can't. And because press coverage, with all due respect, often raises fears and anxieties that are not rooted in any decision process. People sit around in capitals all over the world reading tea leaves, trying to make sense of what we're doing. We have to go and meet and talk and listen, and it is a challenge to manage all of the relationships you have to manage when you're on an airplane as much as I am these days. But that's why having the trust and confidence of the president means that you can do the travel, check back in, report back in without worrying that you're not on the same page because you've talked at length about where you're headed before you go.

I think that, of course, countries make decisions based on their own assessment of their national interests. But part of what you can attempt to do when you've developed a relationship is to offer different ways of looking at that national interest, to try to find more common ground. And it's going to be a more likely convergence if the person with whom you're talking feels that they've already developed a personal understanding of you and a personal connection with you. And I've spent, as Henry has, an enormous amount of time just building those relationships. Because it is all about having enough trust between leaders and countries so that misunderstandings don't occur, but also on the margins, there can be a greater appreciation of the other's point of view.

Kissinger: The difficulty here is in the relations between countries. Very often there arises a gray area where the national interest is not self-evident or [is] disputed, where there is sort of a 2 percent margin of uncertainty. It's very important to establish relationships before you need anything, so that there is a measure of respect in negotiations once they occur or when a crisis develops. When you travel as secretary, one problem you have is that the press comes with you and wants an immediate result because it justifies their trip. And sometimes the best result is that you don't try to get a result but try to get an understanding for the next time you go to them. I don't know whether that would be your experience.

Clinton: It is exactly my experience.

What is the role of theory and doctrine when you are behind the desk or on the plane?

Clinton: Well, Henry's the expert on theory and doctrine. I'm someone who thinks that it could help provide a framework and direction and lessons from history. There are patterns that can be discerned, but the ingredients for every single challenge that you face are not cookie-cutter. You have to be able to be creative and agile and responsive and have enough instincts to recognize the opportunities when they arise and then retrospectively fit it into a doctrine is what I would probably say [laughs].

Kissinger: Because I started life as a professor, I was concerned with doctrines and theory. But professors have a hell of a time getting their concepts relevant to a contemporary situation. They don't always understand that as a professor, you have all the time in the world to write your book. As a professor, you could come up with absolute solutions. As a secretary of state, there is almost no solution that you could achieve in one blow. You could only achieve it in a series of steps.

You are both wartime secretaries of state. You have nothing to compare it to, but what complications do you think warfare adds to diplomacy?

Clinton: Well, I can only speak from the experience we've had this past year where President Obama inherited two wars and had to make some early fast decisions that were waiting for him, not of his making. I give him high marks for taking the time and putting in place a process for us to examine the assumptions and ask the hard questions. Because the war in Iraq is winding down, but as the war winds down and our military troops leave, the State Department and USAID [United States Agency for International Development] are expected to assume even more responsibility. I'll give you one example: the military has been doing the police training in Iraq. They have a lot of resources to do these jobs. Not only tens of thousands of bodies but all kinds of equipment and flexibility in funding streams that are not part of the experience of the State Department or USAID, and I'm having to accept the responsibility, which is going to be handed off. That's a very daunting undertaking.

In Afghanistan, we were all part of the lengthy analysis to determine the way forward. And on both the military and the civilian side there was a conclusion reached that military force alone would not be successful. Perhaps it's an obvious conclusion, but it is one that raises a lot of questions that then State and USAID have to answer. It is so much easier to get resources when you are in the Defense Department than it is when you are in the State Department and USAID. So a huge part of your budget becomes Iraq, Afghanistan, and then the civilian assistance going into Pakistan. In a time of budget constraint like we're facing now, it's just much more difficult for us to get the resources that we're expected to have, but the responsibilities still remain. So, it's the tension of the stress that comes with any kind of wartime situation, because when our young men and women in uniform are put in harm's way, increasingly so are our civilians because they are expected to go right out there with the military. If we say we're going to work on agriculture in Afghanistan, the agronomist is there the next day after the fighting stops. So it adds to the complexity and the sense of responsibility.

Kissinger: I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it.

Clinton: Right.

