Vaping

Why, indeed, do I still yearn for it?

They go on smoking in part because of a fact that the prohibitionists are loath to recognize: Nicotine is a drug with benefits. It has been linked by researchers (and smokers) to reduced anxiety and stress, lower weight, faster reaction time and improved concentration.

Yet the New Puritanism of the anti-smoking crowd stinks strongly of a vested lobbying interest, not just some twisted moral stance.

Americans! Can't Live With 'Em, etc.

http://ask.metafilter.com/200224/What-are-Americas-quirksMeFi has a lovely thread answering the musical question, "What do foreigners find weird about us/our country."
My favorite:Only in America would we have a Mexican Sushi place that is actually called "Casa Sushi".
It is nice to know that our service culture is actually superior to others, who apparently get away with being sullen and difficult. I think Americans expect each other to act like they like people, even though they don't. Where do we get that? And exactly what's wrong with it? Makes the day more pleasant.

Everything Is Amazing

"New York to L.A. in five hours. It used to take THIRTY YEARS!"
I love Louis CK, he's the smartest, funniest to come along in a very long time. Up there with Carlin, Seinfeld. Okay, I hated Seinfeld, but he contributed, as Louis would say.

Cucumbers v. grapes

Some monkeys began throwing cucumbers at the scientists because they know a bad deal when they see it.

Your Incredible Shrinking Brain

Made me laugh out loud, disturbing the three dogs, who are sleeping as I try to put myself back to sleep by visiting the internet at 3:30 a.m.

Digression, cast adrift on the buoyant Dead Sea of your own narrations, is a sign of old age, and remarked by ancient moralists and proven by modern neurology and brain science to be a symptom of natural decay of the aging brain, so let me conclude with one, which now that I consider it, is not really a digression at all, though this present clause surely is:

January 13, 2010: I am defending to a colleague the wisdom of the police rounding up the usual suspects.

Me: Claude Rains was being more than a mere cynic, which of course he was also being, when he said "round up the usual suspects" because the usual suspects were not innocent but the known criminals of whatever the city was, Tangiers, Marrakesh, I forget which.

Colleague: Casablanca.

Me: I am going to go shoot myself.

And This

This

Matt Taibbi Is Such A Good Writer

that I think I'd still read him if he was on the other side. Thank God he's not.
Funeral director with a hangover indeed.

Corgis Do Not Like Halloween

This is why.
They do, however, like The Queen.

And outside the cabin, falling leaves.

Maybe someday I'll write something about it all, but in the meantime, there's always Billy Collins.
And Marvin Bell ("When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life"), and Kay Ryan, and Anne Carson and Marie Howe ("This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me") and Philip Larkin and...and...well, and poetry, my dear.

Correct Me If I'm Wrong

but weren't the Tea Partiers clamoring for an audit of the Fed? While one was going on right under their noses, mandated by the two favorite whipping boys (Frank-Dodd reform bill, anyone?) and put in to the legislation by none other than Bernie Sanders, that dirty hippy pinko anarchist probably born in Kenya as well.
Guess what? It's out. Trillions, baby, tril-y-uns.
I don't think any of what Krugman calls the Very Serious People has seen fit to mention it, though.
I picked up on this at Andrew Sullivan today, and there is since some quite credible context. 

On Any Day

you can be amazed. If you just look. Monday The Owl, today The Juggler. In the hardware store parking lot.

Surprise

I thought owls were nocturnal creatures, yet there she is at 9:03 a.m., two hours past daylight, perched on her third branch since I spotted her at about 7:30.
Shorty has already been terrified by and in turn terrorized a wood rat on the side path — much growling and squealing and tossing of body into the air; the telephone repairman has come and gone, both of us shaking our heads in agreement that the placement of the switch box or whatever it is near the main road was unique in its stupidity lo those 26 years ago. Someone, probably driving a horse trailer, has destroyed it again.
I have had my morning oblations and my morning hot cereal; photographed her on her first perch multiple times and re-discovered how a cheap, three-year-old Kodak compensates for low light. None of the photographs are in focus, betraying either an embarrassingly unsteady hand or a really, really slow shutter.
She has groomed her tail and her wings multiple times, cleaned her claws and waited.
The air around her is as alive as any anthill. She ignores the army of small birds as they flit from trunk to limb to air, light as knats.
Her great head swivels and tilts, though, when it is a big blue jay with his punk hairdo landed on a swaying branch an arm's reach away.
She knows he has seen her, though her markings mimic the very bark of the tree she sits in, the curve of her folded wings looks like just any other cedar bough to a jay.  He seems mezmerized. But he is so fast, she is so heavy.
I believe she is waiting for one of the fat rabbits who come to eat grass and clover from the lawn between my window and her branch. They could come at any time, they are that stupid. She would drop like a stone before a rabbit even noticed a change in the air. Rabbits freeze and blend in. This owl sees them the way an x-ray sees cancer.
Less lucky, but still worth it would be one of the three noisily psychotic little red squirrels that worry my squirrel-proof feeder on an almost hourly basis. Where are they? I haven't seen or heard one this morning. Sometimes they are enough to force my windows closed in summer.

