An Archive, 2007-10
Obama links out.
[W]hen a president regularly links out as well as getting linked to, it’s also a sign that he gets the “ethic of the link–connecting people to knowledge wherever it is;” he’s paying attention, and hopefully responding, to the comments, criticisms and suggestions that are buzzing around the public sphere.
Ever wonder what became of Huey Lewis? Why, look, here he is in Montana, feeding the ducks.
Here’s the back-story in a nutshell: First, I and two of my friends lip-synched the Huey Lewis song “If This Is It” for the fifth-grade talent contest. (I did not get to be Huey Lewis.)
Many years later Lewis bought a ranch down the road from Missoula along this little creek/waterway thing called the Mitchell Slough.
More recently, Lewis and his neighbors lost their court battle to have Mitchell Slough designated man-made. Such a designation would have exempted it from the state’s public-access law, which allows fishermen and duck hunters to do their thing on natural waterways that run through private property, even without the landowner’s permission, so long as they remain below the high-water mark.
So, in other words, the court found that Mitchell Slough is just as huntable and fishable as any other natural waterway in the state.
Until two months ago. That’s when Lewis started positioning duck-feeding stations on his property. The Missoulian explains just what a crafty move this was:
It is legal to feed game birds and waterfowl. It is also legal to boat or wade below a stream’s high-water mark, even if it passes through private property. But it is not legal to hunt waterfowl in an area where they are artificially fed.
So Lewis has effectively shut down duck hunting on his property, and he didn’t even have to get lawyered up this time around. The heart of rock and roll is still beating!
[Update] This is a good question:
“How are they going to retrieve ducks they shoot?” Hebner asked. “There’s not a landowner along the Mitchell that will allow any duck hunter to retrieve a duck on his property.”
Cross-posted at Went West.
The story of the census worker found hanged with “Fed” scrawled on his chest remains a sad one, but at least now we know he did it to himself, according to the Kentucky State Police and the FBI.
State police, working with the FBI, said at a press conference moments ago that Sparkman had recently taken out two life insurance policies that would not pay out for suicide. It appears Sparkman hoped that the scheme would benefit his son, Josh Sparkman.
I know or at least know of people who will be disappointed to see the story of Bill Sparkman turn out this way. It’s always a thrill when your political opponents show themselves to be even more awful than you thought. Now everyone will finally see them for the monsters they are, you think.
I suspect this thrill is part of the fun of being a Tea Partier or Glenn Beck fan. The details of public policy are boring; politics is a lot more fun if you throw in some horror-movie elements. “Hold onto your guns,” the Tea Partiers say, sounding not quite as anxious as you might expect them to if they really thought disagreement over health-care reform was about to turn into a shooting fight. (Although I suppose they probably assume that they have all the guns.)
It certainly makes sense that the inflammatory language currently being employed by Republican Party leaders and conservative opinion makers could inspire violence (it seems to be inspiring a resurgence in armed militias), although at least CafePress won’t sell you a Psalm 109:8 t-shirt anymore. But still, as a general operating principle, the more a story confirms your worst suspicions, the better reason you have for questioning it.
Sparkman… “had discussed recent federal investigations and the perceived negative attitudes toward federal entities by some residents of Clay County.”
In other words, [police] suggest, Sparkman deliberately played on rural Kentucky’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment to create the impression that he had been murdered because of his job.
Poor rural Kentucky! But anyway, suicide disguised as something else so as not to scotch an insurance policy is an old story. It’s why so many farmers die in “thresher accidents.” Sometimes the simplest explanation really is the right one.
“Alert but mute”? What Belgian isn’t?
But seriously, folks: misdiagnosed as being in a vegetative state, Rom Louben lay conscious but unable to move or speak for twenty-three years. Reminds me of this song that used to come on MTV every three seconds while I was in high school.
The bright lights of the big city apparently proved too heady for a bachelor-party group from Frenchtown that ran wild in Missoula last Thursday. By the time the Missoula Police Department forced the evening to a close (at Red’s Bar, naturally), the revelers had racked up numerous assaults, including on their own limo driver.