Kissinger: Nobody has more at stake than the administration in office. But if you look at the debates we had on Vietnam, Iraq, and so forth, ending the war became defined as the withdrawal of forces and as the primary if not the exclusive exit strategy. But in fact the best exit strategy is victory. Another is diplomacy. Another is the war just dying out. But if you identify exit with withdrawal of American forces, you neglect the political objective. In such circumstances you trap yourself in a position in which the administration in office gets assaulted for insufficient dedication to ending the war, [and] it has to do things that can be against its better judgment. We often found ourselves there.

This is my attitude toward the administration on the war, whether I agree with every last detail or not. The second point that Hillary made is about the civilian side of it, and there is a third element, which is the war will have to find, at some point, a diplomatic outcome. There has to be something that recognizes what the outcome is, in the name of which it can be defended. The disaster after Vietnam was that we would not support what had been negotiated. Whatever emerges in Afghanistan has to be supported, and it needs a legal framework internationally, and that couldn't exist yet. I would think that it's a big challenge that the secretary faces. But the debate ought to be in that framework and not "Do we want to end the war? How quickly can we end the war?" I take it for granted that the administration wants to end it as quickly as is at all possible. Why would they not?

In the popular mind, I think there's sometimes a sense that there's diplomacy and then there's military force. There's a hawk-dove simplicity. What would be the message you would want voters and Americans to have in their heads as they are evaluating Afghanistan, Iraq, the negotiations with Iran going forward?

Clinton: I want people to know we may be sending more troops [to Afghanistan], but we're also intensifying our diplomatic and political efforts and doing what we can alongside the people of Afghanistan to deliver results in terms of better services for them, all of which are part of our strategic view of how you reverse the momentum of the Taliban. So it's all connected. It's not either/or any longer.

Kissinger: Whenever one creates a diplomatic forum, one has to understand that there has to be a combination of rewards and penalties and that the other side will make its conclusions on the basis of benefits and risks. One has to be able to construct that, and one should never put a poor negotiator in the room and say, now you will start making compromises. Create the impression of endless willingness to compromise and you almost invite deadlines. That's the challenge we now have in North Korea and have had in North Korea for 10 years. In this sense, diplomacy and foreign policy and other elements of political activity have to be closely linked and have to be understood by the negotiators. That's why Hillary has the most exciting job in the government.

Clinton: But it's also more like a conductor than a soloist.

Obama-larity.

2009-12-19T11:47:00.000-05:00

The Awl has come up with some very witty things to say about the White House Flicker stream. I'd check it out of I were you and I wanted to laugh. But maybe you hate humor. Whatever, I don't judge anybody for anything.

The American Enterprise Institute had a whole conference on Obama ceding cultural hegemony to Maeve Beliveau, daughter of Director of Advance Emmett Beliveau.

And this one's for CW:

“Baby… delicious, delicious Japanese baby.”

HIV in Glass

2009-12-18T19:26:00.000-05:00

Luke Jerram makes glass sculptures of diseases (that's HIV there) to demonstrate that most diseases are actually clear.

These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks' beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity. The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of 'presence' do pseudocoloured images have that 'naturally' coloured specimens don't?

The Top 10

2009-12-17T19:21:00.000-05:00

Foreign Policy stories you may have missed this year.

Animation without Animation

2009-12-16T18:54:00.000-05:00

Cool.

Disney buys Marvel

2009-12-15T18:50:00.000-05:00

Yes, You're Old.

2009-12-14T20:48:00.000-05:00

Proof.

The decade according to 9-year-olds from allie garcia on Vimeo.

Probably the best end of decade concept I've come across.

I can't tell if this is real...

2009-12-13T20:45:00.000-05:00

or action figures.

Hulkamania from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Making Publicly Funded Data User Friendly

2009-12-12T20:38:00.000-05:00

Ready to be pissed?

2009-12-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

David Cross, Will Arnett and Spike Jonze are on a TV show together. But only in the UK.

Thank you internets.

Street Fighter

2009-12-10T20:26:00.000-05:00

Time Machine Cheat Sheet.

2009-12-09T19:54:00.000-05:00

Full version HERE. Put this in your time machine so you can steal everyone else's discoveries and inventions, just helping you to conquer the world.

Burns Wins!

2009-12-08T19:19:00.002-05:00

Apparently, in New York City's recent Mayoral election, which Bloomberg won by spending something like $1800 a vote (or a total of $85 million or some such,) Montgomery C. Burns won a majority of the write in candidates. Sure that just means 27 out of 299, but still. Excellent.

