Author: swanksalot

Some additional reading November 21st from 10:27 to 10:47:

• Viral e-mail of the day – "HOW SMART IS YOUR RIGHT FOOT?

  You have to try this please, it takes 2 seconds. I could not believe this!!!

  This will boggle your mind and will keep you trying over and over again to see if you can outsmart your foot, but, you can't. It's pre-programmed in your brain!

  1. Without anyone watching you (they will think you are GOOFY……) and while sitting at your desk in front of your computer, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

  2. Now, while doing this, draw the number '6' in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

  I told you so!!! And there's nothing you can do about it! You and I both know how stupid it is, but before the day is done you are going to try it again, if you've not already done so."

• Minnesota Public Radio: Challenged ballots: You be the judge – "Representatives from the campaigns of Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken have been challenging ballots across the state.

  It's your turn to play election judge. Tell us how you would rule in the case of these challenged ballots. Use this Minnesota state statute as your guide."

  You can examine the votes and cast your own (non-binding) vote.

Some additional reading November 20th from 17:46 to 20:58:

• Apple – Support – Discussions – Pictures automatically attach to e-mail? … – "Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer! "

  and the answer, of course, is no, your husband is cheating on you, and came up with a lame excuse.

• What Might Have Been – " a quiet triumph for Pelosi. Without her tacit support, Waxman’s campaign would have quietly died. Meanwhile, few in the House will forget that she tried to solve this problem months ago by letting Dingell remain at Energy and Commerce and creating a new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Dingell fought her efforts, and managed to neuter the new committee. It has nothing more than an advisory role. But it’s now clear that what looked like a win for Dingell was actually prelude to a much larger loss. He not only loses jurisdiction over global warming, but over health care and most everything else."

Some additional reading November 19th from 09:12 to 20:40:

• Media still trying to delegitimize MN recount – "Media outlets don't typically emphacize how much elections cost; they certainly don't emphacize how much individual aspects of elections cost. (When was the last time you saw a newscaster announce "election workers rolled voting machines out of storage this morning, at a cost to taxpayers of …"?)

  And that's all this recount is: it is one part of the elections process. Its cost is, simply put, irrelevent. Elections are worth doing correctly no matter how much they cost. Not only that, but $86,000 is, even in the midst of a struggling economy, an utterly trivial amount of money for the state of Minnesota to spend in order to get the results of an election right.

  How trivial? The $86,000 cost comes out to 1.7 cents per Minnesota resident. One point seven cents. It's a mere three cents per vote. Anybody out there think making sure each vote is counted correctly isn't worth three cents? Anyone at all?

• Auto officials nailed on private jets: The Swamp – "Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee asked at today's hearing on a potential bailout for the struggling U.S. auto industry asked the Big Three's chief executive officers which of them had flown by private jet into Washington for the hearing. All three raised their hands.

  Then he asked which would be heading home commercially. None of the three raised his hand."

• FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: An Interview with John Ziegler on the Zogby "Push Poll" – Republican mind-set, encapsulated. Wow, just wow.
  "Ziegler was responsible for commissioning a Zogby International survey of Barack Obama supporters, which took the form of a multiple choice political knowledge test, stating a "fact" to the respondent and asking them which of the four major candidates (Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin) the statement applied to. Because I believe that many of the statements on the survey are questionable or false but are misleadingly presented as factual to the respondent, I characterized the survey as a "push poll" in an article posted early this morning."

  You should read this transcript if you are up for a good laugh. The RNC pays this guy Ziegler?

Some additional reading November 18th from 14:16 to 22:25:

• Life magazine photo collection goes online | – Awesome news, really.
  "One of the biggest photo collections in the world that ranges from the 1880s through to the seminal moments of the 20th century and on into the present day was made available to the public online yesterday.

  The bulk of the archive is from Life magazine, the premier platform for photojournalists in the 20th century. About 10m images will eventually be available, from Marilyn Monroe and JFK to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. About 97% of the pictures have never been seen before."

• Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens loses re-election bid – Yahoo! News – "The crotchety octogenarian built like a birch sapling likes to encourage comparisons with the Incredible Hulk, but he occupies an outsized place in Alaska history. His involvement in politics dates to the days before Alaska statehood, and he is esteemed for his ability to secure billions of dollars in federal aid for transportation and military projects. The Anchorage airport bears his name; in Alaska, it's simply "Uncle Ted."
  Tuesday's tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens."
• Interesting Times: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker – Dylan on Obama – Ahh, Bob, you wordsmith you…

  "Bob Dylan Quote of the Night from November 4th : “I was born in 1941. That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now.”"

• Interesting Times: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker – After Kristol – "The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

  In one sense, this mental shallowness and literary poverty come as a surprise from the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the student of Harvey C. Mansfield, the devotee of Leo Strauss, and the colleague of Robert Kagan, David Brooks, et al. Kristol was never an intellectual—he’s always been a Republican strategist with various public platforms, including government office"

  I say fire the punk! His columns are not a good reflection on the NYT, and aren't interesting either.

• Daily Kos: Why It Matters – "In the end, the Lieberman fight isn't entirely about Lieberman. Yes, people want to see consequences doled out for the perennially back-stabbing Senator who formed his own political party when his own Democratic voters voted him out, who used his committee as a protectorate of the abuses of the Bush administration, and who — for God's sake — campaigned for McCain and Palin, even when their campaign reached its most rancid lows.

  But more to the point, people in America want a change from the Bush years — desperately. And they voted for it, delivering a thumping mandate for Obama. They want things to change, and that's why this minor battle has taken on so much meaning, and why people are so peeved: this was the first test of mettle, and it showed no mettle at all."

