On Indian Food

The International Herald Tribune has a few words on the rarity of classy eats in New Delhi. Apparently, one cook is making a lone stand for the new cuisine. We're game for a trip to India just to have a taste. Wanna come with?

"Doctor" Frist on Eugenics

The Editors have brought Bill Frist's Family Tree to our attention. Question: Can you imagine the hubris required to publish your family tree?

One Amazon.com reviewer described it as an insecure man's attempt to demonstrate that he is "melanin-free," which made us chuckle, but we think reading this inbred family tree might be darkly fun. There must be something to a family of doctors that can build a huge healthcare organization to bilk their patients and then send their son off to Washington to keep their conspiratorial way of life legal, only to have him make an ass out of himself over a vegetable in Florida, may her soul rest in peace.

Alice Walker: "I am no Condi Rice"

When Tavis Smiley compared Alice Walker to Condi Rice, Ms. Walker fired back:

I find it very objectionable because she is someone that has helped the president actually bomb people, kill people, starve people...

Touche!

The Physics of the Bra

The average American woman now wears a bra size 36C, up from an average bra size of 34B in 1990. This means more gravity in play, so some physicists have been called in to hold things up. We think their work is worthy of a Nobel.

UPDATE: The fruits of research? A Dutch firm has designed a wall of silicone breasts in all sizes to help men shopping for their significant others. The customer can go to the wall and squeeze the silicone models until he finds his wife/girlfriend's size.

Trick or Treat!

After Shandy introduced us to Gubbins, we have grown into fans. And Gubbins has the downlow on these new Mocha Almond Hershey bars. We haven't seen them at the neighborhood CVS (the closest thing we have to a candy store here in God-forsaken DC), but they sound so good we might dawn a pumpkin-head and go trick-or-treating tonight just to score some.

The Amateur Gourmet also has instructions on making your own candy today. Make us some and bring it over after the game, would you?

UPDATE: And now a new flavor of Hershey's Kiss. What a time to be alive!

Happy Halloween!

via Screenhead.

Google Print: Authors vs. Publishers

This "news" is two weeks old, but we're going somewhere with this...

To recap: Google Print is starting to scan the archives of libraries, which will provide the libraries with a digital back-up and provide Google users with searchable excerpts of the books. The publishing industry is pissed, because they think this will cause people to read books one snippet at a time at Google instead of buying copies, so they are suing Google. As Lawrence Lessig at Wired put it, "No one would have thought a library needed permission to create a card catalog."

Meghann Marco wants her book indexed in the hope that Google Print will drum up new readers for her work. Simon & Schuster told her no; they seem to think that they are doing her some kind of favor by keeping her book scarce. And besides, what would book publicists do for a living if Google drummed up new readers for free?

Of course, most of us flip through a book, whether physically in a store or with the help of Amazon's Look Inside/Search Inside feature, before buying it. Search Inside, btw, increases sales of books by 9%, according to Jeff Bezos. kottke.org commenters make some great points beyond this, including an author who says she wouldn't dare to demand that her publisher put her book on Google, because she is certain that if she pisses off her publisher, she'll never get a book deal again. This reveals political savvy enough to survive in the real world, which we are glad to see in an author.

So what can be done if authors cannot win any ground against the publishers?

Absinthe

Wired mag writes about Ted Breaux, a chemistry dork from New Orleans who has reverse engineered several anqitue bottles of absinthe to re-create 19th century recipes for the famous bohemian hootch, which he now distills, bottles, and sells at an old-school distillery in France. This stuff is apparently worlds different from the wormwood-laced mouthwash that parades as absinthe in Prague these days (for the price, it better be).

But wait--isn't the stuff illegal? Turns out the EU does not mention absinthe in its liquor regulatory statutes, so, by oversight of omission, the stuff is treated the same as every other 140-proof liquor in EU countries. That being said, it is illegal to sell absinthe in the USA. However, you may import a bottle and drink it without restriction, as long as you don't get caught by customs.

And from what we're reading, despite hundred-year old accounts of absinthism complete with epilepsy and "criminal dementia," the wormwood at this concentration seems to merely provide an herbal kick not unlike Red Bull.

Requisite Fitzmas Post

We'd be remiss if we let the first indictment of a White House official in 130 years go by without at least a dishonorable mention.

Remarkably, within minutes of the announcement on CNN, Fox announced that the newly indicted Libby was resigning. This tells us that he knew he was guilty but would only resign if caught--that's pretty obvious. So how many other guilty parties are staying at the White House because, so far, they haven't been caught?

From the Wires

A hanging-suicide along the side of a Delaware highway was thought to be a Halloween decoration for nearly a day before anyone went over for a closer look. Apparently, the body "looked like something somebody would have rigged up," according to the Mayor's wife.

Question: Was the deceased wearing a witch's hat? Or did she have a pumpkin for a head? Then maybe ya'll should have walked across the street to check this out a little sooner, huh?

Drinking Liberally

Discovered just today: Drinking Liberally. This sounds like the Dean Meet-ups, but with no pretense of doing anything more than drinking with liberals in a conservative-free zone. We're going next Monday. (via Eschaton)

Miers Withdraws

The Right successfully obstructs the GOP agenda.

At least Miers can still play the lottery.

