Bill O’Reilly’s meltdown thanks to a hapless teleprompter is making the rounds again; I saw it on The Colbert Report. Thanks to the wonders of technology, someone has constructed a dance remix of Bill blowing a gasket. Pant-hoot to Bill from Dover for passing this along. Word has it that he found [...]
Archive for May, 2008
28 May
And justice for all
Some of you may have noticed that the Refuge looks a little different than it did yesterday morning. This is no accident.
When I returned to blogging in January after a four-month sabbatical, I swore I would avoid returning to my previous form and spending many hours a week mocking the same people or entities hundreds [...]
28 May
Ammonia is on the Periodic Table?
You gotta love Glenn Beck. This guy knows how to bring the crazy. On last night’s show he had a segment on hydrogen-powered cars. You can find a transcript here, about 2/3rds in (you’ll probably want to avoid the first section featuring Ben Stein unless you have vomit buckets handy). So Glenn checks out the [...]
26 May
That’s a lot of cranial sucking sounds packed into one TV studio
Watching Glenn Beck (no relation) interview Ben Stein about the latter’s foundering film Expelled! is like observing a schizophrenic urologist interviewing a syphilitic, talking phallus. Nevertheless there’s a certain value in watching Beck crow “If the New York Times hates it, you know it’s gotta be good!” and Stein indulge in shameless quote-mining and babble [...]
26 May
Hemorrhagic stroke as a gateway to nirvana?
I’m not trying to be cavalier and I’m certainly not discounting the experiences Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor relates in a NY Times piece published yesterday; I can’t imagine anyone being in a better position to analyze first-hand some of the sensory and perceptual changes that can occur as a result of a cerebrovascular accident (“CVA” [...]
26 May
ACLU lauds Sarasota’s Muntz for fighting to right election wrongs
Florida has been recognized for almost a decade as a grim laughingstock when it comes to the reliability of its state and federal voting results, a status that government officials are apparently bent on retaining at the expense of trivial issues such as accountability, fairness, and honesty — traits that long ago fled the region [...]
24 May
Does Janet Folger have hypoxic brain damage from sticking her head in the sand?
Or maybe from giving herself too many “whirlies” in the nuthouse commode?
Folger, long intent on carving out a niche as the unofficial commandress-in-chief of roaring, scripture-spraying lunatics, again makes up things as she goes along in a WorldNut Daily column which — and I know people say this a lot, but trust me this time [...]
23 May
Gold medalist Pettigrew admits to EPO, hGH use
With the perjury trial of sprint coach Trevor Graham — one of the most drug-soaked figured in professional athletics — now underway, the habits of some of track and field’s recently retired superstars are being thrown into the light of day, and the view is predictably discouraging.
The Associated Press reported yesterday that Antonio Pettigrew, a [...]
23 May
Back On My Feet ambles into prime time again
Assuming there is no major news that breaks way late in the day, ABC World News will be showing a follow-up segment on Back On My Feet, a running program for Philapdelphia’s homeless that I mentioned over the winter, sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. EDT tonight. Complementing the piece they did back in December, [...]
23 May
Sarasota County no longer hiring smokers
I’d love to see cigarettes disappear from the face of the earth and from its bowels too, but I have problems with this decision on the part of the Sarasota County Commission.
Citing the burden they place on taxpayers who pay for government workers’ health insurance, Sarasota County officials announced Monday that they no longer will [...]
22 May
A thought exercise for denialists (and their critics)
What typical reaction might the following passage have elicited had it been written four or five decades ago? And how does that reaction compare to the one it would generally elicit today?
I do not feel that people who have quit smoking nor have spent money on smoking-cessation products and services should be congratulated for their [...]
22 May
Is quitting smoking a meme?
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego have concluded that smoking cessation may indeed be “contagious.”
The scientists tracked over 12,000 participants in the now-famous Framingham Nurses Study for over 32 years and found that quitting tended to occur in identifiable clusters of people — most of whom did not know [...]
22 May
Is quitting smoking a meme?
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego have concluded that smoking cessation may indeed be “contagious.”
The scientists tracked over 12,000 participants in the now-famous Framingham Nurses Study for over 32 years and found that quitting tended to occur in identifiable clusters of people — most of whom did not know [...]
