Elf Sternberg

I was reading the local newspaper, the Seattle Times, and came across an article that addressed a problem in my household: whooping cough. According to the family physician, it was "very likely" that at least one, and possibly up to three, of the people in our house caught the disease. We're all old enough that it doesn't represent a life-threatening condition, but it's annoying to go weeks without a let-up in the coughing. So I read the article hoping for enlightenment.

Except author Carol Ostrom writes to me as if I were a child. Starting with the title, "Feds probe whooping cough epidemic; are vaccines pooping out?," Ostrom goes through a series of bizarre language choices to get her point across. Starting with "pooping out," which is going to make everyone's inner five year old snigger, and move on to telling the audience that whooping cough is "pertussis in science speak," and that it is "acknowledged to be a bad bug." It reads like she's trying to reach not just that target 5th grade reading level, but all the way down to the 2nd grade playground.

Worse, a mechanical analysis of the article shows a 12th grade reading level to the whole. As you go further into the article, Ostrom's vocabulary becomes more dense and complex, and the last third of the article is written in language that doesn't insult my intelligence.

I know these are conscious editorial choices-- to make sure that everyone who bothers to read the Times can understand the point the author is making, but I find it tiring to wade through the childish introductory paragraphs to get to the real material and issues involved in the story.

I was intrigued this morning by an article entitled On the Evils of Wheat, by Dr. William Davis. There is strong evidence that grains, especially modern refined grains, have a much more powerful insulimic response than other sources of carbohydrates, and are much more easily digested, leading to a strong fat-creation reaction within the body. Just how strong this reaction is, and just how problematic it is, if it's a problem at all, is up for some debate.

So I was hellaciously annoyed when I read the author state flatly:

New strains [of grains] have been generated using what the wheat industry proudly insists are "traditional breeding techniques," though they involve processes like gamma irradiation and toxins such as sodium azide. The poison control people will tell you that if someone accidentally ingests sodium azide, you shouldn’t try to resuscitate the person because you could die, too, giving CPR. This is a highly toxic chemical.

Now that's some high-grade bullshit right there, right up with the whole "there are detergents in your vaccines" screech coming out of the anti-vax people right now.

Of course, a "detergent" is just a chemical that allows two immiscible liquids to be dispersed together, and detergents are used in all manner of edible foods such as salad dressing and sauces. Sulfate-based detergents are used in all sorts of injected medicines to keep particulate injectibles evenly dispersed throughout a liquid medium. You get more sodium lauryl sulfate into your system every time you wash your hair than you do whenever you get a flu shot.

But Dr. Davis' gambit is classic: because two strains of wheat were mutated together under the influence of sodium azide, and sodium azide is an incredibly powerful toxin that will kill you in minute amounts, therefore wheat can become an incredibly toxic substance that will kill you in small amounts. At least, that's the association he wants to create in your mind.

Way to blow your credibility in the second paragraph, dude.

If a Muslim in America killed 40 people, the right would claim it was because of Islam, and the government wasn't doing enough to keep "dangerous Islam" out of our country.

If a Christian in America killed 40 people, the right would claim he wasn't a true Christian, and if he attended a church it was only a stealth campaign on his part to discredit Christianity.

If a hurricane killed 40 people, but only in New York City, the right would claim the government hadn't done enough to get people out of harm's way.

A hurricane killed 40 people, but none in a major media market. Therefore, the threat was oversold and the government's efforts to get people out of harm's way were a waste of time and effort.

An article sailing through the lefty bloggerverse this morning is a profile on Rick Perry that basically says that his claims about job growth and education in Texas are chimeras, and any news agency doing its job (i.e. John Stewart & Stephen Colbert) will be able to ferret out a dozen millstones that ought to sink any attempt by Perry to vault into the Presidential race.

One millstone in Perry's behavior in the Cameron Willingham death-penalty case. It was widely reported that Perry's attitude toward Willingham was dismissive and cavalier, and that he had no responsibility to look any deeper than the initial guilty verdict. (Follow this logic and a governor ought not to have pardon powers; he will use it only for cronyism.) What is factually known is that, when questions were raised about the rush to judgement that ultimately put Willingham to death, Perry convened a panel to investigate whether or not he had been innocent. A preliminary report emerged that yes, Perry may well have signed the death warrant on a man for whom not only was there reasonable doubt, but Willingham may well have been completely innocent of the crime. Perry then tried to silence the panel by firing all its members and suppressing the report.

