What do you say if we make applejuice and fax it to each other?

Absurd:

I can't believe it

Ever play Joe Montana Talking Football on Sega CD? I did. And I also remember how, inexplicably, "Fake FG" was the best offensive play to run. And how the announcer was continuously shocked throughout the game. "They line up for a field goal on first down and I can't believe it....Fake."

Cheney's dishonor

Over the last couple of days there has been a lot of indignant commentary like this:

The former vice president, the man who imported torture into the American constitutional system, failed to capture bin Laden, invaded a country under false pretenses, allowed the Afghanistan campaign to disintegrate, and added $5 trillion to the next generation's debt burden, is attacking a sitting president on a day he announces a critical military strategy in front of his troops.

It is, again, a breathtaking piece of dishonor from this bitter, angry man.

What's puzzling about it is that I don't quite understand why the mere act of "attacking a sitting president" should be considered so dishonorable. People seem to think there's some unwritten rule that says that former Presidents and Vice Presidents shouldn't weigh in on partisan political issues, but even if this is an unwritten rule, I fail to see what the benefit of it is, or why it's such a bad thing to break it. Certainly I wouldn't have had any problems if Bill Clinton decided to go into attack-dog mode on George W. Bush when he was president--in fact, I probably would have welcomed it.

Just to be clear, Cheney really is a dishonorable man. But this is the case not because he chooses to criticize the President contra some nicety of beltway decorum, but because he has done and believes in morally reprehensible things.

Ron Artest: "I've Killed a Man"

That, at any rate, is my best attempt at a Ron Artest Onion headline. The article would have to contain at least one instance of Artest referring to himself in the third person, and maybe include some speculation as to what kind of fine David Stern might impose ($25,000, say).

Yahoo, Verizon, and others profit by handing over your information to the government

Yahoo and Verizon are trying to block a Freedom of Information Act request as to how much they charge the government for wiretaps and such.

The public option: tastes like water!

Ezra Klein has a must-read post that succinctly describes the current state of the public option, as well as how it got to be the watered-down non-factor that it is.

Did you know that even if it passes and is implemented, it will only even be available to 10% of Americans--and that it would draw all its revenue from customer fees, and not the public coffers? A pretty far cry from a government takeover of the health insurance industry, and yet that is what the opposition's rhetoric would have you believe.

Theft!

I'm trying out Modern Family (ep. 2), but the subplot where the father steals his son's bicycle to teach him a lesson is lifted directly from an episode of This American Life!

John Bolton: coward

Greenwald utterly destroys the erstwhile UN Ambassador:

Yesterday, Bolton -- on "Washington Times Radio" -- revealed that he is so petrified of Terrorists that he would not feel safe in New York City during the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and would not even allow his family there (audio here):

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Host Melanie Morgan: Given the nature and danger of bringing these terrorists to American soil, where do you think is the most safe place to be when they get here and this trial begins? Where would you put your family?

John Bolton: Well, not New York City, I'm afraid to say. This is part of the callousness and the really, lack of professionalism and judgment to put them on trial anywhere in the United States in civilian courts.

The cowardice on display here is difficult to overstate -- and to behold without being ill. I lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and for many years thereafter. For weeks -- even months and years after that attack -- it was widely assumed that New York would be a likely target for another attack, but I never heard a single New Yorker -- not one -- talk about fleeing the city or hiding their family in some faraway place.

I don't think that Bolton really believes his family to be in danger from a single unarmed, detained terrorist--I think he's just being incredibly cynical. But still, if your cynicism is going to lead you to say something completely ridiculous, you should be nailed for it.

The future of sausage is upon us

Via Paul Krugman, it seems as though lab-grown meat is one step closer to becoming a reality:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

...

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

I'm a huge proponent of lab-grown meat. Most people's initial reaction is one of disgust, but when you think about it meat grown in a petri dish can't possibly be more revolting than present day factory farm conditions. Moreover, you get the ethical bonus that there is no cruel treatment of animals (in fact, on this last point, I've often wondered why we don't try to genetically modify livestock to have essentially no brains, so as to alleviate animal suffering...this may seem horrifying at first, but how could it be more horrifying than torturing sentient creatures?).