Even the Beards Were Better

2009-12-07T15:37:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Nostalgia.

Steely Who?

2009-12-06T11:11:00.000-05:00

From Letters of Note

You, Me and Cousin Dupree

July 14th, 2006: You, Me and Dupree, a film both produced by, and starring, Owen Wilson is released in cinemas.

July 17th, 2006: The following open letter is posted on Steely Dan's official website, and is addressed to Owen Wilson's brother, Luke. In it, the band - with tongue firmly in cheek - claim their song Cousin Dupree has been 'ripped off' by Owen's film.

July 28th, 2006: Owen Wilson releases the following statement in response, in which he jokingly refers to another of Steely Dan's songs, Hey Nineteen...

"I have never heard the song 'Cousin Dupree' and I don't even know who this gentleman, Mr. Steely Dan, is. I hope this helps to clear things up and I can get back to concentrating on my new movie, 'HEY 19."

Transcript follows.

Source

Transcript

The Residential Suites at Longworth
"Where Value is King -- And So Are You!"

Corpus Christi TX

Hey Luke -

Hey man - it's, like, Don and Walt, we're the guys from Steely Dan, the group, we won those Grammies that time, maybe you recall? You know, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"? "Reelin' in the Years?" "Hey Nineteen"? "Babylon Sisters"? Right, that's us! So how's it going?

Cool, we hope. We both really liked that "Bottle Rocket" movie that you and your brother did. We both thought it was way rocking! - even though the end was a little sad, you know, the overall thing was so great. In fact, it's the only movie that you and your brother did that we can really agree on, the two of us... we usually like the same kind of things, but not always exactly the same things, if you can get to that.

Anyway, the reason we're writing, aside from the fact that there's no show today and we're stuck in this dump in Corpus Christi - well, man, something kind of uncool has come to our attention and we've got to, like, do something or say something before the scene gets out of our control and something even more uncool happens. This doesn't involve you directly, man, you seem pretty cool, even when you're playing some pretty bogus parts in bad movies all the time, we realize that it's not entirely your fault and that you're entitled to have whatever low standards you want in terms of what's cool to get involved with for the, you know, bread or whatever.

It's your little brother Owen C. that's the problem. We realize what a drag it is for you to have people coming to you about his lameness all the time and we're really sorry to be doing the same thing - believe us, usually that's not what we're all about. But it so happens that your brother has gotten himself mixed up with some pretty bad Hollywood shlockmeisters and that he may be doing, like, permanent damage to his good creds and whatever reputation for coolness he may still have - let's face it, 'Bottle Rocket' was a ways back already.

What we suspect may have happened is this: some hack writer or producer or whatever they call themselves in Malibu or Los Feliz apparently heard our Grammy winning song "Cousin Dupree" on the radio and thought, hey, man, this is a cool idea for a character in a movie or something. OK, so the "cousin" idea was no doubt eliminated so as not to offend the Fundamentalist ticket buyers in the Flyovers. Nevertheless, they. like, took our character, this real dog sleeping on the couch and all and put him in the middle of some hokey "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" ripoff story and then, when it came time to change the character's name or whatever so people wouldn't know what a rip the whole thing was, THEY DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO THINK UP A NEW FUCKING NAME FOR THE GUY!

Anyway, they got your little brother on the hook for this summer stinkbomb - I mean, check the reviews - and he's using all his heaviest Owen C. licks to try and get this pathetic way-unfunny debacle off the ground and, in the end, no matter what he does or what happens at the box office, in the short run, he's gonna go down hard for selling out like this and for trashing the work of some pretty heavy artists like us in the process. You know the first fucking thing you learn, right? Instant karma is a fact, Jack. So your spaced out little bro is generating some MAJOR harsh-ass karma for himself by fucking us over like this - I mean, we're like totally out in the cold on this one - no ASCAP, no soundtrack, no consultant gig (like we got from the Farrelly Bros. when they used a bunch of songs in their movie, "You, Me and Irene" or whatever). No phone call, no muffin basket, no flowers, nothing.

And Luke, think of yourself, man. Do you want to go down as the brother of the Zal Yanovsky of the 21st century? Maybe this reference is a little obscure for someone of your generation (X? - Y? - ZERO?), but it would be worth your while to look it up in some counterculture encyclopedia or something. Because being the New Zallie's brother is definitely NOT A GOOD THING to be.

