Were you as shocked as I was when that guy from the Canadian curling team tested positive for steroids?
Update. Sorry — I didn’t realize that something awful involving an obscure sport really did happen today. It is very sad about the luge athlete.
by DougJ| 84 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Good News For Conservatives
Were you as shocked as I was when that guy from the Canadian curling team tested positive for steroids?
Update. Sorry — I didn’t realize that something awful involving an obscure sport really did happen today. It is very sad about the luge athlete.
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I’m not sure why, but I find it pretty depressing that I’ve spent the last three weeks waiting to have sufficient range of motion in my right arm so I can… play Mass Effect 2. At any rate, if I loosen the brace a little I can use a mouse, so I am installing the game right now.
And to complete the effect, I have Chuck, Season 1, in the DVD player so I can “multitask.”
This post is in: Humorous, Open Threads
Stolen from The Poor Man, because it made me laugh:
There’s a Republican joke or several waiting to be written there…
Speaking of Republican jokes, the WaPo is eager to know more about Sen. Brown #2:
“Nationally, people are saying, who is Scott Brown? Is he an ideologue, an opportunist — in fact, the open-minded thinker he claims to be?” said Paul Watanabe, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In Massachusetts, he added, “we have these same questions.”
Scotty was in the state senate for eleven years, and what his colleagues remember about him is “not much”. With his new national platform, he can play the white Justice Thomas, I guess.
And to continue my misuse of the Pathetic Fallacy, Sen. Brown #2 was in DC for Snowpocalypse #2, just as he was for Snowmaggedon last week. Here in Massachusetts, we got… a dusting. Except for the southeastern area of the state, closest to Brown’s home town (Wrentham), which picked up 5 – 10 inches of heavy wet snow they didn’t need either.
This post is in: Cooking, Open Threads
Take it away, Bad Horse’s Filly:
Every year around this time, one of my local grocers offers Cornish Game Hens in packages where they are cut in half. I decided I needed to do something with this idea, so the Valentine’s menu was born. When they are cut in half, it reduced cooking time enough for the recipe to be workable on a week night. Since Valentine’s falls on a Sunday this year, using whole game hens seems reasonable, too. Longer cooking time, but worth it. In case you’re feeling really ambitious, click here for JeffreyW’s wonderful stuffing recipe. And if you’re looking for a more elegant dessert for Valentine’s Day tomorrow I’ll repost the recipe for Raspberry-Chocolate Cupcakes in Raspberry Sauce.
I’ll be cooking this recipe again on Saturday, so check back for any tweaks I might have.
On the board tonight:
Cornish Game Hens w/Stuffing
Buttered Peas and Carrots
Tossed Salad
Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies
Click on the link for recipes and shopping list.
P.S. from Anne Laurie: WordPress plays no favorites; my own access to this site has been spotty for the last couple days.
Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu (Valentine’s Day Ed.)Post + Comments (86)
This post is in: Movies, Open Threads, Popular Culture
Now that the worst of the crowds have died back, the Spousal Unit and I went to see Avatar in all its 3-D IMAX glory. He really loved it, and I… thought it was better than my worst fears. There were at least two joke-shaped lines. I always enjoy Sigourney Weaver, and am glad that both CCH Pounder and Michelle Rodriguez got paychecks & exposure. I said that it was less an actual story than a big lumpy bag of shiny narrative-objects and worldbuilding-trinkets, and my husband the gamer enthusiastically agreed that, yes, that was kinda the point, Ms. Obvious. I also thought Frank Frazetta should have gotten his own line in the credits, at least, but the Spousal Unit says that Frazetta has influenced so many sf/fantasy/comix/gamebuilder artists over the last sixty years that he’s become an essential part of the genre vocabulary, like van Eyck to sixteenth-century artists. (Also, from the previews, I am really looking forward to Hubble 3D: IMAX.)
But in the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg tells me something about Avatar’s chances at Oscars that I did not know:
Who’s going to win Best Picture? Among Oscar touts, the consensus is that it’ll be one of the two top nomination-garnerers, with “Avatar” the heavy favorite…
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Even so, there is a distinct possibility of an upset… From 1946 until last year, the voting worked the way Americans are most familiar with. Five pictures were nominated. If you were a member of the Academy, you put an “X” next to the name of your favorite. The picture with the most votes won. Nice and simple, though it did mean that a movie could win even if a solid majority of the eligible voters—in theory, as many as seventy-nine per cent of them—didn’t like it. Those legendary PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants don’t release the totals, but this or something like it has to have happened in the past, probably many times.
