If other cars are passing you on your right side, you are going to slow for your lane.
Texas drivers are better at understanding the concept of speed lanes than in other states. At least it’s not Maryland. That was a state full of people who think 55 mph is a good speed and lanes are just a matter of preference. And there’s nothing at all wrong with pulling in front of someone in the fast lane and slowing down.
Apparently, anti-smoking ads make kids more likely to smoke.
Looking closer at the study, I think it mainly disputes the effectiveness and could equally conclude that they have no positive or negative effect on teen smoking (in which case, why are we wasting money on them?). Gasp! You mean you can’t make people live better lifestyle just by wagging your finger at them? Say it ain’t so!
Anyway, the implication is that Philip-Morris is deliberately sabotaging their ads. But I haven’t found the cigarette company’s ads to be that bothersome. No, it’s those obnoxious, propagandistic “the truth” which make me personally want to run out and smoke three packs just to show ’em.
Yeah, I finished it in one night. So what about it?
All told, I thought it was excellent. My amazon review will be up at some point. There are a handful of negative comments on it over at Amazon and other sites. And it’s amazing, as usual, to see how many of these negative arise from a simple inability to read declarative English sentences.
Note to the negative nellies (very minor spoiler alert):
1) You can’t complain that Hermione is dumbed down when she spends large parts of the book saving Harry’s butt and is right about almost everything.
2) Ron’s books is clearly about how to charm witches in the more conventional sense — manners and style. The one time he uses the book’s advice, it’s giving compliments. It’s not about mind control.
3) Ginny can not be a Mary Sue in the sixth book and not be a Mary Sue in this one. Doesn’t work that way.
Actually, looking over the very few negative reviews, is seems like there are some big feminists chips on a few shoulders. The biggests complaints are that the women turn out to be, you know, women.
Yes, I’m reading Deathly Hallows. It’s goofy but there’s something to be said for reading a book and knowing that ten million other people are reading the same thing. It’s the closest my generation will get to a shared cultural experience this side of Janet Jackson’s nipple.
One of themes in the last couple of books which continues in Hallows is the ruthless and often illegal methods being used by the Ministry of Magic to battle Voldy. Secrecy, kangaroo courts, secret witness, alliance with bad people, etc. And I feel that there’s more to come.
How long will it be before some Right Wing reactionary decides she’s criticizing George W. Bush? I mean, these guys lost it because they thought Revenge of the Sith had an anti-Bush message.
I predict that by Wednesday, J. K. Rowling is denounced as a left-wing lunatic who wants the terrorists to win.
After all this serious stuff, I’ll post a funny piece about a guy who got Deathly Hallows four days early.
Mine should come tomorrow. It’s been shipped and is in San Antonion. But knowing the New Braunfels Post Office, I won’t get it until Monday.
I’ve referenced Norman Borlaug twice in the last few weeks. I was going to write a long diatribe on how no one knows who this great American is, but Easterbrook, damn him, beat me to it.
Borlaug is 93 and I hope he’s with us until he’s 193. I’ve heard him on television and his wit and intelligence is as vibrant as ever. But when goes, his tombstone could be inscribed, “one billion saved” as that’s the conservative estimate of how many lives he’s saved worldwide.
And you probably know more about Brittany Spears’ underwear or lack thereof.
Pathetic.
One of Glenn Reynolds’ readers adds:
Gregg Easterbrook has it half right about why Norman Borlaug is ignored by the press. It’s not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It’s that Mr. Borlaug didn’t serve the poor by giving away other people’s money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.
You won’t see any accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason.
This is an excellent point. Contrast the attention given to people like Bono or Princess Di to Borlaug. It’s amazing.
Things that amuse while I ponder my potential pending unemployment.
Finally, on BBTN, Phillips and Kruk debate the “Worst Franchise in Sports.” Phillips chooses the Phillies because their next loss will be their 10,000th. This is problematic for several reasons: first, because that says as much about the longevity of the franchise (starting in 1890) as anything else. Second, the team is only 4 games out this year and has a lot of good players. Third, the team has been in the WS as recently as 1993. The Phils aren’t close to being the worst franchise in baseball, much less all of pro sports.
