• RS McCain needs donations for his journalistic trip to New York’s district 23. An interesting line item for his expenses is two packs of cigarettes per day. I hope those are for share.
• The clients’ guide to web design. This kind of tutorial is essential in expectations management. I’ll be expanding on this matter down the road.
• Tom McMahon’s 4-block world has always been a source of great humor. Just start at the front page and keep scrolling.
• Ditto SondraK’s Knowledge is Power, which, by simple linkage or judicious use of emphases, is able to turn any liberal news into a source of humor.
• Jeffro asks, “how low is too low?” The basic skills for clients need to be reinforced. Clients should not dare deign to expect us to mainain sites in perpetuity.
• Here’s an interesting article I got found from Twitter about the benefits (or lack thereof) of extended steady-state cardio. It seems a little more geared towards slightly more, erm, fit people, but once a fatty reaches his plateau it’s time to rethink methods.
• Palin, Oprah, and the politics of personality — commentary by C4P, with some interesting insights on Oprah’s “community.”

• Professor Chris Lawrence has a roundup on BHO’s Nobel Peace Prize commentary.
• Charles Johnson, who was responsible in 2004 for publicizing (note, it was a Free Republic member who noticed the proportional font) the Dan Rather fake memos, himself has descended into fake-but-accurate Ratherisms about Rush Limbaugh.
• Barry Oh and Jeff Flake, a side-by-side comparison of male physiques. Aaron Schock couldn’t be reached for comment.
• Radley Balko muses on chicken wings and reveals that he thinks that chicken breast is tastier and easier to eat than wings. When you need to wash down every bite of ill-cooked chicken breast with a swig of drink and and sauce it up to mask the cardboard flavor, it’s really difficult to agree with him.
• Fallible Blogma, verbatim: “There is a freedom that accompanies an economic system like capitalism that doesn’t exist in socialist and communist systems. And this freedom is essential to respecting the dignity of the human person.”
• Mark Jaquith wants to start a new meme.
• With the seeming departure of Satin Shaw from the daily weather, Weather In Satin about to throw in the towel. I say they should cover Cooking With Lee instead.

• Deep Glamour reacts to the FTC disclosure rules, which prompts me to put up my own policies page. (Found from Dustbury.)
• Venomous Kate encounters an incontinent, obese woman.
• Inside Charm City, published by my friend Jeff Quinton, has been on top of a sex-toy event in UMCP that goes beyond the basics of safe sex and use.
• James Joyner responds to Paul Krugman, on the politics of spite.
• A fifteen-year-old British girl appears before parliament and rightfully lambastes Gordon Brown. Conservatives for Palin, however, forgot to note that our fifteen-year-old children are fat, lazy, and preoccupied with video games, feel-good activties, and singing praises to Barry Oh, so they don’t care.
• The City That Breeds reviews Mo’s Seafood, and has a nasty encounter with some raw clams.
• “Do you have any idea who I am? I can let you slit my throat and not blink an eye.” The Anchoress quotes a story and reflects on Barry Oh’s seeming desire to just tell the American people, “don’t you know who I am?”

• Jules Crittenden examines the brewing Shakespearean tragedy that is Obamlet.
• The Anchoress shares a Hebrew folk tale on the value of sharing what is the most to us, no matter how seemingly small we seem to perceive it.
• Rob at Say Anything has some Liberal columnists telling Barry Oh to step back a little. If only! Except Oh treats the Presidency as about him.
• Radley Balko (one of my three favorite Libertarians, all on equal footing) has a column on Reason about the Pottawamie vs. McGhee case and prosecutorial misconduct. I’m torn on this issue. I tend to lean in favor of law enforcement, but the bad apples make it really difficult at times.
• Powerline digs through the data of a report on the enormous unemployment rate among our country’s young. Having grown up in the Philippines, this looks all too familiar. “Are we racing towards the third world” is a question on so many lips these days.
• Julian Sanchez (the second of my three favorite Libertarians) picks apart a specious argument in favor of “net neutrality.” As is the case with almost any political buzzword these days, “net neutrality” has gone way beyond the simple desires of consumers’ ability to get as much bandwidth as they’re paying for.
• Inside Charm City is soliciting votes for the Baltimore Sun’s Mobbies, where your kind host is also a candidate under Misfits. Votes require registration. One vote per category per day.

• Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine on why it’s bad for Conservatism to have Glenn Beck as its face. Poor Wehner doesn’t get that Glenn Beck is the face of a movement, not a philosophy. Movements belong to its constiuents, not its leaders, silly!
• Fallible Blogma explains the origins of the concept of Transubstatiation. Like most religious doctrine, a lot of people get the origins backwards. Doctrine is written to codify what is generally accepted, not to force its acceptance upon the congregants.
• DJ Drummond profiles BHO the political narcissist and concludes that his incorrigibility arises from his inability to admit that something is wrong. Well, yeah.
• A Christian blogger wonders who is that man in the White House. I don’t know, man. All I know is that a lot of people voted him in. (Found from: The Anchoress)
• An agency responsible for misinformation about Sarah Palin was a participant in a conference call where the aim is for the National Endowment for the Arts to promote a pro-Administration agenda. It’s the Chicago way.
• Charles Hill writes and cites about the incursion of online life into real life, and laments.
• Last week, Norman Borlaug passed away. Calling him the father of the green revolution seems inadequate. The number of lives he’s saved due to his research would be hundreds of millions, if not billions.

