At the Allium Spacecraft Café...

... don't take off just yet.

(That's my photo, animated by Chip Ahoy, according to instructions by Penny.)

"Obama Signs Patriot Act Extension with Autopen..."

"... Odd Clauses Watch Gets Hundreds of Hits."

At the Bumblebee Café

... just be yourself.

"I'm sure I'm not the only one who read this and thought of one of the greatest movies ever made."

Yeah, I did too. And thanks for posting that 36-year-old trailer. I haven't gone to the movies in many months. I never see that there's anything coming out that I'm even slightly moved to think about seeing.* I thought maybe it was that I am getting old, and I no longer feel the way film needs you to feel to work as film. But seeing that old trailer now... I don't think it is me. It's the pictures that got small.

———————————————
* Not a fiction movie anyway. I do care very much about seeing "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," and I will see this documentary about Bill Cunningham.

Crack plays Instapundit...

... with Instapundit. There's a funny but NSFW image at the link. BTW, I think Crack is wrong about why Glenn doesn't link to him. I think Glenn's mind and Crack's mind are just far enough out of sync that... well, maybe one day, one of them, all of a sudden will realize he's on the wrong page or on the right page but the wrong note, and he's got to get in sync with the other one to understand what’s happening in this country. And it will be blogged.

ADDED: Crack, could you take a look at this?

AND: The link in the "ADDED" section was wrong for many hours yesterday, I apologize. Corrected.

ALSO: Instapundit acknowledges that his site was sending out malware vibes yesterday. Sorry I passed that along. I kept noticing a nasty window popping up when I tried to go to his site, but it took me a long time to notice that I'd entered it here.

"'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,' that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind..."

"... You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,' we were saying that the thing that’s gonna change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It will just be something that you see, and all of a sudden you realize I’m on the wrong page, or I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note, and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country."

Gil Scott-Heron, RIP.

Why did Cornel West call Obama "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats"?

What set him off? Glenn Loury and Joshua Cohen try to figure it out:

"I love the opening thump thump of the drums..."

"... and once hit a dashboard so hard that it made the cassette eject."

"Scott Lemieux's Spencer Ackerman moment."

Actually, I think this is unfair, but I'm not going say why or distinguish Scott Lemieux from Spencer Ackerman, because I swore off linking to Lawyers, Guns and Money when they deleted all Meade's comments. I'm not going to interact with people who have deliberately and finally cut of my channels of interaction with them.

Restore everything and apologize and I will.

Margo Dydek, the tallest WNBA female basketball player ever, has died of a heart attack at the age of 37.

She was 7'2" tall.

Despite Dydek’s prowess in Europe, American scouts were lukewarm before she arrived in the United States in 1998 for a predraft camp. There was a reason: because of a clerical error, her height was listed as 6-6 in the advance materials they had been given.

Then Dydek walked through the door. The scouts scrambled.

Lech Walesa rejects meeting with Obama...

... as Obama arrives in Poland.

At the Indoor-Outdoor Café...

... are you in or out?

Gallup poll: Democrats estimate that 28% of Americans are gay.

Republicans are much closer to reality, at 20.2%, but still far off. (The actual percentage is more like 3.5.)

What accounts for this discrepancy? Perhaps Democrats are more likely to live in places where there are larger concentrations of openly gay people. Perhaps those with liberal views are more likely to hear the news that people they know are gay. Maybe Dems are dumber. The poll does also show that less educated people have the highest estimate. Or maybe it's that women tend to be Democrats and women estimate high (29.7% to men's 19.4%). Why would women estimate high? It might be that they are more likely to key into talk about private lives, and thus hear more about various people being gay, and then they extrapolate a ridiculous number. Younger people estimate high too, and younger people tend to be more liberal.

Whatever. Why are people so ill-informed? It's embarrassing. Would people be more likely to support equal rights for gay people if they knew how small the number is? But of course, we don't really know exactly what the number is. We're all only estimating.

Are you more likely to support gay rights if you think there are very few gay people?
	Yes, because then they're more of a minority and more subject to discrimination.
	Yes, because then giving them rights won't have much effect.
	No, because it's worse if a larger number of persons are denied equality.
	No, because rights are what they are regardless of how many people are being denied those rights.
pollcode.com free polls

"Althouse is shrewder."

Says Andrew Sullivan. Thanks. He's saying I'm shrewder than Byron York, referring to this post, earlier today, which is up to 249 comments (on the Friday afternoon before the long holiday weekend.) Of course, the topic is Sarah Palin. Sullivan connects my post, which tweaked the "serious people," with something Rush Limbaugh said:

'The Inside the Beltway’ ruling class — the elite — they’re more oriented toward candidates they can attach the word ‘serious’ to — which is another way of saying someone who is boring, who doesn’t ruffle feathers, someone who exudes an air of formal education and sophistication — she doesn’t exude that, and I think it’s going to shake a lot of people up ... You know the effect that she has on establishment Republican people.

Later, Sullivan put up another post on the Sarah Palin/seriousness theme. Asking "Does this sound like someone not running?," he posted Palin's bus tour ad:



Wow.

"Death from Dehydration Is Usually Serene."

An ABC News article, from 2005, back when people were agonizing over Terri Schiavo.

"The process of starving to death seems very barbaric but in actuality is very peaceful," said Dr. Fred Mirarchi, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia.

"The patient's experience is really pretty benign," said Dr. Joanne Lynn, a hospice physician associated with Americans for Better Care of the Dying, a group working for improved end-of-life care. "Overwhelmingly, what will happen is nothing."...

"Patients [become] uremic -- filled with bodily toxins -- and are unaware of their surroundings," Mirarchi said. "They develop electrolyte imbalances that eventually cause an abnormal beating of the heart."...

"The heart will then stop and the patient will die," said Mirarchi....

"Going without water makes it more gentle," Lynn said. "Allowing chemicals [in the blood] to cause arrhythmia is more merciful."

That came up first when I Googled "patients die of dehydration," which I did because I was trying to find this news article I'd read yesterday. Here it is: "Elderly patients dying of thirst: Doctors forced to prescribe drinking water to keep the old alive, reveals devastating report on hospital care." That's in the Daily Mail, reporting on the situation in the UK:

The snapshot study, triggered by a Mail campaign, found staff routinely ignored patients’ calls for help and forgot to check that they had had enough to eat and drink.

Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year.

Another 300 die malnourished.

Am I wrong to suspect there is a form of euthanasia going on?

"Married couples have dropped below half of all American households for the first time..."

"... the Census Bureau says, a milestone in the evolution of the American family toward less traditional forms. Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010.... What is more, just a fifth of households were traditional families — married couples with children — down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950, as the iconic image of the American family continues to break apart."

(NYT link.)