As someone who works for a company with a Teletubbies-themed conference room...the London mascots look exactly how I would have expected them to look. They're straight out of the CBeebies lineup.

(Don't get me wrong - they're still creepy as fuck, but not surprisingly so.)

Oh my god you guys. I just had a 10 course tasting menu dinner. I was prepared to throw down, but not quite like that. Definitely the best and most expensive meal I've ever had. And they threw in free marrow!

Was there anything you had that you never thought you'd eat, but loved it? Because my problem whenever I look at the Craige menu is I keep seeing things that make me go "Why would I EVER want to eat that?" But I am a bit of a finicky eater (not a fan of seafood or offal, and a number of vegatables make me gag).

Looks from Wikipedia that code blue and red are about the only universal hospital codes, and few seem to have a code for lockdown. UCLA certainly didn't.

Lovely headline on the Olympic mascots: Really, London? Twitter Reacts in Horror to 2012 Olympic Mascots [link]

We are not alone!

"The blue guy put his assless chaps on backwards"

Hah!

That is hilarious. they are freaky.

FRIDAY!!!

Grrr. I'm thinking that if you are out for a class 3 days, you don't telecommute the remaining 2. I'm at the end of my rope here.

Was there anything you had that you never thought you'd eat, but loved it?

I did love the marrow, which I was having for the first time. I was less crazy about the sweetbreads, which I was also having for the first time. Other than that, everything was pretty normal, if a wide range. Of the 10 courses, I think 5 were seafood? So that's probably not a good choice for you. There was farfalle with a wild boar ragu that was to die for. The "big" course was lamb three ways, of which I was really only crazy about the regular slice of meat. But I was also fairly full by then! I definitely want to go back and sit at the bar for the burger.

I forgot to mention a couple of things in the hurly burly crazy new schedule of my life:

1) mac DID get his iPod back (I emailed the teachers and they talked to the boys).

2) my new fridge was delivered yesterday and fits great in the space.

3) I have exciting food use to report, but that will have to wait for a minute.

On Rand Paul, I like what Amanda Marcotte has to say. [link]

I’m sure Matt thinks he’s being pretty hard on Rand Paul by invoking the term “white supremacy” in his post, but he makes the same mistake that Dave Weigel does in rushing to reassure people that Rand Paul isn’t a racist so much as a hard core ideologue, and that surely his support of segregation is offered more in sorrow than in glee. This view ignores some pretty damning evidence about Paul’s history and associations, but it also ignores the fact that “principled” libertarians who woefully say that they unfortunately have to promote racist policies against their own moral compass will abandon that principled libertarianism when it breaks in favor of reproductive rights. “Principled” libertarianism only seems up to making those “hard” choices if oppressed people have to suffer the consequences. Which is why I object to this line of thinking:

The point to make about Paul, however, is that what he suffers from here is an excess of honesty and ideological rigor not an unusual degree of racism.

The abortion question alone makes it clear that Paul doesn’t have an excess of ideological rigor, or even a bounty of it.

Adam Serwer is also compelling on this subject: [link]

Paul would never face the actual "hard part" of his vision of freedom, because it would never interfere with his own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Rand Paul would not have been turned away from a lunch counter, be refused a home, a job, or denied a loan, or told to sit in the black car of a train because of his skin color, or because of the skin color of his spouse. Paul thinks there is something "hard" about defending the kind of discrimination he would have never, ever faced. Paul's free-market fundamentalism is being expressed after decades of social transformation that the Civil Rights Act helped create, and so the hell of segregation is but a mere abstraction, difficult to remember and easy to dismiss as belonging only to its time. It's much easier now to say that "the market would handle it." But it didn't, and it wouldn't.

In short, I think that yes, he is a sexist, racist tool and his "principled beliefs" don't hold up past the most surface level of examination.