OK, then. So not to worry, man. Check it - whatever redress we get from the suits at the studio, that's strictly between our badass attorneys and theirs - we wouldn't even think for a Hollywood minute of getting Owen mixed up in all that bullshit... After all, Donald even liked "The Big Bounce". Really!

But, hey, Luke, man - there is one petite solid you could do for us at this time - do you think you could persuade your bro to do the right thing and come on down to our Concert at Irvine and apologize to our fans for this travesty? I mean, he wouldn't have to grovel or eat shit or get down on his hands and knees and ask forgiveness - we don't want him to do anything he's not comfortable with - but he would have to cop to the fact that what he and his Hollywood gangster pals did was wrong and that he wishes he had never agreed to get involved with this turkey in the first place. He just tells the audience and the band and the crew that he made a bad mistake and that he's sorry - is that so fucking hard? What the hell, you're his big brother. If you lean on him a little bit, I'm sure he'll do the right thing. You don't owe him anything, after the way he and Gwynnie Paltrow double-timed you in "The Royal Tenenbaums". So you just tell him - he'll come down to Irvine, apologize on stage, then we'll load him up with cool Steely merch and he can party with us and the band. Otherwise, if this business goes unresolved, there are some pretty heavy people who are upset about this whole thing and we can't guarantee what kind of heat little Owen may be bringing down on himself. When negative energy like this attaches itself to someone because they allow themselves to get involved in stuff that is not spiritually aligned for them on all levels, there can sometimes be some very harsh trips that go down. Your bro may be creating an extremely retrograde reality matrix for himself with his whole sellout moviestar game and there may be some righteous dues to pay, amen.

For example, there's this guy who works for us sometimes, he's not necessarily the kind of folks you want to know or hang with, but, if you happen to get in a barfight or some kind of hassle in a foreign country, he's your best fucking friend in the world. You guys must go to the movies a lot - you know what a Navy Seal is, right? Well, this dude's like that, only he's Russian. This particular guy - of course, he's a big fan of ours, but he may not have even heard of "Bottle Rocket" - hardly anybody has - I mean, one time we saw this guy, WITH HIS BARE HANDS, do something so unspeakable that - but, hey man, let's not even let it get that way, you know? Let's just help Owen C. do what's right, let's play past this particular screwup, and then he can get back to his life and his family and his beautiful moviestar-style pad or whatever, none the worse for wear, and with some groovy new tee's and hoodies and maybe a keyring or a coffee mug in the process. Alright? Well, alright!

Regards & etc. Don and Walt

P.S. Tell Owen to bring his bongos if he wants to sit in --

P.P.S. We're now seeing that according to Wikipedia, Owen is older than you are. But you seem a lot more mature somehow... don't you?"

My Six-Pack has a Face

2009-12-05T20:38:00.000-05:00

Anyone know who the dude on the left is?

This is why all the superheroes live there.

2009-12-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

Poor Hollywood. You have such an inferiority complex.

World Flag

2009-12-03T19:39:00.000-05:00

Kottke had this up the other day:
What the world needs is a great flag, a flag of pure bliss. Here's one of the intermediate steps to the finished product; it's an average of all the world's countries' flags weighted by population.

LOSE

2009-12-03T16:12:00.003-05:00

Comcast buys NBC.

Donut Seeds

2009-12-02T18:47:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving on Hobart Street

2009-12-01T18:26:00.001-05:00

Fresh Prince of Bel Air

2009-11-27T12:08:00.000-05:00

Jimmy Fallon's picking up steam.

Jacues Pepin whips up a meal

2009-11-24T20:39:00.000-05:00

This is a great story from the Washington Post. Jacques Pepin goes to Giant, spends $24 and comes up with a six course meal--including wine. All in 45 minutes of cooking time.

He jumped into prepping Golden Delicious apples with a simple combination of butter, sugar, lemon peel and water. While the apples were baking, he minced and smashed garlic cloves into a paste, then shredded about a third of the Savoy cabbage and tossed it with a garlicky Dijon dressing.

