Island Passage

...Living for today. You don't have to be a dreamer, because these people seem to exist. They are called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). They are described in this New Yorker article : ...They playfully tossed my name back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi , that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me later. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds.” But his [Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor's] work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “ Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition ...

This guy has his ex-wife and former girlfriends campaigning for him. This makes Karl Rove's mid-control ray-gun look like a Pez dispenser. IN the battle for the women’s vote, Fred Thompson has a secret weapon against Hillary Clinton - the legions of former girlfriends who still adore him and who want him to be president. The Hollywood actor and former Tennessee senator racked up an impressive list of conquests during his swinging bachelor days in the 1990s, but he appears to have achieved the impossible and kept their friendship and respect. Lorrie Morgan, a country singer who dated Thompson and considered marrying him in the mid1990s, told The Sunday Times: “I couldn’t think of a bad word to say about Fred if somebody put a gun to my head...." ...he was also able to reassure them that he was on excellent terms with his first wife and home-town sweetheart Sarah Knestrick, whom he married in Tennessee at 17 and divorced 26 years later. Thompson said he had just spoken to...

Hard on the heels of reviews that Rattatouille is the best Pixar-Disney film since Monsters, Inc. , comes news about their 2008 release: WALL * E . You know, I'd have bad deja-vu about Short Circuit , but so far it seems that Pixar won't let themselves release a dog.

The Constant Reader knows of my dismay when Churches leave the realm of bearing witness to the Good News and enter the realm of trying to get on the Nightly News. This dismay is illustrated in the following snark from National Review Online's Planet Gore blog . Stephen Hawking Opposes Designated Hitter Rule [ Jim Manzi ] Apparently the Southern Baptist Convention has just approved a statement that questions the role of humans in creating global warming, and has come out against government-mandated limits on carbon emissions. I assume this is at least in part a response to the National Council of Churches June 7 th statement that the unequivocal role of human activity in creating global warming demands, among other things, legislation to reduce US carbon emissions by 15 – 20 percent by 2020. In related news, NASA has released a statement affirming the Trinitarian nature of God, and the Modern Language Association has published a new Global Climate Modeling textbook — presu...

Few reading this blog (with the exception of Mrs. Panjandrum) remembers Jeff. Jeff was my best friend in High School and my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright. Jeff was one of the few people I knew at my own wedding. That was the last time I saw him. We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff .) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney , Jeff was Jackie Gleason . Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick . You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: l...

I'm so far behind these guys, I'm embarrassed. From Reason Magazine 's Hit & Run blog , quoting Shawn Macomber : Poor John Edwards. His personality cult is all personality and no cult. One imagines Kim Jong-il sitting in an undisclosed hermetically sealed room somewhere in Pyongyang lecturing an audience of apparatchiks. "Can you believe this Edwards guy?" he squawks, lifting his sunglasses to show his own wide-eyed shock. "Is his ego out of control or what?"

Sometimes the real world outstrips my poor ability of mocking. via Best of the Web : Lard Have Mercy The New York Times reports that China is in the midst of "an acute shortage of pork," which is affecting the international economy: Steep increases for pork loins and bacon are the most tangible sign that after a decade in which prices have fluctuated but not moved significantly upward, inflation is creeping back into China. In response to this pressure at home, Chinese companies are starting to raise prices for exports, removing what has been a brake on inflation in the West... Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited the pork counter at a supermarket in Xian in central China on May 26 and called for local governments to pay pig farmers to increase production. The commerce ministry has raised the possibility of distributing pork from China's strategic pork reserves . Strategic pork reserves? Let's hope the U.S. Congress doesn't get any ideas.

And shame on those that gave this bad man a pulpit to pound : He wasn't an Army Ranger. He didn't earn a Purple Heart. He didn't witness war crimes in Iraq. The truth about Jesse Macbeth? He's a fraud, and he's now facing prison. Macbeth, 23, pleaded guilty in a Seattle federal courtroom Thursday to making false statements to the Department of Veterans Affairs and altering his discharge papers. Kicked out of boot camp after 44 days, Macbeth instead portrayed himself as a decorated soldier who served in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was discharged due to post-traumatic stress disorder... For several years beginning in 2003, Macbeth became a star of the anti-war movement by claiming he saw and participated in war crimes in Iraq. He gave interviews to news reporters and was popular in blogs and the alternative media. In a video that was widely distributed on the Internet, a frail Macbeth dressed in camouflage told of killing hun...

At Rio Fashion Week :

Charles Krauthammer gives two-and-a-half cheers for our seemingly endless political primaries: In Britain, Canada, and other civilized places, national elections are often called, run, and concluded within six weeks. In America, election campaigns go on forever. While we can grow weary of the endless stumping, it does serve a purpose: The final function of the endless campaign, and perhaps the most psychologically important, is to satisfy the American instinct for egalitarianism. We have turned the presidential campaign into a pleasingly degrading ordeal — pleasing, that is, to the electorate. The modern presidential campaign is meant to be physically exhausting and spiritually humbling almost to the point of humiliation. Candidates spend two years and more on bended knee begging for money, votes, and a handshake in a diner. Why do we inflict such cruel and unusual punishment? Because our winner is not just chief magistrate but king. True, the kingship is temporary, but its glories an...

Actually, no. But it would have been a lot more fun this way. Japanese contestants try to say a tongue twister under "duress." http://www.glumbert.com/media/tonguetwister Or, why I'll never appear on a Japanese Game Show, Part XIII In other commentary: ...a key constituency among Democratic primary voters in 2008 will be insane people.