Sunset on Lake Wingra.

This evening, with paddleboard and dog:

The Nevada Supreme Court upholds letting the defendant's rap song "Drug Deala" in as evidence in a murder trial.

Deyundrea Orlando Holmes wrote the song in jail and included lyrics about the details of the crime.

"You know, it's hard to die. It takes a long time, and it's not easy to get killed."

A Rush Limbaugh pronouncement, made the other day, that's stuck with me. I like it out of context, but here's the context:

Cop at a memorial for a dead cyclist "then told me explicitly that he 'would not leave until I ‘understood’ that ‘it was the bicyclist’s fault."

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition said that SFPD Sgt. Richard Ernst made his "apparent disdain for 'you people,' bicyclists, disturbingly clear."

Shahum said that she tried to be diplomatic with Ernst and asked him to please move his patrol car out of the bike lane and into an available parking space that was right next to it, saying that it presented an unnecessary hazard to bicyclists riding past.

Diplomatically asking a cop to move his patrol car? Is that possible?

And apparently Ernst didn’t stop at denouncing [24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac] for causing her own death, in front of people who are still mourning that death. Shahum said Ernst also blamed the other two bicyclist deaths in SF this year on the cyclists, and on “you people” in the SFBC for not teaching cyclists how to avoid cars.

"Some rock stars get tragic as time passes... That would never happen to Rod."

"He doesn’t take any of this nonsense personally.... You don’t get to be Rod Stewart unless you have an element of the cold-blooded showbiz huckster... But you also don’t get to be a husband unless you have some Rod Stewart in you — grinding through the years, getting off on repetition."

From a review of Rob Sheffied's book "Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke."

Speaking of men in shorts...

Here's a NYT article about how Richard Simmons has gotten a new lease on fame through the internet, even though he's 65 years old and like "a lot of older people in show business, Mr. Simmons has been slow to fully grasp social media."

In late July, Mr. Simmons started a weekly YouTube series called “Workout Wednesdays,” with theAudience pairing him with young Web celebrities like Cassey Ho, whose YouTube fitness channel has more than 800,000 subscribers. Coming soon is a separate video series involving the D.J. Steve Aoki, who has 2.4 million Facebook fans. Mr. Aoki will go teach at Slimmons; Mr. Simmons plans to go crowd-surfing at a concert.

“There’s just something so cool about the way he does his thing, it’s punk rock,” Mr. Aoki said. “I’m definitely wearing a pair of those super-short shorts when I go. Those are dope, man!”

So... we's got Steve Aoki vouching for him... and his shorts. Your logical fallacy is: appeal to authority.

He's "stale, hairy and vanilla."

The reasons — according to the NY Post — why 100s of 1000s of people think Ben Affleck should not play the role of Batman.

The conservatives' high ground on race is colorblindness, and they'd be fools to abandon it.

That's a general piece of advice I'd like to deliver, prompted by this specific headline, seen just now at Twitchy:

Slain World War II vet Delbert Belton honored at candlelight vigil [photos]

I know there are those who think there's a need to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case, which skewed racial discourse in this country over the past year, but it's a terrible idea to go looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white and to exploit them in what seems like an effort to undo the distortions. I saw this happening earlier this week over the Christopher Lane murder, I labeled it "counter-Trayvonistic," which was a too-subtle way to say: Don't fight skewing with skewing in the opposite direction.

"If someone says I believe God requires me to wear a hat..."

"... it's considered completely inappropriate for the authorities or people who aren't intimate with the person to pressure him about whether there really is a God and whether that God cares about who's wearing hats."

The last sentence of my long comment at the end of the thread on the post "Not much is getting said about the Chelsea/Bradley Manning transgender announcement."

The great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian has died on Pitcairn Island...

... where the population is now 51.

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about two square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is about 24 square miles.) Most of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them.

[Tom] Christian, who for his services to Pitcairn was named a Member of the British Empire in 1983, was long considered an elder statesman on the island.

