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Soupe au pistou, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Soupe au pistou with goat cheese croutons, made from a slightly modified version of this recipe. I was proud of this one.

As proof that this blog is about things other than Larry Craig, let me point to a few interesting things that I've collected over the past few days:

• Anil Dash, "occasional lolcat critic and vice president of Six Apart", in the WSJ.  Explaining lolcats.  Heh.
• MSNBC's "Ads of the Weird" gets upset that the TIAA-CREF ad campaign uses Bob Mould's music.  The best part, though, is the second comment on the post.  Schooled.  Next issue?  (via torrez.)
• wow, this is a dumb stunt, particularly when it's not too hard to think of some better uses of taxpayer dollars.
• the Center for Land Use Interpretation limns the Blue Ridge Parkway and its environs.

Tucker Carlson calls himself the "least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet."  Okay, fine.  But something makes me think the Log Cabin Republicans won't be terribly thrilled with him, given that Carlson described himself that way in the same breath in which he confessed to gay-bashing.  Literally gay-bashing:

CARLSON: I have. I've been bothered in Georgetown Park. When I was in high school.

ABRAMS: Really?

CARLSON: Yes. . .

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and -- and --

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I'm the least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet --

[laughter]

Now, we don't know what this guy allegedly did to Carlson -- did he tap his foot, expose himself, grab him, what? -- but I'll go out on a limb here and say that calling the cops would be a more constructive way to deal with it than conspiracy and assault.

Incidentally, I'd be very interested to see if this purported arrest is on record someplace, and if Carlson's alleged "botherer" is available for comment.

UPDATE:  Carlson has responded, in an e-mail sent to Mediabistro, saying that calling it gay-bashing is "absurd" and "an insult":

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

But that's not what you said on air, Tucker.  You said that you "grabbed the guy by the -- you know" and hit his head against the stall.  See why there might be some confusion?

Actually, Carlson needs to go into some detail here.  Why'd he wait 25 minutes before returning with a friend, only to grab the assaulter and hold him "until a security guard arrived"?  Did he call a police officer or security guard in that interval?  Or did he call the security guard after he and the friend had "seized" the assaulter?  Or did the security guard just wander into the men's room and notice Tucker & Friend with this guy in a full-nelson?  (Does the theory of self-defense as justification for an assault still hold if you leave, wait a while, and then come back with a friend?)

By Carlson's telling, yes, he was assaulted.  But the proper response to an assault is to call the cops and press charges, not to go get someone else and proceed with an assault of your own.

Given recent developments, perhaps we should all brush up on restroom etiquette.

Wow.  I'm sure more information will (ahem) come out as time unfolds, but this is a big 'un:  a U.S. Senator was arrested in June in a men's room at the Minneapolis airport.  Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) copped a plea to disorderly conduct in Hennepin County District Court on August 8 and was sentenced to a 10-day suspended jail sentence, a year's probation, and more than $500 in fines and court costs.  (That link is Time's blog, picking up a Roll Call story, but Roll Call's site is, understandably, getting hammered right now.)

Sen. Craig (who once called Bill Clinton "a bad boy, a naughty boy") voted in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment, as TPM Election Central notes.  (TPMEC also has Craig voting in favor of an amendment to Idaho's constitution defining marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman, but I'm unclear as to why a U.S. Senator would be voting for an amendment to a state constitution.  Can anyone enlighten me?)

In a detail that I just love, Craig's spokesman apparently called the incident "a he said/he said misunderstanding."

Evidently it was quite a misunderstanding, considering that Craig pled guilty to disorderly conduct.

And, I'm sure his arresting officer was duly impressed:

At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states.

Does that mean he got the fur-lined handcuffs instead of the plain old metal ones?

Seriously, the thing that makes my jaw drop about this story is the lag time.  What amazes me is that Sen. Craig was arrested on June 11, his court date was August 8, and that news didn't break on this for nineteen days after that.  The cops knew he was a U.S. Senator, the DA I'm sure knew, I'm guessing Craig's staff knew about it (because, presumably, they had to know why he needed to go back to Minnesota for his court date), and no one leaked it to the press at some stage?  That's the truly shocking thing to me...even more than Craig's hypocrisy.

