Birthday Song

It's true. Today is my birthday. I used this nifty Billboard #1 song finder to discover what was the top song on the day I was born. Here it is.

Oh boy, am I ever a child of the 1980s. I also apparently share a birthday with Dolly Parton. Huh.

Obligatory St. Paddy's Day Post

I learned to pour my perfect pint of Guinness while in Ireland. You should too. Also, the Irish are so excited they're dancing in the streets. Literally.

About that Party ...

I often have a lot of reporters around me at parties. I had many at my birthday party this weekend. But I didn't expect this to land in the (web)pages of the New York Observer. What I didn't expect was for them to insult my house:

ON SATURDAY EVENING, in a mostly undecorated house in rapidly gentrifying Columbia Heights, some of the city’s young, left-leaning blogger elite were celebrating. Matthew Yglesias, the 27-year-old Think Progress blogger, reclined on a shapeless couch, drinking a can of Miller Lite. On the wall, under a clock that looked to have been lifted from a diner, was a poster of Obama and the words “Yes We Can.” By the stairs, a knot of bloggers discussed a party thrown by The New Republic earlier that evening, featuring a performance by the cellist Yo Yo Ma.

“He was sponsored by pharma,” said one blogger.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What?” said another.

“We should’ve gotten Canadian pharma sponsorship like Yo Yo Ma!” said the first, adding, “He played my cousin’s bar mitzvah.”

Okay, so first my beef is a factual one. My house is not located in Columbia Heights. It's just not. I live on Florida Avenue, and it seems to be under dispute which neighborhood it actually falls into (Shaw or U Street), but Columbia Heights is definitely not one of them. If New Yorkers can be picky about their neighborhoods than so can we.

My second beef with the article is more one of taste. Apparently I live in a "mostly unfurnished" house. Um, it's a rental. And we had cleared out furniture for the party. Geez, that's the last time I give reporters from the Observer free beer at my birthday party.

Sarah Haskins Explains the Appeal of Vampires

So. Funny.

James Dobson: WWJF?

This is a pretty funny video making fun of the fact that Focus on the Family is laying off 200 employees after sinking $500,000 into passing the ban on same-sex marriage in California.



Cross posted at Pushback.

The Wealthy Elite

Jen Sorensen, one of my favorite cartoonists, posted this info from an alumni flyer (she went to UVA):

AROUND THE WORLD BY PRIVATE JET
Estimated price: $64,950 per person

Highlights include Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Samoa, the Great Barrier Reef, Angkor Wat, Tibet, the Taj Mahal, the Serengeti Plain, Luxor, the pyramids and the Sphinx, Petra, and the Moroccan city of Fez. All in slightly under a month.

Trips sponsored by alumni associations are pretty common, but, as Jen says, this one takes the cake.

This Is a Surprising Revelation

We think http://kaysteiger.blogspot.com is written by a man (79%). [Gender Analyzer]

Dating Locally

I, like Miriam, thought this dating locally thing on Slate was pretty good and clever. It's just another case against long-distance relationships. Now I'm not totally anti. I know that a lot of people are strongly committed to someone and may need to go through periods where they aren't located in the same city, state, or country. But I would dispense this advice to anyone who's considering such a long-distance endeavor: If there's not a defined end point to the long-distance part of the relationship, don't bother.

I know it's not that simple, but I've seen too many people carry on long-distance relationships with an indefinite end point end end badly. It may seem weird, but there's a lot of commonality about living in the same place and seeing one another often. So as Miriam pointed out, not only is dating locally good for your emotional health, it seems to be good* for the environment.

*I know all relationships aren't the same an you should in no way interpret this to mean that if this situation applies to you I think you are dumb or your relationship is doomed. There are exceptions to every piece of relationship advice.

The Rumor Mill

My co-worker Jesse Singal had an interesting article in this Sunday's Boston Globe's Ideas section. He talks about rumors and how they spread. It turns out that rumors are a lot like news and other things that could be facts. People trade them not with vicious intent, but rather tell people to try to figure out if they're true. Of course, Jesse places his story in the context of the election, but probably the best example is John Edwards' affair, which was rumored to be true for months but Edwards was finally forced to admit it was true. One of the really interesting things I thought was this:

Other than denying a rumor that's true, perhaps the biggest mistake one can make, DiFonzo and other researchers say, is to adopt a "no comment" policy: Numerous studies have shown that rumors thrive in environments of uncertainty. Considering that rumors often represent a real attempt to get at the truth, the best way to fight them is to address them in as comprehensive a manner as possible.

This makes sense to me. The answer "no comment" doesn't make any sense and whoever asked the question will just ask more people to see if he or she can get a better and more sensical answer. The whole Norm Colman press agent answer "The Senator has reported every gift he's ever received" line seems to fall along the lines of "no comment."

