An Antidote to Family Circus

When you feel like shaking Bill Keane until he vomits treacle, check out Red Meat. Papa Moai will heap blessings on your stone head.
Courtesy of silvertide

The Story So Far

In his column in the Washington Post, Colbert I. King gives a succinct and chilling summary of our Iraq war, ending with this:

Afterward, Bush should close the doors, repair to a quiet place, and read from beginning to end Delaware Sen. Joe Biden’s speech Thursday before the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Getting It Right in Iraq.”

Biden said: “Let me leave you with one thought. I come from Delaware. I have been to Dover many times. The men and women there who receive our soldiers and their families on that last long journey home know what this is about. When those planes fly over Delaware and land in the middle of the night, we are reminded that this is not about politics, about whether we believe with every fiber of our being that we are fundamentally right or that someone else is dangerously wrong. This is not about assigning blame or about partisanship. This is about that last journey home to Dover Air Base. It’s about those brave Americans who are doing everything in their power to get it right. We owe them no less than to get it right ourselves.”

The president should start handing out walking papers.

Battery Harris

I rode my bike down to Rockaway today, to the beach and Fort Tilden. During World War II the fort was part of New York City’s coastal defenses.
From atop Battery Harris, a defunct gun emplacement, you can look north to see the Manhattan skyline, and south to see the Atlantic Ocean and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The dunes are full of birds and rabbits. At noon, when the sun heats up the flora, the air is heavy with the scent of scrub pine and juniper.
If you’re not a native, it’s hard to believe that this is part of New York City.

Point to Point

A great site for calculating surface distances and great circle routes.

Brooklyn, New York, to Easter Island (Rapa Nui): 5203.20 statute miles.
Baghdad, Iraq, to New York, New York: 5986.96 statute miles.
Seattle, Washington, to Zanzibar, Tanzania: 9369.19 statute miles.

Ask Not for Whom the FCC Trolls…

Today in Salon, newspaper editor and sex columnist Dan Savage talks about the FCC’s war on Howard Stern, and on sexual content in the media. Savage asks Why isn’t everyone who cares about free speech rallying around the embattled radio personality?:

We should be concerned because what’s being done to Howard Stern is part of a concerted effort by religious and cultural conservatives to stamp out the sexual openness that has come to define mainstream culture over the last 20 years.
…AIDS forced Americans to start having open, honest conversations about sex and desire. It was an adult conversation about sex, and like all adult conversations about sex it involved a lot of humor. Dying is easy, as the AIDS epidemic made clear. Talking about sex is hard — and the sudden need to talk about sex in the wake of AIDS opened the door not just to condom commercials on television and safe-sex pamphlets in our mailboxes, but sexually explicit humor on “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” and Howard Stern’s radio show.