Backyard bombardier

* Brush with infamy: Turns out disgraced former NBA referee Tim Donaghy went to high school with my girlfriend. Her yearbook shows that Donaghy was voted Most Likely to Compromise the Integrity of a Major Sports League.

* Civil discourse, illustrated: Seattle Mariners GM Bill Bavasi was asked to comment on criticism from Florida Marlins' exec David Samson, "My mother always taught me that if the only thing you have to say is '[expletive] David Samson,' you shouldn't say anything at all."

* The other day, Atrios pulled off a trick I can never seem to manage: using the word recherche without seeming recherche. I'm trying to think of examples of other words that tend to be demonstrated in their use.

* It seems Rudy Giuliani's claim that he "cut taxes 23 times" as mayor of New York is, well, not really true. It's a weird claim to make, anyway. If you want to win votes on your record as a tax-cutter, then the number of separate tax cuts isn't really meaningful. A single well-designed cut could, in theory at least, be more effective than 23 separate, poorly designed ones. It's also possible, in theory, to cut taxes 23 times while raising them 24 times (a la Ronald Reagan's payroll tax hike). A more meaningful figure, for those who want to tout their tax-cutting prowess, would be the difference in the overall tax rate on the day they left office vs. the rate on the day they took office.

* "AFSCME: The Union That Works For You" (via)

* This is very well done.

* (via) The 5,000-calorie pizza. It includes 12 pigs in blankets, 4 hamburger patties, 21 cheese pizza rolls and bacon, but no sesame seed bun. Anything this bad for you should come with sesame seeds. That's the genius of the Big Mac, it lets you know when the worst of the damage is over.

* Delawareans without prescription drug coverage can now get a free discount card from the United Way. Nationwide, United Way has distributed some 2 million of these "FamilyWize" cards. If you don't have prescription coverage, check it out. (You might also want to download your own free 'SiCKO Health Care Card.)

* Bookmark this Crooks & Liars post. SilentPatriot links to the specifics of each Democratic candidate's health care proposals.

* I'm not sure I'm clear about what all Catherine Tumber is saying on "How to Talk About God and Politics," but her recommendation of Martin Luther King Jr. as a model is worth reading. And I rather like her insistence that "religious integrity" shows itself, in part, through "a reckoning with the limitations of life that surpasses stoic resignation; a sense of a cosmic future that will outlive us, upon which to base present hope."

* From comments, joed supplied the link to Max Blumenthal's "Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour." Two things: 1) that's a different Fred Clark, and 2) evangelical "liturgical dance" must be stopped.

Comments

[Jeff]

Corn-based ethanol is a really REALLY bad idea. It costs a lot more energy to grow corn for ethanol than is derived. (Besides, what we do without all the high fructose corn syrup [yuck!]?). As I understand it, Brasil's cane-based ethanol is much cleaner and much lower cost than corn-based. But we can't be seen using a South American technology, can we?

[Jeff]

It looks like the AFL-CIO is finally figuring out what SEIU knew all the time: the power of unions is in a union of workers. The janitors in one hotel didn't go on strike; they got all the allies in SEIU to join them on the lines and in the marches.

Now the Teamsters have said that they'll not cross grocery workers picket lines, and the Longshoreman were going to respect the Clerk's strike. Neither strike happened because the are very few people who can do what the Teamsters (drive semis long distance) or Longshoreman (unload crates at the docks) do.

The more locals that join in a strike, the easier it is for the workers to win concessions. The AFL-CIO were started with this idea, but somewhere along the line, each local was forced to go it alone.

[Robin Z]

Pleonasm?

[Liadan]

"Erudite" comes to mind.

[cjmr]

As I understand it, Brasil's cane-based ethanol is much cleaner and much lower cost than corn-based.

Yeah, and unlike corn-based, cane-based ethanol (IIRC) is made from the parts of the plant that are not used for human consumption. I'm not a big advocate of turning a food source into fuel for automobiles.

[Jeff]

I'm trying to think of examples of other words that tend to be demonstrated in their use.

There's "obfuscate" in all it's glorious forms. Very simular to Pleonasm. Of course, when put with "eschew" (as "eschew obfuscation", a sign that my high school teacher had on his desk), it tends to mean the opposite.

[Indecisive]

How about mellifluous?

[Jim]

"As I understand it, Brasil's cane-based ethanol is much cleaner and much lower cost than corn-based. But we can't be seen using a South American technology, can we?"

It's not the technology, it's the crop. The problem is that normal yeast cells cannot ferment complex carbohydrates like starch or cellulose to alcohol. Sugar cane has more fermentable sugars than corn does. Most of the carbohydrates in corn are bound up as starch and must be converted into glucose or maltose before they can be fermented. Brazil is succeeding because sugar cane is so abundant and so rich in fermentable sugars.