Not to be outdone, Kruk chose the New Orleans Saints.
Who played in the NFC Championship Game.
Last year.
Nice work, everybody.
Then I took my first sip. Nothing in this world could have prepared me for that. The initial thought that came rushing into my mind was from a deep, dark place: Oh, that’s bad.
I didn’t know quite what I had just tasted, but my mind immediately painted a picture of someone going into a supermarket, opening every can in the canned fruit aisle, pouring all the various syrups into one 16-oz container, and hoping for the best. It was like an evil punch made from fruits that had no business ever knowing each other.
The second sip was even worse. This was when I first noticed the awful aftertaste. Initially, it reminded me of rancid peaches, but it quickly went downhill from there.
Just a reminder of how bad things were just thirty years ago. If something similar happened today, we wouldn’t have anything like this.
Progress, people. We’re making it every day. Don’t let some nitwit politician or pundit tell you things are bad.
Via Sully some thoughts:
Watching Planet Earth, I was stuck by the sheer difficulty of life. You can’t help but feel for these animals, as they are forced to scrounge out a miserable existence in their ecological niche. I’m thinking of the desert kangaroos, who have to lick their paws to keep from overheating in 140 degree surface temperatures. Or the male polar bears, who are forced to swim for sixty miles in icy ocean in search of food. Or the penguins, huddled with their eggs in Antarctica. Life is short , nasty and brute. Nature is red in tooth and claw.
And then I looked at myself, lazing on a couch and complaining about the lack of air-conditioning as I sipped my cold beer. I have absolutely no understanding of the struggle for existence, or just how cruel the selection of the fittest really is. Most Americans live similar lives of luxury. As a result, we don’t realize that staying alive (let alone reproducing) is damn hard work. And this leads us to dramatically underestimate the creative powers of natural selection. Most of us think it’s absurd that a simple algorithmic process could create an orchid, or a human brain, or hundreds of thousands of beetle species, in “just” a few hundred million years. Thus, we invoke God. But perhaps the ingenuity of evolution appears less absurd from the perspective of the male emperor penguin, who is shivering in a -90 degree blizzard right now.
It’s not just the creationists. Our lack of understanding of the brutality of the natural world underplay all our attitudes. It’s Neal Boortz complaining that Planet Earth is too violet; it’s people claiming anything is too violent; it’s an anti-abortion movement that doesn’t understand how nature murders 50-80% of fetuses; it’s feminists who don’t remember that motherhood used to be the only thing a woman had time for; it’s socialized medicine morons who think we’ve cured all disease and can cripple innovation.
The natural order of nature is brutality. We are fools if we forget this. Because nature will happily remind us of it on a moment’s notice.
At the risk of revealing myself a hopeless — what’s the phrase? — white male atheist virgin working in IT living in his mother’s basement libertarian troll (although I’m married, living my own home, Jewish, working in astronomy, slightly more conservative than libertarian and always thought of myself as more of an ogre than a troll), I have to like to Reason’s tribute to Robert A. Heinlein.
My favorite Heinlein quote for today? I mentioned it earlier. It’s from Jubal Harshaw:
I don’t like to be called ‘Doctor.’. . . Oh, I’m not offended. But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stinkin’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered down whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees . . . it is time they called it something else, so as not to have it mixed up with playground supervisors.
It’s even worse than when Heinlein wrote this. Christ, the people they give Ph.D.’s to these days. They even gave me one. But I’ll paraphrase the good Mr. Harshaw:
“I don’t like to be called ‘conservative.’. . . Oh, I’m not offended. But when they began calling “conservative” torture of detainees and advanced moral hypocrisy, I became too stinkin’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered down whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down political philosophy . . . it is time they called it something else, so as not to have it mixed up with neo-fascist twinks.
The 50th anniversary of a titan of American cinema.
(Hat tip, Bad Astronomer.)
Why am I glad to be out of college? Because I don’t have to deal with nitwit feminists anymore.
So what exactly is a “chick flick?” I think you and I could probably agree that it has more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die.
Also, the men are emasculated twerps. But I would argue that non chick-flicks would also include films like Twelve Angry Men, Citizen Kane, It’s A Wonderful Life, Amelie and To Kill a Mockingbird, which involve little violence, no special effects and only off-screen death.
