More New Tiger Woods Commercials

By now, you've all seen the Billy Dee Williams thing.  But this one, I think, is new:

Edwards Air Force Base

It's kind of a shame that when my in-laws come out next month, I won't have the ability to take them out to the base.  Driving out there today for work reminded me that the landscape is pretty extraordinary.  Some days I can see the beauty in the area and some days I can't; today was a good day (in part because it had just rained).  Super-old Joshua trees, expansive lake beds, Martian-looking rock escarpments, weird-shaped buildings where science and aviation type stuff happens, and lots of cool-looking old airplanes on sticks.  My father-in-law would enjoy that but we'll have to make do with civilian-access equivalents elsewhere.

NyQuil Dreams

One minor benefit to suffering from rhinovirus or whatever the hell it is that has me coughing and sniffling all the time is NyQuil.  Sickly-sweet, the very taste of illness, it contains a powerful ingredient that knocks me out and gets me to sleep quickly after I take it.  And I have the strangest dreams.  Like my cat morphing into a horse with a long ostrich neck but keeping her face.  Or a rain of cherries.  Actually, I think it would hurt to be in a rain of cherries if they've fallen from any height at all, but in my dream it was somewhat pleasant.  I don't like waking up at 2:30 totally dehydrated but you know what?  If I need the stuff I'll take it and deal with the drying-out because that beats the hell out of the alternative.  I am, however, really really ready for this to be past me.

This Is Where It All Happened

A cool map showing where every nuclear explosion has taken place on the planet.  There is one additional test site, at sea in the southwestern Indian Ocean, which is likely to have been a joint South African and Israeli test.  Neither country will either confirm or deny the event.

Like You Needed More Proof

Yes, Pat Robertson is nuts.  The sky is also blue at noon on a clear day, water is wet, and heavy stones placed on slippery slopes will tend to move down rather than up.  If you need any other pressing questions of that caliber cleared up, try Wikipedia.

What Haiti needs is not a lecture about Satan or any amount of prayers or our collective astonishment that anyone still assigns the remotest bit of credibility to this weirdo.  Right now, Haiti needs doctors and food and medicine.  Here's where you can help make that happen. I gave, so can you.

What Haiti needs in the long run is a return to the rule of law, the restoration of some kind of educational system available to all its children, and an uncorrupted government with leaders who have been trained in American, Canadian, British, or French universities in things like urban planning, agriculture, and political science.  That won't happen overnight.

Sneezing, Coughing, Choking and Functional

Do you ever get that drop of liquid (no matter what kind) falling into your windpipe?  I had that happen to me in front of my class last night.  Sent me into a coughing, choking fit that lasted five minutes and nearly cost me my voice again.  Humiliating.  The good news is, my new class format seems to be well-received by my students and I am able to work in quite a bit of good information to my lecture despite "teaching to the test."  The bad news is, one of my students is "talky" and doesn't understand issues of relevance.  A business law class is not really the place to be discussing Thoreau or Baudelaire.

Do you ever have to sneeze or cough so hard that it causes your muscles in your neck and upper arms to seize up in intense pain?  That happened to me this morning when I was driving in to work.  The coughing hasn't gone away yet but I can't afford to take more time away from the office and from court than I have.  It's not even a matter of being a hero -- it's just plain a matter of keeping up with the press of business.  I'm trying to avoid people here as best I can.  Dancing lessons tonight are not really a good option.

The Daily Show Is Not News

Jon Stewart, by all accounts, got outmaneuvered and outclassed by John Yoo (the author of the torture memos) the other night.  Well, I guess that isn't much of a surprise.  Stewart is not a lawyer, not a journalist, not an interrogator.  And in fact, in order to attract guests, he does need to provide them with enough room to express themselves, and that means that some of them, like Yoo, will succeed in framing things in a favorable way.  Mainly, though, the Daily Show is a comedy vehicle, not an investigative news vehicle, and the interview cannot get too heavy.  It falls to serious news shows to do serious interviews with the architects of American torture (including the one now teaching law at UC Berkeley) and it falls to Jon Stewart to point out for comedic value the times when those serious news sources have failed to do their jobs.  It is not Jon Stewart's job to do the serious job of investigative journalism himself.  And in a way, I'm glad that Stewart didn't play "gotcha" for yuks with something so serious as this in the first place.  Let him have fun with the non-issue of Harry Reid's unwise remarks, the Daily Show is good at that sort of thing.  But we shouldn't play torture for laughs.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Day One

Having spent most of the day ill and abed, I've not done a ton of reading or writing.  And the Supreme Court would not allow YouTube to simulcast or delay-cast the trial despite the trial judge's order that it should.  (Query as to why all trials and indeed all court proceedings are not available in this way.  Courts are supposed to be public.)  Therefore I commend to you the excellent summary of this most critical of trials available here -- although the source is pro-SSM (as am I), there appears to be some effort to fairly present the arguments offered in favor of defending Proposition 8.  Nevertheless, those arguments appear to me to be intellectually very weak, the only reason I can think of to approve of them is simply that they were the will of the majority and there are limits to the effect that the majority's will can take effect under our Constitutional system.  At the end of the day, it appears that the case will come down to Romer v. Evans sort of argument -- was the ballot initiative animated by anti-homosexual bias, and if so, does that violate the Equal Protections Clause?  That's a lot of eggs in one basket.

