Archive for 2013

52 THINGS, 52 WEEKS: 2013: A Year in Review. “Say Yes. You never know what you really like until you try it and you won’t have any great life experiences while sitting at home on the couch watching TV. I have learned so much about myself and have had a great deal of fun just by saying ‘yes’ to invitations to go out and do things I would not normally want to do. I know it can be painful to break out of your comfort zone, but 90% of the work is just walking out the front door.”

Plus: “People love goats. Two of the most viewed photos on my posts are pictures of goats. You guys are weird.”

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHRONIC ILLNESS. “When should you disclose medical conditions to a date? When is illness too much for a relationship to survive?”

SHORT ANSWER: BECAUSE THEY’RE BETTER. Why People Still Use Inefficient Incandescent Bulbs. Plus:

Some consumers complain that CFLs don’t last as long as advertised. One characteristic of CFL bulbs is they are “fairly fragile” and can succumb to overheating, said Terry McGowan, director of engineering for the American Lighting Association.

“Those life ratings are established in a test lab and not established in somebody’s living room fixture,” McGowan said. “When you put them in a fixture and bottle them up in a glass shade, they get too hot and the life will be shortened.”

LED lights can also overheat. McGowan recommends using these bulbs in light fixtures that have good ventilation.

So the LED lifespan figures, like the CFL lifespan figures, aren’t really applicable to the real world. Great.

It’s not quite too late to stock up on incandescents.

ROGER KIMBALL: Inadvertent Comedy From The American Studies Association, or, An Ecofeminist Does Milk. “You may not know much about the American Studies Association. The small (5000-member) organization is known to many outside the academy as “The Anti-American Studies Association” because of its reliably backwater, reflexive leftism. . . . Every now and then, however, something truly egregious bubbles up from the dismal pit of pseudo-intellectual academic lucubration, some special gem of fatuous, wood-pulp darkeni’g nonsense that even now, at the fag-end of Anno Domini 2013, has the capacity to spark a little frisson of nauseated wonderment in this jaded breast. . . . Despite the inadvertent comedy of its title, ‘Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies” really exists, and my is it in earnest. How many things had to go wrong — intellectually, socially, morally — to account for prose like this? . . . Charity prevents me from offering an analysis of this vaguely minatory tripe. Considered as a rhetorical product, it is pitch perfect in its bristling opacity, touching gently on a vast host of political and intellectual clichés while maintaining a semantic content of nearly zero. The amazing thing is that Ms. Gaard keeps it up for nearly 25 pages.”

IN THE MAIL: From Larry Correia, Swords of Exodus.

ROGER SIMON: The Principal Enemy. “The principal enemy for the right and the center-right is now Hillary Clinton, the vastly favored frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She is so far in front, in fact, that her competitors are not even in hailing distance. Hillary is the one who can consolidate and solidify the ‘gains’ of the Obama era in a way Obama himself never could because she is much more politically savvy — Obama was only savvy about getting elected, not governing — and has the backing of her even more politically savvy husband. Hillary is the one who can fully remake the United States into some version of Western Europe or, yet more frighteningly, China, a permanently stratified state capitalism governed by quasi-totalitarian bureaucrats. (We can call this system Soros Marxism, meaning a ruling clique of increasingly rich corporate czars employing a propagandistic veneer of socialist equality to keep the power and wealth for themselves.)”