Per aspera

Sam Adams unveils ultimate beer glass
Sparing no effort, Boston Beer said it recruited “world-renowned sensory experts” to work on the design of a glass that beginning in March, will be sold in packages of four for $30 at www.samueladams.com.
It’s this sort of dedication to the betterment of the human condition through technological innovation that got […]

Can someone please tell me what the fuck happened to the stock market today?  Did everyone all of a sudden decide to realize that China has us by the short-and-curlies, or what?

Rick Perlstein has an excerpt from his upcoming book Nixonland at the News Blog.  I highly recommend it.
They’re running guest posts over there because Steve Gilliard, the proprietor of the News Blog and one of my favorite writers in the blogosphere, is in the hospital waiting for open-heart surgery.  Obviously, my fingers are crossed.

Keith Olbermann is my hero.

I’ve updated the Creative Commons license for this site to the new 3.0 version of the non-commercial/attribution/share-alike license I’d had it under previously.  Just keepin’ current.

I may have this wrong, but it appears to me that Kucinich is calling for Captain Planet.
Ezra Klein, on some gnomic oratory by Dennis Kucinich. (I mean “gnomic” here not in the sense that he’s speaking in aphorisms but in the sense that he sounds like some magical gnome. Seriously, go read it; […]

You can take a test on the ABC News site to see if you know which of the people we’re alternately killing and selling weapons to are Sunni and which are Shiite.
UPDATED in a futile effort to make that sentence slightly clear.
(via The News Blog)

Fred Clark on trap streets:
We showed this to my friend’s dad, who explained how such minor fictions are sometimes included on maps to trap copycats who might try to pass off this atlas as their own work. The repetition of such errors would be evidence that the copycats had stolen their work, demonstrating the real […]

What’s that? You’d like to cleanse your palate with some Temptations? Excellent. I am in full agreement.

If there was an acceptable YouTube instantiation of “I Can’t Get Next To You,” I’d have given you that, of course.

There are bouncy ink drawings who will tell you that drugs can help with your depression. I assume that in some, perhaps many cases, those ink drawings are right.
My grandmother once told me, with wide emphatic eyes, that she would not wish depression on her worst enemy. I would like to go on […]

He’s running for Commander-in-Chief.
Now this is the guy I want picking the uniforms for my secret police.
Unrelated to that, I really like his “Oh, Jesus Christ, you again?” expression in the little video box.

(via Oliver Willis)

(via Making Light)

I scoffed at Cory Doctorow’s claim to have been choked up by an effing YouTube video about Web 2.0. Silly dotcommer. Go back to San Francisco.

Then I watched it, and got choked up right at the part about teaching the machine. Dammit. I get misty watching Bill Moyers, too. It’s […]

“Welcome to the Terrordome” by Public Enemy prominently features a sample from “Psychedelic Shack” by the Temptations.  The latter of which is the fucking bomb, and should be listened to by all right-thinking people.  Hell, the entire Temptations catalog should probably be listened to by all right-thinking people.  I’m working on that.