All posts by Mike

News

Sneezola

There are a number of things I will miss about Texas: the cheap real estate; the warm spring; the way random strangers will, on little urging, tell you their life story.

One of the things I will not miss is cedar pollen. Good Lord. I feel like I’ve been over by a truck full of Obama supporters. My face feels like I was punched in the nose by the blob. I’m lying on the floor of my daughter’s room next to air purifier, hoping I can breath in a few hours. I don’t dare drive to Austin today — I might run off the road just to end the suffering.

Every place has its pollen. I used to spend every fall in Minnesota sneezing my brains out. But this is the worst I’ve encountered.

Politics

I Just Read Playboy For the Articles, Too

Um, OK:

Lap dancing “is not sexually stimulating”, the chairman of the Lap Dancing Association told a parliamentary committee today.

Simon Warr made the claim, which was greeted with scepticism by MPs, while he was giving evidence to the Commons culture committee as part of an inquiry into the operation of the Licensing Act.

The government is under pressure to change the act so that lap dancing clubs have to be licensed as sex encounter establishments.

At the moment, they are licensed in the same way as pubs and clubs, which has led to complaints from councils who believe that they do not have the power to stop clubs being opened in their areas.

See, this is why the British Parliament is so much more entertaining than our Congress. Even if our Congress did hear testimony from the President of the Lap Dancing Association (really?), it wouldn’t be nearly as funny:

[Tory MP] Davies responded with even more astonishment.

“So if I did a straw poll of all the customers who came out a lap dancing club and said ‘Did you find that in any way sexually stimulating?’ I would find a big resounding fat zero? On that basis you would have a lot of dissatisfied customers.”

Politics

Title Bout

Here’s something I’ve grown awfully sick of: endless book titles. It seems that no book these days can be published without a paragraph length subtitle. For example, Leviathan on the Right wasn’t long enough, so it got the subtitle How Big Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. The Dark Side wasn’t enough, so we got The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. Ron Paul is seemingly the only man who can avoid this. His book has the comparatively simple and concise title of the The Revolution: A Manifesto.

But Dick Morris’ latest ignorant screed has to take the cake. Here’s the title: Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us … and What to Do About It. I’m tired just reading that epistemological and grammatical nightmare.

News

Incoming Links

It’s always flattering/scary when other people link to me. Today, I got a nice link from my friend Amanda, who runs a cool astronomy blog and is a skilled volleyball player. Another inbound link comes from Nicole, a graduate student from my old UVa stomping grounds who recently counter-protested the Westboro Church. Counting myself, that’s at least three readers.

Sports

Why I Rock

Keep in mind. I’m not saying that my very presence creates an aura that causes sports teams to triumph. I will simply put out the facts and let you be the judge.

  • In 1990, I moved to Minnesota for college. In 1991, the Twins went worst to first and won the World Series. That same year, the Minnesota North Stars made the Stanley Cup final.
  • In 1994, I moved back to Atlanta. In 1995, the Atlanta Braves won the World Series.
  • In 1995, I moved to Charlottesville for grad school. That year, only a few hundred yards from my apartment, UVa beat Florida State for the first time and took the ACC title. They would be a second-tier power for the entire time I was there.
  • In 2001, I moved to Baltimore. As I accepted the job, the Baltimore Ravens won the superbowl. The next year, the University of Maryland won the NCAA Basketball Championship.
  • In 2004, I moved to Austin. That year, the Longhorns won the Rose Bowl. The next year, they won the BCS championship.
  • In 2005, I moved to New Braunfels, not far outside of San Antonio. The Spurs would win two of the next three NBA Championships.
  • Earlier this year, I accepted a job in Penn State. Already, the Phillies have won the World Series for the first time in 28 years. And Penn State today just clinched the Big Ten title and will go to the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1994.

    • So is it all just a coincidence? Or do I rock? You be the judge.

    'Culture'

    Cracked Fights Back

    I didn’t take internet plagiarism seriously until it happened to me. So good on Cracked for zealously slamming the thieves. I don’t know what it is about the internet that people think they can just steal content. I mean, a link takes two seconds to post.

    'Culture'

    What’s Old Is New

    Reading Ross Douhat’s excellent post on the new Trek movie, I had a revelation. Many of the stories we are familiar with — the Arthur legend, ancient mythology, the Iliad, etc., are version of stories that were being continually reinvented. The Arthur legend, for example, passed through many many versions to and beyond the one crystallized by Mallory. The Iliad shows signs of having been revised many time before it was written down.

    We’re seeing that process applied to modern pop culture. Many of the stalwarts of comic books and movies are reinventing themselves to shed the labyrinthine continuity with which they are shackled. James Bond, Batman, Superman, X-Men and now Trek retain the forms but dance differently, rediscovering the story in a new way.

    I’m not saying that 3000 years from now, people will still be watching Batman Begins as a classic of 20th century film. But it’s amazing to see the pattern repeat and to know that it has been going on, not just for the last few years, but ever since human beings began telling stories to pass the time.