Easiest trivia question ever, if you think about it

What famous person, when staying at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, special orders bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread with mayonnaise, with Doritos on the side?

Answer here, via Gawker.

No mention of a beverage, but my money's on chocolate milk or apple juice in a sippy cup.

Fuck you, Easterbrook

I don't know why I still bother reading his stupid column. Although I suppose "read" is being generous - mostly I skim to find the one or two paragraphs about the Patriots and don't bother with the rest. But anyway, sometime way back when (I'm too lazy to find the link to it right now), I wrote about his penchant for being a bully and his mocking of science.

Well, he's doing it again (scroll down to the section entitled "Coming Soon -- Drive-Through DNA"). He spends an entire paragraph saying, essentially (I'm paraphasing, of course), oh, aren't science nerds and their silly tools just precious? So biotech companies advertise their products just like any other industry. So the fuck what? God, it makes my blood boil.

You know how Landru wants us all to punch Tucker Carlson in the gob? Well, if you ever see this fucking fuck Easterbrook fellow, I would like you do the same to him. And after you do that, point to his bloody nose and say, there's some science for you, asshole!

The store was probably out of Duke stickers at the time

Seen on the back window of a car today: A Raiders decal, a Lakers decal, and a Yankees decal. Not present, but implied, was the one reading "I am a complete douchebag."

Ad Nauseam

Reason number 8,459,362 why I hate American Idol: It is repsonsible for foisting upon the world that asshole in those infernal Ford commercials that seem to be in permanent rotation on EVERY fucking show I watch. Seriously, that guy is haunting my nightmares.

And can someone explain to me these Pepsi ads with Jay Mohr and Jackie Chan? I guess the whole Coke-acting-as-stunt-double for Pepsi is supposed to imply...what? That Pepsi is just too cool, or too valuable, or...something? But what it says to me is that Coke is the soda for tough guys, and Pepsi is for wimps. Doesn't seem like the best marketing strategy to me, but what do I know.

Yeah, right

The White House wants us to believe that not only does the president read actual books, but he reads books about history and strategic commodities. COME ON. Do they think we wouldn't see this for the transparent attempt to make him look smart/well-read/intellectually curious/whatever that it is? Do they think we're that dumb? (Oh, right. They do. Nevermind.)

Wow

Not only is Congress giving the Constitution a big old "Fuck You" this week by making a mockery of the separation of powers and blocking the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, but now they are going to subpoena her to appear before Congress. This is such an astonishing level of cruelty and indignity being inflicted on her, I don't even know what to say. What is the point of doing this? She can't testify. Are they going to give her a medical exam right there on the House floor? And what makes any of them qualifed to determine anything about her medical condition? This is just so disgusting and dehumanizing. While her parents may be a little nuts, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt because they are her parents, and no parent wants to see their child die. But not a single one of the other people fighting to keep her alive gives a fuck about her. She's just a tool to advance their agenda. It makes me sick.

Update: Well it looks like whatever they were trying to do didn't work (yet), and a judge has ordered the tube removed, which has now been done. Granted, that doesn't meen it's over, because it will take a while for her to die, and things could still change (it was removed once before, and then replaced a few days later, so anything is possible). I want to say that she will finally get to die with dignity, but that almost doesn't seem possible (the dignity part, not the dying), given all the craziness that's already happened. If there's one thing I think we can probably be pretty sure of, it's that she never would have wanted to become the center of this ridiculous spectacle. Who would?

Are you kidding me?

I don't care what people believe. I don't. If people want to be Catholic and think that the Pope should have moral authority over them, that's their business. But honestly, why should the rest of the world be forced to listen to this guy?

Gay marriages are part of an "ideology of evil"? Abortion is analogous to the Holocaust? And we all know what he thinks about AIDS and condoms. It's like he sat down and said to himself, hmmm, what's the best way to sound like the most arrogant, offensive fuckwad on the planet?

"It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man," he writes.

I mean, he openly admits that human rights should be secondary to "the family" and "man," whatever the hell those things mean. I'm sorry, but that is fucking insane.

ETA: After I posted this, I saw this post over at AmericaBlog, and realized I completely forgot about the part where the Catholic Church actively covered up the priest sex abuse, as well as ignored the actual Holocaust while it was happening.

So to summarize: gay marriages = evil; child sexual abuse = not evil unless we're caught, then it's evil, we guess; abortion = Holocaust, which is now evil, even though we kind of didn't care when we actually could have, you know, saved some people.

Amazing. Absolutely fucking insane.

Gregg Easterbrook is an idiot, and also an asshole

I know, what's new, right? I've never actually read anything he's written about politics. I only read his football column because he leaves politics out of it for the most part. Or if he does inject anything political into it, I just skip it (actually, I usually skip about 90% of the column - mostly, I just like to read what gets written about my favorite team, because I'm provincial like that).

