Battlestar Rhapsody

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

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

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.

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

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

Foreign Policy stories you may have missed this year.

Animation without Animation

Cool.

Disney buys Marvel

Yes, You're Old.

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...

or action figures.

Hulkamania from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Making Publicly Funded Data User Friendly

Ready to be pissed?

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

Thank you internets.

Street Fighter

Time Machine Cheat Sheet.

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!

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

Sigh. Nostalgia.

Steely Who?

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

Anyone know who the dude on the left is?

This is why all the superheroes live there.

Poor Hollywood. You have such an inferiority complex.

World Flag

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

Comcast buys NBC.

Donut Seeds

Thanksgiving on Hobart Street

Fresh Prince of Bel Air

Jimmy Fallon's picking up steam.

Jacues Pepin whips up a meal

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

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

Fiddle-tastic!

E-warfare

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...

...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

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

Between Two Ferns: Schedenfreude!

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Terrorists are not Supervillains.

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?

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!

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

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.

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

Click pic to enlarge.

Afghanistan Strategy

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

man vs. bear

We are all fools to Ricky Jay.

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

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?

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

Armistice

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

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

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.

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

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

Public Diplomacy

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

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.

What to do with the Postal Service.

Postmaster General Jack Potter likes to point out that the Postal Service has more retail outlets than McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined. I wonder what those companies do when they are as deep in the red as the Post Office is?

Article here.

Save the Internet!

Urlesque recently did an awesome bit on Net Neutrality. Dear friend CC works this shit day and night for the rest of us--like a superhero-- and when she stays with me I like to pretend I'm helping fight the good fight.

In the same vein here's the poop on net neutrality:

Net Neutrality! It's a big issue! Super-important! I'm not sure why but everyone else is shouty about it so I'm being shouty too!

1. Learn the basics

Okay, Net Neutrality is the principle that internet service providers shouldn't treat some web traffic differently than other traffic. That means that Verizon can't deliberately make Yahoo load slower than Google, or that Time Warner can't charge you extra to get access to certain websites.

Right now, net neutrality is an FCC policy. Congress is looking at bills to either make net neutrality into law or to outright kill it.

2. Know the sides

Here's where the real reasons for net neutrality become clearer. The main opponents of net neutrality are the ISPs, who argue that they'd never use their power to limit service, charge more or control information. That would make more sense if Comcast hadn't gotten caught last year doing those things.

Speaking for the ISPs is John McCain, who totally takes back that comment about not knowing how to use a computer, and who isn't at all thinking about the $894,379 the telecoms donated to his various campaigns! He's introduced a bill called the Internet Freedom Act.

Of course some heavyweights support net neutrality: Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and other companies that want their content to get out to users without paying the telecoms extra. Granted, they already have an advantage: Google has enough servers to deliver a web page far faster than a smaller company. But once it goes into the pipeline, all traffic is the same.

Alongside these companies are groups like MoveOn.org, the AARP, Gun Owners of America, the Christian Coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, the Parents Television Council, and loads of other organizations. This is clearly not a traditional partisan battle. These groups are convinced that net neutrality will help maintain the freedom of information we enjoy online today. So are Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet and the web.

Too long, didn't read? Let Jon Stewart explain it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
From Here to Neutrality
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

3. Picture the consequences

Here's another even simpler explanation: Know how a cable bill depends on which channels you order? Well a Reddit user named quink mocked up the sort of plan that would be legal without net neutrality:

Check out the full version. Yep, that's just a total of $80/month to get most of the internet you already use! What a deal. And that's being generous; Comcast knows you'd pay more for your porn and music.

4. Do something!

So what can you do? First, you can tell your Congressman: Here's a super-simple e-mail you can copy and paste to fight McCain's anti-net-neutrality bill, which would preempt any net neutrality laws. This page even links to the directory of Senate email addresses so you can get in and out in two minutes. (Here's more about McCain's bill.)

You can also sign the "Save the Internet" petition to register your support alongside all those organizations I mentioned. You can be on a list with the Christian Coalition and the ACLU at the same time!

Oh and you can get laid, if you're into Belgian girls with awful YouTube shows.

5. Dig deeper

Net neutrality is a complicated topic. Even neutrality supporters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are worried about doing it right, so we don't accidentally give the FCC the ability to censor the internet. So when you're asked to support any particular plan, check who supports it and who's against it. There's a right way to save the internet.