Dept. of Things About Which You Must Be Shitting Me

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All hail the Uterus Police:

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

Remember that “Class War” post?

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Yeah, the GOP gets more repugnant: Minnesota Republicans to Outlaw Poor People Having Money:

Minnesota’s Republican lawmakers are, as expected, very angry about poor people. Why give those poor people money when we know they’ll just spend it on the hip-hop and fancy sneakers and for crack smokin’. So, the Republicans had an idea: Until any kind of welfare or assistance to the needy is completely outlawed, which will be soon enough, Minnesota should make it illegal for people getting “emergency cash assistance” to have any of the cash assistance in cash.

So, the poorest families and the poorest disabled adults would be unable to take any of this money as cash, even though poor people by design are kept from having bank accounts or a checkbook, which is why they usually pay bills and rent in cash:

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all

The Houston Nostalgia List

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I’ve been sitting on this list for months, but it deserves to be posted. I’ve only been a Houstonian for 16 years, but I definitely miss #96, the excellent burgers and green chili stew at Cosmos Cafe (#91), #84 (where I saw Sling Blade), the divey awesomeness of #69, and Charlie Watkins’ wine list at Sierra (#64).

Being at least tangentially connected to Rice, I know that #60 is just “tending at a higher bar.” It will always be Transco to me (#94). I hate we lost the Proletariat (#39), and still have no rail on Richmond. I definitely miss the Book Stop (#35). And my feelings about pre-United Continental (#9) are well documented here.

The loss of #8 (the Ale House) is partly soothed by the Stag’s Head, but it lacks the same rambling charm of the old house-turned-pub. Where’s Allen Hill going to leap from a balcony in the new place, I ask you?

The new Cactus is just fine by me, with a nicer staff and a more sustainable business model, so I’m not sure I miss the old store any more.

I don’t miss #100 at all, and the Daily Grind (#59) has no place on the list. What I miss in the “Heights breakfast and coffee” category is Kaldi, dammit.

Dept. of Automotive Genetic Testing Gone Wonderfully Awry

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Singer Vehicle Design makes 911s.

The Singer Concept 911 attempts to channel the spirit of the delicate 1960s original, the race-bred chic of the ’70s longhoods, the ’80s bombproof solidity and the power and sophistication of the 964/993 series [in a] single jewel-like form that represents the golden era of the world’s most important sports car.

The body is a lovely bespoke carbon fiber throwback, the chassis from the 964-era, but significantly strengthened, and the powerplant is a souped-up version of the air-cooled (duh) 3.6L from the Heathenmobile-era 993s. I’m not sure exactly what they’ve done to take it from 275 ponies to 410, but then again I’m not the target market.

They’re hand-built, so it’s no surprise that buying a new 997 instead would represent the “cheap” option by comparison: entry level here is $175K, according to a Robb Report article in their press kit. Even so: Gorgeous, enough so that I’m forgiving them for the utter bullshit of their Flash-heavy, music-playing web site.

Weird fact: ex-Catherine Wheel singer Rob Dickinson appears to be a Singer principal, at least according to this Excellence article.

Dept. of Interesting Wedding Writeups

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Today’s Times includes this writeup of a little wedding in Austin:

“WE said 4:44, and we meant 4:44,” Michael Nesmith, the wedding officiant, said with mock insistence before about 125 guests on March 4 in Butler Park, which looks out at the Austin, Tex., skyline.

There was no processional. The couple about to be joined, Carolyn Wonderland, a blues singer and guitarist, and A. Whitney Brown, a writer and comedian, were already standing on their marks. There was nothing else to wait for except the string of fours that had been specified in the wedding invitation.

Yes, that Mike Nesmith, with whom I share a church, apparently.

Yes, that A. Whitney Brown.

And yes, obviously, that Carolyn Wonderland.

The Monkey, at Night

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Dominic is small, but he wonders what his special soft friend Bity the Monkey does at night. Dominic’s father obliges, in a lovely and hilarious video.

Dominic loves his monkey toy. So i made a short film to show him what he does at night while he’s sleeping.This is what Bity the Monkey does from 2am to 6am.

Why does NPR keep giving up?

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So the jackasses on the right have another pelt on their wall this week, thanks to NPR showing their belly like giant pussies. Jon Stewart nailed this last time, ink the dustup about Juan Williams: they keep bringing tote bags to knife fights.

Where are my two-fisted liberals, dammit? Is Rahm the only one made in LBJ’s image?

Dept. of Disappointing Corrections

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It turns out that whole thing about space germs in meteorites?

Yeah, crap. P.Z. Myers explains:

[The Journal of Cosmology] isn’t a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn’t exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: “Northern California”), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific “publications” on this web site.

Of the paper itself, Myers notes:

It’s a dump of miscellaneous facts about carbonaceous chondrites, not well-honed arguments edited to promote concision or cogency. The figures are annoying; when you skim through them, several will jump out at you as very provocative and looking an awful lot like real bacteria, but then without exception they all turn out to be photos of terrestrial organisms thrown in for reference. The extraterrestrial ‘bacteria’ all look like random mineral squiggles and bumps on a field full of random squiggles and bumps, and apparently, the authors thought some particular squiggle looked sort of like some photo of a bug.

Dept. of HOLY CRAP

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This has the potential to be a bit earth-shaking:

The buzz is building over a paper by Richard Hoover, an award-winning astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, concluding that filaments and other features found in the interior of three specimens of a rare class of meteorite appear to be fossils of a life form strongly resembling cyanobacteria. Chemical analysis, Hoover argues, shows no evidence that the fossils are of organisms that infiltrated the meteorites after they arrived on Earth.

Oh, Sharepoint, you fucking jackass

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So I’m standing up a new Sharepoint 2010 server, and I get this when I point it to one of our database servers:

Screen shot 2011-03-03 at 2.20.15 PM.png

There’s so much wrong with this it’s not even funny.

  • BigSQL is running the latest major version of SQL Server.
  • The dialog helpfully tells me what specific build I’m using, but does not tell me what version I need.
  • The dialog box does not include any meaningful information in and of itself, and instead redirects me to a URL.
  • The URL is neither selectable nor clickable.

Fuck whoever did this. I mean, seriously. This right here? This is why people hate you.

Compare and Contrast, or, satire is dead

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MeFi pointed this out, but the key posts to view are this Volokh Conspiracy post, wherein he notes that

I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

Our counterpoint is the Onion story with the following headline: Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

A bit:

“The voters sent us to Washington to stand up for individual liberty, not big government,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said at a press conference. “Obama’s plan would take away citizens’ fundamental freedoms, forcing each of us into hastily built concrete bunkers and empowering the federal government to ration our access to food, water, and potassium iodide tablets while underground.”

“We believe that the decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual,” King added.

Don’t miss the sidebar summarizing either side’s arguments.