Joe Klein goes full-on shrill:

American Embarrassment:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party's banner. They are the most compelling argument I've seen against American exceptionalism. Even Tim Pawlenty, a decent governor, can't let a day go by without some bilious nonsense escaping his lizard brain. And, as Greg Sargent makes clear, Mitt Romney has wandered a long way from courage. There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know. Mick Huckabee, the front-runner if you can believe it, might have to negotiate a trade agreement, or a defense treaty, with the Indonesian President some day. Newt might have to discuss very delicate matters of national security with the President of Pakistan. And so I plead, as an unflinching American patriot--please Mitch Daniels, please Jeb Bush, please run. I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you. And you seem to respect yourselves enough not to behave like public clowns.

How food consciousness shapes an industry...

It's funny how food consciousness and consumer pressure shapes the grocery store layout. What's hip and interesting often gets massive shelf space, whereas what doesn't sell well gets often desultory placement on a boring mid-shelf, far out of sight.

Today's example: in the staples aisle at my neighborhood grocery store (a QFC-branded Kroger outlet), there are eleven varities of rice (not including various "instant" types), some of them quite pricey in their 12-oz plastic containers with screw-on caps. There are four varieties of cous-cous. In the vegetables, there are six different varieties of potato. There are multiple varieties of sugar. There are several different kinds of salt, for Horus's sake.

And there, all alone is the staples aisle, is one lonely bag of lentils. And it was labeled as such: "Lentils."

But there are all kinds of lentils: French lentils, Spanish Pardina lentils, Green lentils (that's what was in the bag), Tan, Red, Black, and Mexican lentils. There are the Indian varieties, which are more like beans: Chana dal, Urad dal, Masoor dal, and Toor dal, among others.

Lisakit, bless her heart, found me a recipe for Masoor dal hummus (now that's a linguistic mash-up!), which is great because lentils lack an amino acid that other ingredients in hummus supply. (Saying so is close to nutritionalism, but let's back this up: cultures where the pulse (the family of plants which includes small beans and lentils) is a foundational food also eat a lot of sesame (nee' tahini), and they probably do so for a reason.)

Having to visit a specialty store to lay in a supply of these different kinds of pulses is a fun exercise, but it's also a frustrating one. It's fairly obvious that QFC is trying hard to have what its audience wants-- that's how it stays in business, after all. And most pulses last for months in cellar storage, so buying in bulk makes sense.

I'm sure QFC has a lot of vegetarian customers, however. It's in that kind of neighborhood, full of foodies and yuppies and their self-indulgent radicalized animal-lovin' children. These people aren't well-served by having the most common protein source most of the world uses relegated to a few token bags on an out-of-the-way shelf wedged between the rice and the "ethnic foods" sections.

Feed on the Brains!

Wonkette pens the speech Obama should have given about Libya:

We were dealt a pile of complete shit, and the only way out of it is trying to pick up the shit. There were three options for doing this, and all of them were bad and would end up getting at least some shit on our stuff. I had to pick one, so I did. We may have to switch that strategy in the coming days and put even more effort into this so we don't get shit all over the fucking place, so don't get all pissy, but that's the one I'm going with right now. I'm sorry somebody put this shit here. Hopefully we can get it picked up eventually. God bless America or whatever.

Changing Corporate Gender: A Case Study. It's about oil-rig workers (!) being trained out of their traditional macho attitude (!) to embrace their feminine side, only to be shown and ultimately accept how doing so saved lives and money.

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, there goes my whole image of Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis all shouting at each other, "I will make 800 feet!" Never mind Bill Fichtner's awesome delivery: "Get. Off. The. Nuclear. Weapon!"

Tea Party Nation warns America: White people are going extinct, and you can't have America without them.

All of these programs, ideals and ideologies are doing one thing and one thing only - reducing America core total fertility rate to the point of no return. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant population in America is headed for extinction and with it our economy, well-being and survival as a uniquely America culture.

This county is dying not because it is aging, it is dying because of infertility as public policy.

Google's Recipe Search deliberately privileges big producers, hurts food bloggers. An article on how Google's use of the hRecipe microformat makes it hard for Grandma to tell the world about the best pumpkin pie humanity has ever experienced.

OGNIB! Recruiters, WTF?

So, here's the weird thing. That "Resume Recruiter Bingo" that I mentioned the other day is even stranger. Two of the requirements are:

• Good knowledge of ASP.Net and C#.
• Ability to work and debug code in Visual Studio 2008.

My resume reads like an open-source, Linux-based history textbook. I contributed the time-to-service feature of the original Apache web server. I've fixed bugs in the Python standard library. I wrote a driver for the Linux kernel, goddammit.

What is making my resume show up on a keyword search looking for someone familiar with Microsoft products?

Is it just because I live in Seattle?

PageSpeed!

Huh. Tried PageSpeed, a tool from Google on how to make your website more responsive. I have five websites I currently maintain. The ones I wrote myself: 90, 86, 82. The two that use off-the-shelf templates: 68, 46.

I'm not surprised. I'm fairly good at what I do. :-).