Category: The Dish

Ah, the blogosphere: a font of important questions. A Sunday round-up:

Is Oprah a Nazi?

Is gay marriage the same as slavery?

Should women not vote?

Ilan Goldberg notices a problem. A major Shiite faction wants the US to stop recruiting Sunni tribesmen for the Iraqi police force.

Heh. The full list here. Some selections from three categories:

Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards

Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other.

Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal, Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects.

Side-effects? Seven years of Ig-Nobels here. (Hat tip: Worstall.)

There had to be some explanation:

"Extra time spent grooming has a positive and significant effect on both men’s and women’s earnings, but the effect is considerably larger for men," they said in a paper called "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Effect of Time Spent Grooming on Wages."  "For men, every extra 10 minutes daily grooming increases their weekly wages by 6 percent. However, women would have to nearly quadruple their daily grooming time to receive that much in additional wages."

"One of the most irrational things I have ever seen in my life in the law." The full story of copyright infringement insanity is here.

"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] … I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country," – George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775.

A quote to ponder:

"I made my arguments and went down in flames. History will prove me right," – Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush after voting against realignment and a new wild-card system during a Major League Baseball owners meeting in September 1993. Bush was the lone dissenter in a 27-1 vote.

I haven’t a clue about these things, but apparently history has proven him wrong.

I tried once. I failed. This post is appearing on a Saturday afternoon on a holiday weekend. And you keep enabling me. A 40 percent increase in traffic over last year is crack to hacks like me. Of course, I’m not alone:

Nearly as common as the abandoned blog is the "final comments before I reclaim my life" post. Followed by "an update to something I said in my final comments." And, "Well, I couldn’t let this story go by." And on it goes.

One of the best resignation letters came from Alan Jacobs in Books & Culture. "Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought," he wrote in "Goodbye, Blog" (May/June 2006). A year later, in addition to writing a regular column for Books & Culture, the Wheaton College literature professor blogs thoughtfully at two different sites.

Florence, Italy, 9 am.

A testament from Hitch:

I feverishly clicked on all the links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily’s MySpace site, where his statement "Why I Joined" was posted. The site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album Warrior’s Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those who were neutral about the battle for Iraq … I don’t remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.