How a black man could be white in the American South in the 1940s.

Wear a turban!

"It is said that every city, every country, has its smell."

"Paris, they say, smells or used to smell of acrid cabbage. Cape Town smells of sheep. There are tropical isles that smell of roses, musk, or coconut oil. Russia smells of leather. Lyon smells of coal. The Orient generally smells of musk and corpses. Brussels smells of black soap. The hotel rooms smell of black soap. The beds smell of black soap. The napkins smell of black soap. The sidewalks smell of black soap."

Notes for a book about Belgium, by Charles Baudelaire, who died in 1867, without having written the book.

"'The Ideal Head': Bizarre Racial Teachings From a 1906 Textbook."

"A hundred years ago, American geography students learned about a world in which 'the brown people raise rice,' 'the black people … have no books,' and 'the red men are savages.'"

Are you orthorexic?

10 signs.

"You Silver Spring transients are ruining our neighborhood."

Is it a breach of etiquette to park a car on the street in front of someone's house?

You asked for new pics of Abby.

See the whole series at "Abby pays a visit."

American cheese.

Actually, it's cheddar cheese, but it seems to have an uncanny tendency when broken up....

"There was a howling noise... then I heard a roar and she landed in the kitchen, the roof was broken..."

"The body's still here because they told me to wait for experts to come and get it... I opened the door and I saw people falling. One fell in my vegetable patch."

60 years ago today: The rock 'n' roll era begins.

On July 19, 1954, Sun Records released the Elvis Presley record "That's All Right."

During an uneventful recording session at Sun Studios on the evening of July 5, 1954, Presley, [Scotty] Moore, and [Bill] Black were taking a break between recordings when Presley started fooling around with an up-tempo version of Arthur Crudup's song "That's All Right, Mama." Black began joining in on his upright bass, and soon they were joined by Moore on guitar. Producer Sam Phillips, taken aback by this sudden upbeat atmosphere, asked the three of them to start again so he could record it.

Black's bass and guitars from Presley and Moore provided the instrumentation. The recording contains no drums or additional instruments. The song was produced in the style of a "live" recording (all parts performed at once and recorded on a single track)...

Upon finishing the recording session, according to Scotty Moore, Bill Black remarked, "Damn. Get that on the radio and they'll run us out of town."

If you're inclined to cry "cultural appropriation": 1. Take note that Elvis innovated by playing Crudup's song very fast, and 2. Read John McWhorter's piece "You Can’t ‘Steal’ a Culture: In Defense of Cultural Appropriation."

The Freedom From Religion Foundation settles with the IRS about investigating tax-exempt religious groups that get involved in politics.

AP reports:

"This is a victory, and we're pleased with this development in which the IRS has proved to our satisfaction that it now has in place a protocol to enforce its own anti-electioneering provisions," said [Freedom From Religion] co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor....

The FFRF argued that churches and other religious organizations have become increasingly more involved in political campaigns, "blatantly and deliberately flaunting the electioneering restrictions."

("Flaunting." Somebody — AP or FFRF — made the old flouting/flaunting mistake.)

Anyway, the point is — as we know from the big IRS scandal about Tea Party groups — if a group is too political, it doesn't qualify for a tax exemption. The same degree of enforcement should apply to all groups who seek tax-exempt status, whether they are conservative or liberal and whether they are religious or secular.

The IRS had said publicly in 2012 that it was not investigating complaints of partisan political activity by churches, leaving religious groups who make direct or thinly veiled endorsements of political candidates unchallenged.

Perhaps you think religious organizations should get special treatment from the IRS or, at least, you may not be comfortable with this issue getting resolved in a settlement between the IRS and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I prefer applying the same rules to everyone and not giving special deference to religious groups, but the Religious Freedom Restoration Action requires the federal government to justify substantial burdens on religion with a compelling interest and narrow tailoring, as we saw in the Hobby Lobby case.

You can't expect the Freedom From Religion Foundation to push that point, however, and nothing about this settlement prevents other parties from raising that question in their own lawsuits. In any event, the IRS has a moratorium on investigations right now, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future with this FFRF-satisfying "protocol" if some church that's used to telling its parishioners how to vote gets surprised by a deprivation of its tax-exempt status.

"[T]he tragic news equivalent to losing hundreds of years of broad expertise in combatting HIV/AIDS."

"Many HIV/AIDS researchers, officials, and activists – perhaps scores – had been traveling on Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 en route to the 20th anniversary AIDS 2014 conference in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia."

"When your thought process is as mangled as this author's tour de force of reasoning, you just might be an idiot."

"She doesn't merely have a different opinion - she seems to not understand the difference between statistic and anecdote, she is under-educated about the topic she chose to write on... and she seems to have a great deal of trouble drawing logical conclusions. You pick the epithet. This author also seems to have a pathological need for attention - a craving so strong that she doesn't care who she hurts...."

Want to get the most hostile possible reactions in the comments? Do what Erin Auerbach did. Write: "Why I’d never adopt a shelter dog again."

Lake Mendota... with "cross process" accidentally selected on my Lumix camera.

And a little tweaking in iPhoto. Differently tweaked here:



You can buy the camera here. And here's Panasonic's explanation of the "cross process" setting. Supposedly it "emulat[es] the look of cross processing in film photography."

"What the hell is Cross-Processing?"

Cross-processing (also known as 'x-pro') is the procedure of deliberately processing one type of film in a chemical solution intended for another type of film. As particular chemical solutions are optimized for specific kinds of film, you will get unpredictable and interesting results when they are combined differently....

The best thing about cross processing is THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE. Try as you may, it is nearly impossible to predict exactly what effect cross processing will have on your images. But this is where the fun lies. Every roll of film you develop is like a box of rabid hamsters. You never know what you're gonna get!

Which 2016 presidential candidate are you? I'm Chris Christie.

Based on this quiz, which isn't about politics.

"The same-sex marriage movement suffered setbacks in two states on Friday, while enjoying an advance in one."

WaPo reports:

A federal appeals court ruled Oklahoma’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional, affirming a federal judge’s January decision while keeping the state’s ban in place for now. Meanwhile, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered the Denver County clerk stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor ruled that the state of Utah may continue to deny marriage benefits to more than 1,000 married same-sex couples.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's "'Diversity' Plan Involves Grading By Race And Ethnicity"... really?

The quote part of my question, above, comes from Instapundit, who is paraphrasing John Leo (at Minding the Campus) who wrote. Leo wrote:

Professors, instead of just awarding the grade that each student earns, would apparently have to adjust them so that academically weaker, "underrepresented racial/ethnic" students perform at the same level and receive the same grades as academically stronger students.

Apparently. That's a pretty big "apparently," omitted by Instapundit [who also includes the Leo quote], and I cannot figure out what motivated Leo to make that leap to the point where he could say what he said even with the "apparently."

Naturally, the University of Wisconsin wants a diverse student body and wants all of the students to do well in their classes and to graduate. It's a pretty dismal diversity policy that looks only at whether once underrepresented groups are now well represented. If the admissions process works to increase diversity, we don't just sit back and congratulate ourselves. We have the additional duty to provide a good educational experience to all of the students who come here.

That doesn't mean the plan is to adjust grades by race and ethnicity!