From Rob: British Blamed for Basra Badgers:
British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.
Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.
[…]
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.
The folks over at Will It Blend? have gotten ahold of an iPhone.
It’s no surprise that some bits of Kentucky Fried Movie are on YouTube, of course, but this morning we’ve come across two bits we all know and love:
Enjoy.
The Pope has declared that if it’s not Catholic and reporting to him, it’s not a church. We’re glad that, in a world filled with daily stories of sectarian violence, Pope Ratz feels it’s a good idea to get his own digs in rather than encourage tolerance, understanding, and compassion. Way to go, Rome!
Former Bush surgeon general says he was muzzled:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The first U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues like embryonic stem cell research.
“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation’s top doctor from 2002 until 2006, told a House of Representatives committee.
“The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party,” Carmona added.
We keep saying this, but it bears repeating: if your political beliefs run afoul of facts, and you respond by suppressing facts, you are the worst sort of craven bastard. Bush’s administration has made a habit of this since 2000, and they and their party have made it abundantly clear that this is part of their platform. Voting for them means voting for ideology over science and facts whenever someone doesn’t like what the data shows. It has implications in virtually every sphere of life — public health, the environment, the military, you name it.
Tom Tomorrow points out an interesting new coinage: Googlestupid. It’s defined as the unfortunate tendency of someone to make pronouncements that are trivial to investigate with the Internet, and getting them wrong. This week’s best example is yet another bit of idiocy from the Times’ David Brooks, who is called out this week for a column complaining about two female pop singers (Pink and Avril) promulgating ideas in their lyrics hostile to marriage before 30 (this, in Brooks’ world, is apparently bad). The Googlestupidity is, of course, found in the fact that Pink, 28, and Avril, 22, are married.
Anyway, this particular example of Brooks being a lazy fuck brought another article to light, this one a fairly brutal deconstruction of Brooks’ famed post-2000-election Atlantic piece “One Nation, Slightly Divided,” which we read at the time and thought little of. The author, Sasha Issenberg, has no trouble documenting that Brooks basically fabricated nearly every supposed “division” between Red and Blue America, and did so in a way that was trivially easy uncover with the most cursory of fact-checking.
Brooks’ article hinges on the comparison of two counties near DC: Montgomery County, MD, where he lived, and Franklin County, PA, which was his stand-in for Red America. We’ve been to Franklin County; it’s decidedly rural, but not at all as far from suburban DC as Brooks would like us to believe.
For example, Brooks begins (as quoted in Issenberg’s piece):
“I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is,” Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across “the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.” Franklin County was a place where “no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings … [where] people don’t complain that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny,” he wrote. “In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.”
Funny, right? Also, sadly for Brooks, bullshit. Issenberg notes that one of Goodwin’s strongest markets is deeply rural McAllen, TX, and that QVC does profoundly well in urban, wealthy areas. But Brooks was too busy to check on things like “facts.” Issenberg, though, wasn’t, and took a trip to Franklin County to check things out for himself.
Issenberg discovered many things we find not at all surprising. For example, Franklin County boats both a fine Thai grocery and gourmet coffee company (we’ve been there as well). Notwithstanding Brooks’ assertion about Red American and Woody Allen, it turned out he couldn’t rent Annie Hall at the Chambersburg Blockbuster, but only because someone had beaten him to it. Even more absurdly, Brooks had claimed he was unable to spend more than $20 on dinner anywhere in Franklin County, and further called out their Red Lobster by name as one location where he tried. Issenberg found, as any normal human knows, that Red Lobster’s menu includes plenty of options to get a single dinner tab over that mark, including a surf-and-turf for $28.75. We’ve spent many evenings eating in that area, and can tell you from personal experience that keeping a dinner tab below $20 would be the real trick — i.e., just like anywhere else in the country.
The inescapable conclusion is that Brooks basically just makes shit up; Issenberg’s money quote:
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.
