Electric Josh

Pres
A lot of the Presidents have been cousins. For example, FDR and Richard Nixon are 8th cousins, once removed, which, I would think, makes it much less meaningful that Bush pere and Bush fils are both 10th cousins of Herbert Hoover. Bill Clinton, unsurprisingly, isn't related to any of the other presidents. What does it say about me that I stumble across this stuff?
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War
More Get Your War On for you to enjoy. "Why is Afghanistan so far behind in registering voters? Don't they know they've gotta be a democracy by June?"
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Mad River
This is why we will move back to Vermont someday. Saturday saw Mad River Glen with every trail open, hardly any bare patches at all, no ice, and 50 degrees. The sky was cloudless and the lift lines surprisingly short. The moguls were in good condition, and I surprised myself by somehow finding the stamina to hit the bumps most of the afternoon without collapsing in a winded, dehydrated heap. I even found some of my old form on the bumps. My back feels as fabulous as it did every weekend from junior high through grad school. Just a wonderful day with my dad and sister and an old family friend who is a ridiculously good skier, and who managed to have such a good time that he broke both skis, like matchsticks, just in front of the bindings. I'm not completely sure I understand why people, once they've driven to Vermont, bother skiing anywhere else. What a lucky boy.

Furthermore, those of you who happen to be my wife would have shared my enthusiastic appreciation of a seven-year-old who, with her mother watching nearby, was were hitting the moguls on Fall Line (roll over #27 near the upper left of the map) at least as well as anyone else I saw all day. One hopes that this cute baby will find herself so lucky as to be bombing down Fall Line so elegantly someday.
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TV
Television Without Pity.
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No
A list of thirty-four Senators who will vote against gay marriage. This space's fondness for Dick Lugar (R-IN) and John McCain (R-AZ) appears well placed, here. Update: A more complete list, and better documented, too. 41 Senators against, at the moment.
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CPD
Dad has started updating again, this time with pictures of the hapless, injured dog.
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Dean
Meanwhile, across, town, it's still perfectly okay to vote for Howard Dean. He's still on the ballot. The primaries award delegates based on the fraction of the vote you receive, not in the all-or-nothing fashion of the Electoral College, so it's not possible to throw your vote away if you trust the guy you're voting for. I'm just sayin.
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R
Thoughtful, conservative, gay Republican enraged, unsurprisingly.

"Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."

Dog
This is why we don't have a dog.
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OSP
Long LA Weekly interview with Karen Kwiatowski, formerly of the Office of Special Plans, where Gulf War II was hatched. Note that she posits three of the real reasons the administration wanted to fight the war (and they're not totally unreasonable, actually!). Discomfort with the Saudis (predictably) and a frighteningly weak dollar (which I wouldn't have guessed) figure prominently. Of course, lying a lot (including to Congress) to start an optional war also figures prominently.
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papers
If I ever get arrested I'm so totally going to put up a website like papersplease.org, complete with video of the arrest. This guy is my hero for the day.
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Dash
I stumbled across this explanation of how to use em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens. The Times (and everyone else) gets this wrong, and it drives me nuts.
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Ralph
Dave Winer on Ralph Nader:

If Nader is going to win the election for the Republicans, then now's the time to fix the bug in the process. Kerry isn't nominated yet. Think. What's the problem that Nader exploits? ... Is this the America you imagined when you were a kid? Why can't we make it better?

Dean's big mistake was in not recognizing, up front, that the media are very much part of the existing order and were bound to be hostile to his provocative kind of politics. To be heard, clearly and accurately, he would have had to find another channel.

For the record, reporters and editors deny that this occurred. Privately, they chortle over their accomplishment. At the Washington airport I ran into a bunch of them, including some old friends from long-ago campaigns, on their way to the next contest after Iowa. So, I remarked, you guys saved the Republic from the doctor. Yes, they assented with giggly pleasure, Dean was finished--though one newsmagazine correspondent confided the coverage would become more balanced once they went after Senator Kerry.

