More "B" and then some "C"

"B", continued:

Biblical Theme Parks: Looks like Pat "God Struck You Down, Suckers!" Robertson is out of luck on his plans for a biblical theme park in Israel. Note to Pat: Israelis welcome your support because they need all the support they can get, and they don't realize how batshit crazy you actually are because they're not paying attention to internal U.S. politics. When you say batshit crazy things about their PM, though, they tend to notice.

Bigot: Word used by Lindsay Graham to refer to Sam Alito so that Mrs. Alito would cry and Democrats would be blamed for being rude. Alito claimed on some job application to have been a member of some bigoted Princeton alumni group, although no documentation exists that proves he was actually a member, and no one else who was a member remembered his involvement. Why he would claim to have been a part of this group is not, then, clear. Methinks it sounds like he went in for a little ill-considered resume-padding.

Even more Bird Flu.

Blame: "The disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk today apologised for fabricating human stem cell breakthroughs, but insisted the blame lay with dishonest junior researchers." It's amazing how it always turns out that scandals are caused by a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel.

Blog: Don't you think any software that has Blogger integration built in should also not flag "blog" as a misspelled word?

Body Armor: This is the problem with secret shit. People are so damn lazy and incompetent that they won't get anything done unless they have everyone breathing down their necks to do it. Now that the secret pentagon study showing how some more body armor could have saved a bunch of U.S. military lives in Iraq is public knowledge, suddenly, suddenly, the Pentagon is gonna actually send some more of the armor to Iraq. Wow, what a fucking good idea!

"C"

Calculus: It is a little-known and completely irrelevant fact that when I was 18 I wrote a novel about a teenage girl who was obsessed with staging photographs illustrating various concepts in calculus. (See how much more ambition I had as a teenager? I used to write novels, and have degenerated to half-hearted blog maintenance.) My Harvard entrance essay was also about calculus. I have not taken a calculus class since high school, but I found it beautiful and dreamy.

Cat: My new project, by the way, is writing a children's book about Chloe, the family cat. This will go nowhere, of course, since I have no ambition (see Calculus, above). Also, cat blogging is a really bizarre meme. Sometimes I think, well, I should cat-blog. But that would involve mucking around with the digital camera, and I hate taking photos.

Juan Cole: Max wants me to write something about Juan Cole. I told him that I sometimes like his analysis of Middle Eastern politics, but prefer to get
it secondhand. His big ol' issues with the whole Israeli-Palestinian thing make him hard to take, firsthand. But -- as Kevin Drum discusses -- like many bloggers, I don't want to get into talking about Israel.

Constitutional Catechism: Balkinization has a very interesting post up about what the Alito hearings say about what court decisions are still considered worth fighting for: No, Griswold, Yes, Roe. Etc. I'm pleased to read that the Right no longer thinks it's worth fighting about whether married people have a right to use contraception.

Content Challenge: You'll have to ask Licketysplit where the idea of a content challenge came from. I'm so damn lazy, I didn't even bother starting my own, but just mooched off of hers. I gather the idea is just to post every damn day, which, when you think about it, is kind of pathetic. We here at Biscuit are not just amateurs, we're amateurish amateurs. A real blogger's content challenge would involve posting every hour, on the hour, a ten-page essay. This, on the other hand, is the special olympics of content challenges. Hmm, not even that, probably, given what I've read about those guys in Murderball. This is the Terry Schiavo content challenge. "Are you breathing?" "Okay then. Good Job!"

Corrections: This is a very funny op-ed in the NYTimes about that stupid dustup involving a memoirist lying through his teeth. C'mon, literary people, can we concentrate instead on the more important people who are also lying through their teeth?

Kevin Drum is Cranky. Of the bad blogger behavior he is cranky about, I am guilty only of linking to Times Op-Eds even though the only reason I have access to them is because I have someone else's password on permanent loan. The someone else gets the paper on paper, and thus has the privilege of reading the op-eds, if he so chooses, on what in this house we now invariably refer to as "the potty". I could be accused of providing "link-rich" commentary, though I don't actually link as much as I probably should, cuz, well, lazy. But it's certainly true that I rarely am found to be "taking the trouble to write a persuasive and coherent post". I think I used to have actual thoughts, but that was when Ari still took naps. (See also Calculus, Cat, and Content Challenge. )