A few days after the Super Bowl, I watched the highlight package on NFL.com -- and minutes later read a Bill Simmons column complaining that Super Bowl highlights weren't on YouTube (nor, as far as his incompetent self knew, anywhere else on the Internet).
Long story short I wonder how many fans of Saturday Night Live experience something similar. On the off chance you didn't know, they roll their own archives. For example, Jimmy Carter talks you down from a bad trip.
Please apologize for committing treason.
(It's a shame certain righties laughably overused that word a few years ago, given how perfectly it fits this situation.)
Non-issue of the day: Fred Armisen (white; part-Asian) played Barack Obama in a Saturday Night Live sketch.
I think the broader issue (blacks underrepresented on SNL casts) is a good point, but is it seriously wrong to cast a half-white actor to play a half-white role? (Some of the commentary centers on the darkened face makeup (by the way, they should have also put some on Fred's left hand). It's plausible that blackface is a red flag, but are we really so crudely incapable of using common sense that dark makeup is a priori racist?)
In any case, let's think about historical SNL cast members who could(n't) have played Obama. Phil Hartman could pull it off, for example. Tim Meadows would've been tremendous in the role(probably the best hypothetical Obama in my personal SNL viewing history). Chris Rock probably couldn't, and Tracy Morgan definitely couldn't.
I don't want the leader of the free world to be reading blogs any more than I want that leader to be reading all the e-mail addressed to president@whitehouse.gov
Life is short, and that's what aides are there for, to summarize the important parts.
"I never considered myself a Buckleyite conservative but as a kid I was much taken by his show Firing Line."
--Tyler Cowen
I was too. (These would have been later editions of Firing Line than the ones a child Tyler Cowen saw.) His "Notes & Asides" were also the best, always with their "Cordially, WFB."
Which William F. Buckley phrase would sound the most jarring as enunciated by Myron Cope? (Or vice versa.)
Suppose you knew someone who apparently died (not of old age) a few years ago, but then you saw someone who seems to be that same person (as if the death were faked).
If your intuition were that this person wanted to meet you, but couldn't communicate a location, where would you go to hope to find that person? The answer seems very obvious to me, and I assumed that's what Mr. Monk was up to in "Mr. and Mrs. Monk," yet even if the case turned on that, he didn't specifically explain as much.
But both the plot and the climax of the previous episode ("Mr. Monk Gets Drunk") make up for it.
("Captain, you've got to see this! Monk is doing that summation thing of his, only he's completely wasted!")
There's lots of right-blog commentary lately on just how miserable a place Cuba has been, at least from Ilya Somin and from Tyler Cowen. (My new favorite red meat sentence, from this earlier Cowen post: "It's time to stop apologizing for communist dictatorships; are you really so taken with the idea of confiscating property as to overlook decades of tyranny, impoverishment, and human misery?")
Meanwhile the Lancet thinks it should be an "international crime" (their phrase) to hire doctors who come from poor countries. They want serfdom -- almost literally!
If you want to really cut to the chase about my political philosophy, the most important problems we face, by far, have to do with an entire world out there of people living in abject misery. (Coincidentally, that gives me about the same frame of reference as some of the most strident lefties you could imagine.)
Now the huge difference between me, and someone else who would look at the same problems and decide to soak the rich, is that reducing us all subsistence just isn't going to solve all those problems, certainly not any time soon. Instead, what are the best ways to solve some of those problems relatively quickly?
Until the next Norman Borlaug comes around, our best options basically amount to free trade -- and just getting rid of a handful of the absolute worst despots.
And if we spent even a fraction of the time thinking about how to deliver clean water around the world that we spend pimping ethanol...
USA: Health insurance company cancels breast cancer patient's policy.
UK: National Health Service refuses to treat breast cancer patient.
They're strikingly similar scenarios. I wonder how many times you'll hear someone flog one or the other of those to demonstrate the horrors of the {free market health care system, government health care system} they revile so much, conveniently omitting the analogous story.
Additional commentary by Tyler Cowen and Jacob Sullum on those respective stories.
Asking the right questions: It's not just for quiz-bowl people!
The Kansas City Royals quiz their players. So far so good.
I presume you call can immediately spot what's wrong with the structure of a question like "Before a game starts, what are the first two things a player should check?"
(My answers were "his cup" and "the scheduled start time." The former might not qualify among "first two," but surely the latter is a potential disaster if you mistake a day game for a night game.)
(It was a Sunday if that jogs your memory.)
I was helping a friend move from Berkeley to Oakland. I actually have a much more satisfying answer to the deeper question involved there, but it would be about a 1,500-word essay whose best medium might not be this weblog.
Even though a minor element of the story is a bit bittersweet, on balance I am significantly better off now than I was four years ago.
As I drove from Berkeley to Oakland I made (took?) at least two phone calls. On one, a friend sought romantic advice; that friend is now happily married (wedding was a few months ago) to just the right spouse.
On the other call I arranged for a ride to the airport, to avail myself of what seemed like an incredible opportunity. For convoluted reasons, that "opportunity" became the most frustrating situation I've ever been in, and yet if I'd never had that initial opportunity then I have no idea what other circumstance would have led me to reach out to the most important person in my life.
And hey, the friend I helped move is now happily married also (got married this past July)! -- that couple were still a long ways away from even meeting as of February 29, 2004.
And yet this article is full of it, though not intentionally.
As far as I know, all the major partisan political magazines have been holding cruises for years now. For a hefty fee (I presume), you could meet William F. Buckley and so on. The National Review has been advertising theirs for years, ditto The Weekly Standard. I'd be shocked if The New Republic didn't also do this.
Not that I mind choosing The Nation, if you can only choose one. But wouldn't the article have been far more interesting if it compared and contrasted different magazine's cruises rather than going "gee whiz, hey Martha!" about just one of them?
Bonus stuck-under-a-rock euphemism:"It's like an S.D.S. reunion on the Love Boat," said a guest speaker, Mary Mapes, the former CBS news producer who helped break the Abu Ghraib story among others, before being fired over her involvement in a "60 Minutes" piece on George W. Bush’s military record.
If it's worth mentioning at all that Mapes got fired, which of these points do you think is more useful context?
A. The piece was about Bush's military record?
B. The piece relied on documents that were laughably amateurishly forced?
(N.B. I really don't follow college basketball, except at best about three weeks a year. You can guess in which month. I also have no horse to back between Memphis and Knoxville. They're both decent cities.)
"Memphis wanted to prove it really was the best team in the country, maybe even make a run at perfection. Turns out, the Tigers aren't even best in their own state."
--Associated Press by way of Glenn Reynolds (doesn't everyone get their sports updates from the right half of the political blogs?).
Last night Tennessee proved to be better than Memphis. So as of last night, Memphis indeed "wasn't the best." I suppose a lot depends on what time frame you give to any given superlative.
On the season, Yahoo! tells me that Memphis is 26-1 compared to Tennessee's 25-2. (Don't make me dig up their respective Ratings Percentage Indexes: I just don't care enough.)
If you throw all your eggs in the "head-to-head" basket then does that mean Tennessee is putatively the better of those teams until the moment they meet again?
If your argument rests on winning "when it counts" then the best is yet to come of course.