Read the whole obituary for details of the old mutiny and what it's like living in such a tiny and remote place. (It's midway between Peru and New Zealand. There are no cars. A supply ship arrives quarterly.) But let me highlight the legal dispute that occurred in 2004: 7 men were charged with sexually assaulting underage girls. The defense was "that initiating girls into sex was a time-honored South Seas custom and that they were unaware that British law was in effect on Pitcairn." Christian "publicly disputed the defendants’ contention, as did his wife." The men were convicted, and "Mr. and Mrs. Christian were shunned by much of the island for years afterward." He and his wife continued to live there on the island, tending their garden[s].

"I was out with a white person and I had not done this intentionally. And he was out with a black woman and didn’t know it."

"The schools in my town in Arkansas were just being integrated, but I graduated from an all-black high school. I just did not know white people. And even though I am very fair, everyone knew my family and they knew I was black. This was the first time I realized that it wasn’t obvious that I was black."

Civil War cannon mortar.

Closer look:


(Click to enlarge.)

Right in front of the Iowa State Capitol. Come on, Iowa!

About that Speedo...

The continuing saga of Madison's Brett Hulsey.

Cory Booker does standup.

"The Newark mayor and candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey was one of five political performers who appeared at the annual Stu Bykofsky Candidate Comedy Night in Philadelphia."



"I'm kind of tired of people comparing me to President Obama... I coordinated neighborhoods; he organized them." Can someone explain that joke?

"As you are too thin, I am too white. I am so white I literally appear to glow in the dark."

"'Get some sun,' I'm often told. 'Haven't you ever heard of a tanning bed?' It's hurtful, and neither of us should be shamed by anyone for our bodies. HOWEVER. I do not write nonsense comparing myself to long-oppressed people of more pigmented ancestry and taking cheap shots at their intelligence, will-power, and self-discipline just because someone who saw me on the beach failed to understand that my skin color options are white, pink, or red. This piece you've written? It is ridiculous."

A comment on this Daily Beast piece which I got to via this Kate Waldman item that began: "I must yawp my indignation after hate-reading the Daily Beast’s Emma Woolf bemoan the scourge of 'thin-shaming' in Western society."

Hate-reading. I like that. I looked it up in Urban Dictionary and saw it had an entry from January 2012, but only one person had voted on it. 

Not much is getting said about the Chelsea/Bradley Manning transgender announcement.

I'm thinking it must be disappointing to some people that mean/stupid things haven't been said. Or did I miss something? There's nothing about Manning at all currently trending on Memeorandum. A search for "Chelsea Manning" at rushlimbaugh.comcomes up empty. The Blaze only quotes the Washington Post on the difficulty of reporting about someone who's acted in the past under one name and gender and now asks to be referred to differently.

I can't find anyone saying anything that gives pro-transgender advocates an opportunity to pounce. Where did all this restraint come from?

Here's James Joyner at Outside the Beltway handling the issue with great sensitivity a day after an almost agonizingly reticent discussion of the topic with Joshua Foust on Bloggingheads:



I don't think I've ever heard more hemming and hawing on Bloggingheads (and that's saying a lot).

ADDED: I do see this piece in NRO by Kevin D. Williamson, "Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman," which comes across as serious and not mean-spirited. Key passage:

We have created a rhetoric of “gender identity” that is disconnected from biological sexual fact, and we have done so largely in the service of enabling the sexual mutilation of physically healthy men and women (significantly more men) by medical authorities who should be barred by professional convention if not by conscience from the removal of healthy organs (and limbs, more on that later), an act that by any reasonable standard ought to be considered mutilation rather than therapy. This is not to discount the feelings of people who suffer from gender-identity disorders — to the contrary, those feelings must be taken into account in determining courses of treatment for people who have severe personality disorders.

That's very focused on surgical intervention, which requires the participation of doctors. Speaking of things that can be disconnected, you could disconnect that surgery from more speech- and expression-based things about names, pronouns, dress, and behavior. Why can't those things be treated more like other matters of conscience, like religion, where we leave people to their own notions?