Blue Armadillo weblog

Saturday, June 09, 2001

Michigan Governor John Engler is touting former Survivor contestant Michael Skupin as a potential Republican candidate for the US Senate. He would face current Senator Carl Levin, who is one of the most popular poititicans in the state. Skupin has as good a chance as anyone else, which is to say none at all, but give Engler points for thinking outside the box.
posted by John Heaton 8:48 PM | link

I like Ted Rall quite a lot; he's not the best artist in the world, to put it mildly, but his editorial cartoons have a bite to them that many don't. I particularly enjoyed this cartoon about the Bush daughters.
posted by John Heaton 8:34 PM | link

Friday, June 08, 2001

This is about the least likely headline I've ever seen: Nuns guilty of genocide. Call me a crazy traditionalist, but in my day nuns didn't participate in massacres. Link via moreover via Linkwatcher.
posted by John Heaton 1:00 PM | link

I am now listed in LinkWatcher. This is the latest in my continuing series, "Ideas I Stole From Vanessa."
posted by John Heaton 12:50 PM | link

This interesting essay by science fiction author Diane Duane about how she created the Romulan Language for use in a couple of Star Trek novels she wrote led me to the Universal Translator Assistant," which can provide a rough translation from English to Klingon, Vulcan and Romulan. Wierd.
posted by John Heaton 12:32 PM | link

Thanks to Gael of Pop Culture Junk Mail for pointing to this videogames.com history of video games. I was up into the wee hours of the morning reading it. It starts to drag a bit as it hits the 1990s, but nevertheless it's fascinating. And it has a good Flash intro, which a rare thing indeed.
posted by John Heaton 9:54 AM | link

Thursday, June 07, 2001

This is the greatest editorial I've ever read. Leave it to the LA Times to treat the David Manning story with the gravity it deserves. Thanks to medianews.org for the link.
posted by John Heaton 11:58 PM | link

I'm troubled by the report that the FCC recently fined a radio station in Colorado for playing an edited version of "The Real Slim Shady." I'm no fan of Eminem, and I do have concerns about adult content being marketed to kids, but that doesn't mean the FCC should fine a station for playing a song that merely contains sexual innuendo. What's next, Oldies 100 being fined for playing "Chevy Van"?
posted by John Heaton 2:51 PM | link

A month ago, the Capitol Hill Chorale performed the American premiere of an important new requiem mass by an up-and-coming young composer from Georgia. Unfortunately, it turns out that the mass was a note-for-note copy of another requiem mass written by an obscure French composer in 1963. The Washington Post explains the situation, including the possible legal and financial repercussions for the CHC and the mysterious and apparently exaggerated past of the plagarist. It's fascinating, and of course as a chorister myself I feel bad for the CHC, which is apparently innocent in all this, but I have to say, thank God it happened to them and not my group.
posted by John Heaton 2:39 PM | link

When I think about country music, I tend to think of unsophisticated hicks and moonshine -- thank you, Hee Haw. For that reason, I was a little surprised by this slate.com article about the the sophisticated and professional efforts of the Country Music Hall of Fame to restore and preserve early country music recordings. I wonder if the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum does stuff like this?
posted by John Heaton 2:14 PM | link

Wednesday, June 06, 2001

In 1986, Michael Kinsley wrote a column in The New Republic on the subject of boring headlines. Fifteen years later, one of his employees at slate.com has revisited the subject. Rob Walker's examination of recent stories in the New York Times World Business section. My favorite is "Myanmar Tests Resolve of I.L.O. on Enforcing Standards," but they're all pretty good. Incidentally, the Myanmar story is just as interesting as it sounds.
posted by John Heaton 10:57 AM | link

Apparently I'm not the only person concerned about the government wasting money on tax rebates for people who don't need the rebate in the first place. Salon.com reports that a gentleman named Tony Adams has created TaxRebatePledge.org to encourage people to pledge their tax rebate to one of a variety of "organizations fighting against Bush's agenda," such as the Sierra Club, the ACLU, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. As of this moment, 48 people have pledged $14,125. I was no. 48.
posted by John Heaton 10:28 AM | link

Tuesday, June 05, 2001

Conan O'Brien's commencement address to the Harvard University Class of 2000. My college had a policy of not inviting famous speakers to give commencement addresses. Instead, the seniors would select a member of the faculty to give the address. Therefore, I have absolutely no clue who gave the commencement address at my graduation.
posted by John Heaton 11:20 AM | link

"I'm not sure if Jenna Bush has a drinking problem, but there's little doubt she has a thinking problem." Hee! Richard Roeper's column in the Chicago Sun-Times basically says what I said in my June 4 journal entry, only better.
posted by John Heaton 10:35 AM | link

It's hard to believe that a film like Pandemonium ever got made. The synopsis sounds like a joke, like it was a "film-within-a-film" in a farce about the movie industry. That it appears at theonion.com doesn't help its credibility, but it appears in the A.V. Club section, which is where they cover real entertainment news, so I guess it's true.
posted by John Heaton 10:29 AM | link

This chart compiled by Timothy Noah for Slate is very interesting. It shows the various members of the Bush legal team who have landed jobs in the Bush administration. Nothing wrong with that, of course; I am in favor of political patronage. Nor do I begrudge these people their jobs. But if patronage is going to exist, we have a right to know who is benefitting from it, so the chart is a valuable service.
posted by John Heaton 10:18 AM | link

Sunday, June 03, 2001

This is one of the more intriguing error messages I've ever run across. I don't know what they're up to over at MIT, but if their security policy really requires a password of "at least 18770 characters," I'm impressed.
posted by John Heaton 7:58 PM | link

There's another chapter in the White House vandalism scandal. The Bush administration has released a list of acts of vandalism supposedly committed by Clinton staffers as they left the White House. A list is all well and good, but as Josh Marshall points out, a list is not evidence. A list is, well, just a list, and from all accounts it's not even a very detailed list. Minus any actual evidence, the reasonable assumption is that the list is little more than a half-assed attempt to discredit the GAO report that discredited the original vandalism claims.
posted by John Heaton 7:51 PM | link

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