(and an elephant or two)

A gift from the inertnet: the David Hasselhoff 2005 Photocalendar.

You’re welcome.

(via metafilter

WaPo’s Richard Cohen spares no one in the sick and sad spectacle of Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case:

By late Sunday, when the debate had reached the House of Representatives, Barney Frank stood almost alone in opposing the bill. Cliches suffered. Here was an openly gay Democrat, the Massachusetts liberal of all Massachusetts liberals, defending the Founding Fathers, federalism and the American tradition of keeping the government’s nose out of a family’s business.

It was a bravura performance and one could only have wished that it had been matched by John Kerry or Hillary Clinton — or any of the other Democrats who are being mentioned as presidential candidates. Most of them seemed to be cowering in some bunker, calling their consultants and pollsters, asking what they should do and how they should do it. Please, have a memo on the desk by morning.

…But for me the real loser was the Democratic Party. It showed that it’s almost totally without leadership. If there is a national figure (other than Frank) who stood up and took on the GOP in this matter, his — or her — name does not come to mind. In the Senate, oddly enough, it was Virginia’s John Warner who pointed out that he opposed the bill — and he’s a Republican, for goodness’ sake. The Democrats were nowhere.
Damn right, on both DeLay and Democrats alike.

And a corollary:

Kerry’s words and moves suggest that he thinks Nov. 2, 2004, was merely a detour on his road to the White House. He has been holding private dinners with potential fund raisers and policy advisers, signaling he might run again and blaming his political strategists for many of the mistakes his campaign made last year, such as not responding swiftly to ads attacking his Vietnam service. He has set up a political-action committee to finance his travels around the country, which will include stops in 20 cities over the next two months to give speeches and headline fund raisers for other Democrats. And he is constantly e-mailing his list of more than 3 million supporters to promote causes he championed as a candidate, like expanding health insurance to all children and preventing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Kerry plans to write a book on his views on national security.

No, clearly, it was all someone else’s fault, John. It’s not because everyone’s got you pegged as a gutless poll-watcher. (This coming from someone who voted for you.)

Le sigh.

Saw this blurb in today’s Express (WaPo Lite for those of you not in the DC-metro area):

Hell on Wheels
Smack the snooze button so often the alarm is pointless? Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab has just the thing. “Clocky” is an alarm on wheels that lets you snooze once, then rolls off the table and zips away to another part of the room, the New Scientist reported. If you want to go back to sleep the next time it goes off, you’ll have to find it first. And every day it finds a new place to escape to.

Oh, what fun that little toy would be! Personally, I’m not a snooze-button addict, but it would be great fun to see the gadget torment someone else.

Zoom! Zoom!

And so it begins: a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judge has ruled that domestic violence statutes cannot be used against an unmarried man accused of pushing and slapping his live-in girlfriend. The reason? Ohio’s new constitutional amendment prohibiting any law recognizing, creating or approximating a marital relationship for unmarried persons means “domestic violence” laws, drafted to protect “families”, recognize a marital-type relationship in unmarried persons.

Ooops.

Which leaves me in a quandary the next time I get an unmarried client in here who wants to file domestic violence charges against boyfriend/girlfriend/etc. We don’t know how other courts are going to rule on the issue if and when the other party brings it up, so yeah, you might be SOL. Personally, I think the judge’s decision is the right one, given how ridiculously broad the amendment was, but so far Cleveland’s the only place in the state that’s said as much…

(hat tip: Chris Geidner)

Via Neil Gaiman’s journal, here are 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense from the latest issue of New Scientist:

4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Of interest mostly because of Airborne, the oh-so-popular cold remedy — you’re supposed to take this when you feel yourself getting a cold, and it either shortens the cold’s duration or prevents it all together. It’s a homeopathic remedy that is the pharmaceutical industry’s Tickle Me Elmo — it’s so backordered, a Giant Eagle pharmacist told me last week that they’d been waiting for two weeks to be restocked and hadn’t seen any yet.

Most folks will tell you it works, despite not actually containing any real medicine to speak of (apart from a massive infusion of Vitamin C, which is great and all but isn’t what we think of as “medicine”…) (Looks like someone even asked Google.) I’m one of them — I took it the weekend I was starting to get a bad cold (beginning on Saturday) and by Tuesday morning I’d knocked it on its ears. Never left my sinuses, never drained into my throat and lungs — which ALWAYS happens when I get a cold, leading to two weeks of hacking and grossness. Not this year.

Unfortunately, we used the last two tablets in the house last night, after Carl puked his guts out all over himself, the car seat, the bed, his blanket, and other various and sundry items in the house. Anyone know where there’s more to be had in Columbus? I don’t really want to have to resort to Amazon…

After railing against the use of intelligent design in classrooms, I felt it only fair to offer up an opinion that shows maybe, just maybe, it’s not such a horrible thing after all. In today’s Washington Post, metro columnist Jay Mathews argues that presenting the concept would actually enhance learning. He makes a compelling argument:

Drop in on an average biology class and you will find the same slow, deadening march of memorization that I endured at 15. Why not enliven this with a student debate on contrasting theories? Why not have an intelligent design advocate stop by to be interrogated? Many students, like me, find it hard to understand evolutionary theory, and the scientific method itself, until they are illuminated by contrasting points of view.

When you put it like that, it makes it hard to disagree with, whether you believe the theory is being pushed through by the religious right.