21 May
WaPo, unpreaching to the antichoir, calls BS on “academic freedom”
The Washington Post ran a brief, boilerplate, and unflinching editorial yesterday calling the latest round of witless yammering about “academic freedom” by creationists exactly what it is — wounded, pitiful bellyaching that could probably fool no one with a pulse living outside the God-soaked U.S. (Well, I’m paraphrasing, but barely.)
This is one of those many [...]
20 May
My annual tour of downtown Kreationist Krazyland
About once a year I remember that a site you’ll swear up and down is a parody exists, and I have a look around to see what ol’ Ikester has done with the place. The site is called YEC Headquarters, and although I cannot vouch for whether it serves any official or unofficial administrative role [...]
20 May
My annual tour of downtown Kreationist Krazyland
About once a year I remember that a site you’ll swear up and down is a parody exists, and I have a look around to see what ol’ Ikester has done with the place. The site is called YEC Headquarters, and although I cannot vouch for whether it serves any official or unofficial administrative role [...]
19 May
Rowbury leaps to fifth* all-time on U.S. 1500-meter list
Some of us had a feeling something big was coming yesterday. With 2008 less than halfway over and the real track action yet to commence, Shannon Rowbury, a 23-year-old middle-distance runner from San Francisco I randomly had the pleasure of training with and writing about this winter, had picked up a national title (the 3,000 [...]
19 May
Rowbury leaps to fifth* all-time on U.S. 1500-meter list
Some of us had a feeling something big was coming yesterday. With 2008 less than halfway over and the real track action yet to commence, Shannon Rowbury, a 23-year-old middle-distance runner from San Francisco I randomly had the pleasure of training with and writing about this winter, had picked up a national title (the 3,000 [...]
18 May
The California gay-marriage decision: Why?
I’m not asking why a judge in the most populous state in the U.S. ruled that a 2000 law rendering same-sex marriages illegal is unconstitutional did what he did. What I’m wondering, seriously, is why people get so pissed off when things like this happen.
I’m going to follow a schematic process of reasoning here. I’m [...]
17 May
Olympic spring has sprung for Pistorius, maybe
An international court ruling has given South African 400-meter runner Oscar Pistorius approval to compete in the Summer Olympics.
The double amputee told reporters in Italy, “I think this day is going to go down in history for the equality of disabled people.”
The issue is that some view Pistorius’ “disability” as being qualitatively similar to that [...]
16 May
Tim Montgomery sentenced to 46 months in prison
Tim Montgomery, who once held the distinction of being the fastest man on the planet with a 100-meter dash time of 9.78 seconds, is about to become a number of a vastly different, much less celebrated sort.
The 33-year-old one-time partner of Marion Jones — also a former sprint superstar and also sentenced to jail (she’s [...]
16 May
A drug-free Olympics? That’s a good one!
So says someone who should know. Victor Conte, the head of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) in Burlingame, Calif. who spend four months in the federal pen for his massive role in supplying professional athletes with illegal performance-enhancing drugs, has seemingly done nothing but thrive rhetorically and even professionally since serving his slap-on-the-cuticle penalty. [...]
16 May
Can the (Blue) Devil’s own make it to China? You can help
A couple years ago, San Francisco native Shannon Rowbury, then a junior at Duke University, was one of the best middle-distance runners in the NCAA. As a film major, she made a video about her cross-country team’s quest to win the 2005 national cross-country title.
Now Shannon is a national champion (she won the 3,000 meters [...]
16 May
From the Annals of Arachnophobia Vol. 5, Issue 2
I have been known to display my love-hate relationship with spiders here on the Refuge. Knowing my ambivalent feelings toward arachnids, on-line droogs have shared photos of a couple of cool orb weavers, the type of spider I like, versus the lycosids which freak me out.
Spider porn below the fold…
15 May
I’m giving up menstruating until they move the Olympics out of China
Keith Olbermann is over the top (and understandably so) whenever he takes aim at George W. Bush, and his criticism of Bush for responding to a “what’s the worst-case scenario?” question by saying “they’ll attack us” is unfair — Bush’s reply to this, if not to much else, was eminently reasonable. But there’s something surreal [...]
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