drat fink
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here it comes (there it goes)
"When the old Sun bowed out on Jan. 4, 1950, it promised, as newspapers do, that the solution to the crossword puzzle would be published the next day. More than 52 years later, that next day finally came. The new Sun printed the answers yesterday."
history chunnel
"Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" (via booknotes)
time piece
""Four-twenty"--once an obscure Bay Area term for pot--is showing up nationally in the advertisements and business names of concert promoters, travel agencies, even high-tech companies."
give me a call
i think we might be able to build a coalition around this op-ed piece. who needs tom friedman when we can build up trust from our mutual hatred of cell phone excess.
smile for the camera
"Media training one of great delicious experiences of life," wrote Ms. Fielding in a 1998 account published in England’s The Daily Telegraph. "Word ‘scarf’ came up within three minutes …. Suddenly understand why Americans so fluent and sound-bite-esque on TV. Am trained to ‘scope out’ my ‘bullet points’ …. Must, however, not try to be funny but simply decide what going to say; tell them am going to say it, say it, then tell them have said it whilst ignoring interviewer, apart from using interviewer’s name as often as possible and remembering to ‘stay in the moment’ and clenching the buttocks to avoid tense-looking mouth."
phuket, yo
some abc gum for ya.
lapdawg
"Lapham once considered himself a centrist, but said the center has moved so far to the right that he's now seen as liberal. Still, he believes the notion of a liberal media is "a canard . . . utterly a straw man as far as I'm concerned."
The right wing wants to "blame the wreckage of the culture on a few university professors," Lapham said. "The people that have (wrecked the culture) -- it's the (Rupert) Murdochs of the world. Those are the people who say, 'Whatever the market will bear.' The market doesn't think. The market isn't a cultivated person. It's a ball bearing. It will go immediately to what sells. That's what wrecks the culture."
midas well
ny observer columnist michael thomas "retires" to life of golfing gardening and blogging.
yellow ruse
nobodys got any dirt on the karen hughes announcement that she would be leaving the administration because her family was homesick. seems highly implausible but stranger things have happened. meanwhile, talking points starts the ari fleischer deathwatch. may it be more successful than those of rumsfeld, o'neill and white.
bad oman
"MUSCAT, April 22 (PNS): The US has decided to spend £90m to build a new airbase in Oman with runways long enough to handle B52 strategic bombers and heavy-lift transport aircraft."
taking a break
"WASHINGTON, April 23 — The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners."
fashion plates
"Since he posted the first installment on Oct. 9 at www.mnftiu.cc, the strip has been a textbook illustration of the viral reach of the Web, spreading by word of e-mail alone, so that in its first two weeks it received five million hits from Web crawlers around the world. "A friend sent it to me," said the gadfly commentator Arianna Huffington, whose taste in language usually runs to more polite combat. She added: "Profanity is often a part of biting political commentary, including what `The Osbournes' is doing right now."
gated community
"In this fairy tale, Gates and his colleagues are knights in shining armor. They rescue technology from hard-hearted titans like IBM, and their own subsequent toughness is necessary to curb the chaos that would result if actual competition existed in the regime that replaced the big-iron brutes. Hence it is Microsoft's due, and right, to rule as sovereign. Without Microsoft's iron-fisted but simultaneously benevolent rule, the entire technology industry would unravel, and along with it just about everything else."