Friday Nephew Blogging

Minnesota Nice

I'm from Minnesota. I'm nice. This apparently proves it.

Crappy Hour

Megan and I talk about Madonna, McCain, and the right pandering to women on the "glass ceiling" over at Jezebel today. Check it out.

Girls Do Rock

Via DCist, I heard this show at 9:30 this weekend was amazing. These girls are seriously my heroes. I wish I had any musical talent or had grown up somewhere that this camp was offered. The week-long camp sounds amazing, and my roommate who went to the show said there were songs with lyrics pumping up how girls can do things just as well as boys. It's so true. Girls can do things just as well as boys -- sometimes even better.

Baby Blogging

Okay, I normally don't do this kind of stuff, but I'm really excited about the birth of my nephew last Wednesday. He was born at 6 lb. 7 oz. and 20.5 inches long. (My sister said it was okay I blogged her baby.) His name is Garrett.

Banning Beer Pong?

The University of Florida, named the number-one party school in the country by The Princeton Review, is about to ban drinking games, according to an article published today in Inside Higher Ed. The school’s administrators are banning “‘excessive rapid consumption’ of alcohol. The policy specifically bars ‘drinking games,’ as well as ‘alcohol luges,’ which are carved ice blocks that serve as frozen pathways for liquor shots.”

They’re banning drinking games and ice luges? How will the frat houses ever survive? Apparently UF isn’t alone. IHE reports similar bans that have already been enacted at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Tufts University. It’s hard to say how they’ll effectively enforce the bans, or if they’ll just be slapped on top of other party-busting, underage drinking charges.

The IHE quote from the World Series of Beer Pong site’s co-founder Bill Gaines is pretty hilarious: “You can sit there and watch a church service in college and drink every time they say ‘God,’” he said. “Do you blame God?”

Photo by Flickr user Mohan S used with a Creative Commons license

Cross-posted at Pushback.

Flesh and Blood, Man

Kevin Carey has a remarkable piece in the Washington Monthly (which I heard is facing a very uncertain future) about the case of Shawn Earl Gardner and his attempt to use the flesh-and-blood defense:

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

The flesh-and-blood defense, it seems, has quite a history. It goes back to a man named William Gale, a World-War II veteran horrified by the 14th Amendment. He went on to argue that, though a combination of that and the dropping of the Gold Standard, the U.S. government is illegitimate. Therefore, he argued, any documents issued by said illegitimate government were false. In Carey's words, "All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. ... [such documents created] an artificial construct, they were told, a legal 'straw man.' It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men."

The judge dismissed the defense, noting the irony of the defendant's declaration as a "flesh and blood man." The whole story is worth a read.

American Lives Worth Less, Not Yet Worthless

Economists have decided that the value of an American life is, well, just not worth what it used to be. The price of an American is worth about $6.9 million, down $1 million in the last five years, according to an AP report. Remember that scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton explains that his company has a formula to determine if it’s worthwhile to do a recall on a deathtrap car? Apparently the government has a similar formula for figuring out if it’s worthwhile to enact safety policies:

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

This is the result of the Environmental Protection agency “reevaluating” how much a life is worth. So this means a lot of environmental regulation, especially where the causes are harder to trace like asthma or pollution-related deaths, is just not worth it given the declining value of an American human. On a weird side note, apparently we’re worth more than our grandparents. The AP article says that the elderly are worth “38 percent less than that of people under 70.”

Cross posted on pushback.

DC Public Pools

Today I went to the second in my exploration of DC's public swimming pools. This one was south of Dupont Circle, called Francis (25th & N, near Trader Joe's). It's a nice pool, divided into three sections: the baby pool, the lap pool, and the diving pool. The diving pool was 12 feet 8 inches deep, probably the deepest you'll find in the city. The DC pools are free to city residents, and I had a lot of fun.

Friday Afternoon Quizes

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man 90% Spider-Man 80% Wonder Woman 72% Supergirl 72% Superman 55% The Flash 50% Green Lantern 35% Hulk 35% Catwoman 35% Batman 35% Robin 32%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

Minneapolis

Minneapolis is a great city. They're beginning to build a public wireless network that's available in parks downtown (although you still have to pay for it). They tend to have outdoor music festivals every weekend in the summer (because it's so cold the rest of the year). There's a great exhibit at the Walker Art Center about the great suburbia with a fake basement (complete with wood paneling, green shag carpet, and bean bags) that features the following video, a tribute to a Minnesota suburb known as West St. Paul which I find both brilliant and hilarious:

I do have one complaint, though. Minneapolis is no different than any other city in this one regard: street harassment is just as rampant. This morning as I walked down the streets of downtown Minneapolis two men stopped as I walked by to stare and then asked both "What's your name?" and "Do you want to make some money?" Gross.