How Far You Get With One Piece Of The Puzzle Missing

If you've got an elite quarterback, outstanding receiving corps, a fast and aggressive defense, but only a mediocre offensive line, how far do you get?  You get a wild card slot and you take the defending conference champions to overtime after your early blunders spot them two touchdowns, that's how far.  You get super high-scoring games but uncertain-until-the-end outcomes.  The deeply interesting and heart-wrenching season of the 2009 Green Bay Packers will end with this line:  "A. Rodgers sacked by M. Adams. A. Rodgers fumbled. K. Dansby recovered fumble and returned for 17 yards."  Although disappointing, it seems fitting.

I hope you took the over, Readers.

O Felice Giorno!

Sometimes, a good beer is just the thing you want.  Libertine Benjamin Franklin once said that "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."  Whether he believed in God or not depended on what point in his life you caught him, but it seems he pretty much always believed in beer.

But if you're in the mood for a tall cold one, and you're in Italy or an Italian restaurant, you're pretty much out of luck.  Just about the only Italian beer you can get anywhere, including in Italy, is Peroni, and Peroni is quite possibly the weakest, most watery barley tea ever put in a bottle and called "beer."  It makes Bud Light seem hearty by comparison.

So it's nice to see the development of Italian craft brews because hey, you can't drink wine all the time.  When the American craft brew movement built up a head twenty or so years ago it did nothing but good to the market and even the majors began to pay attention to the quality of their product again and now all offer craft brew-style upmarket alternatives.  Pay attention, Peroni Sp.A.!  Hopefully under the lead of these small brewers and pubs, Italy will take its place alongside Germany, Belgium, Czech, and England as a producer of quality brew.

Were We Vaccinated Too Late?

Friday I left work after getting the necessary things done.  Wasn't feeling right.  No one at your work wants you to be a hero and work through your illness only to infect them, too.  I don't think the people at my office feel any different about me.

Yesterday we took it easy and stayed home because both The Wife and I were suffering from periodic coughs and sore throats and general ickiness.  The only time we left home was to get more meds at the drug store.  There, for the first time, there were H1N1 vaccinations available, which we got.  But today I feel even worse than I did yesterday.

I'm only kidding in the post title.  Some flu-like symptoms are gratefully absent from the constellation of ailments we suffer and the less said about those the better.  But whatever it is that's been hanging around my throat for four days is more than welcome to settle up the bill and move on to the next phase of its travels.

This Never Happens When I Play The Sims

Three in the morning comes and my bladder tells me it's time for a short interruption in sleep.  This problem is easy to solve.  But the dogs hear me moving about and come in, demanding food.  It's earlier than their typical 4:30 a.m. feeding time but I'm still half-asleep and so I decide to feed them.  My throat is very sore and so after I let the dogs out (they are trained to go outside right after they eat) I decide that a salt-water gargle would be just the thing, so I open up the right-hand pantry door, find the salt among our baking supplies, and mix it with hot water.  The taste is disgusting, so I decide to mix myself up one of those little packets of a flavored beverage to counteract the briny ick of the salt water with something sweet-tasting.  So I open up the left-hand pantry door to get at those and

THUNK

a brand-new bottle of Spanish olive oil overbalances and falls on the floor right at my feet, its yellowy-green contents slowly oozing out all over the tile, which is now decorated with itty bitty shards of cheap, thin glass.  The dogs, fortunately, are still outside but now it's five minutes after three in the morning and I have to clean up a quart of olive oil and a broken glass bottle before I can let them in because, lacking the dignity gene, they're going to lick wherever on the floor has any aroma at all and I don't want them to hurt themselves by acting on their instincts.

A great many paper towels later and most of the oil is sopped up from the floor and I begin my hunt for stray glass, looking as best I can for places where dogs might walk or lick.  This reveals dozens of tiny, sharp fragments which I cannot pick up with my fingers, even if I don't mind a little pain and blood.  So now I've got to find a vacuum cleaner to suck up all this glass, which means making a lot of noise but what can I do?  A few minutes of that produces a sleepy, squinting Wife wondering what in the hell is going on and why I'm awake at this hour, and good Wife that she is she takes it all in and figures out that I'm probably best left to my own devices and after showing me where the wet-mop sponge is kept, goes back to sleep like any sensible person would in her sitaution.

I am, of course, wholly awake by now since removing the oleagenous waste and glass has taken a good half hour, and it takes me what feels like another hour to fall back asleep again.  Neither the dogs nor the cats have yet been bothering the kitchen floor any more than they usually do and have not indicated any pain or favoring on any of their paws, so I think that means I did the job right.

Making Ignorant Choices

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  We all make choices based on incomplete information, all the time, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  One's choice of religion is usually not a choice at all and is certainly based on incomplete information.  That goes for atheists, too.  There's also an amusing video from the Daily Show embedded in the essay.

