Orange bike. Lamborghini.

2 vehicles, seen today.

Japanese human art.

Just something I stumbled into on YouTube. Pretty cool and amusing. Watch the whole thing and don't worry about not understanding Japanese.

IN THE COMMENTS: Christopher Smith provides the translation:

The hosts and the text say "The reason my girlfriend is angry"

The woman says "What heck are you doing?!"

Then in the middle the guy says "Why are you so angry?" and she responds "Well you..." then after they rewind she says "what the heck are you doing?" again.

Thanks!

The 100 greatest moments in the history of food.

Assembled here.

Of course, you know what #1 is. #2 is harder to guess, and it's a matter of opinion, but I approve:

1762 The sandwich is created as gambler John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, calls for his dinner to be put between two slices of bread so he can continue his card game with one hand and eat with the other. Lunchtimes would never be the same again.

The discovery of egg salad must necessarily rank far lower. But in the egg category, I think the greatest moment is the separation of yolk and white. Think of all that follows from that!

But actually, the egg hardly figures in the top 100. Its first appearance is at #21 as a mere ingredient in the Caesar salad:

1924 In Tijuana, Mexico, restaurateur Caesar Cardini is short of food after a big party. Scouring the kitchen, he digs out lettuce, bread, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan, eggs and lemon, and knocks up the first Caesar salad, a dish that does at least look healthy despite being full of fat. It is, needless to say, hugely popular.

Ha ha. I love the idea that one of the all-time great recipes is a quirk of what one guy, one day, happened to have in the kitchen. But I'm sure this is the source of many recipes, including the most horrendous ones.

What's the best/worst/weirdest concoction you ever made from what you happened to have on hand? Tell the story. I remember once being treated — along with a large group of partyers who'd stayed overnight somewhere on Long Island — to a breakfast of eggs with sliced hot dogs scrambled into them. Since we were very hungry, it tasted delicious. That was decades ago, and I've never felt the urge to make scrambled eggs and hot dogs.

I do remember once making creamed tuna on mashed potatoes — in a situation where soft food was a medical requirement. It seemed really good at the time, but I never made it again... needless to say.

Criticizing "Clinton News Network."

Outcry noted.

ADDED: About those citizen questioners. There's this. And this.

BUT: Consider the current "media frenzy" over the planted question at the Clinton rally the other day. After the initial story broke, CNN gave it more life by doing an interview with the student (Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff).

Woody Allen's favorites of his own films are "The Purple Rose of Cairo," "Match Point," and "Husbands and Wives"...

... with "Stardust Memories" and "Zelig" at the second rank:

He expresses bafflement over the high regard in which “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” continue to be held (“People really latched on to ‘Manhattan’ in a way that I thought was irrational,” he says) and makes a strong case for “Manhattan Murder Mystery”...

Eh. I think he's just unnerved that his 2 best films are among his earliest. And he's got all the credit he could possible get for "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan," so the strategy for reaping more credit is to promote the other films.

The link is to a review of a new book, Eric Lax's "Conversations with Woody Allen." I'm sure a lot of you, when the subject is Woody Allen, think first of his sexual misadventures. How does the book deal with that?

Unprompted, [Allen] brings up the subject with Lax, conflating the people who criticized the age difference between his and Mariel Hemingway’s characters in “Manhattan” with those who were up in arms about him and Soon-Yi. “Speaking of Soon-Yi,” Allen says, “it is ironic that my marriage to her, which was seen by many as so irrational, to me is the one relationship in my life that worked.”

And the aptly named Lax leaves it at that. If you were really a good conversationalist — good enough to sell books with titles that begin "Conversations with..." — you ought to be able to think of a hundred ways to prod your interlocutor to reveal something here.

What does it mean to say that a relationship "works"? Is there some sense in which you mean that your partner works for you? In "Wild Man Blues," Soon-Yi seemed to be managing you, moving you along in a positive way. Do you think perhaps the women your age expected you to do a little working for them? Or do you imagine that a relationship just works or doesn't? Do you still think a relationship is like a shark? That it has to constantly move forward or it dies? What does Soon-Yi do that keeps the shark going forward? And are you appropriately animate for a human being in the context in which you exist? Is that a robotic shark?

"Brave New World" or "1984" — "Which template would win"?

We used to wonder, Margaret Atwood writes.

During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race.

That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in 2001. Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former iron curtain: the west has its own versions now.

On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.