Water
Has anyone else in this area noticed the water pressure going erratically up and down, sometimes down to zero? Just wondering. (No, my pipes aren't frozen.)
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Bear
Yet more St. Augustine Bear, now featuring penguins. "I'll make up a psalm about buckets of fish and you write a hymn about bossy zookeepers."
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Blades
We're Going to Five Blades! "Sure, we could go to four blades next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!"
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George
Why did George Steinbrenner fund anti-Dean ads? "Considering that Steinbrenner was convicted of giving illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon, one would expect him to be particularly alert to any new contributions made by firms he controls. The way the Yankees picked up A-Rod is not the way we should pick a President. Let's not let George Steinbrenner do to America what he's done to baseball."
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Geography
National Geographic has published their annual Good-Lord Americans-Are-Stupid geography quiz and accompanying press release to the effect of, Good Lord! Americans are stupid again this year. This year is different, though, in that this space (written by an American) has actually taken the quiz itself and got only one question wrong of twenty. Vermont public schools, baby!
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Emmett
Happy birthday, Emmett.
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Howard
So my guy, the very first candidate for any national office that I've been enthusiastic about voting for, is out. I haven't voted yet. More on this later. He's staying in the sidebar.
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Chong
Chong Family Values. Tommy Chong's character Man, from the Cheech and Chong albums and movies and whatnot, is better identified in Up In Smoke (1978) when his best friend Pedro (Cheech Marin) says to him, "Hey, Man, I didn't know your name was Alex!" which has always struck me as one of the funniest lines ever. Maybe you had to be there.
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wakeup time
Eric Alterman's tragically entitled follow-up to yesterday: Wake-Up Time: "Journalists are supposed to enjoy their work and take pride in it. Otherwise, why bother?"
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Press
How those crazy liberals running the newsmedia failed to bother to critically report the drive to war in Iraq. This space was forced to rely on the occasionally whiny lefty sites in its sidebar for over a year (especially Cursor) while the International and Washington bureaus of the various Papers of Record managed, you know, to fail to do their only job. Now They Tell Us, in seven parts.
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fox
The Littlest Groom!? Are you kidding me? (Must...avoid...cursing loudly...) Of course we're watching a bit of it. This is why I regularly feel the need to throw the television down the basement steps. Haven't yet. Update: There's a Lifetime Original Movie on that was so bad that it made me say, quite unironically, "K, I'd rather watch The Littlest Groom." Of course, I'd rather be reading or writing (or hitting the Happy Family brand bourbon or something).
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Kennedy
Dan Kennedy has been covering the whole gay marriage thing in the Phoenix which is in the sidebar as always. He's got his perspective, to be sure, but at least one can tell what happened in and around the chamber. I wish the Gannett and AP wires had stuff with a real human voice like this, regardless of its persuasion.
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the armenian
A speech my great-grandfather delivered at Alfred University in 1912: The Armenian.
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Diamonds
Roland P. has more links to the artificial diamonds that this space mentioned a couple of months ago, complete with nice pictures. Just in time for Valentine's Day. Big fat jewels, no shadowy syndicates.
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Balloon
Movies of zero-gravity water balloons! Your tax dollars making this space very happy.
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Gay II
Update to the post below asking for something other than the usual two opinions. I had thought (totally facetiously!) that it might be nice to define a new legal status called schmarriage that is indistinguishable from marriage except in name. So I'm watching the constitutional convention live on NECN, and---holy smokes!---that's exactly what they're debating. They're calling it civil unions instead of schmarriage, but that's what it is, complete with a long, disclaimery-sounding bit about how these civil unions would legally identical, except in name, to actual marriages. Geez. Note, of course, that every state would have to pass schmarriage laws for that to work. Only Vermont has even approximately such a law at the moment.
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Ayup
The Globe on Vermont accents:

"I never thought I talked weird until people started telling me that," Fletcher said. To him, the Maine accent has a strange "drag," Bostonians have a "drawl," and he still shakes his head at the memory of the "Brooklyn boys" who teased him about his accent during National Guard training at Fort Dix, N.J., in 1960. "They'd call me `Old Vermont' and `Farmer,' " Fletcher said. "I had a hard time understanding people."