Well, they know she's here. That's it. They've seen her shadow as they cross the roof, easy targets. Or they've seen her take something. They know where to check for her, like I know now.
She's been here before, I bet.
And she'll come again.

Steve Jobs Is Dead, But

Charlie Kaufman is still alive and still writing. So there's that.
I ran into a MeFi discussion about Kaufman related to a talk he gave somewhere but there was no video yet. But someone found this.http://youtu.be/xpjgjJqayxI I could embed it, but it's 72 minutes.
And yes, some people hated Synedoche, NY and some people loved it.
Now the question for me is, it's 11:30 so should I watch CK or last night's Project Runway as planned.
Not really. There is no question.

Krugman's Army

Heh.
I love people who actually know what they're talking about, in this case, the Occupy Wall Street movement and what is needed for the left to succeed.
I admit I haven't been paying much attention. I sort of thought of them as Operation Pink or something. Then yesterday I read some personal stories (just the sort of thing I would have told them to put out there, I've yet to read any personal stories of the Tea Party, but I might have ignored those) and decided maybe I ought ot pay more attention.
Who knows, something may be happening.
Andrew Sullivan admits he's rooting for the dirty hippies.

Quote O' Teh Day

Krugman steals from DeLong about a Bloomberg piece on the Koch bros and Iran.

the hard right is worse than you can possibly imagine, even if you take account of the fact that it’s worse than you can possibly imagine.

Not just Iran, as it turns out, but a nice long piece about Koch's long bad history.

For six decades around the world, Koch Industries has blazed a path to riches -- in part, by making illicit payments to win contracts, trading with a terrorist state, fixing prices, neglecting safety and ignoring environmental regulations. At the same time, Charles and David Koch have promoted a form of government that interferes less with company actions.

‘Overall Concept’

“My overall concept is to minimize the role of government and to maximize the role of the private economy and maximize personal freedoms,” David Koch told the National Journal in May 1992.

Posthumous Honorary Contrarienne

Pioneer photographer Anne Brigman.
This from 1926.
I'd look for Imogene Cunningham and include her if I was more motivated.

Meditation O' Teh Day

Full screen recommended.

So Long, Summer

Labor Day weekend with the very entertaining Locust Street Taxi on city pier in Port Townsend.

The Economy's Fucked. News At 11.

I'm going to bookmark the article and read it later because it's long. It's highly (read MetaFilter) recommended.
But I wanted to share this little wrap he puts on it under the heading Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Dept.

In 2005, Porsche began to buy shares in Volkswagen (I know that sounds the wrong way around), to help it ward off a foreign takeover. They kept buying shares over the next three years, and as they did so the share price rose. As it did so, the remaining Volkswagen shares, obviously, kept becoming more expensive, so it became clear that Porsche wouldn’t be able to afford to buy all the rest of them and take full control of the target company. At the same time, prospects weakened for the global car industry. The hedge funders took out their crystal balls and concluded that this meant Porsche would stop buying shares, and so the share price would fall, and they began to short Volkswagen stock. So far, so routine. But what they didn’t know was that Porsche was secretly using Germany’s not so transparent rules to accumulate more and more shares, until 26 October 2008, when Porsche announced that it now owned 75 per cent of Volkswagen, i.e. pretty much all the publicly tradeable stock – most of the rest was, for various reasons, locked up in places where it couldn’t be sold. At which point, the hedge funds shat themselves. Remember, all those shorted shares were borrowed, and had to be bought back and then returned – but where were the hedge funds going to buy the shares to return them, since there was now no stock on the market? Answer: they’d have to pay whatever the seller wanted to charge. In 48 hours, Volkswagen’s share price went from €200 to more than €1000. Hedge funds lost £24 billion betting against Volkswagen and Germany’s fifth richest man, Adolf Merckle (b. 1934, cement, pharmaceuticals), threw himself under a train.