UPDATE:  Craig has decided to, as they say, revise and extend his remarks:

"At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions. I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty. I was trying to handle this matter myself quickly and expeditiously."

So he shouldn't have pled guilty...but he pled guilty.  And he didn't have the advice of counsel?  I count 41 business days between his arrest and his court date -- ample time for someone so august as a United States Senator to secure a lawyer.  Or did he not remember his Miranda rights, which were surely read to him?  The ones guaranteeing him a lawyer and offering one to him if he couldn't afford one?

It's kind of hard to argue that you were wrongly convicted when you pled guilty.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Turns out Craig was outed back in October -- that blog post claims that Craig had had assignations in a Union Station bathroom. 

Also at that link, check out the video clip from 1982.  During the page-sex scandal (a bipartisan one!)  Craig was never named or implicated...but he called a press conference and issued a pre-emptive denial anyway.  (!)

David Pogue's technology wish list is interesting.  I have often joined him in wondering why the hell clock radios don't have keypads.  (I've only seen one, on a circa-1979 Radio Shack model.)  It's honestly why I use my cell phone alarm as an alarm clock (which means I have to somewhat carefully plan when to charge my phone, as there's not a convenient spare outlet in the bedroom) instead of the clock radio.

And seriously:  how hard could it be for electronics manufacturers to label their AC adapters?  Amen, brother.

I greatly enjoyed this NYT story about a guy who flies from Kansas City to New York for every single Mets homestand...to sell cotton candy at Shea Stadium.  Magnificent obsession.

Speaking of Shea, I was there for the first time last night to see the Mets lose to the Dodgers in a somewhat disorganized game.  Fun to see David Wells pitch, though.

It was, with one exception, the first time I've paid to see a major-league baseball game since the 1994 strike.  (I know that the dollars flow to the same places, but I've preferred minor-league games since then -- cheaper to attend, you sit closer, and you feel less squeezed for every dime.  Plus, "Bull Durham" is inspiring.)  The one exception mentioned above was a Cubs-Cardinals game at Wrigley Field in 1999; I had to visit the Friendly Confines, and to see McGwire & Sosa slugging it out was great fun, even if it was the season after their race.

It was also an interesting game last night because it was Jewish Heritage Night at Shea.  A Jewish a cappella group sang before the game, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" was sung in Yiddish (!) during the seventh-inning stretch, the players were introduced with Hebrew lettering on the scoreboard (Moishe Alou, perhaps?) and somewhere on my camera's memory card I have photographic evidence of Mr. Met doing Israeli folk dances on top of the home dugout.

The dark(er) side of Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" series.  Riveting reading.

Thing I Love About Summer, #127:  the copious availability of fresh basil.

We got a ton of basil from our CSA this week.  Pesto = made.

Home invasions must be one of the most stressful situations around.  Here's how to defuse them:  keep really good wine on hand.

(Not a new story, but I just ran across it on Jason's blog and had to share.)

On ABC, ex-astronaut Lisa Nowak "speaks her peace."

And also with you.

UPDATE:  They've fixed it.

I'm a little late to this story, but oh no!  The best liquor store in the city is getting forced out of their space.   Manhattan would be an okay place for LeNell's, but I worry about their ability to compete with the Astor Place Wines and Sherry-Lehmans of the world. 

Better yet:  Astoria.  For entirely selfish reasons:  a top-notch liquor "likker" store in my nabe (no slight whatsoever to Grand Wine & Liquors, which is pretty great, even if they don't carry rye) would be delightful indeed.  It's a long ride on the B61 to Red Hook.

(by the way, that's gin in the bathtub by the front door, not vodka.  Bathtub gin, get it?)

It' s not work-safe, but Moan My IP made me chuckle.

If corporate meetings were staffed by YouTube commenters.

Go check out DSORecords.com, Chico Bangs' new website multimedia empire.  Blogging, podcasting, trivia, video, music, and more!

You know my feelings about Starbucks, but I just might change my mind and patronize this one.

Shark Tank Water Slide, originally uploaded by Chico Bangs.

