Month: November 2009

Rachel Kramer Bussel highlights eight new sex trends on the Internet. Here's her description of a new site called I Just Made Love:

With just shy of 60,000 entries, this site lets you record each of your individual sexploits like a notch on a virtual bedpost. A map of the earth on the homepage tracks where each entry is coming from so you can see where, when, and how other people are getting off all over the world. The map even has a filter option that allows you to view, say, just lesbians, or couples who recently did it outdoors, providing a fascinating, almost anthropological real-time survey of global sex patterns. As of this writing, a gay male couple had just made love in Greenland, the Spaniards were using condoms the most often, Portugal was having the most sex per capita, and someone named Foi Otimo was getting laid on a minuscule South Atlantic island called Edinburgh.

Matt Sigl sends George Lucas a cease-and-desist letter:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the production of the films Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode 3: Return of the Sith (hereafter referred to as “Star Bores”) as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter referred to as “Grandpa Jones”) infringes upon the rights of millions of moviegoers to preserve their childhood memories unscathed. This is a clear violation of your contract with the public to create films worthy of the legacy that you, yourself, began in 1977. Your recent actions have been grossly negligent, displaying a complete lack of regard for taste and artistic merit. Star Bores and Grandpa Jones represent a failure to satisfy the duty of care mandated for a filmmaker of your status. A partial list of the infringing acts are enumerated herein:

View Sigl’s list here. Trey and Matt’s admonition of Lucas was a little less subtle:

A reader writes:

I think there is a case to be made for Palin's take on the "hoarding" of Qs and Ks.  Hoarding has more than one meaning and one of those is too keep as to one's self.  I think good Scrabble players know you don't just use those letters willy-nilly. You may be able to spell "quit" upon drawing a Q, but may not be able to place that word on a good scoring square, only giving you 13 points.  If you drop "quit" on the right squares and rack up double or even triple word/letter bonuses, that can really turn the game around. You may even be able to place "quitter" on the board and get the 50 point bonus for using all your tiles. Pain me as this may, I tend to go with the Palin take on this one.
 
And to anyone who suggests any sort of pun by using Scrabble letters to spell "quit" or "quitter" in regards to Palin, I loudly protest my innocence.

Speaking of which …

Shake those tail feathers:

(Hat tip: Reddit)

But clearly outmatched.

A reader writes:

The St. Louis Fed has a good graph that shows the outstanding private credit (consumer debt) since the end of World War II.  I believe you are justified in your "two decades" comment although it was actually about two and half decades ago that it really started to explode after starting to ramp up in the 70's. Between about 1984 and 1990 it doubled from $400 billion to $800 billion. Then doubled again in the '90's to $1.6 trillion by 2000. It appeared to be on pace to double again this decade before this recession hit.

The base is frustrated by Obama's governing moderation in DailyKos's new poll:

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Republican Voters: 81/14
Independent Voters: 65/23

DEMOCRATIC VOTERS: 56/40

Now wait will Gitmo remains open through the middle of next year, finanical re-regulation gets gutted by Geithner, gays keep being fired from the military, unemployment plateaus at 12 percent, and more troops are sent to Afghanistan even as withdrawal from Iraq is postponed because they cannot even agree on an election date or terms despite months and months of negotiations. 

Of course, there's a very very long way to go. And if health reform passes, unemployment begins to drop before next November, some movement occurs on Iran, and troops come home from Iraq in larger numbers … anything can happen.

A reader writes:

I think it's more aptly put that the new age of publishing has made it possible for small, opinionated news publications to have viable, market-based business models because they can cut the overhead that print requires. These publications have always existed in the print and web worlds, just with subsidies, witness: The Nation, The National Review, and any of the myriad of think tanks like the Cato Institute or the Center for American Progress.

Ultimately, Josh Marshall may be more like the William Buckley of his day but, ironically, with a market based business model rather than a subsidized one.

However, we should probably be careful before going too far with any of this. Marshall is funding his current expansion with investment funds provided by Marc Andreessen. The impressive thing is that Marshall was able to make his expansion pitch based on solid financials. We have yet to see whether the expanded vision he's headed toward is itself profitable.

Copybot compiles 50 interesting entries. Here's the one for Parsley Massacre:

In October 1937, Dominican President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina ordered the execution of the Haitian population living within the borderlands with Haiti. The violence resulted in the killing of 20,000 to 30,000 Haitian civilians over a span of approximately five days, which would later become known as the Parsley Massacre due to the shibboleth which Trujillo had his soldiers apply to determine whether or not those living on the border were native Dominicans who spoke Spanish fluently. Soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley, ask "What is this?", and assume that those who could not pronounce the Spanish word perejil (called pèsi in Haitian Creole, persil in French) were Haitian. Within the Dominican Republic itself, the massacre is known as El Corte ("the cutting").

Forty-nine more topics after the jump:

1. Anthropodermic bibliopegy
2. Elm Farm Ollie
3. EURion constellation
4. (the) Demon core
5. Pole of inaccessibility
6. Globster
7. Hoba meteorite
8. Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic
9. GRB 971214
10. “Resolute” desk
11. Candace Newmaker
12. Cryptomnesia
13. Hans Island
14. Harrowing of Hell
15. Semantic satiation
16. Dempster Highway
17. Dalton Highway
18. Paul Felix Armand-Delille
19. Herschel Island
20. Stone spheres of Costa Rica
21. Paternoster
22. Self-immolation
23. Narco submarine
24. Louis Slotin
25. Language deprivation experiments
26. London Stone
27. Cité Soleil
28. Blood chit
29. Parsley Massacre
30. Ribbon Creek Incident
31. Art intervention
32. Impostor
33. Bata LoBagola
34. Cheating at the Paralympic Games
35. David Hempleman-Adams
36. The Kafka Machine
37. Park Young Seok
38. Houston Riot (1917)
39. Albert Pierrepoint
40. Discoveries of human feet on British Columbia beaches, 2007–2008
41. Taman Shud Case
42. Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?
43. First flying machine
44. Defeat in Detail
45. Peppered moth evolution
46. Resource holding potential
47. Saint Dismas
48. Target girl
49. Longevity myths
50. SL-1