From The Daily Show, December 1, 2008: John Oliver explains the Mumbai tragedy.

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Via NPR’s Song of the Day: Theresa Andersson is incredible. You should go watch the YouTube video of her performing “Birds Fly Away” in her kitchen. Now. I’ll wait. The movie is too big to fit in the design of my blog, and she is not to be missed. Trust me on this one.

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A history lesson—with up-to-the-minute repercussions—from Professor Juan Cole.

All those who deify Ronald Reagan should remember it is a straight line from funding the Afghani mujahadeen in Pakistan in the 1980s, via death squads, drugs and illegal arms sales*, to September 11, 2001. Are we finally ready to learn from our mistakes?

*The same methodology, as Cole points out, that Reagan used against Those Scary Terrorists in Nicaragua. Remember them? Fortunately, the repercussions from that little adventure don’t seem to have lingered so long.

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I wish I could say I’ve never had a recording session like this.

Via an email from Guido. I would have liked to embed the video here, but instead of a Flash or QuickTime movie the site only provides a link to a JavaScript residing on their servers. No thanks. Anyway, pretty funny, too true, and blissfully short.

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Another fascinating article from the New Yorker: Red Sex, Blue Sex. It turns out that evangelicals and liberals have distinctly different attitudes and behaviors in the sexual behavior of their adolescent children, and not in the way you might expect.

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

Of course, as a liberal I find this appalling (talk about keepin’ ’em barefoot and pregnant!), not least because not only is this evangelical group more likely to get pregnant, they’re also more likely to get STDs. The gift that keeps on giving. Of course it follows that both their educational and lifetime income levels are lower as well. Higher divorce rates, too. These are American family values?

But the most interesting factoid in the article was this nugget about those icky (and incredibly Freudian) chastity pledge programs like True Love Waits:

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

Like I said, fascinating stuff.

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Howard Iceberg’s new album is out now. It’s called November Nights, and all proceeds go to benefit health expenses of Abigail Henderson of The Gaslights.

I just got my copy yesterday and noticed that, while the players are credited, there is no info as to who played what on any given track. Since I’m in a unique position to furnish that info, I’ll go ahead and post it here. Just in case anyone wants to know. After the jump.

Continue reading "November Nights: the missing credits" »

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Hey, according to the Gender Analyzer site, there is a 71% chance I am male.

It’s kind of fun. I think it’s pretty clear on most sites whether the author is male or female. A couple of years ago, though, I was interviewed by a local paper about my blog, and the reporter said she wasn’t sure from reading it, and with a name like Pat, what my gender was. So now there’s a tool to let you know in advance—spare yourself a potential social faux pas!

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