This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s read him or his babble for the last several years, of course. Brooks, of course, didn’t see it this way, and clearly tried to intimidate Issenberg:
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being “too pedantic,” of “taking all of this too literally,” of “taking a joke and distorting it.” “That’s totally unethical,” he said.
“Unethical,” Mr. Brooks, is making up facts. Brooks turns out to be employing a novel “rings true” standard, which we’re sure would be at home in any Yellow Peril article from 1885 or Jim Crow editorial from 1955, but falls a bit short of modern journalistic standards, even for editorial writers. Brooks isn’t the only one doing this, but its our dollars that keep him employed and read at his rarefied level. It’s certainly not news that people like to read what the recognize, and accept and reward “analysis” that confirms prejudices, but we’d hope that the gatekeepers in the “old media” would at least make some cursory efforts toward quality control. We know the hope is vain, but we keep it anyway.
DO NOT WANT.
(Via BoingBoing.)
This is brilliant. Aussie TV show decides to determine who, exactly, remembers the lessons of the Trojan Horse. It’s like that stupid Jay Leno news quiz thing, but funny:
(Hat tip to RFB, who notes that the other “Chaser” videos on YouTube are probably worth your time as well, especially their bits on airport security and Fox News.)
In a particularly fun Buffy episode, a one-shot character states, offhandedly, that she’d done her thesis on one of the recurring vampire characters.
Today, JWZ points out that someone has written that thesis.
Today, we are sleepy, because we stayed up late finishing that Goddamn Harry Potter book, but at least now we’re clear to see the film and have ample time to read Half-Blood Prince before Deathly Hallows drops.
(We’d have finished earlier, but we had to go watch Sam Jackson chain up a nymphomaniacal Christina Ricci for two hours.)
Internet Jesus (a/k/a Warren Ellis) points out TheVeidtMethod.com, the supposed web site of a firm owned by Adrian Veidt. Advance marketing, maybe, for a film of the least filmable comic ever? Perhaps:
$ whois theveidtmethod.com Domain name: theveidtmethod.com Registrant Contact: Type40 Internet Marketing and Promotion Michael Regina (xoanon78@hotmail.com) +1.5149475221 Fax: 1. 42 Marcel Meloche Kirkland, QC H9J1K6 CA
Occasional Superheroine points out that 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of What’s Opera, Doc?:
“Opera” is more than just an icon of several generations’ childhoods; this piece is perhaps Jones’ best work, and was voted the #1 animated short of all time by a poll of animation pros. Jones is also the only animator with three shorts selected for preservation in the National Film registry; the somewhat surreal One Froggy Evening (YouTube) from 1955 and the fourth-wall-demolishing Duck Amuck (YouTube) from 1951 round out his trifecta (they are, incidentally, #5 and #2 in the aforementioned greatest-cartoon list). Enjoy.
They recently gave air time to a kook who thinks Mr Rogers ruined a whole generation of children by telling them they were “special.”
Tom Tomrrow’s deconstruction of where, exactly, Dick Cheney’s office fits in our government is well worth your time today. Heh.
Coming very late to the Harry Potter party. We’d seen the movies, of course, but not read any of the books. Fortunately, Mrs. Heathen had nearly a full set, which we’re consuming at something over a book a day. As soon as we post this, we’ll start Order of the Phoenix.
The Albany office has spawned again! Don’t tell Agent K that we’re still calling her “Coco” down in Texas.
We didn’t realize Chron foodwriter Alison Cook was there, but we can confirm her observations that the fireworks views were fabulous, as was the WHOLE GOAT, not to mention the booze. Our delightfully insane friend Igor put together a little pot-luck soire in a snooty hotel suite at what used to be the Warwick overlooking Hermann Park; much fine food and booze was on hand, along with a very diverse salad of people. We’re told some relative of the deposed Shah (the 1925 one, not the 1979 one) made the guacamole, which is the sort of thing that can really only happen in Houston, so there you go. The suite was lovely, but the service deeply questionable, as Cook observed.