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired mag, has a blog-about-to-become-a-book about what he calls the Long Tail phenomenon. If you haven't heard of this concept, the idea is that the web, unlike brick-and-mortar stores cobbled by expensive storage space, makes such a wide range of products available that even if only a few people are ever interested enough to buy them, the seller can still turn a profit. Examples include the DVDs that NetFlix has but Hollywood Video won't stock ("We're sorry, sir, but we don't have the unrated version of Bad Santa because we are a family video store") and the thousands of niche market Lego kits only available online.

Gramophone Awards

This month Gramophone mag named the best classical CDs of the year, along with gratuitous "artist of the year" and the like.

We endorse their choice for CD of the year, the long-awaited first volume in a series of the Bach cantatas that John Eliot Gardiner began way back in 2000 on the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. It was an ambitious project: Gardiner and the Monteverdi choir wanted to record all of the sacred cantatas in big, old churches Bach would have known during the course of a year, playing the cantatas appropriate to the liturgical calendar each week. A subset of those recordings were released as the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, but Deutsche Grammophon was luke-warm on the project and only released about 10 CDs of what was to be an enormous set.

Gardiner put up his own money to produce and release the remainder of the recordings, and this first volume, released on his home-grown Soli Deo Gloria label, is absolutely incredible. (Take that, Deutsche Grammophon!)

Support Our Troops...

...Bring them home alive.

Bush has sent 2000 of them to their deaths, more than died anywhere since Vietnam.

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn't see? How many deaths will it take before he knows too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

So are you going to raise this woman's baby?

A woman in Tuscon, AZ, was raped. She then demonstrated remarkable composure, we think, by setting out to prevent herself from getting pregnant, a task that, in Tuscon, AZ, requires a rape victim to visit every pharmacy in town in a vain search for Plan-B or similar "morning after pills." After visiting dozens of pharmacies, she found one that stocks Plan-B. The only pharmacist on duty refused to dispense it.

So, if she becomes pregnant, is this pharmacist going to adopt the child and rear the cute little bundle of rapist joy?

Some people have said this is a matter of women's rights or, even more degrading to everyone, that it is a matter of commerce. We think it is a matter of public health. When a patient takes a doctor's order to a pharmacist, the pharmacist should fulfill that order so that the patient can be healed. Now, in many circumstances, fertility is not a disease, and treatments to prevent it are silly in those instances. In some circumstances, it is not a desirabled condition, and if, after discussing it with her doctor, a woman does not desire to be fertile--and safe medicines are available for this purpose, as well all know--the pharmacist should hand over the pills.

This is not merely a matter of reproductive health. What if pharmacists want to withhold morphine from cancer patients, because people on death's doorstep should have every opportunity to share in Christ's suffering at the time of death? What if pharmacists withhold HIV drugs, because, as Jerry Falwell once said, HIV is the tool of God sent down to rid the earth of homosexuals?

We mention the raped woman in Tuscon for another reason: All those conservatives who say that abortions in cases of rape and incest are tolerable to them but all other abortions must be stopped are full of shit. They have no compunctions about endeavoring to make abortion so scarce that even in cases they say they would tolerate, abortions are not available, as Plan-B was not in this case.

So, if pharmacists refuse for non-health reasons to release on a doctor's order the medicines they keep under lock and key, we should take the medicines out from under lock and key.

A Movie To Tell Us What is Wrong With TV

We watched Good Night, and Good Luck this weekend and gladly report that it was enjoyed by all. George Clooney's work has been hit or miss, so we were naturally skeptical. What's more, we were reluctant to shell out $10 for a civics lesson from Ed Murrow.

It is a civics lesson, of course: Murrow's reporting was responsible for reigning in Sen. Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt, and we should all remember that an aggressive, adversarial news media is one of democracy's few protections against demagoguery. That being said, most people likely to see the movie are liberals who feel this way already, so Murrow's ghost will preach to the choir. The movie seems to know this; when the CBS team is cutting together clips of McCarthy's grandstanding, they remark that by reporting on him with only his own words, they will only further endear him to everyone who loves him and further disgust everyone who hates him.

As an aside, compare Ann Coulter's keynote, at the Ronald Reagan Black Tie and Blue Jeans barbeque, that she "was never a big fan of the First Amendment," which met with applause and prompted Republicans to describe her speech as "hard hitting, but sometimes the truth hurts." Not only does this make our point beautifully, but also demonstrates that not a damn thing has changed in 50 years.

David Strathairn obviously enjoyed playing Murrow, and who wouldn't? He gets to repeat Murrow's brilliant if obvious editorial: "...dissent is not disloyalty; accusation is not proof; conviction depends on evidence and due process of law; and finally, as defenders of freedom abroad, the United States cannot desert it at home." Last week, Jack Schafer at Slate wondered what the New York Times could do to save itself. There is your answer.

Movie web site / Trailer from Apple

The Worst "Best" List

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so TIME pulled 100 talked about novels off the shelf and called them the best. This has already been done over at Random House/Modern Library, and, we think, well enough that any second attempt--especially any attempt by TIME--would just be a hack job. And it is.

Matthew Baldwin over at The Morning News went through TIME's 100 best and looked to see what reviewers at Amazon.com had to say about these "best" novels to create a Worst of the Best list. A Clockwork Orange "really pissed me off," said one Amazon citizen. Even better, the worst reviewer of Lord of the Flies introduces himself as a Survivor fan, 'cause that makes him totally qualified as a literary critic. (For the record, he was disturbed by the book, as "anyone with a conscience would agree.")

PS After linking TIME, we're going to need to shower over and over to wash off the filth. At least our technorati rankings will rise...