Month: October 2007

A reader writes:

I see your "whole blog devoted to "unnecessary" "quotation marks,"" and raise you a whole website devoted to…."passive-agressive notes" left by non-confrontational people for others to see.

I liked this one myself:

Thanks!

The unexpected love-affair continues. Well: not so unexpected at this point. He helps her win the primary. She potentially doubles his traffic for at least four years. Win-win. Until it’s payback time.

That’s what Congressman Pete Sessions is saying.

The gay rights groups choose to postpone action on a gay employment non-discrimination law until it includes the transgendered. The gay left is mad at Barney Frank’s compromise:

In a telephone press conference discussing this letter, NGLTF’s executive director Matt Foreman underscored the stronger warning contained in this second letter.

"We refuse to accept and in fact oppose any legislation that leaves any portion of our community behind," he said.

They’ve found it – in Sardinia:

In fact, researchers have detailed an astonishing longevity hot spot in which they have documented 90 centenarians among a population of 18,000. That means that one out of every 200 people in Ogliastra has lived to celebrate a 100th birthday. It’s an extraordinary figure, about 50 times the rate of the United States, where only one person out of every 10,000 people lives to see 100.

“These are people who not only have a very long life, but they are healthy up to a very old age,” says Luigi Ferrucci, chief researcher of longitudinal studies at the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) and a co-author of the Ogliastra study. “These are not people who’ve gotten diseased or dementia at 70 years old and somehow lived another 30 years.”

Or not:

The version you are looking at is actually an outside company that made a shortened version of the entire event for their purposes (it’s more of a tourism piece). Instead of using the entire one-hour ceremony, they just took highlights. The National Constitution Center has not edited Bono’s speech and the entire one-hour ceremony is available on our website today. 

Or "the most beautiful house in the world." George Bernard Shaw’s.

Two-week-old Rene Arlson Santana Araujo, of Bahia in northern Brazil, is immersed by a priest in the water as Brazilian Evangelist Christians hold a mass baptism in the Jordan River on October 1, 2007 at Yardenit in northern Israel. The group of 700 worshippers descended in the biblical river as part of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. By David Silverman/Getty Images.

The correlation still exists according to a new economic study of various countries.

A second amendment:

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower – they appear to be mistaken.

"You are showing lack of respect for the dead" – perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty – you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason.

Meanwhile, a horrifying silence fills Rangoon.