But probably the biggest bonus is ecological: livestock, especially cattle, have a huge impact on the environment and on the climate change situation. Many people assume that when you talk about the carbon footprint of cows, you're mostly talking about cow farts, but that's only a part of the problem. First of all, most of the methane that cows are emitting come from burps, not farts. Second, though, a lot of the impact from cattle comes from the fact that feeding people cattle is a very inefficient way to use arable land, because you are using a whole bunch of arable land to grow crops to feed to cows instead of people. Or, if you're not giving feed to the cattle, you're burning down huge swaths of rainforest to create land that they can graze on--and, of course, the elimination of trees causes there to be more carbon in the atmosphere.

Anyway, it seems to me that a big win in the fight against climate change might be this ability to produce meat in an ecologically sustainable way--especially considering that beef is catching on in the developing world (in places like China).

(PS: I think envisioning things like sausage and gelatin and--I don't know, broth--rather than, say, a drumstick make the whole lab-meat idea far more palatable.)

Hey--remember Garfield Minus Garfield?

Charles O'Shea, Anecdotal Analyst

This is funny:

There seem to be more discounts on TVs this year, and shoppers are snapping them up, said Charles O’Shea, a New York- based retail analyst with Moody’s Investors Service. In the four hours he spent checking retailers in northern New Jersey, he saw several shoppers standing at bus stops holding flat-panel sets.

“It looks like everybody has caught the promotional bug pretty heavily,” O’Shea said.

Because nothing is more important in making a business decision than knowing what sorts of things Charles O'Shea saw people holding at a bus stop in northern New Jersey.

Humboldt squid

Megan McArdle is a libertarian who is basically sane, so she is not a global warming denier or anything. However, comments like this strike me as missing the point:

What's at stake is the degree of warming associated with our carbon dioxide emissions. In particular, to what extent the earth's many complex and not necessarily well understood feedback systems may mitigate (or exacerbate) temperature increases. I've long been skeptical of the more catastrophic scenarios, because all this carbon used to be in the atmosphere, which probably defines a ceiling on how bad it will get--a ceiling well below "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE!!!"

I think she's narrowing in too much on the temperature aspect here. While it's true that earth has "many complex and not necessarily well understood feedback systems" that determine what the average global temperature will be, what is really relevant here is that the biological environment is made up of even more complex and even less understood systems, and we simply can't predict what all of the consequences will be for these systems if and when the global temperature shoots up. To invoke some Rumsfeldese, there are known unknowns and then there are unknown unknowns. It is the unknown unknowns that really make global warming such a serious threat--the stuff that no one could have predicted.

Personally, when I envision ecological disruption from climate change, it's something along the lines of the Humboldt Squid takeover of the North Pacific. The story here is that since 1960 the numbers of this kind of squid has exploded, altering the ecosystem so that fisheries for "anchovies, sardines, hake and rockfish"--all species that the squid feed on--are threatened. They theorize that nitrogen-rich farming runoff is causing a favorable environment for the squid, but the region in which they dominate continues to expand, and nobody knows why:

In the KQED-TV story, Gilly says that the OML [oxygen minimum layer] may be growing -- getting thicker and coming closer to the surface. And where the OML grows, the squid follow.

Nobody knows why the OML is growing, though. Does it have something to do with climate change? Is it related to agriculture? It would be handy to know.

This is the kind of thing we should be envisioning, I think, when we talk about the dangers of global warming--stuff like, oh shit, now squid are taking over the ocean. Of course, in this particular case the success of the squid isn't really too disruptive (besides endangering some fisheries, the article doesn't seem to be too worried about any of it), but the point is that this is the type of system that's being affected, and these are the types of consequences we can expect to encounter as global temperatures rise.

