Island Passage

Ouch. A personal note, a couple of quotes, and a few links. I became a Republican at 16 years old, when I received my first minimum-wage paycheck out of which was drawn Federal Taxes, State Taxes, union dues and a union initiation fee, all of which were mandatory. I became a real conservative in the late 1970s when I encountered Mr. Buckley's television show, Firing Line . On Firing Line I saw manifest the "marketplace of ideas." And the delight, the joy, the brio with which Mr. Buckley engaged his liberal guests gave me a model to follow. Quite frankly, after watching Firing Line every other conservative talk fest has more than a whiff of pro wrestling about it. I saw Mr. Buckley speechless only twice. Once was when his guest was Mother Theresa. He asked, as television hosts will, to what address could his viewers send money to support her mission. She said that she didn't appear on his show to raise money, but to communicate what God would have her share. Mr. Buckle...

Tom Leher had a line in one of his concerts: "It is sobering to realize that by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years. It's those kind of people that make you realize how little you have accomplished." Forty years ago I studied the (French) Horn. I even had ideas about turning pro and saw myself doing studio work, staying up all night for recording sessions, saying goodbye to fellow musicians over waffles before sleeping all day. But I made different choices. I still love horn music though; and this kind of thing makes me wonder how good I could have been: Let me note that she is, as my Texan relatives would say, a little bitty thing . But the sound she puts out is wonderfully full.

I know that it's old news, but were talking legacy here, kids. Exhibit A: By the way, in little-boy speak the phrase "throwing like a girl" refers to the way the former president it preparing to fling the ball, pivoting on his elbow. Watch a major league pitcher and you will see that their elbow leads their wrist through the throw and that a lot of power comes from rotating their shoulders.

There is an index to measure insect sting pain? Of course there is , my dear. The bullet ant sting scores highest on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a rating created by entomologist Justin Schmidt, director of the Southwestern Biological Institute, which compares the ouch factors of different insects. How does he know how much these insects' stings hurt? He's willingly endured each of them himself. Schmidt's rating gives a poetic description of the bullet ant's sting: "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch rusty nail in your heel." There's a job that's gotta make it hard to get out of the bed Monday morning.

I'm just wonderin'... One of the big memes of the Clinton campaign has been "experience." Mrs. Clinton touts her experience in the White House, said experience consisting of being a family member of the President. She is going after Mr. Obama about his inexperience. “We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.” Two points: What foreign policy experience did the President with whom she shared the White House have before his election? If being a family member counts as experience, doesn't George W. Bush come with a much fuller nepotistic resume? His father was a member of the house of Representatives, Chief Liaison to Communist China, director of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, Vice President for 8 years and President for four years, dur...

Many people don't realize that technophiles can be the most conservative of people. In the drive for miniaturization and ease of use, there are those who smile and stand aside : While not the sexiest consumer product out there, our engineering audience will likely see the appeal that HP's latest scientific calculator had for me. The 35s, which this new model is dubbed, is similar in many ways to the 15c I bought twenty-some-odd years ago when I entered engineering school... There's no doubt that the 15c was the premier calculator of its time. Just about everybody in engineering school seemed to have one... I bet many of you are smiling to yourselves saying the same thing, "yeah, I bought one of those, too." But the kicker for me, and I'd bet for many of you, is that my 15c is still going strong. In fact, it still serves as my everyday calculator. And it doesn't get lost like many of the other objects on my desk, such as the tape dispenser, stapler...

These are dry times for conservatives like me. I see that the current tack of the Republican party (which began with the election of George W. Bush) is taking to a more mainstream course. I know that the world has changed almost immeasurably since 1980, and that those that long for the second coming of Ronald Reagan both do not know what they want and would not accept it if it came. I have my strong doubts about Obama. He lacks executive experience and will rely on teams of advisers. Who are these advisers? Perhaps they should be making policy speeches. But in all this there is to me one constant: There can never be another Clinton in the White House. Many Clinton haters will to this day gas on and on about the Rose Law firm and Whitewater billing records. These issues display in the Clintons a small-minded meanness. Others will cite the White House Travel Office scandal. In this Hillary showed that she saw the office of the president as a a spoils machine, there to dole out plum jobs...

The People's Cube Has this great Obama graphic. One of the great things about teh internets is that we no longer have to settle for 12-generation xerographic copies of great visual jokes. We get to see the original.

James Lileks was harrrumphing over the NYT Freakanomics Blog's contest : Create a new 6-word motto for the United States. (Of course the USA already has a wonderful three-word motto, "E Pluribus Unum," that is, "Out of Many, One." Mr. Lileks cuts loose: It was no doubt tendered in good faith, but reading the suggestions is like licking a corroded battery. The latter-day sub-Menckens will always get off the sharpest lines, of course; you can’t draw a laugh with something Grandma might knit on a pillow, and drawing a laugh – or a mirthless snort of appreciation, which counts as a laugh nowadays – is the prime objective. Go on: read. It’s not just a lefty thing; the hard-core Ron Paulites are there as well, luxuriously immersed in simon-pure certainties. Hundreds of snippets of derisive snark. You can picture the satisfied little grins on the authors’ faces; you can imagine the whole tableau – the computer (which most people in the world will never ...

Mitt gives a speech at CPAC , announcing that he will not fight on to the convention. So to the people that told me that I was wasting my Washington State primary vote by choosing "Thompson," I say, "Poo."

There has been some small to-do over the fact that January 31st was the 50th anniversay of the launching of Explorer 1, the United State's first orbiting satellite. Rand Simberg has posted a great retrospective piece about the 50 years from then till now. I celebrated the day by putting in the DVD for one of the finiest films ever made about the Sputnik era, October Sky . This is also the film that made me a Chris Cooper fan, and one of the three or four movies guaranteed to make me cry.

My Washington State primary ballot arrived. I could do nothing but mark in Fred Thompson.