So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so
You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage
Bores are people that say that people are bores

A pseudodrome is basically a palindrome with words instead of letters. I suspect there might be a different word for it because a google search only reveals a few pages on pseduodromes mostly derived from one source.

Panglossian
adj.
Blindly or naively optimistic.
[After Pangloss, an optimist in Candide, a satire by Voltaire.]

dik·tat \dik-ˈtät\ n
Peace treaty dictated under duress. Name the Nazis gave the Versailles Treaty.

Ann Coulters Jaw Wired Shut

The interesting thing about visiting california is that I am simultaneously delighted by the smell of ocean rolling in off the breakers and infuriated that nothing noteworthy is open past 9pm.

Two days ago I ate at the worst taqueria in santa cruz, it’s still twice as good as anything in new york.

“Despite its scientific pretensions, economics still remains more of an art than a science” - Robert Kuttner

au·toch·tho·nous
ADJECTIVE:
1. Originating where found; indigenous.

My view is that this is an arduous word barely worth using in conversation or writing. It’s probably good to know what it means when you see it.

It turns out that Alligators are hopelessly enamored with marshmallows. There are even tours through Louisiana and Florida where people can purportedly feed alligators by hand. Coming from a guy with only nine fingers, that is probably one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve heard of in months.

This actually makes a lot of sense if you know a little something about sugar:

I found an interesting and strangely touching article in the NYtimes on an alligator trapper in the everglades. Lots of fun fackts.

-In 1977 alligators were endangered, now there are over 15 million of them in Florida alone.

This snapshot of San Francisco as a city teeming with homeless junkies is not entirely inaccurate. Of course, the reasons fox news presents [secular progressivism] are totally off. The reasons for homelessness in the city are unsurprisingly more complex. My research indicates that the single biggest problem is simply that homeless people from all over the country come to San Francisco. Essentially, SF is tasked with a federal sized problem on a municipal budget. It’s not that the city government adores crack smoke wafting over the tenderloin, the city simply lacks the resources to deal with it. The city has rejected as broadly irrational the notion that jailing drug addicts is either rational or cost effective but has failed to come up with a better solution. 1/2 way there.

é·lan (-lä, -län)
n.
1. Enthusiastic vigor and liveliness.
2. Distinctive style or flair.

blah blah blah, Jurassic park, etc etc

yes yes, michael crichton lives on through his books yada yada

The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly

WTF!?!?!?!?! then the article just drops the subject and talks about mammoths for a while until the end. get this

Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.†The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

whuh? that is fucking crazy.

:: NYTimes article via Email (thanks Mr. Gordon!!!) ::

A man with no arms allegedly stole a 23″ TV from a store in Munich, Germany. According to reports, he had helpers strap the TV to his chest. From the Daily Telegraph:
A police spokesman admitted: “It’s hard to believe that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone’s attention.”

:: The Daily Telegraph via Boing Boing Via Google Reader Via email (Thanks Matt Gutenhosen!!) ::

CNN Talking Head Guy Anderson Cooper moderates the following beatdown.

Okay, this is how these shows should work:
-Every point each speaker makes is recorded on a sidebar
-Each counterpoint should be recorded on a sidebar
-Each citation of fact should be immediately googled

Then the participants get kicked off and the producers go through and reasonably discuss the validity of the points made. They declare a winner and then mock the loser over cocktails. When can I have my own show?

I think the past tense of lack should be laught instead of lacked. I doubt anyone will ever adopt this standard at least partially because I have zero reasons for it. Just sayin.

in other news:

:: Full Article via A Real Live Conversation (Thanks Amy!!) ::

Now get off the internet and go give someone a hug.

At some point, in whatever I got that might pass for a college education, I studied economics. The key thing that I learned in this process (aside from the fact that economics is bullshit and that I wasted my time learning about it in an institutional setting) was that economists love bow ties. While envisioning this post I was trying to come up with a way to show this objectively but I realized that would take too much time. However, I have met and talked with 4 nobel prize winning economists (Arrow, Sen, Stiglitz, Krugman). Of those, 3 were wearing bowties (those also happen to the be the 3 I argued with*). Basically, I’ve hung out with a lot of economists, so just take my word for it: They fucking love bow ties. This baffled me for years. Initially, I just thought it was because most economists have a functionally autistic** understanding of interpersonal interaction and can barely dress themselves but I finally decided that economists love bow-ties because they are more economical than regular ties. think about that.

* Arrow is a billion times smarter than I am and it was pointless but fun. For the record, he’s also one of the most hilarious and lovable people I’ve ever met. (vint cerfbeing perhaps the second most lovable person I’ve ever met, followed closely by, of all people, Douglas Feith (one of the main architects of the war in iraq)) Stiglitz is a million times smarter than I am but I caught him saying something stupid. Krugman is probably 5 million times smarter than I am and I didn’t get to talk to him for that long.

**These are people that are baffled by tipping

In Roman mythology, Janus (or Ianus) was the god of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings and endings. His most prominent remnants in modern culture are his namesakes: the month of January, which begins the new year, and the janitor, who is a caretaker of doors and halls.

This last bit is made all the more interesting because janitors frequently cross border fences to get here.

:: Wikipedia via Email (thanks JFace!) ::

34. People driving on sidewalks and then honking at me when I get in their way, like I am the one in the wrong place. I am not sure what people want me to do in these situations. Am I supposed to go into the street? I generally just ignore them and stand in their way, because it’s a fucking sidewalk.

35. Inconsistent bureaucratic bullshit. My visa says it’s valid for one year, but also says that I can only stay for 30 days. My roommate and another American girl out here got the problem solved relatively quickly by getting a letter from the American Embassy and American Councils (respectively), going to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and resubmitting their passports. Figuring this was a good idea, I also obtained a letter from the American Embassy, the exact same letter my roommate got (with my name replacing her name), only to be DENIED a visa because I didn’t have the proper documents. WTF?!