January 25, 2012 – 8:12 pm
Are you tucked away in an elite intellectual and cultural cocoon, isolated from America’s ‘vibrant’ popular mainstream? One can only hope. Find out here.
January 25, 2012 – 10:24 am
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s something new about to make its debut: the Tata MiniCat. Not what you want for traversing the Interstate system, but perfect for getting around locally — and cheaply.
January 24, 2012 – 11:34 pm
We were on the road all day, so all I have tonight is this odd item from long ago, in which goldfish bowls were banned in Monza, Italy. Apparently, according to the town council’s Giampietro Mosca, a fish kept in a curved glass bowl “has a distorted view of reality … and suffers because of [...]
January 24, 2012 – 1:02 am
It seems old Sol has just launched a gigantic flare our way — the biggest in seven years — and we will notice its effects on Tuesday. While you’re waiting, here’s a fantastic gallery of solar images. My favorites: numbers 15 and 16.
January 23, 2012 – 10:56 pm
Here’s how you can tell working coders from computer-science Ph.Ds: Make them mad. We all know when you’re angry you should count to 10; this should be sufficient for distinguishing the two species. The Coder: “zero…one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight…nine.” The Ph.D: “one…two.”
January 23, 2012 – 7:16 pm
Bored? Then spend a few minutes contemplating this grammatically correct and semantically coherent sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Read all about it here, and here.
January 23, 2012 – 6:39 pm
Here’s a funny line: “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Funny? Well, not so much, maybe. According to a tart item at the Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, Mr. Romney actually said this in a [...]
January 22, 2012 – 11:39 pm
More on the blessings of socialized medicine, from the Daily Mail.
January 22, 2012 – 11:26 pm
What say you, readers? Is this child abuse?
January 22, 2012 – 11:08 pm
When you mix cornstarch with water, you get a gloopy liquid with a strange property: its viscosity increases the faster you try to move through it or deform it. Back when my kids were in grade school, they informed me that the stuff now has an official name: “oobleck”. It turns out that oobleck behaves [...]
January 21, 2012 – 10:17 pm
First real snow of the season here in Wellfleet. Here are two views from chez Waka, taken earlier today (and about half a foot ago). Looking northwest, down the hill: Looking east, out the back door: I liked the way these tree-trunks along the lane looked in the grey light:
January 21, 2012 – 9:52 pm
Off the coast of Brazil is a huge oilfield. Ensuring a stable source of Western-Hemisphere oil would be a good thing for us here in the U.S., especially given recent unrest in the Mideast, and uncertainty about the security of the Persian Gulf. So The Obama administration went to Rio last month to make a [...]
January 21, 2012 – 12:41 pm
Here’s a cheery item: Bankrupt Solyndra is now smashing its inventory and throwing it into dumpsters. I thought our American readers would find this of particular interest, having paid for the stuff.
January 21, 2012 – 12:54 am
Here’s some really terrible news that I just heard about tonight; Tom Ardolino, NRBQ’s longtime drummer and one of my favorite drummers of all time, has died. I don’t know what the cause was, but he’d been sick for a while. Tom Ardolino just whacked the hell out of the drums, and played the biggest, [...]
January 19, 2012 – 1:30 pm
My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them. The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them [...]
January 19, 2012 – 12:28 pm
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention (with pithy comments of his own, here) an article from the Daily Mail on the SOPA bill that has been getting so much attention. (I’ll confess I haven’t read the dense 78-page bill itself yet, but from all the summaries I’ve seen it does indeed appear to be a [...]
January 18, 2012 – 6:34 pm
Sorry to harp on politics today, but President Obama has now petulantly squashed the Keystone Pipeline project, which had broad support, would have created many jobs, and would have decreased our reliance on Mideast oil. Even his own base was divided on this one, with unions supporting it and environmental groups in opposition. Detailed commentary [...]
January 18, 2012 – 3:31 pm
In a gratifyingly swift response, those non-recess “recess” appointments the President made a fortnight or so ago are now being challenged in court.
January 18, 2012 – 1:22 am
Well, Wikipedia’s down for a day. This should reduce the apparent know-it-all-ness of the blogospheric commentariat by about 98%, I reckon. (Fortunately I downloaded a copy, so I should be OK.) Feeling a little better today. Should be my old self shortly.
January 16, 2012 – 11:20 pm
Still under the weather here, and in my depleted state I seem to be losing the battle with the blank page. If brain not in better shape soon I may have to turn things over to my Super PAC for a few days. Update: OK, here’s something, in case you missed it over at Kevin’s [...]
January 15, 2012 – 11:49 pm
I’m not at all well tonight — I seem to have caught a nasty sinus cold, a rarity for me — and it’s all I can manage to keep the conversation going in our “What Is A Nation Anyway?” thread. Back to normal soon, I hope.
January 13, 2012 – 10:09 pm
Pat Buchanan has now lost his TV gig for crimespeak, but he’s still got his website and newsletter. In his latest offering, he examines Ron Paul’s candidacy, and what Mr. Paul’s investment strategy says about his view of the near future. Here.
January 13, 2012 – 11:55 am
Well, here it is again: Friday the 13th. I consider them auspicious, but I’ve already written about that several times (such as here and here), so for today I’ll just note the event en passant, and get on with other things.
January 12, 2012 – 11:13 pm
With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item: Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional. “Human rights do not prescribe national [...]
January 12, 2012 – 4:17 pm
In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or [...]
January 11, 2012 – 7:04 pm
Meet Mercedes-Benz’s new spokesman.
