For those of you who have never seen one, the placenta is to the baby what Stephen Baldwin is to Alec Baldwin. It’s what your liver would look like if it got into an accident on the autobahn with one of those aliens from Mars Attacks! and their bloody carcasses threw jellyfish at each other.
Category: Tumbles
I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.” Later, as night fell over the tumultuous capital, gunfire could be heard in the distance. And from rooftops across the city, the defiant sound of “Allah‐u-Akbar” — “God is Great” — went up yet again, as it has every night since the fraudulent election. But on Saturday it seemed stronger. The same cry was heard in 1979, only for one form of absolutism to yield to another. Iran has waited long enough to be free.
I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.
One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as “that ever‐gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.” If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.
Yesterday, Sunlight Labs announced Apps for America 2. The follow‐up contest marks the recent launch of data.gov
by soliciting apps that find interesting ways to crunch that site’s numbers. (Not sure if I’ll enter yet; I haven’t had much time to see what data.gov has to offer.)
Michael Tyznik’s entry in The Daily Blend’s Dollar RedDe$ign Project. This is currency triumph: eliminate the penny and the dollar bill, introduce $1 and $2 coins, and get people talking about the Bill of Rights. Oh, and it uses Stag, the goddamned excellent font that I use on this here weblog.
InfoQ posted a “virtual panel” in which framework authors answer questions about HTML5. Thomas Fuchs and I, among others, answer questions about how (if?) HTML5 will make our lives easier, and what more we want out of JavaScript in the future.
I’ve had my new unibody MacBook Pro for a week and adore it to tears, but it wasn’t until just now that I was able to address my one outstanding nitpick: I kept accidentally triggering the “pinch zoom” gesture in Safari, making everything on the page awkwardlry huge. There’s no way to turn it off in the settings without disabling multitouch on the trackpad altogether. But Jeff Hawkins’s InputManager fix does the trick. Also available for Firefox and Mail.app.
Oh, by the way: I will continue to post the occasional bit of political opinion (and political silliness) on this site. But I’ve also started to write more sober analysis on the Filibusted blog. It’s going to be an eventful year in the U.S. Senate — hop on for the ride.
In case you don’t follow Louisiana politics (and why don’t you? it’s hilarious): Republican David Vitter — prostitute patron, hypocrite, and general‐purpose jackass — is up for reelection in 2010. He’ll face a legitimate challenge from the Dems, but a grassroots movement to give Vitter a GOP primary challenge is getting pretty hot and heavy. Award‐winning adult film actress Stormy Daniels is considering a run; she kicked off a “listening tour” today in her native Baton Rouge. I hope she will do the right thing for the state of Louisiana and for my general amusement.