Half of the package of kielbasa went into a pan with oil and was paired with the other two-thirds of the cabbage for a quick saute. He peeled and cut up the acorn squash and cooked it until tender in a covered pan with water, then added vinegar and honey to give it a sweet-and-sour glaze. He pan-fried the short ribs, then cut store-bought nan into strips the size of the ribs. He washed baby bella mushrooms ("Do it right before you use them, and don't let them sit in the water"), then blurred them into perfect julienne. He sauteed them with Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi sauvignon blanc ($4.50 a bottle), poured from his glass.

The dishes, five of them, came out one after the other, and Pépin hardly broke a sweat. He sprinkled the squash and cabbage dishes with garnishes of parsley or carrot, spooned dollops of sour cream onto the apples and constructed open-faced sandwiches out of the nan, short ribs and mushroom mixture.

Obama's Purity Test

2009-11-23T18:51:00.000-05:00

John Hodgman is awesome. I can't believe this didn't get more press...

Fiddle-tastic!

2009-11-22T18:47:00.000-05:00

E-warfare

2009-11-21T20:42:00.000-05:00

This article was a little nervewracking. It's one more thing on the plate we need to be watching.

From the article:

One day in late summer 2008, FBI and Secret Service agents flew to Chicago to inform Barack Obama's campaign team that its computer system had been hacked. ... The McCain campaign was hit with a similar attack.

The trail in both cases led to computers in China, said several sources inside and outside government with knowledge of the incidents. In the McCain case, Chinese officials later approached staff members about information that had appeared only in restricted e-mails, according to a person close to the campaign.

China is significantly boosting its capabilities in cyberspace as a way to gather intelligence and, in the event of war, hit the U.S. government in a weak spot, U.S. officials and experts say. Outgunned and outspent in terms of traditional military hardware, China apparently hopes that by concentrating on holes in the U.S. security architecture -- its communications and spy satellites and its vast computer networks -- it will collect intelligence that could help it counter the imbalance.

Westboro Baptist Church Goes to...

2009-11-20T20:35:00.000-05:00

...the most Gay and Jewish friendly city on earth.

Watch what happens:

http://www.tnr.com/article/westboro-baptist-church-vs-new-york

The Post Office: Making Itself Even More Irrelevant To Future Generations

2009-11-20T10:20:00.001-05:00

As NC said, kids can always just email Santa. Or Facebook him. Or just realize he doesn't exist.

Postal Service Limits Letter To Santa Program

by The Associated Press

Enlarge Sam Harrel/AP

A jolly old elf at Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska, holds children's letters to Santa sent this year. The U.S. Postal Service says it will no longer deliver the letters.

Starry-eyed children writing letters to the jolly man at the North Pole this holiday season very likely won't get a response from Santa Claus or his helpers.

The U.S. Postal Service is dropping a popular national program begun in 1954 in the small Alaska town of North Pole, where volunteers open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to Santa each year. Replies come with North Pole postmarks.

Last year, a postal worker in Maryland recognized an Operation Santa volunteer there as a registered sex offender. The postal worker interceded before the individual could answer a child's letter, but the Postal Service viewed the episode as a big enough scare to tighten rules in such programs nationwide.

Commentary

Is The Postal Service Writing Off Santa? Nov. 19, 2009

People in North Pole are incensed by the change, likening the Postal Service to the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The letter program is a revered holiday tradition in North Pole, where light posts are curved and striped like candy canes and streets have names such as Kris Kringle Drive and Santa Claus Lane. Volunteers in the letter program even sign the response letters as Santa's elves and helpers.

North Pole Mayor Doug Isaacson agreed that caution is necessary to protect children. But he's outraged that the North Pole program should be affected by a sex offender's actions on the East Coast — and he thinks it's wrong that locals just found out about the change in recent days.

"It's Grinch-like that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact," he said. "They've been working on this for how long?"

It's Grinch-like that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact. They've been working on this for how long?

- Doug Isaacson, mayor of North Pole, Alaska

The Postal Service began restricting its policies on such programs in 2006, including requiring volunteers to show identification.

But the Maryland incident involving the sex offender prompted additional changes, even forcing the agency to briefly suspend the Operation Santa program last year in New York and Chicago.

The agency now prohibits volunteers from having access to children's family names and addresses, said spokeswoman Sue Brennan. The Postal Service instead redacts the last name and addresses on each letter and replaces the addresses with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the post office — and leaves it up to individual post offices whether they want to go through the time-consuming effort to shield the information.

Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.

"It's always been a good program, but we're in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information," she said.

Moody stressed that kids around the world can still send letters to Santa Claus. The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in which children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered, and the restrictions do not affect private organizations running their own letter efforts.

But what will change are the generically addressed letters to "Santa Claus, North Pole" that for years have been forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town. That program will stop, unless changes are made before Christmas.

Losing the Santa-letter cache is a blow to the community of 2,100 people, who pride themselves on their Christmas ties. Huge tourist attractions here include an everything-Christmas store, Santa Claus House, and the post office, where visitors can get a hand-stamped postmark on their postcards and packages if they ask for it.

Another issue raising the hackles on some locals is a separate recent change. Anchorage —- 260 miles to the south — is now processing the thousands of requests for North Pole postal cancellation marks on Christmas cards and packages from outside the state. It's a job long handled by nearby Fairbanks, about 15 miles away.

Moody said with as many as 800,000 items processed last year, Fairbanks is not equipped to handle the overload. Anchorage is the only city in Alaska with the high-speed equipment necessary to do the job without delay. Moody disagreed with the mayor's belief that the process creates a false postmark.

Santa Claus House, built like a Swiss chalet and chock full of all items Christmas, sells more than 100,000 letters from Santa, and one of the lures is the postmark.

Operations manager Paul Brown believes his business will be affected under changes to the volunteer Santa letter program because tens of thousands of letters are addressed to Santa Claus House, North Pole, Alaska.

Those letters will still be forwarded to volunteers, but it's unclear yet whether anything will be done with them. Those intercepted by the Postal Service will probably eventually be shredded.

Brown worries about misinterpretations of the changes, such as people believing it's no longer possible to get individual pieces of mail graced with the North Pole postmark.

Conduct a Latin Jazz Collective

2009-11-19T19:37:00.000-05:00

Between Two Ferns: Schedenfreude!

2009-11-19T18:42:00.001-05:00

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Terrorists are not Supervillains.

2009-11-18T19:54:00.000-05:00

Ezra Klein nailed this on the head.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not the master of magnetism

A poll today shows that New Yorkers narrowly favor trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in their city, and this is being treated as a surprise in some quarters. New York sure is brave! More baffling were the lawmakers who cowered when faced with the prospect of holding terrorists in Supermax prisons in the continental United States, as if hatred of America gave men super strength.

These guys took down a plane with box cutters. They used crude weapons to attack a far more sophisticated and effective fighting force. The most fearsome of them was captured at home, in his pajamas. It's not like we're putting Magneto on trial and need to keep him away from metal filings.

It's one thing to be afraid of terrorism. But there's no real reason to be afraid of terrorists, and as Daphne Eviatar argues, there's good reason not to look like you're afraid of terrorists:

The contrast of seeing these ordinary-looking men on trial in an orderly U.S. courtroom — where they’re accorded the right to a lawyer, the right to speak in their own defense and the right to call witnesses — could go a long way toward publicly revealing the absurdity of their cause, as well as the justice that a fair and functioning legal system can provide.

Trying these guys publicly, as well as holding them in normal prisons like common criminals, is good public relations. Being a terrorist is a more appealing prospect if the world's sole superpower appears to cower before your might than it is if you end up trapped in the American legal system, forced to submit to endless cross-examination and consultation with attorneys and other bureaucratic humiliations. Lots of people want to be super villains. But who wants to be a henchman? Being held on a fortified military island and tortured by a country that can't seem to get you to talk is a much more glorious finish than a long and dull trial that ends with you serving time in central New Jersey.

You know where she fits in?

2009-11-18T18:54:00.001-05:00

America.

From Boingboing:

A 20-year old Shanghai woman of mixed race has sparked a discussion about race in China. Lou Jing is half black; she was raised by a Chinese mother and speaks and acts like any other Chinese girl. But when the aspiring TV anchor entered an American Idol-like contest and rapped on-stage, she attracted both sensational admiration and ignorant hate. The presenters adoringly called her "chocolate girl" on stage — meanwhile, on web forums, people called her gross and ugly and criticized her mother for having sex with a black person out of wedlock. In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, Lou Jing says: "I've always thought of myself as Shanghainese, but after the competition I started to have doubts about who I really am." Lou Jing has never met her dad, who left China without knowing he had gotten her mom pregnant. She hopes to study journalism at Columbia University.