“Let’s just say Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan would tuan yuan at every chance,” said Liu, referring to the combination of the panda’s names, which means “to reunite” in Mandarin. “They would do it doggy-style and every armchair zoologist knows that pandas favor the missionary position — when they do it at all. Their behavior caused chaos. Children screamed and parents became irate.” [...]

In a statement released yesterday evening, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) addressed the panda scandal.

“We understand that our compatriots in Taiwan are very upset. We wish to assure them that we have taken steps to address their concerns. We hope that our Taiwanese friends enjoy the gift of two extremely rare Wenzhou brown forest bears,” Qin said.

Hey, I’m an armchair zoologist and I didn’t know that. Then again I prefer marine zoology. In tomorrow’s news, we can expect Qin Gang to be executed for recognizing Taiwan in public. Oh the shame, the shame!

UPDATE: Yes I know it’s a belated April Fool’s post but it’s fun, still.

What would be the first thing that came into your mind if your doctor asked you to sign a gag order banning you from posting reviews? I would think that he has something to hide and terrified of people saying bad things. He would not be my doctor.

Run like the wind and don’t look back.

I think the debate over the definition of terms around SciFi and Fantasy as literary genres will never end. I think there is far less acrimony between writers of each genre than the depictions in pop culture show, however. I’ve always thought of SciFi as answering the question: “what if something we know about science were just a little different?” As for my taste in the genre, I prefer soft SciFi stuff that serve more as sociological and psychological treatises than I do the material details of hard SciFi.

A little bit of action, no matter the genre, always helps. And sex, right?

That and people can only write the action details of space battles so many times before things get a little too common.

(2) Stephan Segraves has something to say about how we generally consume products, as a people:

Part of this is consumer habits, we are a nation of junk consumers. I’m guilty and I am pretty sure you are too. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that now we want our junk at a lower price, even if it means cutting jobs here. Maybe our culture needs to think back to 1950s lifestyle and look at pictures from era Life and Time magazines, home and work life were simpler. And what is wrong with that? The struggle is digging ourselves out of hole when the mentality is, “why get out, we’re already here”.

Let me top that by saying that nowadays the idea of wealth is not a matter of how much money we have in our bank accounts and investments, but how much stuff we have to show for it. Nice idea if everything were bought on cash and we still have a lot more in savings, but that hasn’t been a trend for a while. Changes in consumptive behaviour, though, will lead to a market contraction. Like every economist I read would say: we can’t spend our way out of this.

(3) Here’s an awesome argument between Jeff Goldstein and Patterico, on the subject of Rush Limbaugh, the Post-Modernist Media, and how to win against the latter. Gist? That fighting against the Post-Modernist Media on their terms is basically capitulation. I think Goldstein’s point is missed by a lot of people who wish to “present the Conservative message” in a certain way, and it’s that no matter our ideas and how nice we play, we will always be vulnerable to their distortions. This is where the great polemic, Ann Coulter, excels: she goes on the attack, and speaks in terms that are so clear that the only thing liberals can do is cringe and call her “offensive,” without being able to actually debate the merits of her arguments.

(4)Jeff Emmanuel at RedState is applauding ten House Republicans over their offer for BHO to veto the current spending bill and to “work with him” to produce a better one. In his post, he states the following benefits: First, in reaching out to him, they are giving him the opportunity to show that he really can, contra his entire past record, work across the aisle and find areas of agreement across party lines[...] and, Second, the House Republicans really are throwing down the gauntlet on the “change” President Obama promised to “bring” to Washington when he relocated to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from his previous position, way down the street on Capitol Hill.

I have a better idea. How about introducing every measure possible to trim it down, not voting for the bill when it hits the floor, and then banging the drum when Pelosi and BHO don’t consider your suggestions? I say the GOP shouldn’t afford him the opportunity to actually polish his image. Heck, that’s what the Dems did to take both houses of Congress.

But as Robert Shiller, the Yale economist, has pointed out, this is a very new idea. For most of history, a house was simply a very long-term durable good, which, like cars and refrigerators, began depreciating the day it was finished. Why do we think differently now?

Shiller’s argument, which I find pretty compelling, is that we’ve been deluded by recent history. Since World War II, a number of developments have conspired to boost the prices of homes, giving a large capital gain to those who were lucky enough to own at the time. This has given us the delusion that house prices rise steadily, when in fact, we have virtually certainly exhausted the pricing gains of those happy developments.

Housing as an investment is pretty much financial literacy for the intellectually lazy.

I think I have way too many political blogs on my Google Reader considering that is now the Age Of Obama, and that he is The Won. Time to diversify…