The groom is in the most trouble, first for punching a woman in the face after she objected to his groping her, then-while handcuffed-headbutting a police officer in the temple. “I’ve got a good lawyer,” he is reported to have announced. He’ll need one, because that last thing got him booked on a felony charge.
Word to the wise: when your own limo driver finds it necessary to pull a gun on you out of fear for his life-before you have tipped him-you may have gone too far.
In case you didn’t know, Montana is-statistically speaking-a place young people move away from. My in-laws sent me this article about a recent exception.
Her parents redecorated her bedroom soon after she left for college, as sure as everyone else in this town that Melissa Meyer would not be moving back. …
So, how to explain this? Each morning, Melissa wakes up in her old bedroom, scans the foreign decor and thinks: This is the guest room now. I am the guest. I am not supposed to be here.
How to explain it? Pretty easily: “She graduated magna cum laude from the GW Business School in May, applied for 30 jobs at some of the nation’s best-known companies, and it went nowhere.”
I’m a stay-at-home dad, or anyway I stayed home with Coen today while Amy went in to her office for a couple of meetings. Around three o’clock, I found myself trapped on the couch, afraid to move lest I wake Coen, who was finally sleeping in my arms after a couple of frustrated hours.
I dragged the remote control over with my foot and flipped through the three channels we get, and did you know that there really is such a thing as Dr. Phil? Of course I’d heard the man’s name and seen his picture in the tabloids, but I had always hoped that-like those aliens who are supposed to have cloned Bill Clinton-he was imaginary.
But no, Dr. Phil really does exist. Apparently someone pays him to talk on the television. On today’s show he was intervening in the matter of a grandmother who is suing for custody of her daughter’s children, that daughter being a drug addict, those children exhibiting odd bruises, there being a sociopathic boyfriend somewhere in the picture. The children’s father has brought a separate lawsuit.
“I don’t want any more lip,” Dr. Phil told the addict. “Now, say ‘thank you and I want your help.'”
“Thank you and I want your help,” she whimpered.
Apparently there is a web site where you can read posts by the different family members.
“This will really help you feel like you know them,” Dr. Phil told us.
Next up was The Oprah Winfrey Show, featuring sex addicts. This wasn’t as interesting as I hoped it would be, but it did provide the opportunity to hear Oprah say this to a recovering sex addict: “I usually enjoy the bag of chips while I’m eating it. It’s only afterward that I’m like ‘what did I do that for?'”
I turned the television off when the news started. I don’t want Coen watching anything trashy.
David Ng says anthropogenic global warming is not NOT happening just because there hasn’t been any warming in the last 10 years:
Say you’re trying to plan a wedding, or bbq, or anything, where you hope to be outside, and you want to pick a particular day in the year to have the best chance of sunshine. Chances are, you would not base your day on only what happened the year before. That would be statistically risky. You might not even base it on only two years worth of data, and really, if you want to hedge your bets, you’d want an opportunity to look at many records of that day as possible. All through this, you can actually calculate probabilities along the way, and at some point even make calls on what might be a good number of years to look at all in an effort to feel pretty good about your chances. …
[T]he long story short is that folks have done statistical analysis on this sort of thing, and it turns out that focusing on something like a 10 year trend is just not a reliable way to overturn the long term predictions. This, by the way, is also why climate models aren’t about predicting “weather” – which is something very specific to day to day considerations and also exact locations.
The whole thing is worth a read.
So that’s where those were. Also:
Removing body parts from the corpse was an echo of a practice common with saints, whose digits, tongues and organs were revered by Catholics as relics with sacred powers.
The people who cut off his fingers essentially considered him a secular saint, Galluzzi said, noting the fingers that were removed were the ones he would have used to hold a pen.
“Exactly as it was practiced with saints of religion, so with saints of science,” Galluzzi said. “He was a hero and a martyr, keeping alive freedom of thought and freedom of research.”