Get Festive Bastards!

2009-11-17T13:19:00.002-05:00

VT sent this to me, from McSweeneys:

IT'S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS.
BY COLIN NISSAN

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, "Aren't those gourds straining your neck?" And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, "It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers.

Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well then you're going to fucking love my house. Just look where you're walking or you'll get KO'd by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you're going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer.

Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!

From FMyLife.com

2009-11-17T12:42:00.001-05:00

Today, my five-year-old came home from summer camp crying because her friends and counselors had all laughed at her when she couldn't identify colors correctly during a game. My husband then confessed that he had taught her colors wrong because he thought it would be funny. FML

Two Thumbs Up. Way Up.

2009-11-17T11:34:00.003-05:00

Vintage Siskel and Ebert. From this blog, which I represent.

Click pic to enlarge.

Afghanistan Strategy

2009-11-16T20:37:00.002-05:00

Andrew Sullivan on President Obama rejecting the war options for Afghanistan: "What strikes me about this is the enormous self-confidence this reveals. Here is a young president, prepared to allow himself to be portrayed as 'weak' or 'dithering' in the slow and meticulous arrival at public policy. He is trusting the reality to help expose what we need to do. He is allowing the debate -- however messy and confusing and emotional -- to take its time and reveal the real choices in front of us. This is politically risky, of course. Those who treat politics as a contact-sport, whose insistence is on the 'game' of who wins which news cycle, or who can spin each moment in a political storm as a harbinger of whatever, will pounce and shriek and try to bounce the president into a decision. And those who believe that what matters in war is charging ahead regardless at all times will also grandstand against the president's insistence on prudence."

AHGHGHGHGH

2009-11-16T12:36:00.000-05:00

man vs. bear

2009-11-15T12:31:00.000-05:00

We are all fools to Ricky Jay.

2009-11-14T11:35:00.000-05:00

I read this at Kottke.org a while back:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

"Three of clubs," Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, "Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card."

After an interval of silence, Jay said, "That's interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time."

Mosher persisted: "Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card."

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, "This is a distinct change of procedure." A longer pause. "All right-what was the card?"

"Two of spades."

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

Here's a couple of Jay's tricks:

Star Wars Design FAIL

2009-11-13T16:46:00.000-05:00

This is hilarious:

I'll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten.

R2-D2
Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."

C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

Blasters
A tactical nightmare: They're incredibly loud, especially for firing what are essentially light beams. The fire ordnance is so slow it can be dodged, and it comes out as a streak of light that reveals your position to your enemies. Let's not even go near the idea of light beams being slow enough to dodge; that's just something you have let go of, or risk insanity.

Landspeeders and other flying vehicles
Here's the thing: In the Star Wars universe, there are no seatbelts. And maybe if you're flying your hoity-toity vehicle on Coruscant, you have, like, a force field that keeps you flying out of your seat. But Luke's X-34 speeder on Tatooine? The Yugo of speeders, man. One hard stop, and out you go.

Stormtrooper Uniforms
They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view ("I can't see a thing in this helmet!" -- Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don't just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.

Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.

Bad design in Star Wars is not just limited to stuff; evolution here seems wacky, too. Three choice bits:

Sarlaac
A monstrous yet immobile creature who lives in an exposed pit in the middle of a lifeless desert, waiting for large animals to apparently feel suicidal and trek out to throw themselves in? Yeah, not so much. Not every Sarlaac can count on an intergalactic mob boss to feed it tidbits.

That Asteroid Worm Thing in Empire Strikes Back
So, large space worm lives in asteroid, disguises itself as a cave and waits for unwary spaceships to fly by so it can eat them? Makes the Sarlaac look like a marvel of natural selection, it does.

Midi-Chlorians
Oh, man, don't get me started. Except to say this: If in fact a high concentration of midi-chlorians is the difference between being a common schmoe and being a dude who can Force Choke his enemies, the black market in midi-chlorian injections must be amazing.

Who isn't watching 30 Rock?

2009-11-12T11:32:00.000-05:00

This is an awesome article about Tina Fey's Top 10 moments from the show.

