I am a fairly frequent reader of David Byrne’s journal/blog. He’s been pretty excited and upbeat and heartened by Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election. As someone who travels the whole world over, I think his perspectives on the impact of this election on both the United States of America and on the world as a whole are worth […]

Political junkie, that is. I never claimed otherwise. I’ve even infected my wife. You should have seen us during the last weeks of the election, sitting in the living room with our laptops blazing, checking out polls at Pollster, Gallup, 538.com, & Electoral-Vote.com, and reading and writing for the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos and Bob Cesca’s Goddam Awesome […]

On May 15th, I joined the “Dexter for Obama” group on My.BarackObama.com. A couple of weeks later, I received a message from a woman named MaryAnn. It read: Hope Everyone Cann (sic) attend the Organizing Meeting on Thursday June 19 at 7 at Dexter Pub. See you there. On June 19th, my wife and I plopped our kayaks into a […]

Happy National Chemistry Week. We chemists are a crazy bunch, I tell ya. “Chemists Cause Reactions”“Polymer Chemists Do It In Chains”“Experiment With a Chemist”“If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Precipitate”“Chemists do it in an excited state.”“Chemists do it periodically on the table.” Bonus chemist joke:A chemist walks into a pharmacy and asks the pharmacist, “Do […]

I commend your attention to this piece at the Huffington Post: Escape to Europe, Our Election Follows. I know the guy that wrote it ;) I’m just sayin’…

The scumbag that hacked Governor Palin’s personal email account turned himself in yesterday. I hope he gets the book thrown at him. His little stunt does nothing to further the cause of Democrats. Sure, she shouldn’t have been using a private account to avoid records-retention rules. Fine. I agree. Throw the book at her on that. But illegally hacking into […]

As I understand it, according to our Dear Leader and his minions, it’s our freedoms they hate… I tend to agree more with Bill Maher, actually: “They don’t hate us for our freedom,” said Maher with a laugh. “They hate us for our airstrikes. In Afghanistan, that seems to be the problem. It’s that, we keep killing people with our […]

Jonathon Freedland of the Guardian newspaper in England had an editorial last month that puts the Europoean perspective in very basic terms. I hope that, a month later, he’s beginning to feel more optimism. I think he has summed up how most of the rest of the Western world views the upcoming election. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride […]

This diagram does the best job I’ve seen of showing why all this Drill Here, Drill Now bullshit is just that: bullshit. Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration Any questions? UPDATE: I’ve put this graphic and text together as a mini-poster (a PDF document) for you to download. Print this out. Show it to your friends. Let’s get ’em educated. […]

We lost one of the good ones this past Friday when David Foster Wallace, author of the legendary Infinite Jest, was found dead from suicide. DFW’s insight into society and American life, in particular, made him a standout in the literary world. His death is a tragic loss. In 2000, DFW spent two weeks on the campaign trail with John […]

The US economy is almost literally melting down before our eyes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are taken over by the US government. Lehman Brothers going bankrupt. Merrill Lynch has had to sell itself to Bank of America to save itself. A.I.G. is is asking the Federal Reserve for $40 billion to keep afloat. The list goes on. And yet […]