tiny piece on Bossa Nova - Girl from Ipanema and then interview/piece on Anne Rice on this mornings CBS Sunday Morning.

Laughing babies video was on America's Funniset Home Videos once; as I recall it won. It goes from funny to disturbing to funny to make-it-stop-already! The mom is funny too.

Happy Birthday, E!

Hey, ev'body. Just peeking in while hiding from family-houseguests. It's very sunny here, though I seem to be cold.

Timelies! Happy Birthday Fone Bone!

I have what looks like three flea bites on my arm. I've checked both cats, and I don't see anything. Am I the one with fleas?

Jess, happy DH birthday!

It's sunny and not raining here, for the second day in a row! Yay, especially since I have a pretty, but long, drive down to Santa Cruz to make this morning.

Nice to see this get some mainstream media (AP) coverage:

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is just as problematic.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

...

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy."

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.

Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the program underestimate the terrorist threat.

"There's some in America who say, 'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,'" Bush said during a January visit to the NSA.

Wanker.

Gotta give props to Miami Vice--their episode about French Canadian mobsters has proper accents--because they use Quebecois actors. In fact, one of them was the lead in Jesus de Montreal. Which is a favourite film of mine.

Timelies all!

Happy Birthday Fone Bone!

Stupid cat was jumping on the bed and meowing at me every 10 minutes or so starting at 8 this morning. I didn't ask for a snooze alarm....

That laughing babies video is both funny and disturbing. I'm terribly curious what the story is there...

Heh. The scoreboard CBS had in the corner of the screen for the Pittsburgh-Bradley game in March Madness listed the teams as:

BRAD
PITT