The Phantom City

We have a house!

(You know, trying to figure out whether two words in Latin are correct has seriously exposed how many years it has been since high school for me. I still don’t know if that’s right.)

Recommended:

• Kanye West’s Lyric “The Way School Need Teachers / The Way Kathie Lee Needed Regis / That’s the Way I Need Jesus,” Adapted for Other Religions by Martin Bell
• The Next Thing Said After Select Famous Phrases by Marc Tyler Nobleman
• Translated Thoughts and Questions That Are Running Through a North Korean Refugee’s Mind When He Is Awarded Political Asylum in the United States, Settles Down, Turns on the Television, and the First Thing He Sees Is a Fancy Feast Cat-Food Commercial by David Aldridge
• Implausible Claims Made by Vanilla Ice in His 1990 No. 1 Hit “Ice Ice Baby” by Doug Erickson
• 2008 Presidential Stump Speech of Billy Bush, Cousin of George W. Bush and Access Hollywood Entertainment Reporter by Teddy Wayne

Jack Hitt in the LA Times:

“How quickly it has all happened — that the media, particularly television, has convinced itself that Christianity is little more than a Republican political action committee.”

Link courtesy of This Modern World

I didn’t hear the interview, but it sounds like freshman Senator Richard Burr (NC) did not have kind words for Rep. DeLay’s recent behavior in a recent interview, considering they’re both Republicans:

“To attack the judicial process and the system the way he has is inappropriate.”

Courtesy of EdCone.com

“Vin Diesel does not own a television. Instead, he derives entertainment by routinely opening the Ark of the Covenant.”

“Vin Diesel created South North Korea by drawing a line of chalk 10 miles away from the DMZ and daring anyone to step across.”

“Vin Diesel and Casper Van Dien are actually a superhero team that only fights crime in Toledo, Ohio, between 1:33pm and 4:39pm. Only 5 people in the free world know the reason for this.”

“Vin Diesel built this city. He built this city on rock and roll.”

Keep hitting refresh on this page for more random facts about Vin Diesel.

Link courtesy of the Best Week Ever Blog

I haven’t read Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat. However, if these are actual lines from the book, I may need to, just for the experience:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.”

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!

Very unflattering, but funny, review in the New York Press.

Edit: I’ve been reading the Amazon.com reviews. Almost uniformly good, with the exceptions of folks who disagree with his stance on global capitalism. It’s the #3 book on Amazon right now.

What I find interesting, though, is that there seems to be very little criticism of his writing. Like I said, I haven’t read this book, so I may not be giving it a fair shake, but as the review points out, “flat” and “global” aren’t exactly useful metaphors in this sort of analysis. A few years ago, I would stop and read a Friedman op-ed piece, because at the time he seemed somewhat insightful and down-to-earth. Now his op-ed columns seem more like David Brooks’ — when you take out the obvious and look at the evidence for any new ideas, there isn’t much left.

Wait, isn’t he a Republican?

I’m really wondering what the Republican Party thinks of “supportive” organizations like Move America Forward attacking their own Senators. Or perhaps this is the way the Republican Party is working now? After all, Swift Boat Veterans have to be kept occupied somehow…

Comic book covers tend to be designed to get people to pick them up and buy them on impulse. If you think of your primary audience as being familiar with the characters, for instance, having an apparently dead hero on the cover is usually a good selling point. If, on the other hand, you’re just trying to convey “Action and Adventure Await,” I don’t think you can do much better than these covers from 1939-1942 Fox Comics.

Link courtesy of Scott Saavedra’s Comic Book Heaven

One would think that weather forecasting is a common good that would most easily be coordinated through the federal government, but apparently Sen. Rick Santorum doesn’t think so. He has introduced a bill designed to make sure the National Weather Service can’t publicly share information that would be in competition with private companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel.

While I can’t help but admit the fact that Senator Santorum is at least philosophically consistent on this bill, I would still have to disagree with the bill itself. If the NWS hasn’t stopped anyone from starting a private weather forecasting company, then why would we restrict the information from the people who paid for it: You and me. (Well, ignoring the fact that our lower taxes and increased expenditures have led to a budget deficit, which means that quite a bit of our government’s funding is coming from China buying Treasury bonds.)

Link courtesy of Metafilter

Daring Fireball translates a recent Q&A about Adobe acquiring Macromedia:

“Once Freehand, Fireworks, and GoLive are killed, customers will have the benefit of not having any competing apps to choose from, and we benefit from not having any competitors.”

Link courtesy of ongoing