Okay, I'm not usually in the habit of blogging other peoples' photos, but as Linda Loman said, attention must be paid.

Chico Bangs was in Vega$ last month, and he got to partake of -- nay, commune with! -- the greatest invention yet conceived by the mind of man.

SHARK TANK WATER SLIDE.

(I'm think I'm somehow contractually obligated to type that in boldface each time, and in all caps at least once.)

Seriously -- doesn't "shark tank water slide" just have a certain ring to it, the way the words roll off your tongue?  More machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat than Nabokov's "the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo. Lee. Ta."...but just as evocative to this big dumb American guy.

Two simple concepts:  Shark tank.  And waterslide.  But smoosh 'em together, and you get a peculiarly American form of sheer loopy fantasticness.

Hyperbole much?  Yeah.  But just as Douglas Coupland limned the intrinsic greatness of U.F.O.-brand yaki soba noodles in their plastic bowl with their included spoon, there's something inherently wonderful about a waterslide that passes through a shark tank on its 20-second journey to deposit you plopping into a plunge pool at the end.

This is an admittedly silly post, but you just have to feel impressed by a country and a people that not only made the desert bloom, but also put up a casino.  With a swimming pool.  With a waterslide.  Running not just near or alongside, but right through a frickin' shark tank.

(No word on whether the sharks had "frickin' laserbeams" mounted on their fins...but until I hear the definitive statement on that, I'll choose to believe that they do.)

As Chico himself wrote in his description to the picture:

This is the whole tank.  It's not big.  But it is significant.  There are sharks.  There is a slide.  What else matters?

What else, indeed?

There's a fantastic article in the WaPo Magazine written by a college professor who required her students to go on a fast, abstaining from all electronic media:

"It's only for, like, 24 hours, right?" asked a student near the back.

"Yes," I said quickly. Then came the moment when my growing experience with college students paid off.

"And, what can you do for a lot of that time?" I asked loudly with a big smile, bending at the knees and opening my arms like an overly optimistic cheerleader when the junior varsity is down by 13 points in the fourth quarter.

"Sleep!" came the chorus of voices after barely a beat.

"Yes!" I responded. "You can sleep; you can read; you can have conversations. In person!"

"Can we eat?" someone asked, to laughter.

In retrospect, perhaps that last question wasn't as ridiculous as it sounded.  Eighteen- to 20-year-olds know in their hearts that electronic media are nearly as dear to their lives as physical nourishment. They have vague memories of a time before Tunes, personalized ring tones, Facebook, Google, Rocketboom, "MySpace: The Movie" and www.i-am-bored.com. But like their contemporaries, the Olsen twins, whom they watched grow up in the media, they are no longer innocent. They have tasted the pleasures brought by binary code, and, like most of us, they're not into deprivation.

I've long thought that classes in both media literacy and critical thinking should be part of school curricula from first grade on.  Media, particularly electronic media, become less something that we consume and more something that we bathe in -- actually, that metaphor doesn't quite work, as I know I spend a hell of a lot more time engaging with mass media than I do in the shower.  (But you get my drift.)

One of the things I liked about this article was that it wasn't, like so many media critics, issuing a blanket knee-jerk condemnation of "new media", electronic media, or the million-channel metaverse we live in.  Simply abolishing electronic media isn't going to happen, no matter what the narrow worldview of those "Kill Your Television" bumperstickers espouses, and I can't think of a single technology (save perhaps atomic weaponry) that hasn't been used once invented and perfected.  The key to thinking about this stuff is not to do away with it, but to do just what you're setting out to do:  think about it.  Engage with it, draw lessons from it, critique it, come up with best practices for using it. 

Partway through the semester the students seemed to be getting defensive about their media habits. A little earlier, some of them took my lecture on David Mindich's book Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News to mean I thought less of them for not reading the newspaper or even knowing that traditional network news still exists. I don't, necessarily.

There are a number of reasons why the age of the average newspaper reader and network news viewer is over 50, not the least of which include trends that began when I was my students' age. Many of the reasons lie with the failures of the media themselves. But I sense my students want to shout: We're not frivolous just because we like to IM and go on Facebook! Or, even if we are frivolous, we don't care because we're college students!

