Category: aside

For use in “asides”, quick little posts

  • Excellent APOD title

    The image is cool, too, but today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day title — “Shadows of a Martian Robot” — is amazing. It sounds like a noir-pulp treatment of the psychological torment of a veteran of the War of the Worlds.

    https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260222.html

  • “Miles Away” — Marc Cohn

    I know there’s always something

    We have to go through

    That has some deeper meaning

    Right now I just can’t say

    I know there’s a lesson in here somewhere

    I’m gonna think a lot about it later

    Right now I’m miles away

    (more…)

  • More on Guiliani-as-Kaiser

    Glen Greenwald continues to shine a welcome spotlight on the outright authoritarian — dare we say, totalitarian? — impulses of the Right’s new darling, Rudy Guiliani. Twice in the past few days, he’s made statements that, only a handful of years ago, would have been credible only coming from the mouth of some cartoonish caricature. Really, there is no Constitutional guarantee not under attack by the wingbats who have hijacked the Republican party…

  • 2 out of 3 Republican candidates prefer dictatorship

    OK, so that’s not entirely fair. But Glenn Greenwald has a terrific piece on why it’s not entirely unfair, either. The short version: When asked if the President of the United States should have the power to detain indefinitely American citizens without any sort of review, Mitt Rommey said he couldn’t form an opinion without consulting some “smart lawyers” — despite the fact that it clearly violated the Contitution, the upholding of which is the sworn duty of anyone holding the office Rommey had decided to seek. But it gets better. Guiliani doesn’t need lawyers; he knows he supports this sort of power trip, although (hilariously) he hopes to exercise it only “infrequently”.

    How far we have sunk, in only six years! Who could have guessed that the American habit of liberty would prove so fragile?

  • New Look, New Feature, Lots of New Newness

    So… I’ve wanted a three-column theme for a while and for whatever reason, tonight’s the night I decided to get one. Mostly I want something that uses the real estate of my monitor more efficiently. I went with Anaconda and it seems pretty good. I’m still figuring out how to make it look like what I want. Also, this post is an attempt to check out “asides” to see what they are. And I’ve added a couple of countdown timers just for show.