Do the Yak

If you believe the David Brooks op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, it looks like it's time for Hillary to throw in the towel by graciously conceding the nomination to Obama for the good of the party, since she basically has no chance now of being the nominee herself. I think he's right. The remaining primaries are meaningless, the superdelegates are not going for her in droves, Obama weathered the Jeremiah Wright thing, so all she can hope for is a revelation that he has been hiring high-priced prostitutes — and you can be sure her people have already snooped as much as possible for any dirt of that sort. If she concedes, she helps not only the Dems, who can then turn all their attention to attacking McCain, but also herself. Instead of getting nothing out of a protracted fight except a reputation as s selfish sore loser, she could bargain for more power going forward, such as being Senate majority leader (the consensus is that neither she nor Obama would want her to be

Dooce has gradually gotten less funny and more mainstream, what with her kid, dogs and successful career, but every now and then we see the old outrageousness, such as in her most recent responses to moronic commenters on her blog . * * * * * I was going to write about the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle when it was current, but decided to wait for a bit of perspective. This is the minister of Obama's church whose anti-white vitriol was circulating via YouTube. Since I first saw that clip, Obama gave his speech on race (see single-page transcript , or video with transcript alongside containing links to sections of the speech -- thanks, NYT). I read it and was very impressed. It's a well-reasoned examination of the race in America past and present that looks at both sides of the issue, effectively illustrated by his personal experiences. The writing is nuanced and intelligent without being dry, policy-wonkish or filled with platitudes, though certainly there are some of those. Des

First the throat... Sarah had her tonsils out on Tuesday and everything is fine. We got up at 5 a.m. and got to the hospital in half the time it would take at a civilized hour, just as it was starting to get light. Fun. She was kind of excited about the whole thing -- wrote things in her journal, asked lots of questions and sought reassurance but didn't seem overtly anxious. That is, until we actually got into the operating room. At Mass. Eye and Ear, they let one parent put on surgical garb and accompany the child into the O.R. and stay until the kid is asleep. Of course the OR is full of scary-looking instruments and harsh fluorescent lighting. She lay down on the operating table and the anesthesiologist -- a super-nice guy in his 30s, very kind -- explained what would happen and tried to distract her as he got ready to put the clear mask over her nose and mouth. But by this time Sarah was scared, though not struggling or protesting -- just had tears running down her cheeks and h

If you don't know Lolcats (and you should!), I found a site that applies the concept to Vogue magazine. The best versions, I think, are tard moddles , c'est French lolvogue and Good help is hard to find . Priceless. Then of course we have our tard prez , which is funny only in the blackest-humor sense as in "If I didn't laugh I would have to weep but I'm already gnashing my teeth too much to do that." Since having kids we've fallen out of the habit of eating in restaurants or seeing movies or other entertainment at night, mostly because babysitters are so damn expensive, but one thing we do is read a lot. To be fair I guess I should say "I" rather than "we" because Ben likes to watch TV more than I do; apparently my attention span has become microscopic for anything other than an absorbing book. Ironically, the internets make reading paper-and-ink books even more fun because I can keep track of books I want to read on my GoodReads lis

Lots of words all over the web about the juicy Spitzer scandal. Newsweek goes so far as to link to a pair of blogs with X-rated first-person accounts by call girls and johns . The fascination is, of course, about why a guy with everything going for him would screw it up (literally)? As explained in The Cheating Man's Brain: Alpha males are high on testosterone, which induces a love of risk as well as aggressiveness and competitiveness. And the risk itself is part of the reward; breaking rules is a thrill for these types of men. To be a high-profile politician requires, among other things, supreme confidence—the kind that may shade into egocentrism and lead to downfall. In other words, hubris that leads to a feeling of invincibility. Coincidentally, there's an article on Bloomberg News today about a book by Dan Ariely called "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" (which the author describes as "the evil twin" of Freakonomics )

Today's political news actually isn't about Clinton and Obama -- it's about Eliot Spitzer, the rising-star governor of New York and anti-corruption former attorney general, the Crime-Fighting Sir Galahad Who Couldn't Keep His Lance in His Pants. Yes, he was caught via government wiretapping (one of his favorite weapons as AG) as being "Client #9" in a high-priced prostitution and money-laundering ring. He follows a well-traveled highway in American politics after Toe-Tapping Larry Craig, Gary Hart, James McGreevey and of course Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy. I was going to speculate here about what causes this urge for reckless sex in men of power, but The New York Times beat me to it. The only question remaining in my mind, which a family newspaper can't address, is what exactly would make it worth $4,300 for three hours of... whatever? I mean, just how good can the sex and thrills be to justify that kind of dough? In short, what the heck were they doing