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This year, the Best Picture list was expanded, partly to make sure that at least a couple of blockbusters would be on it… To forestall a victory for some cinematic George Wallace or Ross Perot, the Academy switched to a different system. Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.
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This scheme, known as preference voting or instant-runoff voting, doesn’t necessarily get you the movie (or the candidate) with the most committed supporters, but it does get you a winner that a majority can at least countenance. It favors consensus. Now here’s why it may also favor “The Hurt Locker.” A lot of people like “Avatar,” obviously, but a lot don’t… “Avatar” is polarizing. So is James Cameron. He may have fattened the bank accounts of a sizable bloc of Academy members—some three thousand people drew “Avatar” paychecks—but that doesn’t mean that they all long to recrown him king of the world. (As he has admitted, his people skills aren’t the best.) These factors could push “Avatar” toward the bottom of many a ranked-choice ballot.
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On the other hand, few people who have seen “The Hurt Locker”—a real Iraq War story, not a sci-fi allegory—actively dislike it, and many profoundly admire it. Its underlying ethos is that war is hell, but it does not demonize the soldiers it portrays, whose job is to defuse bombs, not drop them. Even Republicans (and there are a few in Hollywood) think it’s good. It will likely be the second or third preference of voters whose first choice is one of the other “small” films that have been nominated. And “The Hurt Locker” has special appeal with two important and overlapping constituencies. If it’s picked, its director, Kathryn Bigelow, will become the first woman to have directed a Best Picture winner. This would please women and men who like to see glass ceilings smashed, whether or not they were Hillary Clinton supporters. The other group is ex-wives, who are numerous in the movie colony. James Cameron has four. No. 3 is Kathryn Bigelow. She and her ex-husband are said to get along fine. Still, there’s such a thing as identity politics…
This post is in: Open Threads
Love this from MoveOn:
Also, this:
I honestly have never seen such a weak display as what I have seen from the Democrats. Just pathetic. No wonder all the “soft on terror” and “soft on security” stuff sticks. They are soft on everything- except when it comes to infighting. Then they come out with guns a blazin’.
Just a hopeless party. I’m about ready to just bend over and let the GOP take over. At least they understand how to use power. We operate in a political environment in which our media not only excuses and shamelessness and hypocrisy, but openly encourages it so as to advance a story line. And, it appears, politically, that is rewarded as well.
Give Us What We Want, Or the Country Gets ItPost + Comments (261)
This post is in: Crock Pot Craziness, Media, Open Threads, Good News For Conservatives
Matthew Yglesias had a fine post up today about popular things in America.
It is not surprising that 3-4 out of every 10 Americans believe crazy things, but what is surprising is when these fringe beliefs are inflated by the press into a “movement” of some kind. The TeaBagger movement is a case in point. If one is generous you could cite evidence that 3 out of ten Americans are TeaBaggers (maybe 4 out of ten if you define most Republicans as TeaBaggers as well). Of course if you give a crazy idea free media it will infect more folks who believe things because they heard it on the teevee.
Yglesias points to this National dynamic with a poll out of Iowa that claims a third of Iowans say they “support the Tea Party Movement”:
55 percent of Americans say they’re personally protected by a guardian angel. 38 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, but I don’t see anyone writing newspaper articles about how a populist wave of socialism is sweeping the country. The number of Iowans who like the tea party movement is smaller than the number of Americans who want marijuana legalized or the number of Americans who believe the government has had secret contact with extra-terrestrials.
Polls register largish minorities of the population as saying all kinds of things. It’s very hard to know what to make of any of those polls as snapshots without some kind of context and duration over time. Do people even know what the “tea party” movement is?
As the beltway gasbags gas on about the Tea Parties and the TeaBaggers fluffed at these events by professional Republicans/Wing-nut activists like Dick Armey, Grover Norquist and the gang, I wait for somebody to put their fringe movement in some perspective. So thanks to Yglesias, I now know that they are more popular than folks who believe in Reincarnation but less popular than folks who believe in UFOs.
Somehow, I’m sure that this is all very good news for John McCain.
Cheers
dengre
…and yes, feel free to use this as an open thread. I’m going to go outside and measure the snow.