Ew.

Ew ew ew ew ew.

Eeeeew.

Myriad-Minded

When I was small, my parents, in their (I have come to increasingly realize) great wisdom enrolled me in a wide variety of extracurricular activities ranging from clarinet to karate, from riding horses to rowing canoes. One of these activities was acting, and I remember spending one summer taking classes from the fine thespians at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre.

The only problem with taking acting lessons from actual actors is that you're taking acting lessons from actual actors. I assume anyone who has ever met an actual actor will take my point. One day in improv class (the sort of painful activity in which a room full of 12-year-olds pretend to be donkeys and CEO's) our instructor burst into an utterly unsolicited monologue (or was it some sort of schizophrenic soliloquy?) in which he bemoaned the lack of soul, soul, in our performances and decried the shallow, materialistic culture that was clearly responsible for superficial and desultory acting.

Midway through what was probably the first nervous breakdown I'd witnessed, our poor instructor cried out "Have any of you even read any Shakespeare?!?!" Painfully geeky, painfully honest, it never occurred to me to do anything other than pathetically raise my hand and assure the poor man that I'd read Julius Caesar out of curiosity when I was 10. Tears literally sprang to the man's eyes, at which point he spun himself into some sort of fit involving shouts of "Children in Africa are starving to death and only one of you has ever read Shakespeare! Oh the HUMANITY!" Predictably, the 20 other children in the room stared at me as though I'd suddenly spouted an extra head (the contents of which they perhaps would have required to successfully crack a tome of the bard, but that's neither here nor there).

The lesson I took from all of this is that unashamed intelligence, while occasionally appealing to the acutely insane, or the insanely acute, to the well-socialized it is off-putting at best. And that I didn't want to be an actor.

Actually, the classes were pretty great once I got a Romulan cloaking device for the second head (and if American electoral politics teach us nothing else, Americans have very short memories). But some days I think I'd recommend canoeing.

Go Blog Yourself

We've all seen it. Horizontal stripes mixed with animal print. Pleather pants combined with a "Metal Up Your Ass" t-shirt. Highwater jeans with, well, anything.

We mock. We laugh. But the girls at Go Fug Yourself... well, they blog.

And lo, but it is funny.

Laissez Not So Fair

The Federal Reserve acted today to further attempt to stave off an impending credit crisis.

How, you ask? By instituting a mandatory cap on interest rates charged to consumers? Perhaps a government subsidized mortgage assistance program (which would benefit both the residents and the banks)? Or maybe by providing low-interest, short-term loans to economically troubled parties?

If you guessed option number three, you get a cookie. But that's all you'll get. The feds aren't offering this bailout package to actual human beings who could benefit from it. Rather, they are making available $100 billion in loans to troubled banks... who will then turn around and loan that very same money out to their customers at marked up interest rates.

Somewhere Adam Smith is puking into his cravat.

Calling all Losties

My prediction: Michael is Ben's man on the freighter.

That is all.

Shiny New Toy

What do you get for the political junkie who has everything? His or her very own delegate counter!

This awesome little device allows you to create an infinite number of presidential primary result scenarios in the remaining states, and shows exactly how many delegates would be allocated to each candidate under each circumstance. Want to know how many delegates Obama picks up if he wins Mississippi 55-45? He nets three. But what if he wins 70-30? Well then he nets 13.

Mix and match, presto chango, and you can play the same game Clinton's playing — the "there's no damn way to win unless we hold a caucus in Tijuana but shhhh don't tell anyone" game.

Seriously, though, it's an addictive little widget.

While you're at it, check out Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter's column analyzing what the delegate counter shows. It's pretty compelling stuff. Not to give away the ending, but Clinton would have to win all twelve remaining states with a 62-38 margin to beat Obama in pledged delegates. Here's my official prediction: the day Clinton wins Mississippi 62-38 is the day Bush stops tap dancing on public television and signs the Kyoto protocol.

Hucktastic

In honor of the departure of one of the biggest congealments of crazy from the presidential race, I present to you my five favorite Mike Huckabee quotes:

1. "I'm pretty sure there will be duck-hunting in heaven and I can't wait!"

2. "We ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade."

3. "[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

4. "If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I'll accept that... I believe there was a creative process."

And I would remiss if I did not include...

5. "When we were in college we used to take a popcorn popper — because that was the only thing they would let us have in the dorms — and fry squirrels in the popcorn popper."

So long, Huck!