Gay
I'm following the coverage of the Mass legislature's constitutional convention, and this is the first time I can remember where I'm having a hard time figuring out what people (quoted in newspapers and such) actually think, if not one of the following two things:

1. Gay people are normal in every way, and should be able to get married indistinguishably from straights.
2. Gay people are weird, subhuman scum who deserve, if not death, then extreme marginalization.

Math Bio
The coolest area of science that exists is the intersection between math and biology, which is why this space is delighted to report the existence of Science magazine's Mathematics in Biology special feature. Three salient facts:

1. UVM has an excellent resource in Daniel Bentil, who taught a great Mathematical Biology class, and who would probably have made a great Ph. D. advisor. (Mine was also excellent, of course.)
2. The Science site claims that it will magically disappear on March 6. I'll mirror it here.
3. I found this via a banner ad. This is the one and only time I've ever responded to a banner ad. I feel incredibly dirty.

Roland
For some reason I had not, until now, put Roland Piquepaille's site in the sidebar. It's like ZZZ except that it updates regularly and isn't occasionally full of entertaining but incorrect speculatory rambling. Lots of RFID and nanotech stuff. It's really very well done. Enjoy this article about the dorm laundry room web interface, which is (seriously) among the most useful, if obvious, inventions ever.
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NU
Northeastern has some great pictures of the drunken looting that followed the Super Bowl. (They're way funnier if you can manage to forget, for a moment, that one of the students was actually killed.) I found the whole series kind of fascinating, although I'm a bit unnerved by the appearance of my evil twin in picture #23. It sounds too ridiculous to be true, but at UVM we only ever had snowball fights---well, there was the one time a bunch of frat boys burned a shuttlebus, Beirut style, but that wasn't typical, and it was before I got there, anyway. Found on boingboing.net.
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Paywall
I'm delighted to report the existence of the New York Times Link Generator. This is great! Now I can link to Times articles without worrying about their paywall. Nice. (Update: I tried it with the article below and it didn't work. Oh well.)
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Soap
Dave Winer: Howard Dean is not a soap bar. Read this now, especially if you suspect (wrongly) that it's a lefty rant.
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Tit
Bonus link via the Wayback Machine: The other scandalous tit that people seem to have forgotten all about, and that the Times was good enough to remind me of:

If there was anything more bizarre than the sudden baring of Janet Jackson's breast during the Super Bowl halftime show, it was the hyperbolic reaction that followed. The whole fuss began to seem like a sequel to some Philip Roth novella---"The Breast That Ate the Super Bowl."

dyndns
I'm presently paying an outfit in Andover something like $20 every month to host this space and serve email. I should be able to cut that price by at least a factor of two by moving to another hosting provider, but better still would be to use the fat cable modem I pay for in my very own house. Playing around with that idea has gotten me as far as bringing the old server back up, the very one that used to generate the pages for this space, complete with the funky layout that longtime readers of this space will recognize. (Will this, that I'm writing now, look as silly in just two short years as the old site does? Ugh..)
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Bear ad
A bit more St. Augustine Bear! The ad that follows is well worth clicking through to.
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Lessig on Nader
Lawrence Lessig, on why Ralph Nader shouldn't run for President.
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Daghlian
My dear aunt has begun forwarding me family histories and such. They'll begin appearing in the sidebar as I find time to transcribe and present them. As always, the correct pronunciation of Daghlian is described in the sidebar.
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Evolution
So the public schools in Georgia will still teach evolution, but will instead call it "biological changes over time." Sounds like someone's trying awfully hard to avoid dispelling any unflattering stereotypes of the deep south. Says one legislator:

"If you're teaching the concept without the word, what's the point?" said Rep. Bobby Franklin, a Republican. "It's stupid. It's like teaching gravity without using the word gravity."

Mars
Latest status of the Mars rovers. This appears to be the source of all the crappy, incomplete news stories you read about the rovers' status, so here's your chance to cut out the middleman. For example, it turns out that the problem with the Spirit rover was a bug hereby there isn't enough RAM to successfully mount the onboard flash card where they store pictures before beaming them back to Earth. Not enough memory to hold pointers to all the files; so they deleted some files and it seems to be working fine, now. Given what I've heard of NASA's excellent programming culture, someone's about to lose their job over this. Bummer.
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