I can’t decide if Christopher Hitchens’ article in Vanity Fair in which he willingly submits to being waterboarded in order to help him decide if it’s torture or not qualifies him to be considered like one of those spunky courageous first-person journalists of yore like Orwell or if it’s just an audition for Jackass: Celebrity Journalist edition. I’m guessing a little of both, leaning toward the latter. Because while it certainly shows a little more guts than many of his milquetoast bretheren, there are actually a lot of fairly courageous journalists actually covering the war at real, great personal danger. And it’s ultimately sort of a pointless stunt: maybe Hitchens personally wasn’t sure waterboarding was torture, but honestly, I don’t even think the Bush administration lawyers really believe deep in their hearts that it isn’t.

Last week, the Dig noted The Globe’s comically priggish circumlocutions in printing the title of the new Yo La Tengo album.

The one that stood out like a sore thumb for me this week was this one, in a story about Kelley Link et. al.:

Like many genre categories, this one is a shape-shifter with an array of aliases, including “slipstream,” “new weird,” and even a variation that combines “weird” with a common scatological term.

One one hand, it feels like taking them to task for this is a little like trying to get the prissy kid to swear during recess. But really, the only reason that’s fun is because the kid is so prissy. Just saying “weird shit” somehow sounds far less offensive than “even a variation that combines ‘weird’ with a common scatological term.”

In case you missed your local autumn county fair of choice, like we did, you can live vicariously through the descriptions of food creations in this LA Times article

At the State Fair of Texas — known for introducing the first corn dog in 1942 — a vendor who won the best taste category last year for his deep-fried peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwiches has stolen headlines again this year for inventing deep-fried Coke.

Other items making the rounds include deep-fried macaroni and cheese, deep-fried spaghetti and deep-fried cosmopolitans — a pastry filled with cheesecake and topped with cranberry glaze and a lime wedge. And served on a stick.

I apologize in advance for linking to UK tabloid The Sun, but I’m not sure what’s funnier, a drunken David Hasselhoff shouting “Do you know who I am? I’m the Hoff!” or that there was an 80’s cop show in Britain called “Dempsey and Makepeace”.

have the same sense of fatalistic slow motion at their beginning as this one does?

What am I missing that this isn’t all over the news and/or the blogosphere? The new Seymour Hersh New Yorker story on plans for attacking Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons, seems like a pretty big deal to me.

Do you think the Globe, particularly with their extremely cozy relationship with the Sox, would normally ever, ever advertise Derek Jeter jerseys under this article?

How about advertising cheats for online Texas Hold’em after an article about gambling addictions among teens who play Texas Hold’em online?

Here’s one of the pitfalls of those highly-relevant ads that has made Google a bazillion dollar company.

From the NYT corrections page (emphasis mine):

A front-page article last Tuesday about foreign governments’ security concerns regarding satellite photography available through Google referred imprecisely to security measures applied to some of the imagery. Although images of the White House and its environs are now clear in the Google Earth database, the view of the vice president’s residence in Washington remains obscured. (Go to Article)

I’m finally trying to skim through the stack of 3 weeks worth of Wall Street Journals that have piled up by the door (there’s a reason that I don’t subscribe to daily newspapers unless they’re free), and there have only been a couple of articles that have caught my eye.

First, the Google founders are buying not just any jet, but a Boeing 767. That doesn’t bother me so much; I think it would be fun to have a 767. What kind of torques me off is this:

Larry Page, quoted in the article, said “part of the equation of this sort of machinery is to be able to take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world.”

Oh, come on, Larry. Just drive everybody to Africa in your damn Prius if you care about what’s good for the world. If you want to buy yourself a jumbo jet, just buy yourself a jumbo jet and say you’re buying yourself a jumbo jet. If you really want to ship people and gear to Africa, why are you renovating it to have two luxury staterooms and only hold 50 people?

Second, I actually found an article, yes, in the WSJ, stating that global warming is a fact. Not an unproven matter still disputed by scientists, but an observable demonstrable fact. In the science section? No. News? Nope. Editorial? <snort!>

No, it was in the travel section. “Climate Change Island Guide: As weather and geological disasters add new risks, we rank 40 destinations”. It even has an info graphic called the “Dow Jones Island Index” which goes through about 30 destinations and gives each a risk score and the change in degrees of in its average ocean temperature between 1974 and 2004.

While taking notice of environmental phenomena only as it impacts your vacation plans seems like an unbelievable cartoon of self-interest, I’m ultimately not going to knock it. Whatever makes people take notice and do the right thing. I think that business types are still basically rational humanists. I still just don’t understand their support for faith-based nut jobs.

I’ve gone back and forth a couple of times on what to do with things I just want to link to but don’t have a lot of additional stuff to say about, or that don’t warrant a full blow post with the great big title. So I’ve set up the Daily Reading thingy over there on the right, which are things I’ve come across that I think are worth reading. It has its own separate RSS feed.

For those of you who care about such things, it’s done with del.icio.us and the Wordpress del.icio.us plugin.

From Joshua Clark, a resident of the French Quarter’s daily column “Apocalypse N.O.” in Salon:

Last week, the 10 of us holed up together in the commune formed an organization to start cleaning the Quarter: New Orleanians Eliminating Negative Debris (NO END). Our motto is “Less Weeping, More Sweeping.” In keeping with our motto, we constructed a sign and hung it in front of St. Anthony’s Garden behind the St. Louis Cathedral. In the center of the garden, smack-dab in the center of the French Quarter, stands a 20-foot-high statue of Jesus with his arms stretched high and wide — a city icon known lovingly as “Touchdown Jesus.” The sign, now locally (in)famous, says, “Jesus Swept.”

I’ve felt I had little to add to the Katrina blather, but, after the feelings of sympathy and amazement at the devastation and devolution have passed, my lasting impression remains what today’s Onion totally nails: “God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again“. I thought pretty much the same thing after the Iran earthquakes in 2003 and last December’s Tsunami. When God shows how he can wipe out thousands of people in any corner of the world with such casual ease, how can anyone either be a terrorist or seriously fear terrorists? I mean, this is not a being who needs help from his followers when he wants to do some serious killing.

Right now, if I’m Osama, I’d have to wonder if maybe even thinking I can come close to matching God’s murderous capacity is just blasphemy and self-flattery. And right now, if I’m me, I’m thinking, I’ve got no problem riding the subway everyday, but being so close to the Atlantic is maybe not such a great idea.

Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe,” the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday. … Bai is seeking damages totaling $300 million — the approximate equivalent of the mission’s cost — for her “moral sufferings,” Izvestia said, citing her lawyer Alexander Molokhov. She earlier told the paper that the experiment would “deform her horoscope.” (from Yahoo! News via Slashdot)

Now, even if you take astrology at face value, how is it possible to deform a horoscope? Are the celestial bodies supposed to cause things to happen on Earth, or are they just part of the same celestial clockwork, mirroring events on Earth, allowing astrologers to read them? In which case, the cause of the celestial event is irrelevant.

Or, even if you do think that celestial bodies cause Earthly events, doesn’t that mean that the celestial bodies caused NASA to send a probe to the comet? Maybe she should sue the stars.

From New York Metro:

… Yet the standard-issue amber-cast pharmacy pill bottle has remained virtually unchanged since it was pressed into service after the second World War. (A child-safety cap was added in the seventies.) An overhaul is finally coming, courtesy of Deborah Adler, a 29-year-old graphic designer whose ClearRx prescription-packaging system debuts at Target pharmacies May 1.