Unqualified Offerings

1. All of my friend Jesse Walker’s articles for No Depression are, he informs a Facebook-connected world, online now. Kinks, Dylan, Billy Joe Shaver, Pogues, Doris Duke.
2. So in between the okay Jerusalem and the awful Washington Square Serenade, Steve Earle put out The Revolution Starts Now, a record I didn’t give a thorough listen [...]

By Thoreau
I was willing to support a 10% furlough to save jobs. I was under the impression that this “furlough” was a convenient fiction, and that there would be no actual reduction in workload. Now there is a rumor that they will cancel 5 Friday lectures during the quarter to make the [...]

Tom Knapp:
As for the president … wtf? Surely the leader of the free world, messiah of the Democratic Party, ayatollah of rock and rollah, etc., etc., can find something better than Bud Lite in the White House fridge. God help us all if he decides we need a national beer care plan.

Me, I don’t drink.

So was Harriet Christian excluded from Barack Obama’s manly men’s gathering because of her gender? Huh? Huh??
Also, I haven’t checked the pool report yet: was there drumming?

I know just enough French to get that some commenters on Anniceris take issue with both my translation and my attribution. One also accuses me of French-bashing. Well, I suppose I took the Floyd Landis case hard, but I’ll plead innocent of French-bashing in the first degree. Your hardcore American French-bashers are obsessed with the [...]

A correspondent avers that my best blogging these days shows up on my Google Reader shared-items page. So, here are yesterday’s links in handy bullet form:
* IOZ on the “free” “market”
* The Stiftung on the Occupation – of America
* “Banana-eating jungle monkey?” Is America losing its previously unassailable global edge in racial [...]

By Thoreau
We’ve said a lot about the Gates incident, but can we all agree that if you’re going to have a high profile discussion of a delicate, volatile topic, and consume alcohol while doing so, inviting Joe Biden is not the wisest move?

Mark Thompson at League of Ordinary Gentlemen twists my arm!
I do wish that [my introductory post to the Art of the Possible] was still available online . . .
As it happens, some time after AOTP came to involve more agreed-upon writing than agreed-upon paying, I saved all my substantive posts in a handful of thematic [...]

By Thoreau
The cops arrested a guy in his own home after initially suspecting him of trying to rob his own home.  And not just any guy, but a renowned pillar of the community.  Why?  Because he was rude to them.  In any other circumstances we’d all be saying that the cops did something stupid.  It [...]

By Thoreau
So, in talking to a research student, we were examining a paper. He said that the method they used was crappy. I looked at it and said “Oh, they must mean that they did this other thing, not the thing that you thought they meant.” I mean, his interpretation was the [...]