We are, of course, going back next year; Igor’s already booked the “Texas Tycoon” suite for 4 July 2008, which (thank God) falls on a Friday.
Inshallah.
The domestic spying suit has been dismissed at the appeals court level on a party-line vote; the GOP judges agreed with the government that those who brought the suit had no standing to do so.
The decision “insulates the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance activities from judicial review and deprives Americans of any ability to challenge the illegal surveillance of their telephone calls and e-mails,” ACLU Legal Director Steven Shapiro said in a news release.
We’ve said it before, and we say it again: the damage this Administration has done to our country is tremendous, and it starts with Bush’s utter contempt for the rule of law.
Murdoch’s succeeded in buying Dow Jones.
All 260 iterations of ‘fuck’ from the Big Lebowski, condensed into 2:14. It is: the most beautiful things we’ve seen today.
So we were reading our morning feed of stuff, and ran across this video over at JWZ’s blog (watch all 3 when you go over, but the 1st and 3rd are the best):
The video pointed out to us a frankly unacceptable gap in Heathen Central’s musical archives, so now we’re downloading the best of Earth, Wind & Fire from Steve. Dammit.
(Incidentally, there’s apparently a whole series of videos with the boogie-down stormtrooper. The Japanese are very, very different from us.)
Mr Olbermann gives them both barrels over the disgraceful commutation of Libby’s sentence. There’s video and a transcript at the link. Read, watch, or at least listen.
A bit:
We enveloped “our” President in 2001.
And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed, those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.
And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and sharpened it to a razor-sharp point, and stabbed this nation in the back with it.
Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.
Did so even before the appeals process was complete…
Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice…
Did so despite what James Madison — at the Constitutional Convention — said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president…
Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told: break the law however you wish — the President will keep you out of prison?
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens — the ones who did not cast votes for you.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President… of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.
And more:
I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.
I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.
I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.
I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but instead to stifle dissent.
I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.
I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.
I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.
And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of you becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.
And more:
The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy… these are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.
But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush — and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal — the average citizen understands that, sir.
It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one — and it stinks. And they know it.
Thank God for Keith. We just hope people are listening.
We’ll be busy boozing it up, but maybe you want to try this name the Presidents quiz. It gives you 10 minutes to name them; it helpfully puts them in order, and even gives hints by color-coding for “died in office,” “assassinated,” and “resigned.”
We got 33 of 43, but in so doing actually managed to include the most-forgotten Commander In Chief, which is worth something, we guess. Enjoy.
As it happens, Rachmaninov had very large hands.
The NYT on the new Ferrari F340, the $185,000 “entry level” car[1]:
The F1 sequential manual transmission does away with a clutch pedal, instead giving the driver shift paddles on either side of the steering column, just like a Formula One car (although traditionalists can still order a six-speed manual). The steering wheel features Ferrari’s “mannetino,” a small rotary switch with six settings to tailor the car’s electronic aggressiveness, from a snow-and-ice mode (as if!) to race, to the position beyond race that Ferrari’s people politely asked me not to engage, as it disables all traction and stability control and could easily lead to a Code Red Disgraced Journalist Situation.
More:
One habit I got into with the F430 was digging deep into the throttle and then pulling back for an upshift a few thousand r.p.m. short of the redline. This seems to trick the engine computer into dumping loads of fuel into the intake ports in anticipation of a run to 8,500 r.p.m., because when the F1 transmission clicks off the shift, it’s accompanied by a rifle-shot report, a supersonic whip-crack from the exhaust that prompts you to look in the mirror to see if the car behind you is engulfed in a contrail of flame. That never got old, frankly.
Some of my colleagues in the motoring press tell me that on a track, the F430 can be drifted, tail-out, balanced on the razor edge of adhesion.On the street, its handling imparts a sense of invulnerability that finds you wondering why everyone else is dawdling down off-ramps when they’re perfectly negotiable at 80 m.p.h.
