Liner notes, like the acknowledgements and preface sections of books, are rarely read but really one of the most important parts of a record. I finally got around to opening my Christmas present, Corey Wilke’s 2008 Drop It, and looked inside the cover. Today, I take inspiration from these words.

“There’s no need to be divorced from the current time and place in an effort to hearken back to bygone eras when there’s still such vital art to be made in the present…Don’t call an ambulance, there’s no need for resuscitation, because this music is alive and animated.”

Turns out that by mid-career, Philosophy majors will be earning more than Architects, Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, IT guys, Marketers, and Political Scientists. Take that business school!

Classics conspicuously absent from this list. : (

When he called politics “queen of the sciences,” I wonder if he ever had our present-day farce of science funding being controlled by wingnuts and charlatans who are quite possibly the least qualified to be making decisions on the validity of scientific inquiry (that being an improvement over when they are downright hostile to it, of course).

On a side note, I wonder if it is still acceptable to reference The Onion for everything when the Stuff White People Like blog has just written about our love of… referencing the Onion for everything.

Oh no!  A new, dangerous drug with a dumb name!  It made some kids throw up.  That is not at all why I’m posting this, however.  I want to draw attention to school official’s rigorous search for the truth behind Snurf:

“We did the Google and found out more than we needed to know about it,” [Superintendent] Klein said.

He said “the Google”!  What an old person!

***

Beware.  One day, saying, “the Google”, along with “the rap music” etc, will shift from ironic hilarity to accepted usage.

I’m investing in something I believe in.  I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.

-Madame Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), on Meet the Press, 24 August 2008.

Did anyone notice the switcheroo that NBC pulled in its coverage of the men’s 1500 meter freestyle final in Beijing?

For most of the grueling race, Canadian Ryan Cochrane battled it out with Grant Hackett, the obsessive-compulsive Aussie who refuses to take public transportation or touch handrails in the Chinese capital. In the last 400 meters, Tunisian swimmer Oussama Mellouli pulled out in front, eventually putting 0.7 seconds between himself and silver-medalist Hackett. The gold medal is the first swimming medal that Tunisia has brought home.

But at the beginning of the race, Mellouli was identified as Oussama Mellouli. But after his victory, he was described as “Ous” both in print and by the commentators.

I’m not judging you NBC, I’m just taking note.

Faced with war in Afghanistan and Iraq, an uneasy cease-fire in Georgia, Russia’s increasingly menacing attitude towards the West, Chinese human rights abuses, mortgage market failure in America, nuclear North Korea, nearly-nuclear and aggressive Iran, genocide in Africa, mass hysteria, and cats and dogs living together, the London Times still finds time to investigate the truly important questions.

Like, where have the breasts gone?

Bravo, London Times. Bravo.

In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world. Little else will change. Radical Islam will still authorise murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. All those who argued that the ‘root cause’ of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired.

Nick Cohen, “Why Bush has been a liberal’s best friend“

This is actually one of my biggest reasons for supporting Obama as a conservative: to essentially call the world’s bluff on everything being the fault of George W. Bush.

Were McCain to win, the talking heads would simply denounce him as Bush II and we’d have at least another 4 years of Europeans hiding their head in the sand instead of acknowledging that maybe some problems are not the fault of George W. Bush.

Only with a symbolic and decisive break from the past–in this case an Obama election–will the world be willing to stop blaming us. And if even the election of the consummate anti-Bush is not enough to get Europeans to act like allies, perhaps it will finally sink in to the editorial board of the New York Times that maybe Europeans simply cannot or will not cooperate with us, and coupled with the fact that their relative power on the world stage declines even faster than our own maybe it’s time we look for some new allies.

Like, say, India.

Plane carrying congressmen to Washington, DC for vote on airline safety regulations forced to make emergency landing.

Does this count as irony? Or wait, is this the non-ironic situation that we all call ironic? Wait, back up, hold on … I’m confused.

Having used gmail for a couple years now, I’m relatively free of spam.  At work, however, where we use outlook and have a pretty garbage server, I am treated to some very special forms of spam that seems to be targeted to me… it’s very intriguing.

While I would like to chronicle the most magnificent offenders (“DOn’t Kil baby EmbrRyo JESUs” was a favorite), I write today to make note of a more disturbing type of spam… one that tries to give me fake news.  Today’s was “China Fires Missile Over Taiwan”, but what it actually offered was an herbal remedy for increasing the size of, well, whatever you want, apparently.

Gasp!  Politics being intertwined with mythical cures for phallic insecurity?!  Say it ain’t so!