Okay, Perry's attempt to suppress the embarassing fact that he signed the death warrant for an innocent man is ugly. It's a failure of character and leadership.

But today, the lefty bloggerverse is atwitter with this quote:

Multiple former Hutchison advisers recalled asking a focus group about the charge that Perry may have presided over the execution of an innocent man - Cameron Todd Willingham - and got this response from a primary voter: "It takes balls to execute an innocent man."

Here's what I find bullshit about this incident. It doesn't say if the man voted for Perry. It doesn't say if the voter approved of Perry's actions.

Men acknowledge that testosterone makes them act bravely. It does this, often, by making them act stupid. For all I know, the quote is a reflection that Perry thinks with this dick, not his head or his heart. Until the intent of the quote is clarified, I for one don't believe it says what Kos, Politico, and the rest want it to say.

I can get behind this policy:

Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

Women or Wine, Monogamy and Alcohol, from the American Association of Wine Economists

[ht Tyler Cowen]

By now, most people know of the Cooks Source Kerfluffle. If not, here's the short form:

LiveJournalist Illadore found that her work regarding 15th Century apple pie recipes had been lifted entirely into an obscure for-print cooking magazine. When she complained to editor Judith Griggs, the response she received was:

The web is considered "public domain." You should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! ... You as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. ... You should compensate me!

Grigg's "editing" consisted of "fixing" the 15th century spellings, which Illadore had kept for authenticity. Needless to say, this so outraged the Internet writing community that whole-hog attention dropped on Cooks Source like the hand of Hestia, which quickly unveiled the magazines' operation: every article seemed to be lifted from an Internet source, including Martha Stewart, Disney, The Food Network, and Time-Warner Lifestyles.

At this point, the mainstream press picked it up. The headlines were written to be searchable, but headline writers still found the energy to be funny:

• How Not to Piss off the Internet (PC World)
• Recipe for disaster: An editor, plagiarism and a non-apology (The Globe and Mail)
• Exclusive: Cooks Source Writer Marvels at the 'Nerd Rage,' Keeps Waiting For That Apology (Time)
• Food magazine gets roasted online over copyright claim (CNN)
• Magazine Tells Author She Should Be Glad They Stole Her Work (San Francisco Chronicle)

And so on. Fury, rage, "cooked," "poached," the puns and anger (and there was a lot of righteous anger) was all on display there in the headlines themselves.

There is an old joke in the press that the most boring headline imaginable is this: "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." The Canadian press play up this warm but calm reputation often, and they've outdone themselves this morning. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation wins an "Oh, Canada," (no exclamation points, please) award for this headline:

• Blogger victim of infringement wins support

You might remember once upon a time I pointed you all to "the most butch website design house on the Internet," SharperFX, a design group that does websites for black churches. Uber-manly, bold, movie-quality stuff.

Their flagship intro is New Birth Ministries, which has that amazing Hollywood Action Film Soundtrack quality to it. 11 on the manliness scale, that one.

The head of New Birth Ministries, "Bishop" Eddie Long, has been accused of coercing two young men into sexual relationships.

It's only an accusation. Make of it what you will.

Kenneth Turan, the usually professional movie reviewer for NPR's morning show, All Things Considered, gave his review of The Last Airbender this morning and said what has to be one of the dumbest things I've heard from him ever:

The best films for kids have always had something for adults in them. That was true when The Black Stallion came out 30 years ago, and when Toy Story 3 came out last month. So one problem with The Last Airbender is that it's pegged almost exclusively to the small-fry state of mind that earned fans for the original Nickelodeon series.

If Shyamalan aimed for the "small fry state of mind," well, that's a serious blow to the film's possibilities, but Turan shouldn't speak of the TV series without having, you know, watched it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender had plenty of "something for adults" in it. It was a smart, complicated show with a huge arc, an intertwined collection of relationships, and definitive crises involving life, death, redemption, vice, and failure. I'm not sure what Turan was getting at here, but whatever it was he surely missed out on the essential issue: Shyamalan has apparently done horrible things to Konietzko and DiMartino's original story, and the 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes gives every indication of that.