The ideal solution is for someone to figure out how to get the genes for the enzymes involved in cellulose digestion into a yeast cell. But no luck so far, the transformed yeasts aren't genetically stable and don't express the genes at the right times and in the right amounts. If they succeed, then we'll be able to get ethanol from virtually any plant waste such as straw or grass.

[MikeJ]

If I explained the subjunctive mood to you I doubt you'd understand it.

[Josh]

Sesquipedalian always comes to mind for this question.
Abstruse, recondite.
Grandiloquent.
I like to think that onomatopoeia was an attempt to make a word that sounds like the definition of onomatopoeia.

[Josh]

At one time, neologism.

[Cat]

You can make ethanol super-efficiently from algae, I'm told. We'd have to watch how we farmed it so as not to do damage to aquatic ecosystems, but under the proper conditions it might give us something to do with all that fertilizer runoff and raw sewage.

Now, if only we could come up with a biofuel that uses zebra mussels and purple loosestrife...

[A Texan in Bavaria]

evangelical "liturgical dance" must be stopped

AMEN!!!

This cause unites my otherwise-divided family: my enthusiastically Baptist mom, my right-wing but only ethnically-Baptist dad (likes his Sunday School class, doesn't really like church services, LOVES his Miller High Life), my South Park-Republican little brother who only goes to church when he's home visiting our parents, and me, the girl who became a liberal and an Episcopalian in college (the horror!)

When my brother and I are home for Christmas and observe this abomination, along with those crappy "praise choruses" and "praise bands" which have supplanted the best thing about the Southern Baptist tradition (the hymns!!!), we are of one mind. He picks up the hymnal in protest when the words to old hymns are flashed up on the slick projector and insists that the rest of us do likewise, as "church isn't supposed to be a f---ing beer joint" (which he's normally quite fond of).

Who am I to discourage his act of protest?

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

I think you meant, "Were I to explain the subjunctive mood to you..."

[Terry Karney]

It helps, now and then, to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

[cjmr]

How about mellifluous?

Ooooh, I love saying mellifluous!

Mellifluous, mellifluous, mellifluous, mellifluous...

[Lila]

Texan in Bavaria, thank you for introducing a very useful term ("ethnically Baptist")! How about "karaoke hymns"?

Joke from my sojourn at a Baptist university: What do you call a Baptist who's been to graduate school? An Episcopalian!

And for a word that demonstrates its own opposite: "effortlessly" is way too hard to say.

[Cautious Man]

"Obfuscation", perhaps?

[mogley]

As I understand it, Brasil's cane-based ethanol is much cleaner and much lower cost than corn-based. But we can't be seen using a South American technology, can we?

Actually, I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that Midwestern America doesn't grow sugar cane so well. So, clearly, our only answer to this alternative fuels problem is to go invade Brazil and heavily guard the cane plantations while letting the rest of the country destroy itself.

[Reverend Ref]

It's my opinion that liturgical dance must be stopped. Doesn't matter if it's evangelical, fundamental, Protestant or Catholic . . . just STOP. Please.

[KCinDC]

Republicans have a bizarre obsession with counting tax cuts and tax increases. I still remember the list of Bill Clinton's supposed 237 (or whatever it was) tax increases. Aside from the contortions of the definitions of "tax" and "increase" required to get some things onto the list, the number given was the number of *lines* rather than the number of items, so "tax increases" that took up two or three lines were counted two or three times.

[Vermic]

No blood for sugar!

[Jeff]

I had no idea what "liturgical dance" was, so I fired up Google Video. I think now that the problem is not liturgical dance, per se, which seems a fairly organic outgrowth of the AME experience. It's when clueless, graceless, talentless people with a distinct lack of rhythm and taste appropriate the dance without understanding the history and tradition behind it.

The AME churches have always been about spontaneous expression, and worship through movement. I fail to see what's so horrid about that.

I couldn't find much on "praise bands", and all the "praise chorus" videos are based on the song by Jimmy Eat World, so I'm thinking a similar situation may be at work here.

[McJulie]

From the Tumber link:
“Why do so many liberals seem supportive of religious language when it is invoked by black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., but recoil when such language is employed by white political leaders?” The answer, he suggests, lies in “a subtle kind of racism” that holds white people to a self-styled higher intellectual standard.

I don't know who the "he" is, but Tumber's refutation of his suggestion following this seems unnecessarily wordy -- and I think it gives too much credence to the point.

Read the first sentence again. The words that should jump out are "civil rights leaders" contrasted with "political leaders."

Somebody invoking God Almighty who is fighting for civil rights is inspirational. Somebody invoking God Almighty who is fighting against civil rights is most of the current right wing.