More After The Jump -->

Leave Tiger Woods Be And Brit Hume Too

Brit Hume, a former anchor and host and still part-time commentator on Fox News, suggested over the weekend that Tiger Woods should become a Christian.  He [Hume] is under criticism for saying he does not think that Buddhism offers the same sort of redeption and forgiveness as Christianity.  Some have called it already one of the most dumb things said in 2010, while social conservatives are quick to hold up this incident as an example of the liberal media mocking faithful Christians.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  While I think Hume's comment was not particularly helpful and moderately ignorant, it was also mostly harmless and well-intentioned, so it's silly to criticize Hume.  The real issues confronting Tiger Woods are ones which confront everyone going through a tough time like a divorce. Woods has to work these issues out for himself and for the benefit of his children and there is no one-size-fits-all resolution to them.  While some churches offer positive and beneficial resources to their members, others sometimes do more harm than good.  So the best environment in which Tiger Woods (or any divorcing parent) can deal with the issues he inevitably must confront is one in which he gets help from appropriate professionals and is free from potentially-harmful religious teachings.

Full essay below the jump.

More After The Jump -->

Really? People Still Do This?

Ashura is going on right now, it is a religious holiday in which Shiite Muslims annually mourn the death of the Prophet's grandson Hussein, who died in battle in Karbala during the seventh century.  As things for religious festivals go, I suppose commemorating the death of a great historical leader is perfectly fine, but I can't say as I particularly approve of the way some of these folks go about it.  (Moderately disturbing image at the link.)  Beating yourself on the back in the streets with whips and blades on chains seems like a decidedly dumb thing to do, something which benefits absolutely no one.  Earlier in the picture series are Iranian folk who commemorate Ashura by immersing themselves in mud and publicly mourning the long-dead Imam in the streets.  While this seems silly to me, ruining a set of decent clothing isn't nearly as self-destructive as their Afghan counterparts literally beating themselves bloody.  Self-mortification like this seems like something from a bygone age, something primitive and violent and shocking with no place in modern society.

McDonald's Mayhem

Twenty-four year-old Melodi Dushane, of Toledo, Ohio, really wanted some Chicken McNuggets.  Don't judge her for that -- we've all been there.  But when she got to the McDonald's and found that they were out, her response was not disappointment.  It was not to take her business to Hardee's across the street.  It was not even to bad-mouth McDonald's for its inability to meet her desires as a consumer.

She punched right through the drive-through window.  My guess is she hurt herself more than she surprised the clerk.  She's been charged with felony vandalism.

Now if it had been me, I'd probably have ordered a McChicken sandwich off the dollar value menu and thought of it as a reasonable substitute.  But apparently, when you're jonesing for Chicken McNuggets, there is no substitute.

Snuck Up On Me

It's really less than 40 days to the Winter Olympics?  I've not been paying attention, clearly -- and not watching television, particularly NBC.  Or maybe the Vancouver 2010 folks have simply not established any kind of a web advertising presence anywhere I get even my sports news.

Exchange

In my experience, skipping a move in Scrabble to exchange tiles is an act of desperation, a functional concession that you are going to eventually lose the game.  Part of that is because when The Wife and I play, we are both very competitive with each other, so missing a single turn is often a big setback.  But it worked out for me this morning:

Him		Her
braze	38	whale	21
whales, dust	22	tabloid, brazed	80
(exchanged tiles)	0	cite, it, at, by	24
tabloids, stomach	74	ahu	18
gnomon	18	clover	36
gelato	8	binder	18
maxes, ma, ox, ne	39	vox	13
ingot	10	frappe	32
toga, so, net	17	dias	21
mean	27	drawn	11
qi	21	fin, qi	25
keno	16	jars	18
fee	6	mi	4
ye, yore	42	ki	6
pea	7	I, I, U, U	-4
TOTAL:	354	TOTAL:	323

The Wife had the same problem late in the game that I had early -- all vowels and no consonants. To do well, you need a good blend of both. I got lucky in being able to make a seven-tile word immediately after my exchange, and thereafter got a better blend -- leaving a vowel-heavy bank of tiles to draw on later in the game, but at that point there were no other tiles to exchange, so we both wound up having to squeeze vowels onto the existing board.

What's more, by exchanging early, there was still a lot of open board for me to place that seven-tile word at all -- it's sometimes the case that you have a seven- or eight-letter word you can make late in the game but there are no places on the grid still available with enough room to do it.

The lesson here is, if you are going to take the big gamel and exchange, it will only pay off if you do it early in the game.

Top Ten Worst Bible Stories Rebutted And Re-Argued!

A commenter, Ennis, has taken the time to respond to my post from a few weeks ago about the top ten worst Bible stories with some extensive comments on his blog.  Ennis is clearly smart, articulate, and intellectually committed to tackling the issues I raise here on their merits.  I have left a few comments on his blog (here and here), and I invite all my Readers to visit him and chime in there as well as here if they like. Our dialogue is entirely on the meritsand I am as pleased as ever at having a thoughtful "sparring partner."

Oh Yeah It Is A New Decade, Isn't It?

Hey, yeah. How come the decade ends in a year ending in "9" but a century ends in a year ending in "0"?