The Democratic Crash Test Dummies Show goes on and on... 1. Since neither Clinton nor Obama will have enough delegates before the convention to win the nomination (barring something unusual regarding Michigan or Florida -- see below), the nomination will be in the hands on the unpledged superdelegates. Eleanor Clift in Newsweek floats a scenario whereby the superdelegates break the party stalemate by engineering nomination of a third person, likely Al Gore. Also, as I understand it, the rule binding the pledged delegates to their candidate goes out the window if there is no winner after the first ballot, so it turns into a free-for-all. The bottom-line question for them, of course, is who they think would be most electable for the Dems, weighing their relative strengths against McCain and support among the Democratic voters, some of whom will be unavoidably pissed off that their candidate isn't the nominee. 2. ElectoralVote.com also notes today that there's talk of a caucus

Note: Results not typical. Don't try this at home. Usually my job is slow-paced and stress-free, which is fine except when it crosses over into full boredom mode, but yesterday was not one of those days. 6:30 -- Wake up, take shower. Return to bedroom to find a listless Becky sporting a fever of 101.6. Quickly negotiate with ben for me to go to work for crucial early meeting, then return home by 12:25 so he can go to work to attend HIS crucial 1:00 meeting. 7:45 -- See Sarah off on the school bus, then zip to work in a brisk 45 minutes. 8:45 -- Attend crucial meeting, return to desk and fire off memo about throwing together a quick insert into an already-printed booklet that's about to be mailed but has just become obsolete in one fairly y important detail. 9:30 -- Attend another important meeting on a totally different but important topic. 10:00 -- Huddle with uber-boss at her computer, making last-minute changes to a press release, then frantically gather some stats for a com

One of my favorite blogs is Mimi Smartypants , which gave me several LOLs today. One LOL was for the item speculating about getting high from room-freshener propellant, and another was from following the link for Garfield Minus Garfield ... but of course the best was attributable to her opening riff on prairie chickens. For those of you who don't know me well (and I'm not sure anyone reading this would fall into that category), the term "prairie chicken" has special meaning. I might as well write it down for the sake of posterity if nothing else. It all started in a restaurant in Maine called the Chuck Wagon. Yes, it was deep in Maine but had a western theme with a neon sign shaped like a chuck wagon and a menu where onion rings were called "golden lariats," burgers were called things like "blockbusters" and "saddle tramps"... you get the idea. Anyway, a bunch of us smartypants college kids were in there one day, getting ready to order f

So, the election... 1. The prah-maries Clinton had a bit of a comeback last night in Ohio and Texas, but she's still roughly 90 delegates behind Obama, according to the various sources listed on ElectoralVote.com . This means that states with primaries in unheard-of months like April, May and maybe even June might actually matter. I then tried to figure out if either of them could still get over the top before the convention, which is not straightforward because of the arcane system of allocating delegates (it's not winner-take-all like the Republican primaries or the general election). As explained on TheGreenPapers.com , all you have to do is this: Allocation Factor = ½ × ( [SDV ÷ TDV] + [SEV ÷ 538] ) The number of base votes assigned to a state is Allocation Factor × 3000 (fractions 0.5 and above are rounded to the next highest integer) O-kayyyyy... Well, leaving aside all those nasty math symbols, I averaged the delegate counts on ElectoralVote.com after tossing out the hig

This has been going around the Internets and even though I wasn't tagged, I thought I'd fill out the form myself anyway. These are in no particular order. Opera and speed metal. Those weird tropical fruits in the supermarket. Who even knows how to cook or eat them? Why are they there except as the store's way of proclaiming their fruity diversity? Willfully stupid people. If you're dumb, at least feel guilty about it and/or try to get yourself a bit more informed. This of course includes people who don't believe in evolution and those who don't understand the concept of metaphor, as in being unable to say, "Hey, maybe the earth WASN'T created in six 24-hour days BUT I can still believe in some kind of God and take some good things from this-yer book!" College kids who wear shorts or flipflops in the winter, and I'm not talking about UCLA here. Is this some sort of masochistic toughness display, a sadly misguided statement, or just being so dam