Heh.
[1. That’s $185K new. It’s much, much more than that used, since Ferrari never makes enough to satisfy demand. The author notes that Ferrari left nearly half a billion dollars on the table when it elected to stick with a hard limit of 400 cars for its $650K Enzo.]
(Via Rob.)
We finally got around to checking the account.
Since last November, we’ve earned, oh, something under six bucks. What’s really odd is that $2.56 came last December alone. People are Christmas shopping on Heathen? Who knew?
We’d cancel, but Google won’t pay up for anything under ten bucks, so skating now means we lose six bones. We’ll put up with the ad banner for another 5 months to get our tenspot.
Bush has commuted Libby’s sentence, thereby sparing him prison. Details sketchy; it’s a breaking story.
Asshole.
Update: the responses are coming in, this, quoted by Sullivan, from Obama:
This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, one that has consistently placed itself and its ideology above the law. This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people’s faith in a government that puts the country’s progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years.
Word. But one-time Bushite Sullivan continues:
A great move by Obama. This has to be hung around every Republican’s neck. They are now the party of corruption, irresponsibility in national security, and perjury. The Republican party impeached the last president for perjury over sexual harassment. But they commute the sentence of a man who perjured himself in part because he leaked a national security secret. That tells you everything. They care more about their privileged friends than the rule of law. We now know that for sure.
As if there were ever any doubt.
Via JWZ, we find the story of Lonesome George, the last surviving member of a species of Galapagos tortoise.
The “eww” part? Apparently, it’s someone’s job to give the turtle a hand job.
You’ve probably heard of the new, incredibly heinous and expensive speeding fines passed in Virginia. What you probably didn’t know is that the primary delegate behind this new bill is David Albo, who happens to make his living defending traffic tickets.
What a douchebag.
Wired’s excellent but underread Table of Malcontents blog is closing up shop, but not before leaving us with some fine examples of “Cthulu + LOLCat” meme collision. Enjoy.
(All from lolthulhu.com, of course.)
Some terribly, terribly nerdy man contracted with one of the Bunny Ranch, um, “providers” to fabricate and wear a sexy Stormtrooper outfit for a date. And there’s video. Probably not SFW, but more for subject matter reasons than anything else; the nudity is pixelated.
Over at Freedom to Tinker, Prof. Felton sums up why the iPhone is important even if you don’t get one:
[…]the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.
From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.
Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.
In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.
The iPhone could well turn out to be that shock. The carriers will hate it, but the consumers will be the real winners.
In addition to basically gutting attempts to desegregate schools, they’ve also just made price fixing legal again. Oh boy.
The Roberts court is likely to be the most reversed, and most quickly reversed, ever — but it’s going to take a while. In the meantime, they’re going to create some truly awful rulings.
This is just absurd. In short, the mayor has proposed a city ordinance that requires anyone shooting video on public property have a permit and a million dollar insurance policy. As the linked BoingBoing post points out, this sort of law is designed for selective enforcement. While they’ll certainly ignore tourists shooting the skyline, we expect the law will get trotted out tout de suite as soon as some citizen journalist manages to get video of cops beating unarmed protesters (again).
New Yorkers need to step up and quash this bullshit with a quickness. The rights of citizens to shoot video in public, and of public employees, should be absolute. They work for US.
We’re pretty much behind this post about not getting an iPhone, and are even moreso in the “glad we got the 8525” camp after reading this very iPhone-friendly writeup from perpetual Apple booster John Gruber. The whole idea of a “smartphone” without cut-and-paste, or the facility to sync notes back to the desktop, strikes us as folly. The list of things our cheaper Windows Mobile device can do that the iPhone can’t grows longer, and as it turns out they’re things we like to do.
