Tuesday, 11/30/04

It's just not a Tuesday without Paul Krugman. 06:20PM «

Tuesday, 11/23/04

You've no doubt heard about the five-digit eBay auction of the ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich, slightly chewed, bearing the face of the Virgin Mary. Sensible explanations are appearing all over, but the only sensible commentary I've seen came from William Gibson:

You call it pareidolia, I call it apophenia, but why can't people see that it looks exactly like the young Marlene Dietrich?

Just try and argue with the man:

04:59PM «

Saturday, 11/20/04

I learned today, via Malcolm Gladwell's latest, that "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'s main guitar riff is only a minor modification of the one used by Boston in "More Than A Feeling". I had to listen to both songs before I'd believe it. The iTunes Music Store's 30-second samples thankfully met my Boston needs.

The rest of the article is about par for Gladwell, whose M.O. consists of appraising an aspect of modern conventional wisdom as if it were a seventeenth-century treatise on spontaneous generation of flies from rotting meat. There is no periodical writer whose work I look forward to more, and I can't recall ever having been disappointed.

Via boingboing, I noticed a recording of a half-hour talk Gladwell gave at Pop!Tech on the limitations of people to know and express their own opinions. I was listening to it on the iPod as I took a walk in search of a good sourdough loaf, and when he got to the anecdote about the college students' poster preferences, I admit I shouted in the street. 08:32PM «

Friday, 11/19/04

I hardly know what to say about Tom DeLay. He's a very bad man (I lack the stomach to even summarize his responsibility for the de-facto enslavement of women at American Saipan, to pick one revolting résumé-item). I thought it was heartwarming that he only won his biannual House race by 55%. I would like to do what I can to see him defeated in 2006.

That is, if he still has a job in 2006. Ronnie Earle is the district attorney for Travis County, TX, who has already indicted three people in DeLay's circle for campaign finance violations (conducted in the service of re-redistricting the Texas congressional districts, to gerrymander seats away from Democrats -- the whole of the House's GOP gains in the 2004 election came due to the scheme's success).

Earle is believed to be preparing a case against DeLay. The House GOP is screaming "witch-hunt!", though Earle's record shows he's investigated far more Democrats than Republicans, even since the Republicans took all power in the state back in 1993.

1993 was the year before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in DC. The House GOP in '93 adopted a party caucus rule to compel any Republican in a House leadership position (these guys) who'd been indicted for a felony to step down. Not lose their House seat, mind you, just their leadership job. They added this rule to take the moral high ground from the Democrats, who had been embarrassed by Dan Rostenkowski's fraud indictment. (As Molly Ivins points out, the Democrats also had such a rule on the books, and the Republicans "did not make their rule retroactive, so the highly indicted Rep. Joseph McDade, senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, could, unlike Rostenkowski, retain his seat.")

Well, last Wednesday the House GOP caucus scrapped its rule, to protect DeLay from a possible indictment by Ronnie Earle. They did it on a voice vote, with people shouting ayes and nays, to avoid an embarrassing paper trail. However, Josh Marshall has been prodding constituents to call their reps' offices to ask how they voted. This could get really interesting. Unless the House's GOP members are far more scrupulous students of game theory than I expect, the self-reported vote count could compound an already-appalling embarrassment.

DailyDeLay.blogspot.com has a tally, but I think it's defective. When I called retiring Bellevue Representative Jennifer Dunn's office yesterday, I was told that only members of next year's 109th Congress got a vote. Marshall and DailyDelay are both working from a list of the 108th Congress.

I built a spreadsheet yesterday (Excel format) to keep a tally of who's coming out of the closet on the DeLay rule vote. I believe Dunn's staffer is correct, so my list weeds out 2004's lame ducks, and includes the names and web sites of the 109th Congressional GOP. I use campaign web sites in the cases of the newly elected, who don't have official sites or offices until they get sworn in in January.

I'm also not comfortable that DailyDeLay is accepting anonymous reports; I don't think that'll stand up to scrutiny. I'm citing news articles or TPM links wherever I can find them, to support a claim of an individual rep's vote. I'll be updating the spreadsheet over the course of the day, while I figure out an appropriate way to depict it more visually on the web.

Have you called your representative yet? They may stall you by saying they'll only respond to written inquiries from constituents; if so, please send them some polite registered mail. I hope to narrow this list down over the next week or so, and continue to put pressure on the holdouts. The final tally is not going to be pretty, and with any luck, justice, or providence, this should be merely the prelude to DeLay's indictment.

Attaboys, or contributions, may be directed to Ronnie Earle via his old-school website. More to come. 09:57AM «

Wednesday, 11/17/04

Among Google News' many virtues is the ease with which it can expose plagiarists. There's got to be a way to automate this. 03:28PM «

Friday, 11/12/04

Google News matches for "Falluja" (the preferred spelling of the NYT, Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera, and others): 3,990

Google News matches for "Fallujah" (the preferred spelling of the AP, Guardian, Xinhua, and others): 48,300

That is all. 07:49PM «

From the realm of audiobooks, here's a particularly absurd synonym for "abridged" that I have never seen before today: "unabridged excerpts". No shame at all. 07:48PM «

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