Atwood's fear: We get both.

Read the whole thing.

I especially like the part about how she, as a 14 year old girl, struggled to understand Huxley, who wrote things like:

"Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor."

(Here's the line in it's chapter, which includes this sex talk: "'Hug me till you drug me, honey.'...'Kiss me till I'm in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly …'")

She asks:

[H]ow close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?...

We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe... that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

"When I kissed it, I thought the artist would have understood."

Said Rindy Sam, who put a lipstick stain on an all-white Cy Twombly painting. Encouraging art vandals everywhere, the French judge let her off with a fine of 1,000 euros ($1,425) to the owner of the painting (who was an aggressive enough a litigator to demand the full $2.8 million value of the painting). The owner of the gallery got $713. And Twombly himself received 1 euro, which the judge called "symbolic."

So forget about deterrence. In the France that this judge believes in, if you're willing to fork over a couple thousand dollars, you can put your mark on a highly valuable work of art and get famous doing it. Of course, Sam is herself an artist, and now you know her name.

IN THE COMMENTS: Reacting to Drill SGT who said "put on your Artist hat and explain a market that values a blank canvas at $2.8 million?," Palladian writes:

I wondered how long it would be before we got some reactionary "it's a blank canvas!" comment. It's worth 2.8 million because that's what someone was willing to pay for it. That's how markets work. End of story.

As for this incident, Europeans, for some reason, love to vandalize artwork, and European judges love to dole out light, friendly, non-threatening judgments. Sometimes the vandal is a crazy person. Sometimes the vandal is a brainless twat like this one who does it for some political or "performance art" reason. This happens because the vulgar, nihilistic stew that bubbles at the bottom of the contemporary art world can soften the bones and render to jelly even the most stalwart and talented artists thrown into it. When you have the editor-in-chief of a well-known European art magazine writing things like this:

"In my opinion, the arrest of Brener [who spray painted a green dollar sign onto a Kasimir Malevich painting] is an offence to the artist’s freedom of expression and, as such, a repressive act. Brener is no hooligan, but a transgressive artist with a strong personality, just as much as Malevich was the same, in his own time."

...then it's not difficult to see why these acts of destruction continue to occur, and why an art world that has come to value fame above all other things makes destruction seem attractive to its weak-minded bottom feeders desperate to "transgress the boundaries".

The best part about this particular piece of vandalism is that it's not even original:

"[in 1977] Ruth van Herpen kisse[d] a white monochrome painting by artist Jo Baer in the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, smearing her lipstick across it. In her trial hearing, she explains, “[The work] looked so cold. I only kissed it to cheer it up.”

How lame are you when you can't even be original in your vandalism?

I think the willful destruction of artwork should be a capital offense, punishable by a public hanging. Call it performance art.

Is Rudy Giuliani on a mission from God?

WaPo's Robert Barnes wrote about Rudy Giuliani's speech to the Federalist Society this way:

The former mayor said the country plays a "divinely inspired role'' motivated by "ideas and idealism.''

"It was this nation that saved the world from the two great tyrannies of the 20th Century--Nazism and communism," Giuliani said. "It's this country that is going to save civilzation [sic] from Islamic terrorism.''

I want to expand on a point I noted yesterday. Barnes is doing something to Giuliani that is often done to Bush — making it seem as though religion generates and controls his political ideology.

There are several questions this raises:

1. Does the politician deserve this characterization?

2. If so, is the politician sincere, or is he wooing the people who like religion in politics?

3. If the former, do we like or at least accept religion in politics?

4. If the latter, is it unremarkable ordinary politics or something that should worry us?

To answer question #1, we can look at the text of the Giuliani speech:

The theme of this conference is “Shining City Upon a Hill: American Exceptionalism.” Of course the shining city upon a hill was the great reference that Ronald Reagan used bringing up the words of John Winthrop....

So Giuliani is speaking at a conference with a title that is a religion reference. In 1630, John Winthrop wrote a sermon for the Puritans as they were arriving in the New World:

For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.

This is a reference to the Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:13-14:

You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

Many politicians have invoked Winthrop's sermon over the years, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Howard Dean. But Giuliani names Ronald Reagan. He's speaking to a conservative group, making a political speech, and connecting his remarks to the theme of the conference. If it were a liberal group, I think we'd see John Kennedy's name in this part of the speech.

