Month March 2006

Vive La Protestation

When I lived in France, I became convinced that the primary purpose of the French government was to undermine the French economy. It’s become clear to me that the population is now in cahoots. There have been sweeping protests across…

Heeb Hop

A few years ago, I was in Washington Square Park when a friend of mine ran up to me and said, “There’s a Jewish guy singing Reggae and he’s ridiculously good.  And he’s not Jewish like you…he’s one of those…

Microsoft Humor

Think Microsoft employees can’t poke fun at their company’s products? Think again. This bit of CSS code was posted on a Microsoft webpage: /* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */ * html .StupidIEMarginHack { margin-right: 1px; } *…

Origami

This weekend, while dealing with tendonitis in my left knee, I found myself on the couch watching Brainiac.  I had never seen the show before, but it struck me as a lightweight version of Mythbusters.   One of the assertions…

Unhealthy Systems

I was in college when Hillary Clinton was charged with overhauling the U.S. health care system.  My contention at the time is that the last people who should be impacting the decisions of doctors were lawyers.  I still feel this…

Bowden’s Blunders

Thank you, Jacob Luft. In his piece, “Defensible Position,” Luft writes, “If the Nationals had an owner — and a GM that wasn’t pulled off the set of Cold Pizza, for that matter — they could have gotten serious about…

Guilt By Association?

April will be the first month of 2006 in which — unless I am pleasantly surprised — I will not be mentioned in the acknowledgments of a book. So if you’ll allow me this indulgence, I’m going to shill for…

The Internet Has a Long Memory

I blog infrequently. Sometimes I wonder if I should blog at all because I’m essentially making it easy for people to go through all my blanket generalizations and prognostications and do this:

Blank-forsaken Politicians

Slavoj Zizek makes an argument that I sometimes toss around in discussions with friends: atheists would make the best governmental leaders. I highly doubt that a non-believer would be palatable to the majority of the American electorate, but the consequences…

Is Bonds a Hall-of-Famer?

ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski writes, “Bonds is finished. He might play again, but there is only a chalk outline left around his integrity and home run totals. And the only way he gets into Cooperstown is if he spends the $14.50…