Olbermann insists his staff communicate with him via a mailbox outside his office?

Huh. It's good to be the king of bottom-dwelling partisan newscasts.

Allah drops a theory regarding the 1/2 Hour Comedy Hour there. He suggests that conservatives would like the show more if it were either funnier or more savage in cutting up liberals.

Or, of course, both at the same time, though I imagine that's a tricky thing to manage.

So it's a balancing act -- good-natured ribbing vs. savage attacks with less humor value but a whole lot of red-meat catharsis. If that's the case (and it just might be), it's hard to "objectively" pan the show, as it's attempting to find the sweet spot for a broad audience, and any particular person's idea of the sweet spot may be very different from the average.

Maybe that's the case. Though stuff like "B.O." magazine is neither funny nor a cutting attack.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (58)
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Funny little blog about cryptogeography.

Odd facts about forgotten places, like the late lamented "Free and Indpendent State of West Florida" and the still-existing state of East Germany (a Cuban island was given over to the DDR, and still is legally owned by East Germany, despite the fact East Germany doesn't even own East Germany anymore).

California as an island? An old misconception. But the old cartographers may have just been ahead of their time; we'll see what happens after the Big One hits.

Good stuff.

Thanks to steve_in_hb.

Posted by: Ace at 09:41 AM | Comments (14)
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Better living through technology.

Thanks to Eddiebear.
Open thread.

Posted by: LauraW. at 08:57 AM | Comments (31)
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Otherwise, how to explain "his" claim that citing the pro-assassination comments at the Huffington Post is a "transparent" and "flimsy" smear tactic, when Glenn Greenwald has quite the career of engaging in the same "transparent" and "flimsy" smears?

Obviously, that damned Magic Boyfriend is causing problems for him again. Plainly, no sane person could hold such wildly contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

When will Gleen finally enable that password-protection feature on his computer?

Just Curious: As Gleen claims it's the Magic Boyfriend posting on his behalf at least some of the time, how do we know his blog's "meteoric rise" is actually due to his own efforts?

How can we be sure those famous passages read (on the Senate floor!) by Russ Feingold weren't in fact written by the Magic Boyfriend?

How does Andrew Sullivan know if he should be crawling up Gleen's ass, or the Magic Boyfriend's? Perhaps it really doesn't matter. It's all good.

Another Book Deal For Gleen... an autobiography, it seems, likely to be ghost written by Thomas Ellers.

Wait-- can someone else write your autobiography?

Hmmm...

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 AM | Comments (48)
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Which is dumb, but that's not why I'm linking this.

It's for this homophobic attack on Andrew Sullivan:

Alterman complains that bloggers mix too much about their personal lives into their political opinions, as if they think the personal information bolsters the argument: "Tom Paine didn't say 'Common Sense' is a good idea because I'm such a hip guy." But of course, Tom Paine would have blogged, and he probably would have come across as a cool guy, and we would perceive that as bolstering his argument.

Eric is especially perturbed by Andrew Sullivan's personal revelations, notably his description of curling up with his boyfriend in bed on Valentine's Day.

And Sullivan didn't even actually say that! The homophobe Alterman just took a brief post about "being in love" on Valentine's Day and read into it "curling up with his boyfriend in bed!"

I'd accuse Alterman of gay bashing, but I really think he's got too big an ego to allow such self-excortiation.

One thing I agree with: The personal stuff on blogs? I know a lot of people consider blogs to be partly a personal journal, but I've always had a major "ick" reaction to that. Not just Sullivan's beagles, boyfriend, and bronchitis stuff, but personal stuff from anyone.

Who cares?

I try to avoid that myself under the "who cares" principle.

I guess a lot of people do care, but it always seemed like oversharing to me.

Eric Alterman Is High-Pitch Eric?

I don't know if Eric Alterman is that high pitched, but he sure does sound effeminate and screechy when he talks.

Maybe he butches up for his occasional media appearances.

Thanks to Phinn for the pic.

The Conspiracy Widens: "HEY! I'm not widening, you Jew!"

Posted by: Ace at 07:43 PM | Comments (81)
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Sexual restraint isn't going to protect you when 25% of the population carries a bug. It only takes one time. Or one marriage, for that matter.