In particular, check this out (from Gruber’s article):
Mail: I hope you like top-posting, and quoting the entire message you’re replying to. Me, I despise that style of email, but iPhone Mail doesn’t really work well any other way. One problem is that the iPhone doesn’t support the concept of selected text. That means you can’t just select a specific portion to quote of the message you’re replying to; nor can you select a chunk of the quoted message and delete it while editing. The only way to delete text is one character at a time (although the keyboard does let you press-and-hold to repeat). And to top it off, there’s no way to reply without quoting anything at all.
Yikes.
Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow got some great shots of a street in New Haven completely re-dressed in 1950s drag for some exteriors shot for the new Indiana Jones movie. The level of detail is pretty spiffy.
Now, even Fox News push-polling doesn’t come out in the GOP’s favor:
If there is an all-out war between the United States and various radical Muslim groups worldwide, who would you rather have in charge — Democrats or Republicans?
The result: Dems 41%, GOP 38%.
Or, at least, WANT TO MAKE: Via BoingBoing, we are now obsessed with this steampunk jar of articulated fireflies.
Just now, we heard a bit of commotion and looked out our window to see a shirtless man quietly being arrested by three of Houston’s Finest, right there in our driveway, between Mrs Heathen’s car and the trashcan. He had apparently been nabbed red-handed rooting through said trash (which contained an old, nonfunctional, but once-upon-a-time expensive CD player). He was not being arrested for the trash-rooting; rather, he was being popped for burglary elsewhere in the neighborhood this afternoon.
So, it’s a matter of choosing between “Holy crap, there’s a BURGLAR IN OUR DRIVEWAY being arrested by three cops!” and “Holy crap, there’s a burglar in our driveway BEING ARRESTED BY THREE COPS!”
(P.S.: Don’t tell Mrs Heathen.)
Joey sums it up: This Light Switch Might Explain A Lot About Java.
It’s come to our attention that a certain Dallas-area blogger is celebrating his TENTH anniversary.
Wow. The time, where do it go? It seems like only yesterday we were taking our lives into our own hands riding with a hell-bent-for-leather cabbie to some, er, entertainment venues on the night before the wedding. Wow.
Bush has signaled that he will not comply with a Congressional subpoena for documents related to the (clearly political) firings of the US Attorneys, citing executive privilege. More from Aunt Nel.
As noted above, there’s no surprise here. Bush has made it abundantly clear he feels his office is answerable to no one, notwithstanding the checks and balances we all learned about in civics. Sadly for him, he’s incorrect. Sadly for us, his stubbornness is actively damaging our republic.
Desktop Tower Defense is just about the best online game we’ve seen. Don’t click if you don’t have some time.
For the second time in a year, our DSL is down.
For the 6 years prior, the DSL was never down. Since changing providers last October, we’ve had now two distinct problems — one of which, a drastic reduction in bandwidth, lasted for weeks.
Grrrrr.
Why? Because WE aren’t the ones who searched for, found, purchased, and meticulously restored the Camaro from Better Off Dead. It kind of hurts us to realize that gap between “when the car was new” (’66/’67) and “when they made the movie” (’85) is shorter than “when they made the movie” and “now.”
(Very cool. Via MeFi.)
Apparently, there used to be giant, 5-foot penguins in Peru.
That Italy is seeking extradition of 22 American CIA operatives involved in the “extraordinary rendition” program is old news. Now Germany is joining the club, as they’re miffed our government snatched an innocent German citizen. We expect both the Italian and German requests to be denied by the Bush administration, further straining our relationships with our European allies, and further damaging our credibility.
Thanks, George!
From a Newsweek poll:
Perhaps most alarmingly, 41% of Americans answered ‘Yes’ to the question “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?”
That total is actually up 5 points since September 2004.
Further, a majority of people couldn’t identify Saudia Arabia as the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers, even given the question in multiple choice format. 20% answered Iraq, while 14% believed the hijackers came from Iran.
Searching for content management systems for a client, we ran across this lovely but potentially unworksafe blog post: Content Management Systems I Would or Wouldn’t Fuck. Heh.