Weren’t you listening when they read it aloud?
SB [DC Streetsblog]: I was just in an EPW Committee hearing and there was some talk about the fact that some small amount of money in the reauthorization historically gets used for things like bike trails. Some people think that’s waste; some people think biking is a mode of transportation. What do you think?
DH [Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)]: I don’t think biking should fall under the federal purview of what the Transportation Committee is there for. If a state wants to do it, or local municipality, they can do whatever they want to. But no, because then you have us mandating bike paths, which you don’t want either.
SB: But you’re OK with mandating highways?
DH: Absolutely, yeah. Because that’s in the constitution. I don’t see riding a bike the same as driving a car or flying an airplane.
My Nice Nice Day
It’s like he is in my head.
Waterboys / Yeats
The Waterboys have other fine songs, but this is probably all you really need:
And it also proves that young Billy Yeats had the goods from the get-go.
The Order of Myths
A film by Margaret Brown. Trailer:
Read more
things I enjoy hating
Nick Denton
professional and educational peers
that guy with the green fixie and the matching plaid shirt who rides up and down Delmar slower than I walk
Kale
Adobe Flash
Jack Kerouac
the word “cyber” in journalism
journalism
headline of the day, III
Court bans man with low IQ from having sex
Yemen
At the time (1974-1976), Yemen was divided into two countries, North Yemen and South Yemen. We lived in the capital of North Yemen, Sana’a. Since then, the countries have been joined, and the population of the capital has exploded. In 1975 it was somewhere over a hundred thousand, as of 2005 it approached two million.
I loved it there. We explored dormant volcanoes, an underground cave system, abandoned Ottoman ruins — climbed into rural mountains where villagers had never seen a blond child. I will cover these experiences in greater detail, but the booming population of the capital city, and the adoption of kidnapping as a form of rural currency has made the country I remember seem almost inaccessible.
Public Restrooms
A nice photo gallery of restrooms in the Atlantic; also a new book Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing.
car review of the day
Stick some flags on the front fenders and you’re halfway to running your own banana republic. Or, in the case of Americans’ actual S.U.V. assignments, running to Banana Republic.
Visibility is always a problem in a full-size S.U.V. You’re sitting up there in the wheelhouse and your bumpers are somewhere down below the cloud ceiling, possibly in different counties. You’re always getting home and finding small items like A.T.M.’s and hot-dog carts stuck in the wheel wells and wondering, “How long has that been there?”
The system really works; I drove the QX several hundred miles and didn’t crash into a single thing.
Taryn Simon, Contraband
For Contraband, your most recent project, you spent five straight days in the customs office at JFK, sleeping on an air mattress and photographing 1,075 objects—from Cuban cigars to chicken feet—forbidden entry to the US. What did that experience reveal to you? One result of that relentless documentation of seizures was an unexpected awareness of the overwhelming volume of black-market and counterfeit goods that are removed from economic circulation. The threat to the original implied by these products was interesting for me as a photographer, because photography is making a copy of something seemingly original or real, and here I was taking copies of copies. The objects couldn’t cross custom’s border, but the photographs could—and they could become commodities in another economy.
Correction: February 6, 2011
An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.
(via TPM)
headline of the day, II
Catholic church gives blessing to iPhone app
headline of the day
In China, alpha males carry designer purses
For the first time in human history, we have a view of the entire sun
On Feb. 6th, NASA’s twin STEREO probes moved into position on opposite sides of the sun, and they are now beaming back uninterrupted images of the entire star — front and back.
“For the first time ever, we can watch solar activity in its full 3-dimensional glory,” says Angelos Vourlidas, a member of the STEREO science team at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC.
from the comments
J’adore Gene Simmons’ reality show more than you could ever believe. It’s one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen, mostly because it seems to be the thing I love best: Outward Appearance Does Not Match Internal Life.
I watched a lot of the show over the summer, got to know the characters pretty well, and everyone seems pretty great, and they appear to have a stable and loving home life. Gene and Shannon have been together for 24 years I think, and he claims he’s been faithful during that time, but he won’t marry her. She wants to get married, it’s kind of one of the running gags. They have two kids, Nick and Sophie who genuinely seem to love and respect their parents. Overall, it seems like a happy and healthy home life. The problems they deal with are every day problems, Gene works all the time, Shannon is always trying to get him to have fun and relax with the family, the kids get into various scraps. Gene’s a total old man, always futzing with stuff at home and the kids are like “Daaaaaad!” and rolling their eyes cutely, but they’re all so funny. Sure, they’re rich and live in Beverly Hills and their problems are pretty much First World Problems, but there’s something infinitely sweet and caring about the show and the way the characters are dealt with. Yes, you can make anyone look good or look like a monster on Reality TV, but having watched multiple seasons of the show, I feel like these people pretty much have their heads screwed on tightly.
Yeah, this probably sounds like a crazy internet comment, but I love that damn show and found it fundamentally surprising in all the best ways.
I was just wondering the . . . how much
“I was just growing some marijuana, and I was just wondering the… how much, you know, trouble you can get into for one plant,” Robert Michelson said in a 911 call.
“You’re growing marijuana,” the operator said, puzzled. “It depends how big the plant is.”
“It’s only a seedling,” Michelson replied.
The operator informed Michelson he could be charged for possession for having even a small amount of marijuana.
“All right. Thanks for the info,” he said, and then hung up.
quote out of context
In fact, there was a slight trend for participants to be put off this latter kind of sex, perhaps because morbid thoughts make some people want to escape their animal nature, not be reminded of it.
(via marginal revolution)
Chaos In Egypt
Caution: This video contains raw imagery of death and destruction
I post this video here because for me, it took the news out of Egypt and made it real in a way my mind could truly grasp. Sometimes you have to see something to understand what’s really happening. There is pure chaos going on over there and our mass media continues to talk about what our celebrities are doing, like it matters. (via @flyosity)
My broken leg is healing
Via my German friend Desiree.
headline of the day
Chilean makes bomb threat to keep her man at home
Relient K – Sadie Hawkins Dance
I haven’t thought of this song in years.
Yemen
We went to the International School, where my parents taught. The students were from everywhere: England, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United States. Most of the teachers were British or American.
The school was walled, like the other houses around, and was two stories, I think. I remember the wall in front being repaired at one point. Men standing in the street, palming balls of mud they tossed to men who stood atop the wall, slapping the newly formed mud down upon the rest.
The students built forts within the schoolyard out of scraps of lumber, plywood, limbs, and leaves. I remember factions and loose affiliations — a sudden need to set out and storm another — a wall of students rushing in conquest until we were startled back to civility.
The euphoria of that moment before the teachers intervened wasn’t lost on me.
That, or the afternoon a girl explained what Sadie Hawkins meant.
*
Update: Weird synchronicity. Tyler Cowen just posted on Yemen’s mud brick architecture.
Four Chord Song.
Dan Dennett, Dangerous Memes
Here’s one I stumbled on last night.
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
Ask a law librarian
I’m not a plaintiff, defendant, or respondant. I’m a custodial mama.