"Anything this bad for you should come with sesame seeds. That's the genius of the Big Mac, it lets you know when the worst of the damage is over."

Is Fred saying that sesame seeds cause flatulence? Or is he alluding to the antioxidants in the seeds? Even with the Big Mac, including the sesame seeds to try to make the burger healthier is like trying to use a fishing pole to catch a blue whale.

[Tonio]

That was me with the 11:45 a.m. post.

[Rosina]

I'm trying to think of examples of other words that tend to be demonstrated in their use.

Curt.

[cjmr's husband]

There was an article in the WashPost this week with a nice graphic showing how much Amazon rain forest is being cut down to grow the cane...

[Alan]

I can't believe that no one has suggested "pedantic" yet.

[damnedyankee]

My personal favorite: "erogenous"

[twig]

I had no idea what "liturgical dance" was, so I fired up Google Video.

Holy God in Heaven, somebody actually used the Google.

It is a good day.

[Jeff]

Holy God in Heaven, somebody actually used the Google.

I use the Google (and the Wikipedia, and the iMDB) all the time. Teh internets were made for research -- why not use them?

[twig]

Teh internets were made for research -- why not use them?

*weep* It's so...so beautiful.

[cjmr]

At least once a day I say to myself, "How the H--- did we do X before the internet?" (Where X is something like, find a recipe, identify a bird, determine whether that plant is poison ivy, figure out who wrote the lyrics for the song on the radio, get directions to someplace, compare features of twelve different child safety seats, and so forth ad infinitum.) And to think there are people who refuse to use it.

[A Texan in Bavaria]

Lila-

I had to come up with a term to describe people who were born and raised Baptist, whose ancestors several generations back were Baptist, are not particularly ardent about the faith itself, but wouldn't consider being part of any other church. (White) "Southern Baptist" is virtually an ethnic group, with "Texas Baptist" being a fairly distinct regional group. We tend to stick around the homeland and are highly encouraged to marry other members of our ethnic group. And marrying too far outside the ethnic group is kinda discouraged, though I would get far less grief for marrying a white Catholic boy than I would for marrying a black Baptist...

I am dating a German guy who's Lutheran. The fact that he is not Catholic and is a member of a totally respectable profession (Mechanical Engineering) helps cushion the blow for my parents, but I'm pretty sure they deeply regret letting me go to Johns Hopkins rather than pushing me to stick around and go to Texas A&M.

[Jeff]

And to think there are people who refuse to use it.

You mean like the Republicans running for President? "How can you claim you'll face terrorists if you can't face a ****** snowman!"

[Bugmaster]

Teh internets were made for research -- why not use them?

It clogs the tubes.

On a more pedantic note, teh internets were actually made for surviving nuclear war; they were later re-purposed for porn. Research is an accidental side effect.

[Jeff]

How the H--- did we ... 1) find a recipe, 2) identify a bird, 3) determine whether that plant is poison ivy, 4) figure out who wrote the lyrics for the song on the radio, 5) get directions to someplace, 6)compare features of twelve different child safety seats

1) Cookbooks and recipe folders. And clipped recipes stuck hither and yon in the cookbooks and recipe holders
2) Audibon's Guide
3) Field Guide to Local Flora (I had a really cool "flowchart" to identify trees when I was a lad)
4) I don't recall
5) Maps. Rand-McNally ruled THE WORLD!!!!
6) Consumer's Reports

Teh Internets don't really have any more information that was available beforehand (APAs for blogs and wikis, frex), it just made all that information orders of magnitude easier to find. (Or, in some cases, possible to find. If the information you needed was in a Finnish fan-zine, odds are you wouldn't be able to get it. Now the fan-zine is online and available to everyone [who reads Finnish].)

[ohiolibrarian]

cjmr You see once upon a time there were these "libraries" and you could find out all kinds of interesting information. Of course, you had to get out of your 'jammies.

Is there any way to say the word precious without being precious? Or Gollum?

[Jesurgislac]

You know, right up to, um, about 2001, I was building a lovely collection of cookbooks, and I used them. I have an early edition of Household Management that I'm very fond of - not worth anything, it's a bit battered and a little bit stained, but it's Household Management before it got rebranded, and if you're looking for a traditional recipe for virtually anything that falls within English cookery, it's in there.

People still give me cookbooks sometimes, but I don't buy them any more: it dawned on me about six years ago that since I got home access to the Internet I hadn't used my library to research recipes, and that made me sad for them. Cookbooks shouldn't be glossy and shiny a year after you buy them, and all my new ones were.

[cjmr]

I own well over 100 cookbooks. (I'm not done putting them in LibraryThing yet, so I don't know the exact number) At least 5 birding field guides and several plant ones (none of the plant ones have poison ivy, BTW). More maps I can keep track of. And I subscribe to Consumer Reports. As a family, we have 27 (I think) books out of the library right now, we visit there weekly, even though we own a fair-sized home library (~3000 volumes).

