Politicalwire mentions that Sarah Palin is apparently shopping a political radio show, and one of the rumors about why she quit is that she wanted to make more money than she could as governor of Alaska doing a book deal and tv appearances. She's venal enough to do this, I believe.
This leads to a question that's been percolating in the back of my ( Read more... )

Being somewhat absentminded, I tend to forgot about haircuts. That said, I also occasionally have the vague desire to join the Long Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, or have Wildean locks to pass through piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in my medieval hand. The problem with this is that my hair just doesn't do that; it's too fine, and as a ( Read more... )

About twice a week, the NYTimes runs an article like this one about NY hipsters who can't live off their parents anymore. In the course of doing so, I often wonder about the motivations of the Times in writing these articles. They're not exactly stories of suffering, and I have to wonder if it's the case that this is how Times reporters define ( Read more... )

The Hangover was fun.
( Read more... )

That should be "midnight in the garden of the utopians", but I don't so much swear by as at my Esperanto.

Arika Okrent's In the Land of the Invented Languages is well worth reading, especially for anybody who comes from the artlang side of the constructed language community (and that would be almost everyone these days).

( Read more... )

"Nobody but a fool ever wrote except for money" --- Samuel Johnson

Every geek has a fantasy author who they plow through at an early age. For most it's Tolkien, I ended up reading Eddings first and didn't actually read LOTR until college.
( Read more... )

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D. Nicoll

So, whenever I bother to read Christopher Moore, he's automatically slotted into my head as a budget replacement for Pratchett (similar to Tom Holt and Robert Rankin), which is obviously a major concern as Pratchett's brain eats itself alive. That said, Moore's books have generally succeeded for me more when they're tied with a sense of place (his ( Read more... )

A question for people more familiar with the california proposition system than I am. Is there a limit before you can introduce a proposition overturning anothe proposition? Or could we get, say, dueling versions of prop 8 every few years, so that it turns out whether gay marriage is legal in california is a function of which proposition won the ( Read more... )

House has always been guilty of an everyplot setup, but it's more and more reaching an everyseason arrangement where House has a hallucinatory epiphany (we had the moriarty one, the one where he spent the whole time on the hallucinatory bus, and this latest batch). There are really only two things I want out of House at this point:
1) An episode ( Read more... )