I'm not from the we're-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket school of media thought. I use most of the electronic gadgets my students do. E-media keep us up to the minute on information, facilitate relationships without geographic constraint, make logistics easier and sometimes help us relax and fight boredom.

But I do know of a world my students haven't inhabited -- a world in which we may have had less ready access to information but had more power to turn it off and reflect. I hold on to the hope that we're not too far gone in our media stupor to recapture the idealistic vision of the era of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, meaningful discourse and human-to-human interaction in the public sphere.

Exactly.  The mass media are just another tool:  you can use them to enlighten and inform, to synthesize information, to make connections.  You can also use them just as easily to titillate, to frighten, or to propagandize.  And I think that one of the single greatest qualities of blogs, news sites, and most of the Web is something that one of Danna Walker's students hit upon:  So much of the "new media" is based on text.  Glorious, glorious text.  To someone, such as myself, who has been addicted to text since the age of three (to the extent that I've been known to peruse the backs of cleaning products in the bathroom when my reading material runs out -- no joke), the Web represents the single best delivery system in the history of mankind for unlimited amounts of text on any subject for next to nothing.  And as long as we're not communicating exclusively in pictograms or video, there'll always be a place for the printed word; whether it survives hundreds of years from now as smears of ink on paper or as pixels on a screen remains to be seen, but it's not going anywhere.

Awesome video for Kid Koala's "Basin Street Blues":

Fascinating Times article the other day about the work of a custom globe-maker:

For mapmakers like Nova Rico, geographic disputes are commonplace. For a Turkish customer, Cyprus is shown split in two, a division that Greek Cypriots do not recognize. On one globe, Chile is given parts of Antarctica that on another globe go to Argentina. And in much of the Arab world, Israel is nonexistent.

Really does give you an insight into the subjectivity of maps:

Vladimiro Valerio, an expert in the history of cartography on the architecture faculty at the University of Venice, called mapmaking a blend of science and art. “Maps aren’t faithful portraits of reality but subjective constructions,” he said. “Maps reflect the design for which they are to be used. They reflect who commissioned it.”

In sum, he said, “cartographers don’t lie, but they take a position.”

Dogs wearing wigs.

(via BG.)

Mixology moment that shouldn't have happened, #78:  Mayo margaritas.

It's not terribly confidence-inducing that the NYPD is apparently using DEBKA as an intelligence source.

What's next, WorldNetDaily? 

I actually was very impressed with the NYPD's intelligence operations after reading this 2005 article in the New Yorker.  Hopefully they haven't abandoned real proactive intel in favor of credulously listening to Internet kooks.

(See, real proactive intel and threat identification are what help with security, not scandalously ineffective (and questionably legal) wastes of time and manpower like subway searches and mass arrests of protesters.)

To continue the numeric-lists pattern (hey, waitasec: Three examples, and it's a trend!), do check out R.U. Sirius's Top 20 Taboo Topics for Presidential Candidates.

(btw, I don't agree with Sirius's opinions on all this stuff, but I do agree that bringing any of these up in any substantive way would instantly sink any serious presidential candidate.)

Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice knocks it out of the park with this examination of "Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11"

...and Digby pounds the final nail with this reaction to the article:

Someone pointed out to me this little tidbit that would be particularly worth noting if the tabloid political press held the GOP candidates to the same standards as Democrats:

But Hauer says Denny Young, the mayor's alter ego, who has worked at his side for nearly three decades, eventually "made it very clear" that Giuliani wanted "to be able to walk to this facility quickly." That meant the bunker had to be in lower Manhattan. Since the City Hall area is below the floodplain, the command center—which was built with a hurricane-curtain wall—had to be above ground. The formal city document approving the site said that it "was selected due to its proximity to City Hall," a standard set by Giuliani and Giuliani alone...

The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

Seriously, this indicates that Giuliani personally made what everyone considers his biggest blunder --- placing that command center where he did --- because he was actually building a convenient love nest.

Just imagine if Drudge were a Democrat....

Exactly.  But that's why you're not seeing much coverage, or even reaction, to the Voice story.  Dadblamed liberal media.