It might also include movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, Mockingbird, Silence of the Lambs, Spirited Away and Leon in which the heroine is, in fact, female.
Indeed, the books you read probably only survived because they were written by famous guys.
Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll’s House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal?
Ah, the feminist ignorance of history — of the times when, if a woman wanted to have three kids live to adulthood, she needed to get pregnant a dozen times and deliver 5-10 kids. A time when there was no birth control and people lived to be 45. When there weren’t diaper genies and vacuum cleaners that made raising a family anything less than a full-time job and then some. And when working to have enough to eat occupied the entire lifetime of men. When literacy was something only the rich had time for. The reason we remember male writers is because, for a long time, male writers were almost all we had.
But Ms. Steinem is right. Certainly no one has ever heard of Jane Austen. Or Emily Dickinson. Or Mary Shelley (hardly “chick lit”). Or Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Or Agatha Christie. Or Margery Kempe (OK, that one’s obscure). Or Harper Lee. Or Margaret Mitchell. Or Ayn Rand (Steinem would probably not consider her a woman). Or Virginia Woolf. Or George Eliot.
Indeed, as long men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women aren’t taken seriously when writing about themselves much less about men or male affairs — the list of Great Authors will be more about power than about talent.
Yes, powerful people. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe.
She goes into a long diatribe about how “male” movies glorify war and conflict — which is true. Of course, war and conflict defined the human race up until relatively recently. And violence still defines the non-human world. And there is ample evidence that civilization has arisen not because we have eliminted our violent tendencies, but brought them under better control.
I strongly believe that movie violence, TV violence, video game violence, even “boys running around playing guns” violence is a way of satisfying our violent animal urges without actually doing any harm. That’s a good thing. Or at least, it beats the hell out of the way men used to satisfy their violent urges — wars, public executions, animal torture and lynchings.
All the movies that portray violence against women, preferably beautiful, sexy, half-naked women. These feature chainsaws and house parties for teenage guys, serial killers and sadistic rapists for ordinary male adults, plus cleverly plotted humiliations and deaths of powerful women for the well-educated misogynist.
You know, I looked through IMDB’s top movies. Are there are lot of top-rated movies involving the carefully planned humiliation and death of powerful women? There are serial killers, yes. None that are glorified. And one of the top-rated serial killer movies has the beat taken out by a woman.
But carefully planned humilation and death? Someone point out a movie I’ve missed.
And on what continent is “Boxing Helena” the ultimate guy movie? An obscure 1993 art film written and directed by a woman that is rated as one of the worst movies ever (3.8 on IMDB) and is rated higher by women than men (link).
When you have to stretch so far to find a misogynistic movie, I think you’ve made my point for me.
The thing is, critics hammer stupid horror and action movies too. And a lot of women like stupid horror movies and serial killer flicks. Hell, one of my best women friends hates chick flicks and loves Indiana Jones. And the top-rated movies at IMDB are almost identical for men and women. I guess this tells the radical feminists that we’ve got a lot of deluded women out there.
But you have to follow the Leftist logic. Any movie that doesn’t involve teary-eyed women hugging must be violent and misogynist.
And this is the thing that drives me crazy about the Academic Left. That they impute objective truth to their subjective opinions. So if you don’t like the same movies Gloria Steinem does, it’s not because you have different tastes. It’s because you’re a violent misogynist who hates women, even if you are a woman. Actually, especially if you are a woman.
Of course, the real misogynist societies in our world — places like Iran and Taliban Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia — don’t like movies with “beautiful, sexy, half-naked women” either. But that’s facts for you.
Remember how studies showed women talk three times as much as men? Um, never mind.
Actually, it will be interesting to see — and the authors note this — whether the trend holds up with age. I suspect it won’t. College-age guys talk a lot because, well, college students talk a lot of crap. And, college men are trying to get laid by college women and think talking a lot will help (it doesn’t).
As I get older, I find an increasing amount of my male-to-male communication consists of watching the same football game or buying someone else a beer.
Now why didn’t I think of this. Probably because no one would have given 10,000 pounds of crap for it, least of all 10,000 pounds sterling.