Category Archives: Popular Culture

Honesty From Gene Simmons

He wants his Obama vote back, and admits that he voted for him because he was black. I suspect that there are a lot of people in the same boat, and they won’t make the same mistake twice. They expiated their racial guilt in 2008.

[Update a while later]

This seems right to me:

…ask yourself this question: How many people do you know who voted for Obama in 2008 but now express regret about the vote or reservations about his leadership?

Probably plenty.

Now ask yourself this: How many people do you know who voted against Obama in 2008 but have since been won over?

Probably not a single one.

The buyers’ remorse is strong in this One.

A True Bitter Clinger

If this guy was a Tea Partier, the media would make him the face of the movement. But he did it out of a rational hatred of a young woman who’d never done anything to him except be on television, so it’s OK. Apparently his remote was broken, and he was too lazy to get up and change the channel.

[Update a few minutes later]

Iowahawk comments on Facebook: “After booking, he was offered tenure by the University of Wisconsin and a Senior Fellowship by Media Matters.”

Cosmological Thoughts

From Lileks:

Says io9: “Two enormous, gamma-ray-emitting structures are bubbling out of the center of our galaxy. And astronomers have no idea what caused them.” That’s comforting. They do have an explanation for the enormous white brackets and letters and numbers, each of which is several hundred light-years across, but about the bubbles they got bupkis. That’s not what gets me, though: it’s the Milky Way. Suddenly it seems as if we really should have a better name for the galaxy. You meet some aliens, work out the language issues, and find out they call the Galaxy “The Hand of God Prime” or “The Torch of the Void” or “The Cradle of Light,” and then they ask us, and then they look at us with their eyes on stalks moving quizzically up and down and say, in their grating metallic voices, “The Fluid of Mammary Glands Road? Seriously?” And one of them spies a Milky Way candy bar – actually, he heard its distinct chemical signature as it underwent a chemical change when the wrapper opened, and this produced a rather dissonant change in the infra-red spectrum, which they usually reserve for tragedy and dark comedy – and he asks why that is named after the galaxy. Or if it’s named for breast milk. “It’s all about tits with you people, isn’t it?” And then we sort of nod and say, well, you got us there, what can we say. But what did you say you called Andromeda, the Comely Buttock? To each his own, then.

Also thoughts on colliding galaxies, and failure to us a turn signal.

Record Books

They were shattered in Ann Arbor yesterday.

The teams appeared to be evenly matched, but I think that was misleading. What those watching saw was a well-balanced (offense/defense) team play a team with a monster offense, and one of the worst defenses in the nation. Michigan’s offense made Illinois’ defense look much worse than it was, and their defense made Illinois’ offense look much better than it was, so it looked as though it was a purely offensive battle with poor defense on both sides. I have to say, though, that despite the score, Michigan’s defense was looking better than it had been, with some key stops (especially, of course, the final one that won the game by preventing the two-point conversion). Of course, it will have to continue to improve if they’re to have any hope of beating Wisconsin and Ohio State.

[Update Monday morning]

Without looking it up, I’m guessing that Michigan now has another (dubious) record — points allowed while still winning (65).