At the Blue Sky Café...

... enjoy yourself.

What famous movie actor should play Joe Paterno?

Al Pacino!

"The brain science of the vagina heralds a new sexual revolution."

Another headline. My second headline post today. Is this new one more absurd than "Illegal monkey living on Frosted Flakes bites woman"?

"Christian girl accused of blasphemy in Pakistan is released on bail..."

"The girl, said to be 14, could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted...."

Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, all but pronounced the girl innocent. He said the accused never left her home on the day three weeks ago when a young man claimed that he saw her carrying burnt pages of the Koran in a trash bag in her village outside Islamabad....

Last week, the imam of the neighborhood mosque was arrested after a witness accused him of mixing pages of a Koran into the bag of ashes that the girl carried. Christian residents said he planted the evidence as part of a campaign to get Christians to leave the community. Several hundred have fled since the girl’s arrest....

"The Wisconsin Capitol rotunda echoed with the voices of Solidarity Sing-Along participants on Friday."

"They gathered there to defy a new round of arrests by Capitol Police the previous two days, over which a dozen demonstrators were arrested and cited for holding signs inside the rotunda, charged with violating state administrative code."

It's a complex encounter between protesters and police, once the protesters decline to disperse when the police say they must. I'm not saying who's right and wrong here, but I'm somehow inexorably drawn to the giant origami crane.

Mendocino cops helicopter in to a backcountry marijuana farm.

"We have old hippies in our county growing marijuana and they are not our problem... These are people who are trying to get rich quick.... Mendocino County was basically being taken over by thugs."

"Illegal monkey living on Frosted Flakes bites woman."

An L.A. Times headline.

Obama 46%, Romney 44%.

The Rasmussen tracking poll shows Obama got some bounce — bouncing back to where he was just before the GOP convention, that is, bouncing back over Romney's bounce.

And:

Perhaps more significantly, Democratic interest in the campaign has soared. For the first time, those in the president’s party are following the campaign as closely as GOP voters.

"Three West Lafayette youngsters engage in a bit of outdoor sport called skateboarding..."

"... balancing themselves on boards to which skate are attached."



The news — just handed to me — from 1964, when Indiana newspaper readers were assumed not yet to have heard of skateboarding and when kids made their own skateboards by breaking up a metal roller skate and nailing the pieces to a board.

(The caption misspells Meade's first name and his last name.)

Here's Jan & Dean on "American Bandstand," singing their 1964 hit "Sidewalk Surfin'" — and calling this "the newest sport around":

Black licorice! Potty training! Emily Dickinson!

Now that I've wandered over to the San Francisco Chronicle web page — I was looking for info on that "Star Trek" doodle, I find some intriguing headlines:

1. "State expands warning on eating black licorice." (A particular brand has lead in it. It's not the old story that glycyrrhizin is dangerous.)

2. "Photo of mom potty-training kids at restaurant table sparks outrage."

Kimberly Decker [who took a photo and posted it on Facebook] says the mother in question lugged portable potties into the restaurant, placed them on chairs and sat her children down on them. At first Decker thought the potties were booster seats but when the mother stripped off her children’s clothes, she realized the twins were going to the bathroom—in the middle of the restaurant in front of other diners.

“She had to undo the jumpsuits, and take them all the way down so they were completely nude, with the jumpsuits down to their ankles just eating their chicken nuggets, sitting on little toddler potties”...

You have to question whether Decker made the right choice in posting the photo online.

3. "Scholars may have 2nd photo of poet Dickinson."

Kelly said perhaps the best evidence [that it's really Emily Dickinson] is an ophthalmological report that compared similarities in the eyes and facial features of the women in the photos....

That could shift some perceptions about the Amherst native...  For instance, a book in the 1950s was the first to propose Dickinson had a lesbian relationship with [the other woman in the photograph, Kate Scott] Turner....

Today's Google doodle.

Something about Star Trek. Clicking makes lots of stuff happen, but doesn't answer what the occasion for the elaborate doodle is. I'm going to guess the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gene Roddenberry.

Googling for the answer, I see it's just the 46th anniversary of the debut of the show. Nothing especially momentous.

And we'll have to wait until August 19, 2021 for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gene Roddenberry.

"John Lewis tells you something about voting rights and you say, yes, sir, and you shut the fk up."

Charles Pierce pithily dictates the sole method of showing respect. 

But actually, ironically, that kind of respect entails massive disrespect. You say yes and you shut the fuck up in his presence, and that means the only way people can have a serious back-and-forth debate on the subject is if they exclude John Lewis.

***

Pierce has a nice sidebar at his blog under the heading "About this blog." I read it for the first time, by chance, just now. The penultimate sentence is:

It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No."

Philip Roth fights Wikipedia.

Over what they said about the source material for "The Human Stain." Maybe he should have stayed above all this. The book speaks for itself. But this essay speaks for itself too. Does it not?

Obama didn't "fall flat." He went low key on purpose. Here's the reason.

Politico is all "Obama fell flat."

A surprisingly long parade of Democrats and media commentators who didn’t think much of the speech described it less as a failure than a fizzle—an oddly missed opportunity to frame his presidency or the nation’s choice in a fresh or inspirational light.

Blah blah blah. But here's Howard Kurtz with the response Pee-Wee Herman made famous: I meant to do that.

Kurtz says Obama's speech was the result of careful focus-group testing.

Strategists felt they were in a box, unable to meet the twin goals of style and substance at once. To be sure, Obama wanted to excite the party’s liberal base. But his brain trust was convinced that they would have gotten killed by going with a red-meat speech that simply bashed Republicans without detailing what Obama would do in the next four years....

Dial-twisting focus-groupers, strategists-in-a-box, a brain trust. Where is the man himself, the candidate, the President? I don't see the excuse here, Howie. It's like you're saying he is the empty chair.

"The Difference Between A $99 Suit And A $5,000 Suit..."

"... In One Graphic."

And here's an article about the rare skill involved in making a bespoke suit (and how it's not a profitable business, bereft of economies of scale).

The only way to make money in the perfectionist craftsperson industry, it seems, is to stop being a perfectionist craftsperson....

Just as Adam Smith described in “The Wealth of Nations,” there are huge efficiency gains when one complex process is broken down into constituent parts and each worker specializes in one thing.

NPR lists "The 7 Coolest Presidents In American History" — and Obama's not on the list.

And George Bush is! What can explain this? Either the world has turned upside down, or it's all about Bill Clinton, who is #1. Or... is it just that Obama is not "in history," because we can't yet say — or would you? — he's history?