VITAL NEWS: Geico Fires Phone Prankster, But Gecko Still OK. Repeat: The Gecko Is OK.
UPDATE: Moe Lane: GEICO voiceover guy canned for slurring, well, me. “I must not have been the only person to call.”
Archive for 2010
April 21, 2010
THE NEW MONEY: Even uglier than the old money. Every redesign is worse than the one before — it’s like the Facebook of currency!
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “It’s one of those immutable laws, man. The universe tends towards entropy and ugly. It takes a lot of work to slow it down. As long as most of us are willing to put in that work everything will be just fine. And in America I think most people still are. None of them hold high office yet, but that will change soon enough.”
HUGH “TERMINATOR” HEWITT: Keith Olbermann can dish it out but he can’t take it. “The people who were briefed would not speak on the record because they feared retaliation by the network and because they were not authorized to speak about the matter. Some of the people said the decision suggests that criticism of MSNBC is not allowed on MSNBC, potentially a troubling development.” Well, it would be more troubling if people actually watched MSNBC.
UPDATE: Heh: “In any event, MSNBC has now fired the guy they hired to replace the guy they suspended (David Shuster) and all for the sake of a guy who isn’t even the highest-rated host of his own television program.”
THE IPAD AS A KILLER OF in-car entertainment systems. Yeah, I spent a bundle on my Highlander Hybrid’s dual-dvd system, and it was a waste of money; it works really well, but it doesn’t get used much at all. Two iPads would have cost half as much, and been better. That wasn’t an option in 2005, but it is now. . . .
THE JOYS OF CLAY-POT COOKERY.
COULD THE U.S. become Argentina?
UPDATE: The Washington Times is behind the curve — Reader R.G. McFadden notes that Dana Milbank was sounding the warning in the Post way back in 2005:
The timing could not have been more apt. On the eve of a titanic partisan clash in the Senate, eggheads of the left and right got together yesterday to warn both parties that they are ignoring the country’s most pressing problem: that the United States is turning into Argentina. . . .
“The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt,” Walker said. “The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina.”
“All true,” Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.
“To do nothing,” Butler added, “would lead to deficits of the scale we’ve never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We’ve seen them in Argentina. That’s a chilling thought, but it would mean that.” . . . The unity of the bespectacled presenters was impressive — and it made their conclusion all the more depressing. As Ron Haskins, a former Bush White House official and current Brookings scholar, said when introducing the thinkers: “If Heritage and Brookings agree on something, there must be something to it.”
Yet that is not how leaders of either party talk.
Congratulations to Milbank, and the Post for this early warning, but maybe they should be following up today?
A HIGH-TECH, LUXURY, surveillance hotel.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD on Mae West and the Tea Party movement.
RADICAL CHIC, POWERED BY GERITOL: Ron Radosh: Aging Leftists Hold an SNCC Reunion and Inadvertently Reveal the Old Days are Over.
FIGHTING CANCER MORE EFFICIENTLY with dual-action antibodies.
JAMES OBERG: Space Taxis May Be Easier Than You Think.
EAT CHOCOLATE for your heart. The science is settled!
EXPIRATION DATE REACHED? Robert Gibbs finally admits the Obama Admin has no intention of pushing DADT repeal in 2010.
TEA PARTY EXPRESS endorses Democrat in Idaho.
UPDATE: Reaction: “Idiotic.”
SO WOULD THAT BE BESTIALITY, OR JUST “BROAD-MINDED?” Early humans may have bred with other species – twice. “True, Neanderthals are the likeliest contenders for our ancestors’ sexual partners, but they aren’t the only ones.”
UPDATE: Reader Jim Davila writes: “I think it counts as rishathra.”
DNC VS. GOLDMAN, SACHS: A political timeline.
OBAMA’S Fannie and Freddie Amnesia. Yeah, you’d never know that government-controlled entities that provided lots of cushy jobs for ex-politicos played a crucial role in the mortgage meltdown . . . .
Plus this: “Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wallison points out that in 2005 then-Senator Obama joined with his Democratic colleagues in stopping legislation that would have helped rein in the government-sponsored housing duo’s risky behavior.”
THE ATLANTIC: Before Dirty Harry, There Was . . . Ronald Reagan. Feel lucky, punk?
HMM: Taxes drive gas prices to over $7 a gallon in UK, mass boycott coming soon. Britain’s over due for a Tea Party movement of its own. The “Petrol Party?” The Fuel Protests from a few years ago nearly brought down the government, and were bigger than anything the Tea Party movement has done . . . so far.
THE CASSINI PROBE’S amazing orbital dynamics. “Cassini’s orbital mechanics present an astonishingly complex exercise in Keplerian physics and geometry. The enormous array of science objectives and targets — moons, rings, Saturn itself — makes it one of the most complex missions ever flown.”
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER than the Teleprompter.
THE BENEFITS of Facebook.
GOOD NEWS FOR LAWYERS: The Coming Tide of International Climate Lawsuits.