Not that it’s anybody’s business, really, but I’ve renamed my penis “The Hannitizer.” Carry on.

…To Mark Curtin, for the Film Noir DVD box set; David Nolin, for The Fourth Man (been wanting to see that one for a while but never got around to it; no excuses now!); and Lydia Van Houten for the Harry Potter films.  When DVDs arrive at my door unexpectedly, I get all tingly and happy—and for the rest of the day I’m a kind and caring human being, a

Believe me, there’s nothing I’d rather do than to give the gift of a tap dancing Dasypus, but the little fella’s not long back from New Orleans, where he thoroughly exhausted himself working a string of eighteen-hour days helping the Army Corp of Engineers pump toxic water out of the ruins of the Crescent City. Of course, it didn’t help that late Wednesday, over warm Dixie Beers and Étouffée at

From Jim Pinkerton, writing at Tech Central Station: Kyoto Treaty RIP. That’s not the headline in any newspaper this morning emerging from the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, but it could have been—and should have been. Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with “brutal honesty” about Kyoto and global warming, and

Michael Reynolds of The Mighty Middle doesn’t take kindly to my recent “attack” on a certain breed of rhetorical presumptuousness (namely, the willingness to assign blame everywhere in lieu of a complete accounting of the facts as a way to assume a rhetorical high ground), suggesting that I’ve mischaracterized as an argument what was merely a description. But notice Reynolds doesn’t address the operable part of my argument—that Gandelman’s framing

Nope, not at the Subway drive-thru at Clay and Alameda—though I did find a loaded foot-long BMT and a bag of sour cream and onion Sun Chips. So, y’know, silver linings and all that.

“You know something, Billy? I don’t care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink, or if she’s Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don’t care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops

From April of 2005, “Blanco Addresses FEMA Payback Issue”: Governor Kathleen Blanco says if the state is forced to pay back the federal government more than 30 million dollars, the state’s children and sick will suffer. This week, FEMA officials sent a letter demanding back 30.4 million dollars back in misspent flood buyout money. Governor Blanco is very concerned about that FEMA demand letter. She says the state simply does