More than a quarter of U.S. girls and women ages 14 to 59 are infected with the sexually transmitted human wart virus, which causes most cases of cervical cancer, U.S. health officials estimated on Tuesday.

That means human papillomavirus or HPV infection is more common than previously thought, particularly among younger age groups, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said. Its prevalence was highest among those 20 to 24, with 44.8 percent infected, and nearly a quarter of teenagers aged 14 to 19.
...

Using data from a nationally representative group of 1,921 girls and women ages 14 to 49 who provided vaginal swabs in 2003 and 2004, researchers led by the CDC's Dr. Eileen Dunne found that 26.8 percent were infected with any type of this virus.

...

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. High-risk HPV types can cause cervical, anal, penile and other genital cancers.

...

HPV infects about half of sexually active adults at some time, but usually is harmless. About 90 percent of infections clear within two years.

But the virus can cause abnormal cells in the cervix lining that can turn cancerous. Cancer of the cervix kills about 300,000 women worldwide annually, including about 4,000 in the United States.

Penile cancers too. Terrific. Since I fear vaginas, the cervical cancer stuff of course bothers me little (the enemy of my enemy is my friend), but now we're talking about my junk.

"Behavior has consequences," some say. So it does. But shouldn't the behavior of the US medical/pharmacological establishment -- working diligently to mostly eliminate a cancer caused by a common virus -- have consequences, too?

If God granted humans dominion over the animals, for us to hunt and eat, wouldn't He also be in favor of hunting down potentially lethal diseases?

Not to engage in cheap shots, but allow me one. It's not meant as a cheap shot, really. Just an analogy.

Why is it that some chuckle over the idea of reducing human happiness to save the snail darter, but there's a gut-level reluctance out there to wipe out a murderous virus?

I know the argument usually isn't put in that way, that is, affirmatively protecting the natural wetlands habitat of the human papillloma virus, but rather in terms of personal choice and parental authority.

Still, I guess I'm still not sure what the real "choice" is here -- choosing between eliminating a cancer risk, or choosing to keep that risk alive? Is that really a choice?

I just don't see the easy way out here. One can't say that simply abstaining until marriage will protect one from the risks of HPV (as well as the risks, if any, from the vaccine), given that a quarter of the population carries the virus. The only real non-medical protection isn't sexual restraint, but nearly absolute celibacy -- with testing prior to marriage to determine if either party's been infected, and, I suppose, calling off the marriage if turns out, as is likely, that one party's infected. And then back to the dating circuit hoping for a non-infected lifemate.

It Ain't HIV: I think some people don't accept these figures because they're analogizing it to HIV. HIV only infects a small fraction of the population; HIV is a sexually transmitted virus; as HPV is also a sexually transmitted virus, ergo it also must only infect a tiny fraction of the population.

That assumes that a virus is fairly difficult to spread -- as HIV is -- simply because it's chiefly transmitted through sex. Not necessarily so. A lot of viruses are extremely easy to catch -- anyone doubt they've been exposed to countless viruses in the past?

HIV isn't the "rule." It's an exception. We got, comparatively, lucky on that one -- it's lethal but, thankfully, also rather difficult to transmit. It was also, at least in its breakout period, self-limiting to a degree because it was so lethal -- it incapacitated its hosts with sickness, and then killed them, too quickly for it to spread further.

People shouldn't assume that all viruses are similarly courteous enough to be difficult to spread if they're potentially deadly.

Posted by: Ace at 04:39 PM | Comments (293)
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Who goes by the name of Carl Levin, Democratic Senator.

Welcome to the real reality-based community, pal.

Posted by: Ace at 04:18 PM | Comments (19)
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How will he respond? Speculate here.

BTW, thanks to the many, many, many people who've sent me that over the past year. Or two. Sorry for not thanking you at the time-- but I get that tip about once a week. It is, as Dave says, quite old. But funny.

Posted by: Ace at 03:39 PM | Comments (46)
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EricJ's contribution.

Man, you guys are funny. You should have blogs or somethin'.

Posted by: Ace at 03:34 PM | Comments (22)
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He will be missed. By Larry Johnson, for one, who tells Seixon no one cares about what he thinks while frantically hitting the refesh button.

I know how he feels. Well, not really. He's got a sweet job lined up.

Thanks to Allah for that.

Posted by: Ace at 03:29 PM | Comments (17)
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