And yet, none of those resources has the immediacy of the internet. If I'm trying to figure out if the bouquet of three-leaved plants my 4-year-old just brought me is poison ivy or not, I'd like to know the answer now, not once I've stuffed them in car seats and driven them to the library to look in the field guide that may or may not actually be on the shelf today. (It was, in fact, the dreaded ivy, but she doesn't seem to be allergic to it. Yet.)

Besides, none of my cookbooks has Jes' Chocolate Ginger Cookies in them. My birding field guides don't have mp3s of bird calls. Rand McNally is great for plotting a trip from DC to Boston, but won't tell me what to do once I get off the freeway (unless I want to invest hundreds of dollars in street level map books for every town I ever visit, which I don't, and even those won't necessarily tell me what block a given house number is on). Consumer Reports will only tell me about the car seats they tested in their last testing cycle, which are not necessarily the same as the ones currently available (and they can't do price comparisons between stores, anyway).

Libraries cannot be beat when what you want to do is check out a book to read--but the internet has become a far superior way to research just about anything quickly, and anything in a quickly-changing field at all.

[Jeff]

Beat ya, ohiolibrarian! Neener, neener, neener!

[rampancy]

Er, I actually tried to Google the term "Liturgical Dance" (I thought it was something like a school dance, but, with no slow songs, all Christian Pop/Rock, and every boy/girl pairing chaperoned by a stern-faced elderly man/woman with a ruler to ensure proper distance between the two sexes?)...but I found a lot of articles talking about it, but none actually defining it. And then I saw this:

http://www.riversedgedancewear.com/litdandres1.html

*shudders*

So, has anyone actually been to one of these things? Looking at that page of dresses above gives me the impression that a "liturgical dance" is something out of some 60's counter-culture hippie/flower-power get-together...

[Jeff]

rampancy: try Google Video instead. You'll see what I mean about the evolution (and dumbing-down) of liturgical dance.

cjmr: There are two sources for finding who wrote the lyrics for the song on the radio. One was to go the music store and find the sheet music. The other was to go to the record store (which often was the same), find the record and read the credits.

And yet, none of those resources has the immediacy of the internet.

Well, duh. (Sorry) Travelling by jet has more immediacy than travelling by covered wagon. But you asked "How did we..." and both ohiolibrian and I answered your question.

[Bugmaster]

No, the hippie flower-power dresses would be tie-dyed, or translucent, or at least ornamented in some way. These dresses just make the dancers look like Lego figures. *shudder*

[Jeff]

These dresses just make the dancers look like Lego figures.

How long before they have their own series on Irregular Webcomic then?

[hapax]

"There are two sources for finding who wrote the lyrics for the song on the radio. "

Or you could go to the public library, many of which have (or had) extensive collections of sheet music, fakebooks, and the like.

And if they didn't have it, they could request from Inter-Library Loan.

Of course, right now, an awful lot of people looking things up on them intertubes are in fact accessing it at -- you guessed it -- their local library.

But tax-supported public libraries are one of the Evils that The Confiscatory State is trying to shove down our throats with Guns In Our Faces (TM)

[J]

From the Tumber link:
“Why do so many liberals seem supportive of religious language when it is invoked by black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., but recoil when such language is employed by white political leaders?” The answer, he suggests, lies in “a subtle kind of racism” that holds white people to a self-styled higher intellectual standard.

I guess I escape from this because I am not supportive of religious language by blacks OR whites. You all can smile and nod to MLK and the Dalai Lama if you want; I'll be over here sitting crosslegged in front of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

But tax-supported public libraries are one of the Evils that The Confiscatory State is trying to shove down our throats with Guns In Our Faces (TM)

Prairie Muffin, anybody?

[Kitty]

Liturgical Dance: It should be banned in its mainline Protestant form before anything else. I once attended a Presbyterian church here in Austin in which three teenage girls did a dance interpretation of the 23rd Psalm. It reminded me of Hermione Gingold and friends doing "one Grecian urn" from The Music Man, and I started helplessly giggling, which is decidedly Not Cool among Presbyterians.

Yeah, Texan in Bavaria, I remember the best part of going to church with my Baptist friends growing up was the hymnal. I still hum "There is a Fountain" and "Power in the Blood" when I Hymnody is the single greatest artistic treasure of the Reformation (architecture is a close second) and we're trading that heritage for something that sounds like it was rejected by Clear Channel. Gag. Of course, I'm probably the only person in th history of iTunes to have purchased Queen, Blue Oyster Cult, and the Jocelyn Grove Chorale's 50 Greatest Hymns, so maybe my opinion isn't the most educated one out there.