Another assortment of Things.

• ManMan will be at Mr Small’s in Millvale Sat Mar 22. They’ll also be in Austin for SXSW and again on April 30; while there are assorted dates in New York, Baltimore (tonight!), Boston, and all over the Deep South (WTF?), it looks like nothing in Philadelphia or Seattle. Look for yourself (and buy tickets) here.
• From the NY Observer, via Inkless Wells: Hillary Clinton campaign forces reporters to work in the bathroom at a campaign stop in Texas. Another great photo over at Huffington Post. Apparently they were served dinner there, too—tamales.
• This one especially for
  byzantine_ruins

    , from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog: Are Private Student Loans the Next Subprime Mortgages?

• Several more links, including the full text of the Chronicle post (which may be blocked for those not on a university campus), what if the Dutch had never left New Amsterdam?, and the weaknesses, excuse me, future strengths, of academic libraries, are here.

1225

Just in case you’d been wondering about the state of France’s president recently (not good), check out the blog of Maclean’s Canada columnist Paul Wells, such as this post from Feb. 7:

Depending how you measure these things, today [Feb. 7] just happens to be a strong contender for the worst day of the Sarkozy presidency. Largely this is because Thursday, in France as in Canada, is when the newsweeklies hit the newsstands. Here’s a tour of the headlines:
Le Point: Picture of Sarko looking worried. “What’s Not Working.”
L’Express: Near-identical picture. “The Disappointment: Why The French Are Abandoning Him.”
[js: this one's my favorite:]Le Nouvel Observateur: Picture of Sarkozy and his new wife out for a stroll. “The President Who Goes Pschitt,” i.e. like a balloon losing air, although the word is pronounced as you suspect it might be.

For a while, actually, Wells’d been writing a fair amount about “France’s First Family of Self-Parody” … Until last weekend.

Apparently, in France, the politicians even go up in flames in style. . .

1224

It’s been nearly two entire months since I changed my username, and I still find myself trying to use the old one 3/4 of the times I log in. . .

On the off chance you’re interested in reading things I’ve found interesting elsewhere on Teh Net, try here: my Google Reader shared items pseudoblog. It’s largely librariany stuff, because, well, that’s most of the blogs I read off-lj, but there’s other stuff there, too, like this review of a Tallahassee restaurant (“Chance I’d eat here again: 100%”) which contains, more importantly for those of us unlikely to ever actually get to Tallahassee, a recipe for Deep Winter Oyster Chowder which looks utterly fabulous. (While you’re over there, check out also this fabulous excerpt from a soon-to-be-published essay of hers, The Outlaw Bride…)

Seems like a good place for it…

Kimchi in space!!

When South Korea’s first astronaut, Ko San, blasts off April 8 aboard a Russian spaceship bound for the International Space Station, the beloved national dish will be on board.

Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.

I imagine that must have been difficult indeed….

(In all honesty, it’s been years since I’ve tried kimchi. I suppose I should make another effort.)

1222

The first of Pine Township’s Frequently Asked Questions is Who do I call to have someone pick up a dead deer?

1221

so about a year ago, Detroit’s Metro Times weekly did a cover story about the All Media Group, the Ann Arbor company behind the All Music Guide.

It came with a sidebar, cleverly titled The name game: Monitoring marvelous musical monikers.

For some unknown reason, each of the real bands or performers listed decided to name themselves something that is a little off the beaten path. Below is a document featuring a list of the funny band names that we have been keeping a running tally on.

Some are just ripoffs of normal band and people names (“Ben Folds Laundry”), some seem almost… inspired (“Heisenberg’s Uncertain Tea Principle”), and some (ok, most) make absolutely no sense at all (“Freddie Kaboodleschnitzer”, “I Can Lick Any Son Of A Bitch In The House”, “Reality D. Blipcrotch”). . . . Almost all of them are at least somewhat funny, and some of them are actually hilarious (“The Four Foodgroups of the Apocalypse”). Go check ‘em out.

1220

SF Chronicle: Living Dead Join Forces For Obama

OK, that’s not exactly the headline on the article, but I couldn’t pass it up.

1219

Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love – Nicholas Kristof:

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Interesting commentary—reprinted in today’s Post-Gazette, interestingly with the local headline “Liberal prejudice: The one group liberals don’t mind deriding is evangelicals“—on liberals’ blindness to the surprising (and growing) numbers of “bleeding-heart conservatives” (not to mention their potential usefulness to an Obama candidacy in the fall….)

(While I’m at it, has an interesting post about Obama’s margins of victory last night…)

1218

The AP is reporting that Bill Richardson will drop out of the race for President tomorrow.

This makes pretty much every candidate I’d actually considered worth the effort of supporting, gone already after less than a week. Way to go, Democratic Party. Awesome demonstration of the power of rich white people in small, nearly meaningless states Democracy.

An Open Letter to Joe Biden and Chris Dodd

Perhaps I’m just sour because I live in a state—Pennsylvania—whose primary is so late as to be almost meaningless, but I hope both of you will reconsider your decisions to abandon your candidacies for President.

The Times reported this morning that a record number of people went to Iowa caucuses last night—over 239,000. That’s barely 3/4 the population of my city, Pittsburgh, alone, and only 1/6 the population of my county. I urge you both not to let such a small—let alone such an unrepresentative—sample of people decide the future of the nation.

[see also NY Times Editorial Board's blog post from yesterday afternoon, "Report from Iowa: Democracy It Ain’t".]