The Democrats' Marketing Mistake

This article in The Weekly Standard is so bad that it is actually funny:

• The Democrats' Marketing Mistake
  How the Dems insulted the middle-America voters they were trying to court.
  by Trent Wisecup

The thesis: Bush won the elections because most Americans love SUVs and Wal-Mart while the Dems despise people who don't share their passion for Whole Foods and the Toyota Prius.

The best contradicting passage: A working family can save more than $500 a year at Wal-Mart on groceries alone. This is latte money for liberals, but it makes a real difference to middle-class families who have to stretch each paycheck to make ends meet. Americans also like to drive big trucks and SUVs.

Hmmm... interesting logic: does this working family apply the $500 they save on groceries as a down payment for their big truck?

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Pink Floyd pupils claim royalties
Former schoolchildren who sang on Pink Floyd's 1979 single Another Brick in The Wall have begun action for unpaid royalties. This prompted me to listen to The Wall on this morning's commute. I hadn't heard this CD for years.



If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Roy Lichtenstein @ SFMOMA

The family and I spent the afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We went there to see the Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art exhibition. No disappointment here - wonderful!

Podjacking - To Know Me, Know My iPod

An intriguing piece in today's New York Times:
... people whose iPods are filled with opera and people whose iPods are filled with rap would have very different tastes in jewelry. 'The concept of bling-bling is going to be very different for these groups'.

Hmmm... digitized bits of Pavarotti and of Chingy live happily side-by-side on my Treo 600. Can knowledge of this help someone deduce that I'm totally not into bling-bling ?!

Arafat to be Open Sourced by Palestinian Authority

Here's a posting I found on the weblog of my friend Peter Hirshberg.
If you can digest the "murder as peccadillo" euphemism, it's a very funny piece: Arafat to be Open Sourced by Palestinian Authority

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The bastards changed the rules and didn't tell me

Over the years, I've read this quote, attributed to Spiro Agnew, in many Israeli newspaper articles - each time to make another point. Haaretz' old-timer Yoel Marcus is particularly fond of it, e.g.: Suddenly, Israel is faced with a new situation that echoes Spiro Agnew's famous moan: "The bastards changed the rules and didn't tell me."
(http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=58498)

Supposedly, Agnew uttered this sentence when confronted with evidence on his tax evasions. I'm too young to remember - I was eight when Spiro Agnew resigned. I wondered what the context was and decided to google it out. All I could find were references in the Israeli press. Could it be that Agnew never said it?! Was this sentence born in the mind of a semi-professional Israeli journalist and perpetuated by a generation of Haaretz readers turned writers?

Candide

"Fools admire everything in an author of reputation. For my part, I read only to please myself. I like only that which serves my purpose".

Or in Voltaire's French: "Les sots admirent tout dans un auteur estimé. Je ne lis que pour moi ; je n'aime que ce qui est à mon usage".