Martin Miller (“Is Campaigns’ Path to the Heart a Proper One?”, LAT [11 Aug ’00]), on Windy Smith’s cameo at the 2000 RNC:
“What the nation witnessed was the passing of the torch,” said JoAnn Simons, president of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress. “Individuals with disabilities don’t necessarily need people to speak for them.”
More (“Tugging [...]
Eve Fairbanks (“McCain Campaign Tries the Chicken Prank,” “The Stump” [TNR], 25 Aug ’08):
a prank legendarily pulled at my high school in which students procured well fewer than 20 live chickens, numbered them 1 through 20 with magic markers (leaving some numbers out), set them loose, and then sat back and gleefully watched as hapless [...]
“Don’t be evil” is too passive and, above all, too simple. A minor mod like this…
Google may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Google must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Google must protect its [...]
The NYT has an “interactive” piece—an aggro Flash thing that takes its inspiration from OSX’s Dock—about development of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present.
Three alternate/additional designs for the Mexico City ’68 torch can be found at the site of Olympic Museum. Here’s a clearer detail of Type B:
The headline for Ron Lieber’s “Danger Lurks When Shopping for Student Loans” (NYT, 26 July, ’08) is neutered in a typical way: it should read “Predatory Student Loansters *#@% Your Children for Shopping Around.” This isn’t a diffuse, inevitable danger, and it definitely isn’t “lurking”: it’s a morass of meticulously developed analyses and techniques implemented [...]
Motoko Rich, “Conservative Authors Sue Publisher,” NYT (7 Nov ’07): “Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company” [...]
School officials who report suspected sexual abuse of a child based on a psychic‘s claim to an educational assistant that “a little girl by the name of ‘V’ … is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26” versus a mother who, “dissatisfied with the treatment her daughter had received [...]
WSJ, “School Districts Get Tough as Home Foreclosures Rise“:
Districts from Florida to California are hiring private investigators, creating anonymous tip lines and imposing penalties when they believe people have registered at false addresses. [...] One reason for the crackdown is the rise in home foreclosures, which may prod parents into faking addresses to keep their [...]
Mr. Kerrey: “Mr. McCain is getting an honorary degree. He was invited to speak. First was Barak Obama. Both say yes and/or both say no.”
Jean Sara Rohe’s prebuttal of McCain’s commencement speech, and her later explanation. McCain chief of Staff Mark Salter: “The only person you have succeeded in making look like an idiot is [...]
According to “Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching,” 82 St. John’s L. Rev. 235, “Nonverbal behaviors appear to matter much more than anything else in student ratings” of teachers.
(Moneylaw | Froomkin)