"Some students would subsist on little more than lettuce flavored with calorie-free spray butter flavoring."

Ah, the extreme austerity that is needed in preparation for the hedonism of Spring Break!

Thousands of mistakes in Iraq and holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Condi, beset in Britain.

UPDATE: More here:

She gave several interviews to the British press, and almost every one was dominated by questions about her rough reception.

"People can say whatever they wish," she told The Lancashire Evening Telegraph. "I know where I stand. We made the right decision" in Iraq. "I was fully supportive of the decision."

During the news conference in Blackburn on Saturday, the boos and jeers rose to greet the secretaries as they spoke. Referring to the protesters at one point, Ms. Rice said, "They make my point. A democracy is the only system of government that allows people to be heard peacefully."

What poise. What nerves of steel. Tell me again why she wouldn't be capable of handling presidential campaigning.

"By 2008, the blogs are going to be so institutionalized, it's not going to be funny."

The NYT quotes Markos Moulitsas in an article about how the political parties are trying to figure out and take advantage of blogging. Kos is talking about how the candidates are trying to catch up, and that they might get to the point where they are only cluelessly going, "We're hot and we're hip and we're bloggin'.'" Presumably, they need to hire some real bloggers if they want to get up to speed -- like the way Mark Warner hired Jerome Armstrong.

Anyway, an important aspect of all of this is that blogging is not affecting the two parties in the same way, and Kos has a lot to do with that:

On the left in particular, bloggers have emerged as something of a police force guarding against disloyalty among Democrats, as Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant, learned after he told The Washington Post that bloggers and online donors "are not representative of the majority you need to win elections."

A Daily Kos blogger wrote: "Not one dime, ladies and gentlemen, to anything connected with Steve Elmendorf. Anyone stupid enough to actually give a quote like that deserves to have every single one of his funding sources dry up."...

Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

Still, Democrats have been particularly enthusiastic about the potential of this technology to get the party back on track, with many Democratic leaders arguing that the Internet is today for Democrats what talk radio was for Republicans 10 years ago. "This new media becomes much more important to us because conservatives have been more dominant in traditional media," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network. "This stuff becomes really critical for us."

Hmmm.... But blogging is so different from talk radio. Using blogs to try to produce a radio-like effect could go very wrong, and, indeed, seems already to have gone very wrong. Kos and Armstrong have written their book, but haven't their actual efforts to help Democratic candidates fallen flat? Soon enough, someone will write a book analyzing how their blog hurt the Democratic Party.

You shouldn't want a big, dominant blog pushing your party around. The great thing about blogging is the way individuals can be heard and can spontaneously aggregate and disaggregate as the issues play out. Kos, it seems, is pushing the institutionalization of blogging, and would, perhaps, like to lump those of us who resist that together with lame politicians who think they look "hip" because they're "bloggin'." Get serious, grow up, blog for power!

NO!

As for how Kos treats Lieberman: here he goes again.

The NYT crossword today...

... should go down in crossword history as one of the truly great ones. Congratulations to Kevan Choset and David Kwong!

A MILD SPOILER: It's not really as hard as it should be for a Saturday. I think the date trumped the day of the week.

Al Franken's "Screw you."

So Al Franken said "screw you" on "The Today Show." Do you have a problem with that? I'm inclined to defend Franken here, because I'm used to this kind of humor. The other guest snipes at him and says he looks exhausted, and Franken says:

"It's 4:11AM! It's four in the morning here....Screw you! I got up at four in the morning."

It looks worse on the transcript than it sounds in the video.

I don't watch "The Today Show," and maybe its audience is especially fragile and doesn't get mock outrage, but this strikes me as pretty mainstream humor. It gets a big laugh from the crew. He continues because he's doing a humor routine. And when Matt Lauer says "cut his mike" in the end, he's joking too, isn't he? That's an allusion to this, right? That's the way I hear it.

Blogging and the Pro-Test Movement.

The NYT profiles a 16-year-old blogger, Laurie Pycroft, who's gotten a lot of attention lately in Britain:

[O]n Jan. 28, as Mr. Pycroft watched animal rights demonstrators in Oxford marching to protest the planned testing facility. He tucked in behind them chanting, "Build the lab!"

"They got quite hostile," he said. So he went to a stationery store and bought a large square of cardboard and a pen and wrote: "Support Progress. Build the Oxford Lab." When he started waving the sign on the street, someone compared him to excrement. Another person tore the sign apart, he said. He went home and shared his experience on his blog. The result was a new movement, called Pro-Test.

It's fascinating to think of one person, suddenly inspired to dash off a sign, starting a movement. You know, kind of...



In this case, blogging is what makes instant-sign move effective. It's not that he does the sign, but that he goes home and blogs about it. The article doesn't describe the process from first blog post to significant movement, but here's the blog. You can trace the process yourself.

