Peru seizes cocaine haul hidden in giant squid
Squid are getting bigger and more numerous
Your duty is to do whatever your President tells you
Ashcroft condemns judges who question Bush.
Really, the headline is a pretty good summary of the content.
R.I.P., Yassir Arafat
The funeral arrangements having been made, Yassir Arafat died early this morning.
This is just worth sharing:
From a NY Times review of Polar Express:
It’s likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters’ faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus’s North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of “machinery and tall chimneys” in Dickens’s “Hard Times.” Tots surely won’t recognize that Santa’s big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” But their parents may marvel that when Santa’s big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.
…and good riddance.
Our beloved Attorney General, may his name and memory be forgotten, just resigned; he won’t serve a second term. No word yet on his future plans or his successor (a matter which concerns me deeply – Gonzalez, the current White House counsel and architect of various plans to thwart the Constitution, has been described as a likely candidate, and the others likely to be even worse) but I certainly won’t be sad to see him vanish.
Alas, a bit longer until he formally leaves office, so I can’t legally state what I think of him quite yet. But I’m thinking it.
Part of the cultural elite…
I feel like some sort of parody of the “cultural elite.” I’m sitting in a cafe, and my bag contains an iBook, the New York Times magazine and book review, and volume 1 of a new translation of the Zohar.
Dynamic polarization
[Cross-posted to novadem]
At this site you can find maps of the United States at single-county resolution showing the votes in 2000 and 2004. The results are fascinating and well worth a look, especially if you take both images and flip between them a few times.
Some features of note:
Voting Locations
A quick reminder: If you can’t remember where your local polling place is, or need its hours, or a list of local ballot measures, or the like, SmartVoter is a non-partisan site that has all of this available.
DO NOT FORGET – polls will be open until 8pm in most places, but lines may be longer than usual, especially if you live in a contested area.
I probably don’t need to say this to anyone who’s reading this journal, but this is the most important election we’ve had in many decades, and every vote counts. You simply can’t justify not voting tomorrow – if you’re eligible to vote in your area, you need to be at those polls. This is what they mean by “civic duty;” everyone’s contribution really is that important tomorrow.
What the…?
An interesting news story some of you may have seen: The DHS is enforcing trademarks, on the theory that part of their job is “protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems.”
Has anyone noticed that this “department” has taken on itself the authority to enforce more or less anything they want to, and subject to only nebulous and unspecified restriction?
Checking to see if the stars are still moving…
In the past 24 hours, Arafat has gone from “sick” to “hospitalized in what is aides deny is critical condition;” the Red Sox may be on the verge of winning the World Series; and I can’t talk about today’s events at work, but there were at least two major and unexpected turns.
Oh yes, and there’s a lunar eclipse tonight.
Has someone been fscking with the laws of nature again?
Edit: The Red Sox just won the series!
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 