An observation by Peggy Noonan

At this point, maybe my favorite conservative commentator is David Letterman Peggy Noonan. In today’s op-ed piece in the WSJ, Ms. Noonan is holding forth on the dissent in Iran and how it was much helped along by technology in general and social networking technology in particular. Anyway, there are many thoughtful points in the article, but this is what I'd like to point out:

[Technology] is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

Skating away....

As I've commented a few times before, sometimes I wake up with a particular song lyric running through my mind.

Monday, it was "skating away", although the lines I remembered (as shown below) weren't true to the original.

As you push off from the shore
Won't you turn your head once more
You're a rabbit on the run

And have you ever had the feeling
That your song is too damned real
And in the present tense

Skating away
Skating away
Skating away, on the thin ice of a new day

A good goat will do that...

....

The title of this post is inspired by an old joke, but the post is brought about by an analogy in an entry of The Economist's Democracy in America blog entitled Extreme stupidity. The subject of their post is the ridiculous jockeying of our politicos to assign & avoid culpability or connection in the sad and horrific murder at the Holocaust Museum this week.

People this far out on the fringe are probably rather like the neighbour who turns out to have a powerful sexual attraction to goats: It is not helpful to inquire into the goats' gender in order to determine whether the fellow is "gay" or "straight"; his orientation is decidedly "other".

....

Smackin' or uh...not so exquisite.

Exquisite...

Eric Felten's Wall Street Journal column, How's Your Drink holds forth this week on the Gibson, essentially a dry martini featuring a pearl onion in place of the traditional olive garnish.

Anyway, Mr. Felten writes:

The greatest Gibson moment in all of popular culture is found in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959). When ad executive Cary Grant is in New York, his drink of choice is what you would expect of a man so faultlessly tailored—Martinis at the Oak Bar. But when he is fleeing the city on the 20th Century Limited, he heads to the Pullman car and finds himself seated across from the exquisite Eva Marie Saint, with whom he is soon exchanging innuendo-rich pleasantries. The drink he orders? A Gibson—the perfect quaff for someone hurtling in a Northwesterly direction.

"..the exquisite Eva Marie Saint." I've got to agree with the use of that adjective.

.....

Las Vegas 5/26

The original Mr. T