Oregon Defeats the Supreme Court

You have to appreciate the balls of the Oregon Supreme Court to see this through.

New Season, New Burger

Minor league franchises have started to roll out this year's line of glutton-absurdity burgers.

Jets Fans: New Heights in Whining

Here

Manimals

the myopenbar.com newsletter led me to this. I'm all for art prank theater and animal costumes, but I wonder if these people are actually unstable. They seem to think that a good way to launch a brand of homemade fish-chicken nuggets is to give a man in a dolphin costume religious significance and then distribute said nuggets for free on the streets of Williamsburg.

More Historical Sexx Laws

Dirty Title

I have been constantly embarrassed by the thousand year old tradition of titling law review articles with puns and bad jokes, but I applaud the guy who took advantage of that tradition by coming up with this absolutely disturbing title:

Raping Sodomy and Sodomizing Rape: A Morality Tale about the Transformation of Modern Sodomy Jurisprudence

McRib Law

Public intellectual and law prof, Mr. Instapundit, came to school this morning.

Best part of his lecture: He said that his first assignment as a lawyer was finding out if it was OK for McDonald's to advertise a barbecued rib sandwich that is neither barbecued nor rib. (It was.)

Oral HGH

I recently got a comment on a really old post I wrote about baseball that said this:

Most ballplayers today are taking homeopathic growth hormone oral spray because it's safe, undetectable, and legal for over the counter sales. As time goes on it seems it might be considered as benign a performance enhancer as coffee, aspirin, red bull, chewing tobacco, and bubble gum.

The oral HGH shill isn't wrong about the long tradition of substance abuse in baseball. I guess we are nearing the day when it won't be weird for a player to chew on a big mouthful of tobacco, gum, sunflower seeds, ritalin, growth hormone, anti-depressants, and stem cells.

Inadequate Care, Texas Style

. . . where it's not enough for orderlies to just ignore patients and rape people in comas. No, there they have to gamble over organized bloodsport matches where the insane and infirm are pitted against each other.

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith's touching and funny essay about her father that was in the New Yorker in December prompted me to pick up On Beauty, which I just finished. I also just listened to her lecture on Obama and voice (link at the bottom of that post), which is really good.

While On Beauty isn't nearly as good as White Teeth, and while it might have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize largely because of her celebrity and because it is apparently somewhat based on Howard's End (I honestly don't really know or care what that means and only learned about it after finishing the book), it's still decent.

But what really amazed me was the back flap of the book. She's only 34. And White Teeth was published in 2000. So, does it really matter whether her third book was earth shattering? She's obviously capable of writing something amazing, and it's easy to see that she understands this pressure we're putting her under. But she has a long time to accomplish the task, with a lot of room for failure and near-misses along the way.

(This is where Charlie Rose learned me about the Howard's End thing. About 30 min in, after Matt and Tre.)

Is This Your Homework Larry?

I'm torn between believing that the fact that a bit of purposefully botched homework has achieved a status of minor celebrity signals a total and complete breakdown of our society, and then, when I notice the dates on the homework--1999, 2000, 2004--wanting to hire a team of computer excavators to comb through everything I did in high school and college.

But the truth is, real or not, this is bullshit. If you really want to show what an anti-authoritarian, hormone-addled genius you are, then make the world aware of your shitty homework when you turn it in. 70% of the fun of reading stuff like this comes from imagining the confused, angry adolescent hell in which the author lives. To find out that he's now a college graduate and recently fired ad copywriter who's just trying to pull a stunt to land another job ruins the whole thing.

p.s. Matt, the world may finally be ready to accept that stuff we turned into that class about Genesis.

Rahm Emmanuel and Norm Macdonald

Everyone knows that Rahm Emmanuel's brother was the inspiration for Jeremy Piven's character on "Entourage."  But did you know that one of my favorite movies was partially based on Rahm's life?

"After the election, Emanuel and his colleagues hired a Massachusetts company called Enough Is Enough, which specialized in “creative revenge,” to send the pollster a box with a dead fish inside."

Forecast: 95% Chance of Demonic Anime Ghost Fog

SCOTUS Rules To Not Poison Populace, 6-3

This shows, once again, that Scalia is only in favor of states rights when it suits him. Despite his rhetoric, he is a political animal. Also, Bush's appointees are going to be a thorn for a long time--they seem to vote a consistent conservative line without any of the occasional libertarian and just-being-insane-for-the-fun-of-it quirks of Scalia and Thomas. It's too bad that Obama can't just add four or five more justices like in the good old days.

Blame India/Lashkar/the Taliban/the Tamil Tigers/Mafia-Controlled Cricket Bookies

It's probably not a good sign that there are about fifteen groups that might be blamed for this.


On the bright side, looking for more on it in a bit of insomnia last night, I saw this (watch with audio).

CPAC Absurdity Breakdown

There's way too much I want to say about this.  It's just too fucking crazy.  

Lesson for the New Economy From Mad Hatters

"Union hatters at Danbury, Connecticut, in December 1893 packed a special town meeting and voted fifty thousand dollars in unemployment relief for jobless hatters."

Steeples, Douglas Democracy in Desperation : The Depression of 1893.