Tête-à-Tête-Tête

My bloviations on stone walls prompted an email response from a professional who works in the dry stone medium, James Asbury. He pointed me to a project at the Pennsylvania College of Technology that he’d completed, from which I’ve grabbed the photo below. Check out the rest: no mortar, just stones, artfully arranged. [...]

This is a sampling of the sixty books George W. Bush has read this year. (He’s ten ahead of Karl Rove in an informal contest.)
Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero by David Maraniss
Lincoln: A Life of [...]

I’m an enormous fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a television show that ran for about ten years and was canceled several years ago. I have a few dozen episodes from the so-called Sci-Fi Channel era stored on my computer. MST3K showed very bad movies, mostly science fiction and horror, with its heroes in [...]

Is Martin Peretz really unable to see the slippery slope his rhetoric moves along?
In any case, I just received a note from Professor Harriss about my article, “Just Cause,” in the August 7 issue of TNR. He notes a comment regarding an observation I make about Israeli society in the Zionist vision, “scientific, free-spirited, and, [...]

Michael Crowley draws our attention to Fred Barnes, in an article in The Weekly Standard, decrying liberal euphemisms. Barnes comments on “spending” versus “revenues” (an example that Crowley nicely dissects), “redeployment” versus “a move to retreat, to give up, to cut and run”, “choice” versus “abortion”—notice what fine and subtle distinctions Barnes’s language allows [...]

Other bloggers have remarked on this phenomenon, but it’s still dispiriting to read something like this:

Employers added a surprisingly low number of jobs in the United States in July, offering another sign that economic growth is slowing and providing encouragement for investors and economists who hope interest rates will remain at current levels.
While Wall Street [...]

Here’s a funny thing. Dan Froomkin points to George W. Bush’s most recent medical examination, which includes the following:
Exercise: The President exercises six times per week. Workouts include bicycling (15-20 miles, 15-18mph), treadmill (low impact “hill-work”), elliptical trainer, free weight resistance training, and stretching.
That’s a lot of exercise, and Bush is apparently in great [...]

Googling around, I made a discovery, based on the following experiment:
Google for your last name and the word “sex”. Answer these questions:

How unexpected was the first hit? Mine — very. A sexual predator site.
Does a hit that’s unambiguously you occur within the top 50? I make it at #50 [...]

Over the weekend I got self-indulgent and wrote an entire photo essay on my stone walls. For anyone who might be interested. . .

Over the past couple of years I’ve devoted some thought to analogies for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq:
It’s a televised poker game. George won the first couple of hands and got the crowd behind him. He’s lost every hand since, some by a close margin, others by a blow-out. He’s still [...]