Rage

American Academy of Pediatrics Recommends U.S. Pediatricians Perform "Token" Female Genital Mutilation

File this under "WTF?" The AAP has issued a statement advocating that physicians preform a ritual token "nicking" of an baby girl's clitoris to satify the religious or cultural needs of their parents. That's disgusting and outrageous, and it'll be a cold day in Hell before I let that kind of destructive behavior go on in my country.

Some things about our culture are non-negotiable. Our culture is not simply different from those that perform genital mutilation, it is better. Having our kids reach adulthood with as many body parts as they were born with is not negotiable.

Video of SWAT Raid on Missouri Family

Watch the video. It's NSFW, but really, watch it when you can. This is what the rhetoric of "drug war" comes down to: A group of guys with better armor than most Iraqi soldiers barge down a door in an apartment complex, shoot two dogs in front of small children, and terrorize a neighborhood to find a small amount of marijuana and a bong.

This is what cops do now. I'm sure they think of themselves as good people, but this is terror and violence directed against Americans for the sake of terror and violence, by our own government officials. Von says it better than I do.

Giggity!

Christian leader caught with male escort

Giggity! Pastor George Rekers, a co-founder of Focus on the Family and an activist in the anti-gay, ex-gay movement, has been busted hiring a male prostitute to accompany him on a ten-day, all-expenses-paid trip across southern Europe.

His excuse? "I had back surgery recently and needed someone to carry my luggage." Steven Colbert's version: "He wanted a cute boy to hoist his sack."

And hoist he did. The young man, identified as "Lucien," describes himself in his on-line profile as having "a smooth, sweet, tight ass... a perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)."

Rekers is especially noteworthy for years of state and federal testimony he gave in which he identified himself as as expert on gay and lesbian psychology and stated of children adopted by homosexual couples "their welfare comes dead last in the homosexual lifestyle, it is oriented toward grooming them for traumatic early sexualization and exploitation by adults."

Isn't all of that special?

GTD

Mind Mapping

Mind-Mapping is one of those techniques that I sometimes try, and often get mixed results. I'd like to get better at it, but it never seems to click for me quite the way I'd like it to. Still, this article mentions a number of different things I haven't tried before.

Food

Screaming Orgasm Recipe

1 oz vodka
1 1/2 oz Bailey's Irish cream
1/2 oz Kahlua

Pour first vodka, then Bailey's, then Kahlua into a cocktail glass over crushed ice. Stir.

For Sushi at Home, skip the Fish

Mark Bittman with sushi recipes using good sushi rice and, er, not raw fish. A good sushi rice recipe is included. I recommend rice vinegar.

How to make the Perfect Risotto

I'm not sure I buy this, but it looks like a delicious experiment. He recommends using a much lighter oil than I do (I make risottos with meat, and my fat of choice is rendered bacon grease) and a slightly smaller rice grain called carnaroli.

Inspiration

Beautiful Contact Forms

Creative examples of Single Page Design

Tapp Gala

Awesome smartphone interfaces. It seems to me that the small scale of the smartphone screen encouranges heavy graphics use, and it's nice to see. I'd like that brilliance applied to more and larger websites.

Modern CSS Layouts

Smashing Magazine on how to do good layouts with CSS: Grids, Liquid Layouts, living with IE. Don't miss the previous article, about degrading gracefully without sacrificing performance.

Shrill

The Euro Crisis

Der Spiegel has an article on how most nation-states in the Western world have built welfare states and funded infrastructure prices without taxing their citizens appropriately to pay for it all, and how the bill is coming due and now we need to pony up for the things we and our parents bought for all of ourselves.

Here's the thing though: unlike most Americans (and their contemptible representatives), I understand that we've overspent. Not myself, personally, but my government. How we restructure to live within our means is a topic for a lot more discussion.

President urges all Americans to appeal to Invisible Man in the Sky for bailouts, ponies

What is it with our government saying it shall not honor an establishment of religion, then going on to honor any establishment so long as it is not "no establishment?" Can't it just let religious people go about their business? Do Americans really need to be reminded to pray?

Man who spotted Times Square bomb a Muslim, media yawns

The man who spotted the popping and smoking car and reported it to authorities is a Muslim. For all that the right wing wackos worry that we're not calling Shahzad a "Muslim terrorist," maybe the phrase "Good American Muslim citizen" doesn't sit well on their tongues.

Eric Cantor says Obama is not a domestic enemy. Audience at Heritage Foundation boos him.

Porn (Everything here in NSFW)

Turning the Backdoor Corner