Armistice

2009-11-11T11:53:00.001-05:00

From Iconic Photos:

“On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, an armistice was signed, ending “The War to End All Wars”. With the military morale in its ebb and revolution brewing at home, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated two days before on 9 November. The German government had decided to negotiate an armistice with the Allies starting 7th November, when the German Army Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg exchanged a series of telegrams with the Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch.

In the forest of Compiègne, In the railcar given to Foch for military use by the manufacturer, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the armistice was signed. The photograph was taken after reaching an agreement. The diplomatic situation was terse: The German signatory, Matthias Erzberger made a short speech, protesting the harshness of the terms, and concluded by saying that “a nation of seventy millions can suffer, but it cannot die”. Foch then refused to shake Erzberger’s hand and said, “Très bien“.)

Although it was signed at 5 am, the terms of the agreement didn’t come into effect until six hours later at 11 am. The hour was chosen by Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, First Sea Lord and Britain’s official delegate to oversee the Armistice. He was explicitly ordered by his Prime Minister David Lloyd George to delay the terms until 3 pm to coincide with parliment sitting so that PM could get the credit of announcing it officially to the house on the hour. Weymss thought the delay would cause unnecessary killing and decided that the eleventh hour would add to the poignancy of the date. Lloyd George was furious. Erzberger, too, was not kindly received back–he was assassinated later by a right-wing extremist group, Organisation Consul for signing the Armistice. Foch on the other hand was elected to the Académie des Sciences on the very day of the Armistice [and ten days later, to the Académie française].

In the above picture, front row from left to right: Rear-Admiral George P.W. Hope, Wemyss’s deputy; General Maxime Weygrand, Foch’s righthand man and one who read out the armistice conditions; Wemyss; Foch and Royal Navy captain JPR Marriott, attache to two admirals. On the train, clockwise from top right: Interpreter Laperche, Captain le Mierry, Commander Riedinger, and General Desticker, Foch’s ADC. The German delegation was notably absent. The photo was taken at 7:30 am as Foch was about to return to Paris with the signed documents in his briefcase.

Although Germany had insisted that it would only enter into negotiations on the understanding that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s so-called ‘Fourteen Points’ would form the basis for a settlement, the armistice terms were nevertheless punitive. The Allies agreed to an armistice only on the basis that Germany effectively disarm herself; the cause preventing the latter from renewing hostilities backfired spectacularly: her ignominious “reparations” agreement sowed the seeds for the rise of a nationalist movement and subsequently the Second World War.

WTF

2009-11-11T11:09:00.001-05:00

Via Boingboing:

Michael Jackson's funeral cost one million dollars. His final outfit cost $35,000, and the flowers cost $16,000. Lord. Obviously I'm no MJ anyhow, but when I die, if there's a mil lying around? Feel free to bury me in nekkid dirt and use the rest to feed pie to starving kids.

True that.

Indoor Synchronized Bike Riding

2009-11-10T16:41:00.000-05:00

This both mesmerized me and made me sick to my stomach.

Also, who are those guys setting up for an indoor soccer match at the end? What dicks.

Tram-pam-poline.

2009-11-09T16:12:00.001-05:00

I'd say this was BS, with some funky editing. Then I found out Oli Lemieux (the fellow doing the cool ninja stuff) is with Cirque du Soleil. Then it all made sense.

All in all, much better than this.

Protest on Sunday

2009-11-09T13:01:00.003-05:00

From PoP:

Apparently the Israeli PM is in town, and there were some anti-Jewish/anti-Israel protesters of the worst kind. Ok, so be it. There's tons of crazy people out there and that's the price we pay for freedom of speech.

But seriously, "You will eat your babies?" That's just funny. I want to go to every protest with that sign.

Chris Ware Animates This American Life

2009-11-08T20:04:00.000-05:00

Public Diplomacy

2009-11-07T19:49:00.000-05:00

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading a few lines from his poem, America. It's being used in Levi's new ad campaign.

We spend lots of money trying to make people all over the world like us. I don't know why we don't just invest more money in stuff like this. If this doesn't sum up the American experiment, I have no idea what does.

Put This On

2009-11-06T19:18:00.000-05:00

Put This On, Episode 1: Denim from Put This On on Vimeo.

I hope this series runs a long, long time.

The fact that they started with jeans, which many of you know catch my fancy, only endears me to them more.