• The Cure, 4:13 Dream – "What has been done to this record is not new; in fact, it's all too common these days. But it is particularly egregious here, and the Cure are just going to have to take one for the recording industry as a whole. This CD is very loud. Without getting into a lot of technical stuff (which is explained well here), past a certain point, the only way to make a CD's average volume louder is to make most of it quieter–i.e., digitally reduce the difference between the loudest sounds and the quietest ones–so that you can turn everything up. If it's done judiciously, the record sounds louder, but not a whole lot worse to the untrained ear. If it's done carelessly or ham-fistedly, it fucks everything up. My ear is not very well-trained, but this is the most fucked-up record I've heard."
• Weekend America: Fan Free Agent – "How about this: I am now a fan free agent. I contacted teams all over the league to see if they wanted to sign me as a fan now that I was on the open market. An overwhelming number of them did not respond. But some did!"
• 11 Surefire Landscape Photography Tips – Some not-bad tips:
  "There’s something about getting out in nature with the challenge of capturing some of the amazing beauty that you see. Perhaps it fits with my personality type – but I loved the quietness and stillness of waiting for the perfect moment for the shot, scoping out an area for the best vantage point and then seeing the way that the light changed a scene over a few hours."

A few interesting links for November 17th through November 18th:

• Gilbert Arenas: Change We Believe In – NBA Player Blogs – "What I liked about the whole thing was watching that proved that our country is not as racist as people around the rest of the world actually thinks we are. America as a whole spoke and chose the president they wanted. It wasn't just the African-American community that elected Obama, it was America. If you looked at the TV, every color and creed was out there supporting Obama. It should have woke America up to say, "Hey, we're not as racist as people think."

  That was the most beautiful thing about it to me. Look how this one man united the world. You see clips on the TV and they're showing people in Kenya celebrating, people in London … you're just like, "Wow!" That's why I call him a uniter. If I have to describe Obama in one word, I'm going to say: uniter. He unites. "

• Can Danny Davis' star rise with a Moon in the way? | Change of Subject – "In promoting himself as a candidate to succeed Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Chicago) seems to be hoping the public has forgotten his participation in a very creepy 2004 "coronation" ceremony in Washington for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife.

  As I wrote at the time, Davis was an active assistant (see this photo via Rich Miller) in pageantry designed to burnish and inflate the reputation of a man who, divine or not, wants to abolish Western-style democracy, compares gay people to dung-eating dogs, and in exhorting Jews to convert and follow him, told them: "You have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity, Hitler killed 6 million Jews."

A few interesting links for November 16th through November 17th:

• Properly Sauced: The Perfect Manhattan – Sounds delicious actually. I'll have to look for this vermouth.

  "2 oz. Old Overholt rye whiskey
  3/4 oz. Carpano Antica vermouth
  Angostura bitters

  Take a double old-fashioned glass and fill it almost full with cubed ice. Douse the ice with 2 dashes of bitters. Add the rye and vermouth. Stir gently. Serve.

  Most Manhattans use plain old whiskey and bottom-shelf sweet vermouth, resulting in an inspid, sickly-sweet drink. But if you use rye instead, the drink has a persuasive bite on the front end. Paired with Carpano Antica, arguably the best vermouth in the world, the initial sharpness dissolves into a pleasant amber cloud of spice, cherry and vanilla."

• S.E.C. Accuses Mark Cuban of Insider Trading – Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds — DealBook – New York Times – I don't think the New York Times likes Mark Cuban much, for whatever reason.
  "Off the court and on his own blog, Mr. Cuban has been a frequent critic of the National Basketball Association and its commissioner, David Stern, particularly on the issue of officiating, where he once claimed a referee could not run a Dairy Queen. Mr. Cuban then ran a Dairy Queen for a day; even in retribution, he was seeking attention."
• 10,000 Hours – "This idea — that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice — surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours."

  Spending 8 hours a day – that's 1,250 days (or 3.42 years). Hmmm, does drinking wine count? Sex? Seriously, I've probably put that much effort into photography/Photoshop, but I wouldn't consider myself an *expert*, just better than some, and not as good as others.

Some additional reading November 16th from 12:37 to 21:47:

• Consumers are checking their gas bills twice — chicagotribune.com – "Anthony Palermo's Nicor gas bill says he owes $104 this month, but the Melrose Park resident knows better.

  For the second month in a row, the gas company estimated his usage.

  And for the second month in a row, the gas company was wrong.

  Nicor claims he has used 153 therms of gas since it gave him a new outdoor meter this summer. Palermo read the meter himself Nov. 8, a day after he received his bill. His total usage was 49 therms."

• Legume – Wikipedia – "Legume plants are noteworthy for their ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, thanks to a symbiotic relationship with certain bacteria known as rhizobia found in root nodules of these plants. The ability to form this symbiosis reduces fertilizer costs for farmers and gardeners who grow legumes, and allows legumes to be used in a crop rotation to replenish soil that has been depleted of nitrogen."
• Talking Points Memo | More Muscle – "Here is something progressives really need to address. On Sunday morning political shows, three Democrats are confirmed as guests: Carl Levin, Barney Frank, and Charlie Rangel. It's as if Democrats didn't just win huge electoral advances in the Presidential, House, and Senate elections. So we get the same thing we've had the past 8 years–republican hegemony on Sunday."

  Probably the biggest reason I don't bother with the Sunday morning talk shows: they are not interested in Liberal viewers like me.