Things to think about on a cold, wet Monday morning:
One of the most thoughtful pieces about the Gates I’ve seen on the web. Nice work, Mo.
The problem with “intelligent design” is that so much of nature’s design is so profoundly unintelligent.
On clocks, squeezing one out, freedom and plateaus: Rebecca MacKinnon asks “why?” while Maccers ponders the road ahead. Someone should get these two women in a room together and turn on a tape recorder.
So Richard Pearle debates Howard Dean in Portland, Oregon, and he’s surprised when someone throws a shoe at him?
Absolutely astonishing photographs of Hong Kong apartment buildings.
Bush’s pick to be chief of National Intelligence denies that there were death squads in Honduras, which would be almost believable if they hadn’t been developed on his watch. Is it just me, or does Negroponte make our friend Hank seem like a kindly old man?
And in other foreign policy news, Kim Jong Il’s birthday was a few days ago; this reminds me that the winger-sphere has been astonishingly silent about the complete and utter foreign policy failure that is a nuclear North Korea. I mean, seriously: don’t you think that letting a known madman get his hands on The Bomb might be the worst foreign policy disaster since, well, ever?
Would you believe me if I told you there was a tuxedoed bathroom attendant at the Times Square McDonald’s? No, really, there was.
My friend Steve Bunche is doing his bit to celebrate Black History Month by doing a detailed summary of Kyle Onstott’s spectacularly awful novel Mandingo (which spawned the spectacularly awful movie). First up are chapters one through five. Not for the weak of heart or stomach.
How much money will you lose under Bush’s Social Security Proposal?
If you were a teenager in the mid-to-late-eighties, you had to suffer through plenty of interminable pop odes to the wonders of safe sex as part of the AIDS paranoia of the era (the most famous probably being George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”). Well my friend Patrick Runkle has managed to unearth the Ur-Text of this genre: Jim Steinman’s “Safe Sex,” the song.
What subways will get you from here to there? (via wildsoda)
Does the President have a bald guy fetish, or what? The public has a right to know.
And finally (thought I’d never get to it, didya?), the squonk is a mythical, lachrymose creature of the hemlock forests of western Pennsylvania; it’s also the name of a Genesis song that’s allegedly about the departure of Peter Gabriel from the band. Gabriel’s version of the story is told in one of his biggest hits, Solsbury Hill. As a side note, Squonk Opera is the name of performing arts troupe from Pittsburgh that had an Off-Broadway hit a few years ago (the show, called, confusingly enough, “Squonk”, did transfer to Broadway, but didn’t quite ever take off there. I have a videotape somewhere of the show; it’s really quite something. What exactly, I’m not sure, but definitely something.).
OK, maybe I should have broken them out into a few different posts.