Look how he goes on after saying "Of course the shining city upon a hill was the great reference that Ronald Reagan used bringing up the words of John Winthrop....":

... but the American exceptionalism is also a very, very important part of that theme. There are some people I think nowadays that doubt that America has a special, even a divinely inspired role in the world. Now I don’t understand how you can look at history and not see the wisdom of that and the reality of it.

Here we see the phrase Barnes quoted. Clearly, Giuliani is disparaging those who don't believe that America has a special role to play in the world. But he doesn't say that this is necessarily a "divinely inspired" role. He says "a special, even a divinely inspired role," which means it's certainly a "special" role and one might "even" think that role is "divinely inspired."

That's short enough that you could miss it — especially if there's static in you mental facilities when you hear religious things — but Giuliani is not expressing a personal belief that America's role in the world is "divinely inspired."

In a way, he is saying it without saying it, and therefore signaling to people who want to hear it. That one word — "even" — carries a lot of weight in my analysis. But it's there and it means that he has not said he thinks America's role is "divinely inspired."

So the answer to Question #1 is: probably not. Since I'm not giving a definite no, we should go on to Questions 2 and 3 or 4. I'll leave that to you for now.

Hillary Clinton has "scandalous information" about Barack Obama.

Robert Novak tells us:

Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed.

She's decided not to use it? Seems to me this is using it.

This word-of-mouth among Democrats makes Obama look vulnerable and Clinton look prudent.

Prudent... devious... pick your adjective.

UPDATE: The Clinton response:

"A Republican-leaning journalist runs a blind item designed to set Democrats against one another. Experienced Democrats see this for what it is. Others get distracted and thrown off their games," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said in a statement.

"We have no idea what Mr. Novak's item is about and reject it totally."

"The expression 'why don't you shut up?' has become a popular slogan."

"On Monday, Caracas was full of posters. Student protesters have adopted it as their chant, and you can find various cartoons, songs and ringtones alluding to the subject on the web. I would love to be able to defend Chavez and feel offended by the king's remarks, but I can't! The king said what most of us have wanted to say for a long time. We have been listening to his diatribes every Sunday, which go for hours and hours... When he insults anyone who is not with him, when he humiliates our student protesters... We all want to say 'why don't you shut up?'"

So what do people really think of what the King Juan Carlos of Spain said to Hugo Chavez?

Among the Federalists.

"We thought we had planted a wildflower in the weeds of academic liberalism. Instead it was an oak, " said Antonin Scalia last night at the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society.

President Bush spoke too:

"Senate confirmation is part of the Constitution's checks and balances. But it was never intended to be a license to ruin the good name that a nominee has worked a lifetime to build," Bush said.

He also said many qualified lawyers had "politely declined" judicial nominations "because of the ugliness, uncertainty and delay that now characterizes the confirmation process."

Rudolph W. Giuliani spoke to the group today.

He professed his affinity for judges who see the Constitution for "what it is, not what they want it to be.'' He denounced the Senate confirmation process that denied a Supreme Court seat to former Judge Robert Bork and became an "attempted character assassination'' of Justice Clarence Thomas. He promised to nominate justices such as Thomas--and Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts Jr and Samuel A. Alito Jr....

Giuliani said Hillary Rodham Clinton should have been invited, since she is "one of the newest federalists." He was referring to what he said was her position that driver's licenses for illegal immigrants was something to be decided by each state.

"This is the only time in her career she's ever decided anything should be decided on a state by state basis," he said, to laughter from the crowd. "And you know something? She picked absolutely the wrong one.''...

The former mayor said the country plays a "divinely inspired role'' motivated by "ideas and idealism.''

"It was this nation that saved the world from the two great tyrannies of the 20th Century--Nazism and communism," Giuliani said. "It's this country that is going to save civilzation [sic] from Islamic terrorism.''

"Divinely inspired role" — good or bad phrase?

"Islamic terrorism" — good or bad phrase?

"The only time in her career she's ever decided anything should be decided on a state by state basis" — really?

ADDED: Here's the full text of the Giuliani speech. Let's see "divinely inspired role" in context:

The theme of this conference is “Shining City Upon a Hill: American Exceptionalism.” Of course the shining city upon a hill was the great reference that Ronald Reagan used bringing up the words of John Winthrop, but the American exceptionalism is also a very, very important part of that theme. There are some people I think nowadays that doubt that America has a special, even a divinely inspired role in the world. Now I don’t understand how you can look at history and not see the wisdom of that and the reality of it.

