2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 95,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see [...]

Great Sentences: Daniel Deronda edition

Blogger’s note: What follows is some 1,200 words on writing and reading.  It’s part of a temporary redirection of my efforts more generally.  I’ve got a month to get out the door a book proposal that’s been languishing for laughably too long.  So I’m going to be doing my damndest to avoid all provocation from [...]

An Important Birthday Today, I Hear…

…of a fatherless boy,¹ so precariously brought into this world that as his mother lay on her birthing bed, it seemed unlikely so ill-conceived a child could live.² But he did, and as his contemporaries bore witness, he would fashion miracles in their season.  As proclaimed by one of those who spread the good news [...]

Yes, I do know that Sully is a waste of time, but…

…it’s almost wreck-on-the-highway fascinating to watch his Ron Paul fixation play out.* [Blogger's note: I'm posting in even greater haste than usual, as the holidays impose (enable) family time...(yippee, actually).  So apologies in advance for typos, grotesquely elongated sentences, convoluted language, and flabbiness or outright outrages of thought.  In other words, as always, what follows [...]

You Just Can’t Make This Racist Sh*t Up: Fox News Owes Everybody a Great Big Honking Act of Contrition

Via TPM, and courtesy (sic!) of  rightist media flack Brent Bozell and Fox News, this gem: “How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead?” Bozell [...]

Time for the Seasonal Stylings of America’s Favorite Singing Statistician, Wouldn’t You Say?

From the vocal chords of one Professor T. Lehrer, this celebration of Chanukah.  (Embedding is disabled, but you can cross that link for an…interesting aesthetic experience.) And, just to provide some more direct stimulus — here’s an old favorite that popped up on my radio this morning.  Nothing seasonal about it, but still, a good [...]

Sex vs. Money: Sex Makes The Front Page; Money Counts.

So another Republican “family values” stalwart turns up gay as a goose. (h/t yuriwho at GOS) My first reaction was that the seemingly endless GOP of sexual-bigotry-fail is becoming regular enough to resemble how I remember the what the DJ back home in the Bay Area  said about the weather for six months at a [...]

Program Notes: Tim Ferrris/Virtually Speaking Science edition.

Dear all, I’ve been even more absent than usual, for which I apologize to any who’ve noticed (and cared about the absence) and wish coal-in-stockings for all those who were cheering the blessed silence. Nothing disastrous has intervened — just a job that continues to kick my ass more than I thought likely, and seems, [...]

This Deceased Equine Quadriped Has Been Pretty Well Whacked, But…

…I’ve never thought enough was that much better than too much, so here, a brief (for me) reaction about the now-notorious Gene Marks piece in Forbes. (With apologies to ABL, DougJ, and John, all of whom get this “timely” thing waaaay better than yours truly.) I popped these thoughts up in response to this piece [...]

Somewhere, Doc Is Smiling

To the annals of the unbelievably cool, add this:  a camera that can image one trillion frames per second.  That’s fast enough to make a movie of light in motion. Let me say that again:  this apparatus is sufficiently precise and capable of such extreme slow motion photography that it can make a moving images [...]