• Paging Noah.  Report to the gopher wood display immediately.

• Enough nude men and women to fill your quota for the month.  So click this and you won't need to view any pr0n sites until August.  Riiiiiiiiiight....

• This article has been getting a lot of play, since it discusses the female genitalia in detail, and why they will or will not respond well to horny drugs like Viagra. I've meant to post a link to it for a couple of days, but I keep looking for it and not finding it, or when I do I forget to copy the link and then can't remember how I found it last time.

The article takes a very weird turn, talking about the examinations of corpses, and comparing the size of their g-spots to how well arousal drugs would work on them.  Not exactly the sort of thing you figure the medical school is doing with your body when you donate it to science.  It seems illogical too, somewhat like measuring penis size to see how well Viagra would work?  (I mean work better for the male, obviously bigger is better for his partner. *cough*)

• George Michael has done a new video criticizing the British PM Tony Major for being a US lackey on the whole War on Terrorism thing.  The video is apparently a cartoon, a rather crudely-illustrated one (it makes Beavis and Butthead look good), with lots of silly satire stuff.  US audiences are trying to summon up outrage over it, according to this article.

That one is from a British tabloid, so take anything it says with heavy skepticism.  There are a bunch of them on the real news, stories off of the wire, such as this one, but it's not as interesting.

Doesn't hecking him just give his views credibility?  I mean he's a pop star, that's basically synonymous with "naive, clueless idiot".  Would you take political advice from Britney Spears? Anyone who gets upset by an attack on their beliefs from such a limp cannon has a lot of insecurity issues, IMHO.  You can see a shot from the cartoon here, and doesn't it seem odd that he's trying to seduce (I guess) the PM's wife when he's gay?

• You often hear about the US educational problems; dumb kids, teaching only for the test, funding problems, etc.  Article on CNN covers one problem with our educational system; attracting decent teachers.

Also, teachers are becoming whiter and more female.  I'll let you picture that for a moment.

What I mean is that the total population of teachers has more whites and more women than it did in the past.  Almost 3/4 of teachers are now female.  Men aren't going into teaching for financial reasons, since they feel a need to be the "breadwinner" and earn enough to support a family, the job isn't considered macho or manly enough, and a reason not listed in the article that I think is a major one is that men don't really want to deal with children.  Men will interact with kids if it's sports, like coaching a Little League team, but that's just a few hours 2 or 3 days a week. It's the same reason there aren't that many male nurses or social workers; the gender just isn't into doing altruistic things, nurturing the weak, etc.  As a general principle, there are of course exceptions.  Fortunately women are more in the care-giver mode, and pick up the slack.

I would think that teaching is a very good job for young women too, especially ones who are starting families (getting pregnant). If Mrs. McClaren gets knocked up and needs 6 or 8 months maternity leave, that's not such a big deal in a school, you can just get another teacher for a year, shuffle around break periods, combine classes somewhat, etc. One 4th grade English teacher is much the same as another.  If Mrs. McClaren is the CFO of a tech firm, it's going to kill the company to have her gone for 6 months, since no one else can really do her job for her, they have to have a replacement, a new person in her job would need months of training, etc.  Also you can be a teacher with a community college Liberal Arts degree and a year or two to get your teaching certificate.  It's not like you need 8 years of medical school.

Neither of which has much to do with why there aren't more teachers, or more male teachers, but I'm just making observations.

• You probably saw the news about the guy who killed two people in LAX at the ticket line for El Al, the Israeli airline.  There is still no word of his motives.  The fact that he was from Egypt and it was the Israeli airline makes for obvious terrorist thoughts, but it's rather an odd target to pick.  I mean why wouldn't he go to a synagogue and shoot people there?  He killed a 20 y/o counter girl and some older guy in line, so it wasn't like he targeted the head of the airline or a pilot or tried to hijack a plane.  The FBI has of course gone over his apartment like flies over a fresh cow dropping, and hopefully they'll discern some motive for his bizarre action.

He was shot and killed by a security guard, probably saving lives, as he had two guns and a good-sized knife, and more bullets to go.  You hear that and think, "Damn.  Good job!" but then with no suspect to interrogate, you are left to wonder what and why, questions the shooter would obviously be the best one to answer.  So it's a pity the rentacop didn't get him through the arm.  Somewhere horribly painful, but non-fatal, ideally.

he unintentionally amusing award of the week goes to Ann Coulter, a (rather stupid) conservative columnist.  Her most recent editorial attempts to equate liberalism with terrorism, primarily by pointing out how all those awful liberals aren't totally happy with outright racial profiling by police, since after all, all terrorists are of course swarthy Arabic looking guys, right?  She doesn't mention the unknown Anthrax mail bomber, or Timothy McVeigh, or the possibility of white people (say John Walker?) sympathizing with the Arabic cause, but those oversights are probably just due to space limitations.  She wouldn't leave out such obvious contradictions to her main thesis for any other reason, I'm sure.

Her breathtakingly analytical and objective analysis includes the following gem:

No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100 percent, behind John Ashcroft 100 percent, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100 percent, behind surveillance of Arabs 100 percent.

So she's fine with Ashcroft thinking calico cats are signs of the devil, anointing himself with cooking oil, covering up the statue of lady justice, etc? That's what 100% means, after all. And yes, she actually said, "real Americans".

What made this especially funny to me was the most recent TMW cartoon, which brilliantly (IMHO) skewers the exact mindset Coulter is portraying here.  I'd read the TMW (This Modern World) cartoon a day before seeing Coulter's new article, (I can't stand the woman and her disingenuous bullshit, but she's such a train wreck I'm sort of compelled to read on.) and was chuckling to myself as I read her writing, amused at how completely she fell into the ignorant, intolerant, bigoted, clueless "real American" definition the TMW cartoon lampooned.

The illusion, tragically, was spoiled by Coulter actually referring to the TMW cartoon near the end of her editorial.  Obviously she saw it and disagreed with it, so wrote her hyperbolic editorial keying off the terms and points in the cartoon, while not making clear that it was where she got the whole idea for her editorial from.  She tries to dismiss the cartoon and the principles behind it thusly:

The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with "unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass." This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America. Like all cartoons specially featured in the Times, there was nothing remotely funny about the cartoon. Its point was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans.

I would disagree with her on the humor of it; I found the cartoon pretty amusing.  And I defy anyone to not think this one is amusing. It stars Ann Coulter herself, coincidentally enough.

More to the point, her quoting of the TMW cartoon here is quite clearly an attempt to misrepresent the point of the cartoon. The cartoon is here, feel free to compare for yourself.  The actual passage she's quotes reads:

Do you draw strength from your [unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass] above all others?

The portion in [brackets] is what Coulter quoted.  The bold text is from the cartoon.  She left off the initial 6 words, and the last 3 words, which pretty clearly change the meaning of it from an attack on the concept of religion, which is how she's trying to portray it, to a rhetorical question, poking fun at the megalomania of true believers.

I've written about Coulter a few times in the past, and this is her to a tee.  Misrepresenting the words or ideas of her enemies to try and fit them into her argument.  She also always omits several very obvious examples that would ruin her entire argument, and throws in various ad hominem insults that probably make those who agree with her giggle at her naughty nature, but which just make her look ignorant to any informed reader.  As I said in the blog from April 20th, 2002, "Even if I agreed completely with her PoV on the issue, I'd find her methods of arguing it repugnant, and her editorial grossly uninformative."