The Bush Signal

I stumbled across an article today entitled "Bush Says He Lets Red Phone Go Straight to Voicemail". In the article, President Bush responds to Hillary Clinton's recent "red phone" attack ads in which she implies that in the event of a global disaster, neophyte Barack Obama would let terrorists eat your sleeping toddlers.

The first few paragraphs from the article contain a rather disturbing confession from the President:

President George W. Bush commented on Sen. Hillary Clinton's controversial "red phone" campaign ads at the White House today, telling reporters, "When that red phone rings, I just let it go straight to voicemail."

Mr. Bush rarely comments about the Democratic presidential contest, but he said that he had to speak up about Sen. Clinton's red phone ads because he found them "so confusing."

"If I answered the red phone every time it rang, I would never get any sleep," Mr. Bush said. "Sometimes it starts ringing at 9 PM, and I am already tucked in by then."

The sad thing is, I didn't realize the article was a satire until the second to last paragraph, wherein former President Clinton attests that he always used to answer the red phone in case it was a "booty call." And I'm not the only one — the comments section is full of readers who also thought the article was legit until halfway through. How tragically comic that so many citizens find the notion of President Bush letting the machine pick up in face of nuclear disaster plausible.

Lasagna Love: Introducing the Sparta-Choke Lasagna

Inspired by The Mean Bean, I decided to create my own veggie lasagna today. Shockingly, it was quite good. For the curious (and the brave):

Ingredients:

8 oz. cream cheese
8 oz. ricotta cheese
A few handfuls of shredded mozzarella cheese (hey, I said this was an experiment)
An indiscernible quantity of parmesan cheese
Optional: 2 eggs
Optional: Chopped garlic
14 oz. can pizza sauce
14 oz. can fire roasted tomatoes
14 oz. spaghetti sauce (your choice)
1 can sliced black olives
1 can quartered artichokes
A few handfuls of spinach
9 no-boil lasagna noodles

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all of the cheeses together in a large mixing bowl and set aside. If you like, include the eggs and the garlic. Mix all of the sauces together in another large mixing bowl and set aside. In a 9x13 lasagna pan, pour a thin layer of the sauce to cover the bottom of the pan. Then lay three noodles on top of the sauce. Spread 1/3 of the cheese mixture over the noodles, then spread 1/3 of the veggies over the cheese mixture. Repeat the layering until all of the ingredients are gone (although you should save some sauce to pour over the top of the final layer). Toss another handful of mozzarella cheese over the whole thing and pop it in the oven for an hour. When you remove the lasagna, let it sit for 10 minutes before eating (unless you're like me and you don't mind eating stuff that is literally still boiling).

Total prep time is about 15 minutes. And it's really good!

Which is nice, because I'd be eating it for a week either way...

FOR SPARTA!

The [Insert Your Name Here] Show

I just rewatched The Truman Show and was struck by how the world satirically predicted in that film 10 years ago has increasingly come to manifest. I'm not just talking about the growing domination of popular culture by "reality" TV shows such as American Idol, Project Runway and even the pure embarrassment that is Celebrity Rehab. Rather, I'm talking about the reality TV show starring you — the one in which you're caught on camera roughly 500 time a day. That's not a random number. It's the number of times the average American citizen is videotaped by cameras in ATM's, gas stations, stoplights and other subtle public surveillance stations, according to a recent study (I'd link, but Drudge took it down, the bastard).

An article on Military.com (and wouldn't you love to own that domain name) explores the extent to which high-tech surveillance is penetrating our daily interactions without our knowledge (let alone our acquiesence). It's well worth a read. For those of you who doubt the slipperiness of the slope, here's an interesting excerpt:

"This may sound like a privacy wonk's paranoia. But examples abound. Take E-ZPass. Drivers signed up for the system to speed up toll collection. But 11 states now supply E-ZPass records -- when and where a toll was paid, and by whom -- in response to court orders in criminal cases. Seven of those states provide information in civil cases such as divorce, proving, for instance, that a husband who claimed he was at a meeting in Pennsylvania was actually heading to his lover's house in New Jersey. (New York divorce lawyer Jacalyn Barnett has called E-ZPass the "easy way to show you took the offramp to adultery.")"

Of course, an active and informed citizenry could rise up and speak out against these incursions into our privacy. But considering the fact that off-handed remark I made calling something "Orwellian" at the gym the other day was met with "Oh, yeah, I remember that book" by the guy scanning cards behind the counter, I'm not holding my breath.

As Ben Franklin (or possibly Richard Jackson) wrote two centuries ago, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."