Month: February 2004

Citing the same Michael Tomasky article I quoted yesterday, Digby of Hullabaloo offers a suggestion of a prominent Democrat ideally positioned to take out Ralph Nader at the kneecaps: Howard Dean. If Dean could do this, it would possibly be an even greater service to Democratic politics than he’s already provided.

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One of the great cautionary tales from science is Albert Einstein’s “Cosmological Constant”, which was basically a constant that Einstein shoehorned into his theory of relativity (I can never remember which one, General or Special Relativity). In really simplified terms, Einstein didn’t like the implications of his theory for the evolution of the universe, so he stuck in a number he called the “Cosmological Constant”, in order to make the theory fit the way he wanted the universe to behave. (My understanding is that the Constant was intended to balance the implications of his theory that the Universe would either be expanding or contracting, with the empirical evidence of Einstein’s day that the Universe was static, or “steady state”, as it was described then.)

Einstein later regarded the Cosmological Constant as a colossal blunder that impeded the natural beauty of his theory, but it now turns out that he may have been right all along. A team using the Hubble Space Telescope to examine distant supernovae for gravitational effects, and what they observe now appears to confirm the existence of dark energy.

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Here’s something by Will Duquette that I’ve been meaning to link for several weeks, but I keep forgetting about it: “The Old Man in the Hat Comes Back”, a Dr. Seuss parody of Lord of the Rings that Will is working on. If he manages to see this thing all the way through to the Gray Havens, it will surely be one of the great feats of blogging.

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There’s something kind of nifty about the idea of living in a place where gubernatorial candidates do this kind of thing on the day they announce their candidacy.

But then, Ted Kaczinski probably had the same thought when he was looking for a place to set up shack, so….

(via DPS)

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This post is a test to see how the “Change Time and Date” feature on Blogger works. Move along, please. (Or use it as an open comment thread.)

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According to this quiz, I am 60% Dixie. Weird, because the longest period of time I have ever spent south of the line formed by, say, Missouri’s northern border is one week, and that was on three different trips to Florida I’ve had in my lifetime.

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Libertarian Jackass (who is sporting a spiffy new template design, although he should restore the permalinks) points out this Fark collection of altered Chance and Community Chest cards from Monopoly. Some are pretty obvious, but others are downright clever.

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Via Matthew Yglesias I see this Michael Tomasky article about Ralph Nader, the current Big-Ass Lunatic of American politics. Here’s Tomasky’s prescription for how Democrats should deal with Nader:

So here’s a thought for an enterprising Democratic candidate: Attack Nader right now, and with lupine ferocity. Say he’s a madman for thinking of running again. Blast him especially hard on foreign policy, saying that if it were up to the Greens, America would give no aid to Israel and it would cease to exist, and if it were up to the Greens, America would not have even defended itself against a barbarous attack by going into Afghanistan. Have at him, and hard, from the right. Then nail him from the left on certain social issues, on abortion rights and other things that he’s often pooh-poohed and dismissed as irrelevant. Cause an uproar. Be dramatic. Don’t balance it with praise about what he’s done for consumers. To the contrary, talk about how much he’s damaging consumers today by not caring who’s in charge of the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Communications Commission.

Right on.

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For some reason, I didn’t see much outright weirdness this week in the course of my normal surfing about, so I resorted to an old trick guaranteed to turn up wonderful oddities: Just do a Google search using two search terms only, one of which is to be “Cthulhu”. This time, I paired Cthulhu with “Peeps”, as in those horrible marshmallow things that are apparently intended for human consumption.

This search yielded, as a primary hit, this page of Peeps-related cartoons, of which this one is related to Mr. Lovecraft’s creation.

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Yar sold a story to a magazine, but he doesn’t tell which one is his! “Foul,” cries I.

He’s also searching for direction as a blogger — it seems that he finally read one more Town Hall column than he could handle, and his synapses put down their tools and staged a mass walk-out. Personally, I’m amazed that it took as long for his brain to revolt as it did, but anytime Town Hall’s number of regular readers drops by one, it’s a good thing.

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