January 11, 2012 – 6:35 pm
BE IT KNOWN BY ALL that Hizzonner Michael Bloomberg, Lord Mayor of Manhattan, Imperator of The Five Boroughs, Slayer of Term Limits, and Guardian In Loco Parentis of the Well-Being and Moral Probity of the Gothamite Flock, has of Late turned His Attention to the licentious Consumption of Alcoholic Liquors, and other stimulating Potations, by [...]
January 11, 2012 – 11:07 am
Here’s a dispatch from our senior White House correspondent, Milton Polchek: WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 – Michelle Obama, the first black woman to serve as First Lady, took to the airwaves recently to express her irritation at being characterized as an “angry black woman”. Mrs. Obama could not be reached for comment, but a close friend [...]
January 11, 2012 – 12:25 am
Here’s a curious item for you: the only recorded capture, in the Tripiscum Plateau of the Circum-Caribbean region of Northern South America, of the exotic Piercing Devil.
January 10, 2012 – 9:12 pm
With thanks to our reader Pete K., here’s a heartening item from the frontiers of science. What’s more, the story introduces a new and important fundamental unit of measurement, which I think should be called the ‘marley’. And here’s a related video.
January 9, 2012 – 2:19 pm
With a hat tip to VFR, here’s the Jerusalem Post’s latest report on the Islamist renaissance that is coalescing in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’. Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the [...]
January 8, 2012 – 11:06 pm
Gotta love this: the upstart Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has attracted nationwide attention for his ostentatious Christianity, is fond of associating himself with the New Testament verse John 3:16. For you damned heathens out there who may not be familiar with this oft-quoted passage, it says: For God so loved the world that [...]
January 8, 2012 – 5:43 pm
So, conservatives: who’s our guy going to be? Heading into the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney has a commanding lead — and the other candidates spent most of Saturday’s debate snarling at one another, while hardly even taking a swing at Mitt. There are two questions. First: who out of this lot would, by our [...]
January 8, 2012 – 1:09 am
I’ve never been a fan of Rick Santorum, and I hope he doesn’t win the GOP nomination, because then I’d have to vote to elect him President. But any criticism I might make of him begins and ends with his public life: his opinions and intentions regarding government policy. Not so for liberal water-carriers Alan [...]
January 7, 2012 – 3:44 pm
Just tweeted by “Karma’s janitor”, @Iowahawk: New York New York, it’s a helluva town / 3 foot rats, but the transfats are down
January 6, 2012 – 10:55 pm
Peter Kirsanow comments, here, on President Obama’s scorched-earth “recess” appointments. I look forward to an adjudication in the courts. This year’s presidential campaign is going to make Iwo Jima look like a pillow-fight. And if you thought U.S. politics were already polarized to the point of total dysfunction, Pat Buchanan argues here, just wait until [...]
January 6, 2012 – 9:29 pm
New tests of the extract of Japanese raisin-tree seeds (hovenia dulcis) appear to have confirmed that their “active ingredient” is highly effective at blocking the effects of alcohol. Big Think reports: Scientists at UCLA gave a group of rats the “human equivalent” of 15 to 20 beers during a two-hour binge. We’ll call this group [...]
January 6, 2012 – 2:44 pm
So I’ve decided to follow @kanyewest on Twitter. Should be great, I think.
January 5, 2012 – 11:27 pm
From the frontiers of science, here’s some breaking news – Men, Women Really Do Have Big Personality Differences – that any human being, plucked from anywhere on Earth at any time between the invention of language and the 1960s or so, and not in a persistent vegetative state, could have told you. I’m “on the [...]
January 4, 2012 – 11:19 pm
Here’s something I meant to post a few weeks ago, when President Obama was delivering that Osawatomie speech. It’s an essay by Walter Russell Mead, in which he examines the persistent Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian threads in American political history, and argues that after a long period of Hamiltonian ascendancy, the time is right for the [...]
January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am
In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, [...]
January 3, 2012 – 10:15 pm
This in the mailbag from our old friend David Pauley: Freeman Dyson on catastrophes, real and imaginary.
January 2, 2012 – 11:05 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Valicella, here are some prize-winning examples of spectacularly bad writing.
January 2, 2012 – 5:21 pm
Nearly a year ago, as the uprising in Egypt was gaining traction, I wrote: The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it [...]
January 1, 2012 – 4:30 pm
Last January we noted in these pages a mysterious event at Beebe, Arkansas: thousands of red-winged blackbirds had fallen out of the sky on New Year’s Eve. An excerpt: It seems that thousands of red-winged blackbirds (and as far as I can tell, only red-winged blackbirds) fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve [...]
December 31, 2011 – 2:26 pm
With grim 2011 winding down, I thought about making a New Year’s resolution to take a more positive outlook toward the future, to express more optimism in these pages, and generally to stop being so pessimistic about everything. I figured it probably wouldn’t work out, though, so I gave up on the idea. But just [...]
December 30, 2011 – 2:42 pm
There’s something for everyone here at waka waka waka, and we’ve made it a late-December tradition to take a look back at some of the thousands of keyphrases that brought visitors our way from Google and other search engines over the past year. Here’s our 2011 selection; it’s a curious crop as always.
December 27, 2011 – 8:20 pm
We’re on something of a holiday schedule this week — so for tonight, just a grab-bag of little diversions: – An item that, if it were a post of its own, would surely have been titled “Bird Brains”, or perhaps “Counting Crows”. – A little hibernal music from the late Jackie Gleason. – For you [...]