Category: The Dish

"I would ascribe this to an Orwellian technique of transference. He transfers his own motives of vicious personal attack on me – transfers it to me. I never liked him, incidentally, and I think that he today represents the worst continuation of this ‘war on terror’ false metaphor – he’s got all the same advisors who advised us to invade Iraq now advising him," – George Soros on the former mayor of New York City.

Well, five wives in one house can reduce your carbon footprint.

No, I’m not making this up. (Hat tip: Ectomo.) And it gives me an excuse to post this classic on rat-cuisine:

The evangelicals really do have a problem, don’t they?

A new device to warn against aircraft rolls – by piping music to the pilot through earphones.

Now he’s touting her record and beating up on the press. She’s got a double-digit lead in New Hampshire and he’s stillwhining about press coverage. Seriously, when was the last time a former president campaigned this hard for a candidate in his own party’s primary? Bush did it for Bush, I guess – but far less crudely and less frequently as I recall. Or am I forgetting? There is one natural response to a former president trying to stack the deck for his wife: will Al Gore step up and tell us who he’s supporting? My guess is: not Hillary. C’mon, Al. Time’s running out. Time to even the playing field.

Two new polls suggest worrying erosion for support for the West in Southwest Afghanistan and a modest up-tick in support for the Taliban. Money quote:

Confidence in the ability of provincial governments in the Southwest to provide security is down by 20 points; confidence in the ability of the Taliban to provide security, while still much lower, is up by 19 points. As noted above, there’s been a 29-point drop in the number who say the Taliban has “no significant support at all” in the area. And very unfavorable views of the Taliban have fallen from 62 percent last year to 44 percent now.

What has happened to mainstream Hollywood could be nothing compared to what’s about to hit the porn industry. YouPorn’s stats tell the story:

YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product. Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195).

And it’s all free. A fascinating glimpse into our horny peer-to-peer future here.

Some nasty flyers are appearing in Iowa. The GOP primary race is becoming a little seventeenth-century, no? So many Christian sects, so much theology to wrangle over. Welcome to the party you built, Mr Rove.

Or just going blind? A fascinating article on how various ailments affected the painting of some of civilization’s greatest artists. Money quote:

What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

Now, thanks to modern digital techniques, scientists and critics can have a better idea how cataracts changed what Monet saw. This year, an ophthalmologist at Stanford, Michael F. Marmor, described in The Archives of Ophthalmology creating computer simulations of Monet’s world as his lenses yellowed, blurring vision and turning patterns of color and light into muddy, unfocused, yellow-green inkblots.

The result was the above. The contrast with his earlier work is quite striking. (Hat tip: 3QuarksDaily. Painting: The Japanese Footbridge by Monet, 1920 – 22.)