I love the idea of one guy, alone on the other side of a big, active demonstration, and, instead of being outnumbered, using a blog to draw out the numbers on his side that exist, out there, dispersed in the general population. It must often be the case that a person encounters activists and thinks: Yes, these people are passionate and out on the streets, but I'll bet that most people disagree, but they, being more rational, are out living their lives and not inclined to take to the streets. By blogging, you don't need anyone else to be there to respond to your sign -- like the already-assembled workers in the movie "Norma Rae." Your little one-person demonstration comes alive through the description of it on your blog, which also gives you a place to detail your arguments, open a forum for discussion, and touch off debates elsewhere that can link back to you.

"You'll pretty much say anything to stay alive because you expect people will understand these aren't your words."

The hostage point of view. We can't ask for more. We can imagine a bolder hero who would do more. But we should speak no ill of the person who does less.

" This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female black congresswoman."

Said Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who may be criminally charged for slapping the police officer who blocked her entry into the Capitol when she refused to stop after being asked three times:

Her lawyer, James W. Myart Jr., said, "Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, like thousands of average Americans across this country, is, too, a victim of the excessive use of force by law enforcement officials because of how she looks and the color of her skin."

"Ms. McKinney is just a victim of being in Congress while black," Myart said.

He's making the police officer sound like Matt Dillon in "Crash"!

We're asked to picture the member of Congress as the poor underdog here? Before working on this self-presentation as a victimized black woman, McKinney had a earlier draft that said: "It is ... a shame that while I conduct the country's business, I have to stop and call the police to tell them that I've changed my hairstyle so that I'm not harassed at work." The arrogance really comes across in that version. How dare you not recognize me! How dare you stall me as I go about work that is so much more important than yours!

Fear and hope among the Afghan apostates.

Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian who faced the death penalty for converting from Islam, now lives in exile in Italy. But what of the hundreds -- thousands? -- of apostates who remain behind. How has Rahman's case affected them?

Terri Schiavo died a year ago.

How is the press marking the anniversary? Some are running with the "living wills" theme. Others are revisiting the husband and parents who fought so hard over her fate. Still others reargue the issues of life and death.

Thinking about your muscles makes you stronger.

Really.

The team wired their subjects up to weight machines which monitored levels of electrical activity in their biceps and asked them to think in two different ways while exercising.

The more electrical activity measured - the more the muscle is doing.

When subjects were asked to focus on what their muscles were doing and how they were working there were significantly higher levels of electrical activity.

But when they were asked to visualise lifting the weight, electrical activity was lower.

So much for your Zen philosophy!

"It's not like grabbing your crotch, not that bad an obscenity."

But it's an obscenity, says Vito, from "The Sopranos" (Joseph Gannascoli), about that notorious hand gesture of the American jurist Antonin Scalia. Oh, go eat a big bag of small carrots! (Is that an obscenity?)

The Democrats announced their national security plan the other day.

Did you notice? Me neither. Are the media to blame for our inattention to this?

"AI" fashions, critiqued.

Robin Givhan -- the WaPo's fashion analyst -- takes on "American Idol." She doesn't like the sexing up of the women:

Dressed in tight blue jeans, a tight yellow tunic, a tight purple suede jacket and a pair of ivory jeweled showgirl pumps, [Paris] Bennett seemed to have taken all her styling tips from a Baby Phat runway show -- an unwise decision unless one's intention is to resemble what might affectionately be called a hussy.

Well, I think it was. You might want to mention that she's only 17.

Chris Daughtry is a man who knows that a beautifully bald head always looks better than a comb-over. This week, Daughtry was dressed, as usual, like a nonchalant rocker.... Daughtry has a consistent style, and that makes him stand out, since most of the contestants seem to wear just about anything that gets handed to them. Fit, taste, logic, who cares?

I think the biggest problem is inconsistent style. It may take a few weeks (or months) to arrive at a style, but once there, stay approximately there. Daughtry has a consistent look. Well, that is, he has a bald head. He has it every week. And when you look at him, that's what you notice. You can tell all the men with minimal hair that the completely shaved look is best -- and it is! -- but it takes a lot of nerve to put yourself out there like that.

Givhan complains a lot about the women in their elaborate outfits styled around tight jeans (especially on the giant-legged Mandisa), but it's much worse when they put the women in those dorky cocktail dresses that all look to me like crap made by Halston in the 1970s.

Ranking the law schools.

Paul Caron has figured out which law schools have moved up and which have fallen in the new U.S. News ranking. (Wisconsin stayed the same.) He's also pointing us to the rival rankings from the Princeton Review. Can Princeton Review challenge the market dominance of U.S. News? I don't think so. They are based so much on student surveys that the ranks seem mostly to reflect how eager the students are to help their school look good (and how uncritical the students are). Or do these lists just look all wrong to me because of their failure to resemble the U.S. News rank?

"This is the first time that anyone has shown that the brain grows differently in extremely intelligent children."

Okay, all you narcissistic parents: Time to run out and get a brain image done on your little genius. And all you IQ doubters: Time to fret about a future of imaging and classifying our young brain-containers.