democracy

Lots of election stuff, with bonus sports:

1. I listened to On the Media yesterday. In April 4's edition, Bob Gladstone talked about how there was really not a race anymore, how Hillary Clinton could no way win (well, there's a way, but it involves three specific and mostly unlikely scenarios).

Listen to it yourself:

2. But! Sean Wilentz makes a case that H.C. has won way more votes by population and by popular count than B.O. Wait, doesn't that sound like 2000?

3. And! Let's stop pretending Obama is progressive, shall we? (Not that Clinton is. Not by any means at all.)

4. Also! Kristof says we're racist and sexist. Just in case you hadn't noticed any men flipping out about Clinton or any white folks losing their shit over Obama.

5. Finally! HOT DAMN! Stanford beats Connecticut! I so love it when Connecticut loses. And I love it when Stanford wins. Go, hippie dippie West Coast! AND: Because Tennessee beat LSU in possibly the ugliest Final Four matchup of all time, both of the women's teams in the final are coached by women.* Gonna have to find me a way to watch this game. (Gonna be rooting for the Cardinal too, darn tootin'.)

*I won't care about this as soon as just as many women are coaching Div. 1 men's teams as men coach women's teams. You tell me when that happens. I'll go out and chop down a tree or something womanly like that.

From Stephanie Zacharek's review of Lions for Lambs:

"Lions for Lambs" doesn't for a minute treat good citizenship as an easy or certain enterprise. It's easy to live up to diminished ideals; the hard part is rising to the lofty ones. Thanks to the imperfections of democracy, we'll never be able to live in the perfect country of our dreams. That's all the more reason to act like citizens of it.

("The imperfections of democracy" refers to an earlier-cited Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.")

What do y'all think? Where are our lofty ideals? How do we decide what it means to be a good citizen (and hey, what does that mean)?

Ugh! So tired. But oh, my, did Chuck and I enjoy our four days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, even the less good plays and the, well, disastrous tuna affair at the lame restaurant (all shall be revealed in good time).

Anyway, while we were away, things happened.
1. Nuclear war is OK online. Hey, we ran a story on Second Life. But this? This is creepy.

2. Get back on that rowing machine, Einstein! Exercise makes you smarter. SUCK. Why can't it all be about coffee and wine?

3. For more female equality (and better sex), don't beat your swords into plowshares; just get rid of 'em. Actually, that's but one thing that this Salon story tells us.
Generally women take a broader view of everything, for good Darwinian reasons.

4. Jesus F. Christ, please put down your book and pay attention to flight attendants when they talk about those emergency slides. And here's why.

5. Some dailies still have books coverage. Check out my hometown newspaper! Frankly, I'm shocked. Why? Where's Robert Heinlein on that list, eh?! (He was from KC, after all.)

6. Holy fucking shit: Hamas in kindergarten. If the photo with this story doesn't creep you out, you are not creepable. (Yes, it's totally SFW.)

7. Australia totally screws over its Aboriginal population. Seriously. Over the past six years, at least $30 million of the money the Government promoted as being for Aborigines was used to oppose native title and compensation claims.

8. Bush's Sweeping Push for Democracy Falters. Or so says The Washington Post. But um ... WHAT "push for democracy"? (Or here. Or here. Or here. Or ... )

9. The weekend's weirdest and possibly most counterproductive headline comes from Sunday's O, which ran Illegal immigrants aren't filling jails as the above-the-fold front page story. Um. Thanks, I think.
Online, the story has a different headline.

10. Don't have sex! You'll burn ... down your house!

BONUS: "Help! I'm Hot For an Older Lady in my Church Group!"

Thanks to the Interwebs, even zoos are becoming more democratic, allowing webbies to vote on the name of a baby ocelot, among other things. Well, now you web-folk can choose which animatronic dinosaurs to install in the Oregon Zoo’s upcoming exhibit on the prehistoric animals.

There’s something about dinosaurs that is hard to comprehend — given their size, grotesque features and all-around brutality towards each other — thus giving them a seemingly mythological status, like unicorns or sasquatch. However, my Moab, Utah-based geological surveyist brother keeps finding dinosaur fossils in the broken up concrete in his backyard (apparently dinosaur bones were seen as structurally-sound material in 1921). So a zoo exhibit with “realistic” dino robots may be the kind of “seeing is believing” evidence we all need to make these creatures come alive in our minds.

My vote is totally for the Kentrosaurus (a Stegosaurus cousin), Pachycephalosaurus (you might remember them from The Lost World: Jurassic Park), Torosaurus (related to the Triceratops, only more bullish), Velociraptor (for sheer creepiness factor) and, of course, Brachiosaurus (for its size and the fact you probably will be able see it from Hwy. 26). Everyone will pick the T-Rex, so that beast goes without saying.