The NBA on NBC opening sequence for a new generation

If NBC ever gets rights to the NBA again, this is how the sequence has to go:

First, we get Tesh back into the recording studio to record a "preamble" to the original theme--something very dignified with a lot of horns that evokes great Presidents of history and hallowed...er, traditions. You know what I mean: the horns come in--do do dooooooooooooo--and then a big drum--bum bum bum.

So anyway, this preamble is playing and the camera is zooming forward through video cutouts of Great Moments of NBA History, as well as Great Players That Defined Their Era. So you're going to have--what is it, Jerry West hitting some half court shot?--in black in white, and then Wilt's 100 point game, and all this stuff. But the thing is: this sequence is structured like the Wall Chart of History, so that the size of the video cutouts are proportional to their importance at that time. I don't know enough about NBA history to know how the first chunk of this sequence will be, but I do know that once you get to the 80s you start seeing Magic's baby hook, that one Bird steal, and big cutouts of Kareem hitting a skyhook and one of Magic posting up Bird or something. And then of course you have a nod to the Pistons teams.

Then, of course, you get to the 90s and Jordan just dominates the screen, and you have all sorts of classic Jordan highlights going, including one of him maybe hugging the championship trophy (and there can be some smaller screen flitting by that feature Barkley, Stockton/Malone, whatever).

And then beyond this you get the Duncan/Shaq era, and so these two dominate, and you show cutouts of various Horry shots and--er, whatever great Spurs moments there might have been. And then the way is cleared for the present Lebron/Kobe era (with I suppose some kind of recognition for KG, though, really, he's just got the one ring), with the two of them mostly taking up the whole screen.

And mind you--the preamble tune has been playing this whole time (along with audio snippets from the various video cutouts), and, oh, I don't know maybe ten or twelve seconds have passed. But when we ease into the Lebron/Kobe era, the music resolves into the beginning of the original NBA on NBC sequence (in which the logo is etched into that steel thingy with lasers--doo doo doo do do do do doooo), and then--there is some kind of explosion or flash, and we hit the ground running, with the revamped version of Roundball Rock going and an appropriate montage of present day players starts flitting around the screen, plus other basketball visual bric-a-brac. You can fill this bit in yourself.

But the big question here is: what play do you use to finish the sequence off, before the announcer intones, "The NBA on NBC"? In the 90s, it was Jordan hitting the game-winner against the Cavs, but in today's NBA you'd have trouble because you'd have to choose between Lebron and Kobe. I suppose you'd have to go Kobe, since he's older and he's got the rings (and the larger catalog of great moments--I mean, Lebron has a ridiculous highlight reel, but the only meaningful things I think he's done are the Game 5 takeover against Detroit and the game winner against Orlando. But even then, he has no rings, so nothing he's done can be that important). I'm not sure what Kobe's signature moment would be--I suppose one of his buzzer beaters, but if it wasn't a clutch playoff shot I'd go with one of his more ridiculous moves, like for example that nifty pump-fake-spin-jumper he had in the 61-point game against the Knicks, or that one siiiiiiiiick, high-arch fade-away he hit over Lebron last year.

If I was rich I'd give NBC money to buy rights to the NBA. Or maybe just buy the theme song from them.

(PS: I forgot that a requirement for the last play of the sequence has to be a good Marv Albert call--so I retract those two suggestions.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

It was weird watching this again, because I'd forgotten that a quote from it had worked its way into my family's lexicon. Basically, my mom and my sister will say, "It'll be fun Kevin!" in this goofy way whenever they're trying to get me to do something. What they're mimicking is Adam Sandler saying to Kevin Nealon, "C'mon Kevin! It'll be fun." I doubt if either my sister or mom remembers what they're quoting from when they say that.

(In a similar vein, you will find a lot of people who say in a particular voice and cadence, "I like it--Ilikeitalot"--having long forgotten the source material for this, which is the 1994 movie Dumb and Dumber.)

An oddly relevant Dinosaur Comics

They even get the name right.