ninme

The Times - US presidential race is as dramatic as a crackpot Dynasty plot Blake and Alexis Carrington, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton – it’s all getting so confusingm by Tim Hames

In a further quirk, the convention is being held later than usual because the Democrats decided that it would “maximise momentum” to defer it. [...]

Categories: Politics

The man’s on a roll:

WaPo - The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud, by Charles Krauthammer

This contextual analysis of Wright’s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It’s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That’s why [...]

Categories: Politics

When I say “white”, I don’t mean caucasion. I mean people that aren’t a rawhide, wrinkly leather brown, nor bright red (because an excruciating and dangerous sunburn is a great way to get a headstart on getting “colour”). I went to Mass this morning, and everyone was just so normal. And pretty much everybody (except [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Just about two years ago, I posted Free Tibet, which linked to an Alice Thomson column about her trip to see the Dalai Lama, which was probably one of the most memorable articles I’ve read. She’s bringing it up again:

Telegraph - Gordon Brown must back Tibet’s freedom fight, by Alice Thomson

The last image [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Mark Steyn’s really good this week:

NRO - Post ‘Post-Racial Candidate’ Things get out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts on the campaign trail. by Mark Steyn

Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the [...]

Categories: Politics

You know those old toothbrush ads where it’s all about telling you what brand of toothbrush most dentists use?

Telegraph - Only fools represent themselves in court, by Harry Mount

In private, divorce lawyers not only say you shouldn’t employ yourself for your divorce; they also say you shouldn’t employ them either - ie just [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

If not years:

Wikipedia - Pineapple

The word “pineapple”, first recorded in 1398, was originally used to describe the reproductive organs of conifer trees (now termed pine cones). When European explorers discovered this tropical fruit, they called them “pineapples” (term first recorded in that sense in 1664) because it resembled what we know as pine [...]

Categories: Food

The Times - A Beijing boycott won’t work I resisted the pleas to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The same arguments apply today, by Colin Moynihan

The case at the time was clear to my team-mates and me. Despite the horrors of the Soviet invasion, it was wrong for the Government to ask sportsmen [...]

Categories: Sports and Leisure

The Times - Was God in the White House? Past Notes: we think of presidents as churchgoers, but 11 out of 43 were not members of a church, by Graham Stewart

“The White House is the pulpit of the nation,” the American journalist James Reston once claimed, “and the president is its chaplain.” No wonder, [...]

Categories: History

Since I got here Wednesday evening, does that make it Day 4? I never thought so, but I think for accounting purposes it is… At any rate, I was so wound up last night about all the stuff I had to do today, I could barely sleep all night. So then this morning when I [...]

Categories: Wildcard

The Telegraph - Good Friday sell-out

A generation ago, Good Friday at its worst was like Tony Hancock’s Sunday afternoon, a masterclass in ennui. Everything was shut. The pubs were closed by law except for two brief hours at lunchtime. Shops, theatres and museums were shut. Television, in an attempt at solemnity, chose dullness, [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

The Times - Right now all the torch represents is China – the sport comes later, by Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer

At the Olympic Games, bullshit and beauty walk hand in hand. The event totters under the weight of portentous symbols; pious talk of world peace and universal love never ceases; politicians and [...]

Categories: Sports and Leisure

Err, yes, I’m in Maui. See?

the buttcrack of dawn was right behind me. ah, jetlag.

Sorry, why am I in Maui, you ask? Well, I’m doing a renovation of my grandparents’ old place to turn it into a rental property. Why am I using the first person singular, you ask? Because I’m the one doing it. [...]

Categories: Wildcard

Telegraph - Sooner Fed bail-outs than the 1930s revisited, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Most would rather relish the delicious moments of Schadenfreude as the bailiff’s gavel falls on their Gulfstream IVs. Yet we must forbear. It was such sentiments that turned the 1930 recession into a slump. “Liquidationists” prevailed: they insisted with [...]

Categories: Business & Media

BBC - Olympics crisis over squat loos

China is rushing to install sit-down loos for its 500,000 foreign Olympics visitors, after complaints that venues had only Asian-style squat toilets.

Eh…

An appropriately themed preoccupation with the wrong problem needing addressing.

I’m filing this under Science and Nature. …Pffffft

Categories: Science and Nature