bodhi tree swaying

• I’m excited to hear there’s a possibility that outgoing Doctor, David Tennant, might be making a Doctor Who movie.
• The LRO has started sending Hi-Res images of the Moon’s surface.
• In honor of the United States of America’s most important day, Wired magazine publishes the same 4th July article that they published last year.
• I like to call it "Colonial Rebellion Day."
• Wired also has an interesting interview with Daniel Wegner about his paper on "How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion." Just don’t mention the war:

Salon has the best thing I’ve read in a long time — transcriptions of Glenn Beck, the Fox News Commentator, presented as poetry.

The example below could be said to be satirical, except that Beck’s not intelligent enough to be a satirist.

TIME TO BELIEVE

It’s time to stop playing
Games in this country.
It is time to actually believe
In something. I do.
I know you do as well.
Believe in something.
Even if it’s wrong.

(“Glenn Beck,” Fox News, March 11, 2009)

This excerpt from “Friday’s Show” is genuinely beautiful:

We’ve got time to write tickets, we’ve got time to write tickets,
Have the police officers write tickets, you know why…

The man is clearly an idiot, but he does have a talent for using the rhythm of words very effectively.

Salon promises more tomorrow…

(Thanks to bitpakkit on Twitter for pointing me towards this gem).

Jon Stewart is concerned that Obama’s rhetoric so closely parallels that of George W. Bush, but Jason Jones says, “I guess when Obama says this stuff I don’t think he really means it. And that gives me hope.”

I’d have thought it was the other way around myself, but Jones’ version is funnier.

Brilliant clip from Stewart:

“Fox News: Really scared about what might happen; oblivious to what already has.”

Dead whale on a beach. A half ton of dynamite. Hundreds of spectators. What could go wrong?

Frank Rich sums up the pitiful figure of fun that is George W. Bush:

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

It’s well worth reading the whole of his brilliant piece.

When I was teaching meditation at the University of Montana I had a student called Connie who was very concerned about her smoking habit. In my youth I sometimes used to smoke roll-ups at parties and I sometimes even bought tobacco so I could make my own and not be cadging from other people all the time, but I never got addicted and so I had no experience I could share about giving up the evil weed. But I do encourage people to be mindful, and so I suggested that she really pay attention to the sensations and mental patterns that arose each time she was smoking a cigarette. It seemed like a long-shot, but it was all I had.

She reported that after taking up this suggestion she was smoking a lot less. It took her longer to smoke each cigarette, and she was …

This letter is a spoof, but because fundamentalism is so weird it’s not really possible to parody it without people taking the attempted parodies seriously. I wonder how that would make me feel if I was a fundamentalist?

Sometimes a comic strip hits the truth spot on, as with today’s Stone Soup, one of my daily reads, as I was mentioning the other day:

I believe psychologists talk about “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency for us to seek out or to accept information that reinforces our existing beliefs. One of the plagues of modern politics (and the wider “culture wars”) is this very tendency. Republicans tend to watch the right-leaning Fox news, and Democrats prefer to watch left-leaning MSNBC. Thus we limit our exposure to other viewpoints and never really make the effort to appreciate them.

Then things go a stage further and we build up what are in fact mutually-exclusive alternative realities. For some people Obama is a crypto-Islamic terrorist-sympathizing Marxist. For me he’s a very decent guy — very moderate politically. I don’t think that on the left the

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My morning routine includes, before I get to the New York Times, taking in a few of the newspaper comics that I most like: Doonesbury (of course), as well as Zits (life with/as a 16-year-old boy — whatever happened to the movie version), Stone Soup (the adventures of two kinda-real families), Heart of the City (a precocious 5-year-old diva and her geeky best friend Dean), and above all Monty.

Ah, Monty. How shall I praise thee? Let me count the ways as an <ol>ordered list</ol>.

1. Monty is an unattractive middle-aged man
2. He has no visible means of support for most of the time, although sometimes he works in stores or has short-term stints working on documentaries. His jobs are basically just a background for humorous situations to develop. Most of them last for just one comic-strip.
3. I think his ambition is to be a comic-strip

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I’m proud this week to feature as a guest blogger Gail Collins of the New York Times. Oh, wait, no, I just copied her stuff because she’s a really funny woman. But it’s almost the same. I mean, this is campaign season, where you can say anything you want, whether it’s true or not, as long as it makes you look better or your opponent worse.

Oh, and in her current column she recommends meditation! Except she’s probably joking. But whatever.

Obama is going to be racing around from rally to rally over the final 96 hours — eight states in three time zones. This sort of last-minute dash around the nation is another American political tradition, which serves the dual purpose of setting a good example for the campaign workers and torturing the campaign press corps in retribution for all those months of writing down

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Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by.
From Predictably Irrational, a really fascinating blog on the science of rationality.

He stops in mid swing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

Who do you think will find this joke more funny liberals or conservatives?

Common stereotypes link the word “liberal” with words such as open-mindedness, tolerance, and impartiality, while the word “conservative” is linked with tradition, caution, and conventional values. Given these associations we might expect that liberals will appreciate, and respond more to humor and jokes than

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