Mmmmm....victory tastes good.

Ladies and Gentleman...I think we finally have a Democratic nominee! :)

If this were most anyone else running against Obama, they'd drop out tomorrow morning. But I bet Hillary plugs away a bit longer. Which is totally her right to do. But I think Obama would be wise to turn toward the general election race - and Senator McCain - at this point.

I love an Obama vs McCain match-up. I love it love love it. Nobody campaigns as terribly as John McCain. And nobody campaigns better than Barack Obama.

How can it already be ten years ago this month that Seinfeld went off the air?!

Yep, I'm bringing back the random poll after a year or so off. Have at it...


Poll #1181443 Random Friday Poll
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Who gets your vote for President?

Should Vanity Fair's photos of Miley Cyrus be a top news story?

Which is the better month?

Did you own roller skates as a kid?

Have you ever successfully finished a Rubik's Cube

What's the most interesting thing you're doing this weekend?

If you have about 5 minutes, this is a super interesting little study/quiz...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml

(My score: 14 out of 20)

(taken from lessmess)

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina (reading right now)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers</lj>

There has probably never been a better soul singer than Otis Redding. That is a fact.

This couldn't be a more useless discussion, but still...30 Rock has now officially passed The Office in funny. For quite a while, I'd felt it catching up - but still I defended the Dundler-Miflin gang from Tina Fey's furious onslaught of funny - but watching them back to back last night there is simply no question about it. 30 Rock is the sharpest show on network TV, in addition to the funniest. I'd say it's closing in on Arrested Development territory lately, which is like saying that something is approaching perfection. Seriously, I couldn't even keep track of all the funny lines last night, and trying to remember them all now I'm only struck by how I need to watch the episode all over again. Tracey Morgan supporting John McCain (or trying anyway)? Brilliant.

"My fellow Black Americans, Dr. King once had a dream - a dream that we all share - to build a 200 foot high wall to keep Mexico out. And he also hated the estate tax."

The return of Liz's old boyfriend Dennis Duffy? Also brilliant:

"We're like Ross and Rachel, only not gay."


Last night's entire episode:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

- Carl Sagan

Okay, I'm in a totally different time zone so I'll try this again. Anybody still up?!

Any one still up?

I really really wish Hillary Clinton would drop out already...the longer all of this goes on - despite it being all but impossible for her to win the nomination - the harder it is for me to like her, and the harder it will be to vote for her come November. Not saying I won't or anything, but dammit, stuff like this just pisses me off:

1. Democratic Official: Clinton Pursuing the "Tanya Harding Option"

And then, this a bit later:

2. Clinton: Wright "Would Not Have Been My Pastor"

Not that she's trying to deflect attention from the whole OMG BOSNIA WAS FULL OF SNIPERS CHASING ME! thing that's dogging her right now (for good reason, as she stretched the truth beyond recognizable dimensions - and video can directly prove her wrong)


I'm sorry, but I'm just not feeling any Hillary love lately.

Senator Obama's speech today:



Full text of the speech here


Thoughts?


(Personally, I think he knocked it out of the park.)

Fail.




(hat tip to maggiesox)

Oh Snap!

Sinbad Unloads on Hillary Clinton (Washington Post, 3/11/08)

Finally, the Barack Obama campaign has found a big gun to help shoot down Hillary Rodham Clinton's self-proclaimed foreign policy experience. And he may be the wackiest gun of all: Sinbad, the actor, who has come out from under a rock to defend Obama in the war over foreign policy credentials.

Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she's taking much grief on the campaign trail.

Harrowing? Not that Sinbad recalls. He just remembers it being a USO tour to buck up the troops amid a much worse situation than he had imagined between the Bosnians and Serbs.

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.

Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.

"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"

In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."

Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

As you may have guessed by now, Sinbad isn't supporting Clinton for president. He's an Obama guy. All because of Clinton.
( Read more... )

Still, I'm a pretty big deal:


Mix-Tape Master (109-144 points)

You are a music evangelist: the person in your network of friends who always has the coolest new song, the one whose iPod gets picked to DJ every party. You understand the art of the segue, how the key to the best mix-tape isn't just the songs you pick, but how they interlock with each other. You also know who the up-and-coming acts are and are quick to recognise where their influences lie and whether they will make it big. You work hard at the pursuit of this knowledge, scouring music blogs, magazines and record stores. Most importantly, you are generous with your passion – and your friends should be very, very grateful. Still, it’s always good to get new inspiration for your latest mix.

My total score was 123. Go ahead, try and beat me fools:

Music Intelligence Quiz

Olbermann did an interesting piece on this last night, highlighting the fact that Senator Clinton has mentioned - at least three times in the past week! - how qualified Senator McCain would be to lead the country, in apparent contrast to Senator Obama's abilities. What kind of crazy ass strategy is this? There can only be two real explanations:

1) She is far more a "Lieberman" Democrat (hawkish, pro-McCain) than some liberal supporters would like to believe, and is finally starting to reveal this in more depth (in a move to the center for the general election?)

or

2) She will do absolutely anything and everything - i.e. the kitchen sink approach - to beat Obama for this nomination. In which case, praising McCain seems incredibly short-sighted. One can only imagine the commercials he could put out with virtual endorsements of his readiness to be President from Hillary herself if they faced off in the general election.

So, what gives?


Olbermann's piece last night:

...I said what I said quickly, but if I was to spell it out more slowly and rationally, here's what I meant when I said Hillary needs to exit the race already:

from here (hat tip to tyldak)

"And while I can understand [Hillary Clinton's] decision -- bolstered by yesterday's results -- to fight on in this primary election, the reality is that she can only win by convincing large numbers of superdelegates to join her and re-engineering the Michigan and Florida primaries to her advantage, and then taking the fight all the way to the convention in August -- which if she gets that far, will be one of the most divisive in forty years. [...] The sad news is that whether the Clinton scorched-earth strategy ultimately succeeds or fails, it will have caused great harm. [...] HRC's tactics are the old politics the nation is recoiling from -- internal division and national fear. This only serves to deepen Americans' cynicism about politics, and makes social change all the harder to achieve."

- Robert Reich, President Clinton's Secretary of Labor 1993-1997

-----

So, those of you who think she should still stay in, could you kindly explain to me why?

I don't care that she won Texas and Ohio...she still needs to drop out already. It can't possibly be good for Democrats to have this thing drag out until the summer. :(

now THAT was a great episode.

if you gave up on lost in season two (like even i did for a few weeks), you should really hurry back as soon as possible. there hasn't been a bad episode in the bunch this year.