Most countries on earth developed out of a single ethnicity, a single religion, some common characteristic that bound people together before they were even a nation. America is very, very different. We’re not a single ethnicity, we’re all ethnicities. We’re not a single race, we’re all races. We’re not a single religion. We were established so that we wouldn’t be a single religion. So we’re very different in our origins than just about any other country on earth. We’re united because of ideas and ideals. That’s what holds us together. That’s the thing that makes America America, makes Americans Americans—shared ideas....

American exceptionalism isn’t a debate, it’s not something we should be arrogant about where we say, “Oh, we’re very, very special.” We’re just very, very fortunate and when we don’t recognize that, I don’t think we do justice to our background and to what’s expected of us.

... America established this constitutional democratic government in the form of a republic and it was the nation that from the very beginning saw that tyranny and oppression is something that was illegitimate and had to be dealt with. It was this nation that saved the world from the two great tyrannies of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism. It’s this country that’s going to save a civilization from Islamic terrorism.

"Oh my God, it's Whitey!"

A hawk ruthlessly murders the beloved albino squirrel known to Ohio State Students as Whitey. Here's the Facebook page: "In Memory of the 'Whitey' the Albino Squirrel":

Whitey will be remembered for his bizarre looks, his noble character, and his ability to always make a student smile. Ladies and Gentlemen, honor a hometown hero and your friend, Whitey.

Does the hawk deserve a name? Does the hawk deserve a facebook page? Should a hawk starve? Ladies and Gentlemen, honor the hawk!

In other squirrel news, BBC.com sees fit to write a whole article on the fact that a red squirrel went swimming.

"This squirrel was swimming strongly and had its tail coiled on its back so it didn't look bedraggled or as if it was struggling.

"I've never seen anything like it before."

Of course, it was a red squirrel. The British are mad about the red squirrels and hate the invader greys.

Friday night...

... beautiful, in New York.

HDTV and the female candidate.

My son Christopher writes that he watched last night's debate on high definition TV, and:

Hillary Clinton's lipstick looked different in HD. It was kind of weird. Her lipstick looked overly glossy and stuck out, almost a little garish. You can tell it's sort of like stage makeup. When she first came on her lipstick actually popped out in a Rocky Horror-ish way. That was my first impression when she was in close-up. I mean, and it looked good on regular TV but looked way overdone on HD.

He likes Hillary Clinton, by the way.

It seems that there is a problem with doing a woman's makeup so that it works on both regular TV and HDTV.

Actually, I would have thought HDTV would be a bigger problem for the men, because you don't want to think of them as wearing any makeup at all. Remember when we noticed Al Gore's makeup?

In his first debate with George W. Bush, Gore appeared in orange makeup applied thickly to cover a sunburn. He looked awful. Commentators compared him to Lurch from The Addams Family, "Herman Munster doing a bad Ronald Reagan impression," and "a big, orange, waxy, wickless candle." One columnist wrote that "it looked like he melted down orange circus peanuts and then asked Tammy Faye for a 'light' dusting." San Francisco Examiner television critic Tim Goodman landed one of the most quoted blows: "If you'd stuck him in a push-up bra and a sequin dress and had him sing show tunes, he'd have carried San Francisco in a landslide."

The vice president became The Man Who Wears Too Much Makeup. The label has endured as a trope of late-night comedians - "If Al Gore took off half his makeup and gave it to Warren Christopher, they'd both look a lot better," said Jay Leno... - and as color for political journalists. This isn't just fun at the vice president's expense. Commentators treat Gore's pancake problem as if it has deeper significance. It makes him seem bumbling, unmanly, and, most of all, phony.

Poor Al Gore. So it was a sunburn that led to his losing the election? Is that why he's so angry about global warming?

Just kidding, anti-Althousians. Stand clear of the vortex.

The subject is here is: makeup, HDTV, and the possible disparate impact on the female candidate. And Al Gore. You can kick him around a little if you must. About makeup. Or... whatever.

"It's fun, it's supposed to show how cosmopolitan London is."

About that skinhead-urinating-in-a-teacup ad.... It's effective!

Wind.

On the most beautiful day...



... it sounds like a crazy windstorm out there.

UPDATE: 15 minutes later. Completely cloudy now.

+ ... Mother Nature is tempestuous today. Who knows what lies ahead? But I need to emerge from my aerie... There's a Conlaw class to get to...