Archive for March 2006

Just had to throw this one out there, without any additional commentary:
US debt clock running out of time, space
New York (AFP) - Tick, 20,000 dollars, tock, another 20,000 dollars.
So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, that the last four digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New York’s […]

By now it’s all over the web that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia showed his Sicilian roots on the steps of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston this past Sunday. Scalia’s always been tremendously annoying, what with his role in the 2000 presidential (s)election, and more recently his other loose-cannon moment, […]

Today, a brief study in headline writing. But first, we revisit a recent post.
A couple of weeks ago, I commented on how off Nico at Think Progress seemed to be, referring to Jack Abramoff as a “disgraced lobbyist”.

To be fair, just a glance at Google News search results on this story makes it pretty […]

the lone star state has gone over to the puritans.
gone are the days of jim bowie and will travis. now a man can’t even get a drink at the local watering hole without getting arrested.
Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic […]

From the first time I walked through the tunnel at Yankee Stadium for a night game and caught a glimpse of that most amazing expanse of vivid green turf in the middle of a concrete jungle, magically lit up by hundreds of lights, I was hooked. I played 9 years of organized ball, mostly at the catcher position because I idolized the late, great Thurman Munson, never was a great player, but I adored the sport.

One of my earliest posts here at Transcendental Floss concerned one of my favorite musical groups - Wilco. Their latest studio album, A Ghost Is Born, was out and my post wasn’t so much a review of the album as it was an overview of the band and what it is about them that I love so much.

Now, in case you thought that this might be a problem limited to the usual suspects like Bush, Cheney, McLellan, Rumsfeld, Rice, Chertoff, etc., in a story that hit a little too close to home for comfort, we can see how this “believe what we say, not what we do” mindset can be found in every nook and cranny of this administration, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“Because collecting foreign intelligence information without a warrant does not violate the Fourth Amendment and because the Terrorist Surveillance Program is lawful, there appears to be no legal barrier against introducing this evidence in a criminal prosecution.” –The Bush Justice Department

In another step necessary to protect the American people, the Bush Administration recently said doctor-patient […]

Just a week ago I addressed the foul political odor that the Pew Research Center shoved into the spotlight with it’s latest poll, and now, today, I came across a stench of another color in an article in The Guardian that would be hysterical if there wasn’t something so disturbing hiding between the lines.

This week’s open discussion.

“If [Democrats] are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol.” –dick cheney
no, dick. try american idiot.
your not-ready-for-prime-time tenure has shown you have all the tools for stardom…except talent, looks and brains. even your boy newt gingrich, a derelict in his own right, is booing you.
“The country actually […]

Transcendental Floss is a great site, but we are missing one important element: we don’t have a “creepy stalking” category for our posts. That’s unfortunate, because what I’m about to write would fit nicely into that very grouping.
Browsing through MetaFilter, I came upon an excerpt from a post that’s at the top of their charts […]

Three months. Three months. The countdown to the end of my lease continues, and since my job seems to be ruthlessly conspiring to take more and more of my time the closer I get to moving day, the frantic “Rent? Buy? Rent? Buy?” question is mainly drowned out by the “Will I have time to […]

it’s nature’s way of receiving you
it’s nature’s way of retrieving you
it’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
–spirit
does pepto-bismol go bad?
if you took a couple tablespoons of pepto that expired, say, a year ago, would it cause diarrhea? and for how long?
these are not rhetorical questions.
nor were they rhetorical during the historic spaceneedl family […]

My 8-year old son is really into dragons these days, and we are having a lot of fun with the folklore. He’s old enough to understand when I explain to him that scientists have found no evidence that dragons ever existed, but he explained back at me that he read in a book recently how some people believe that some of the dinosaurs were actually dragons. I was stunned because I’d never thought of that, and so I couldn’t think of one decent reason to burst his bubble.