Anyway, one thing he does is pepper the column with little rants about random, seemingly stupid things. Okay, nothing wrong with that. It's not like I don't do that here. However, most of the time, there actually are reasonable explanations for the things he complains about, but he's either not smart enough to understand that, or he's intentionally ignoring it in order to make himself look clever.

What really irritated me this week was the following:

Today's TMQ Is 6,678 Words and Has a Single Author, Which Makes Me 152 Times as Productive as an Author in Science Magazine

A running amusement of modern science and medicine is the practice of many people, sometimes dozens, signing their names to a research paper. This is done so that all signers can take credit for the paper on their CVs, and all get brownie points whenever the paper turns on in a citation index. When the list of authors is long and the article itself is short, the practice becomes comic. Check this article in a recent Science magazine, technical journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Listing 28 authors, the article is 1,225 words long -- that's 44 words per author! Either people put their names on this article solely for citation-index credit, or each of the 28 authors was assigned to write two sentences. ("Nigel, you write the introduction to the third paragraph. Gina, we need you for a transitional sentence in the conclusion. Phillipe, you supervise the adverbs…") Since no one believes for a minute that a 1,225-word article actually was written by a 28 people, why do prestigious scientific journals go along with this silliness?

For those of you not in the know, scientific authorship has nothing to do with the actual writing of the words. It's about who did the work that produced the data described in the paper. Authorship is not granted just so a person can "get brownie points." It's done to give credit to whoever did the work (which, incidentally, usually amounts to several person-years, as opposed to his column, which probably takes only a day or two, at most). In fact, most of the time, no one but the first and last authors has anything to do with the actual writing at all. Granted, 28 authors is a lot, even for a scientific paper, but we have no idea what the subject matter is. He conveniently gives no citation, only saying it's from a "recent" issue. I browsed the contents of a few of the most recent issues and didn't see any papers with that many authors, so I wasn't able to actually look at the one he's referring to. However, many subjects, particularly genomics, do lead to papers with huge numbers of authors because of the massive amount of work involved. (UPDATE: I just realized he did actually give the citation, but you can't read it unless you have a subscription, which I don't. It does actually appear that this is not a research paper, but some sort of policy statement by a group of ecologists, which would indicate that the "authors" aren't actually authors in the traditional sense, but more like endorsers of the policy statement. It's hard to be sure without knowing what it says. In any case, given that he calls this a research paper, and uses it as an example of what's wrong with scientific pubishing in general, it would seem that he makes no distinction between what this is and regular multi-author papers, so my argument still stands.)

So, does Easterbrook not know this, or is he just ignoring it because he knows most of his readership won't know it, and therefore will think he's really funny and clever? I honestly can't tell. At best, he's just an idiot who's too lazy to be bothered with a little simple fact-checking, and at worst, he's dishonest. Also, what really pisses me off even more is that the whole paragraph reads like the words of a bully who thinks it's funny to make fun of the geeks. You'd think an adult would be beyond that, but then, you have to remember his political persuasion, and you realize it's not surprising because bullying is standard operating procedure. *sigh*

People Who Need To Go Away

Lindsay Lohan

George W. Bush

The creepy guy who works at the convenience store in my neighborhood

People who don't look where they're going

Anyone and everyone associated with American Idol

Scarlett Johansson

George Steinbrenner

Lawrence Summers

The Osbournes

The screechingly loud woman in my office who has a giant mullet

James Dobson

The Desperate Housewives

Jared

Sarah Jessica Parker

The people who agressively shove The Metro in my face when I get off the subway

Mel Gibson

Mischa Barton

The Verizon Wireless guy

Joe Buck

The woman in my office who really won't go away unless you explicitly tell her to

I wonder if I can use this as an excuse to go home early

I hear there's been an uncorroborated report that a bunch of terrorists are planning to attack my city today*. But I'm sure we'll be okay. After all, we have the glorious and exalted George W. Fucking Bush to protect us. He said he would. He wouldn't lie, right?

*Update: Perhaps not today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe some other day. Maybe never. Who knows.

Update

So as you may already know, that Virginia bill requiring women to report miscarriages has been withdrawn. And the guy who sponsored it is now complaining about all the nasty emails he received about it. Give me a fucking break. This is (among many other things) what I will forever and always HATE about conservatives (social conservatives, anyway) - their entire agenda is about controlling other people and trying to dictate how they live their lives, and the moment someone has the audacity to object to that proposition, the conservatives cry "victim." Aaargh. God, this almost makes me angrier than the original bill.

I really have nothing to say so I'll just give you more links

First, if anyone is looking to buy me a present, I'd like to suggest this.

I was going to laugh at how ridiculous it is that Newt Gingrich is thinking about running for president, and then I remembered the last two elections, and how the American public really will vote for anyone, no matter how awful they are, and I started to cry.

Then I read this, and cried some more, because that is seriously fucked up.

But then I cheered up a little, because how can you not when you read about a 62-foot-long stogie. Hmmm, I wonder what Freud would say about that cigar.

Finally, I cheered up a lot when I saw this, because the Manolo, not only does he know the shoes, he knows the funny.