In 2004, Don Cheadle appeared in Hotel Rwanda and was nominated for an Academy Award.

In 2009, Don Cheadle appeared in Hotel for Dogs, and although he won't be eligible until next year's Oscars, I feel confident that he won't be nominated for an Academy Award.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 January 2009 at 9:28 PM

According to the Washington Post, Barack isn't too impressed with how eager the schools in Washington are to cancel classes when there is bad weather:

"We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town," Obama said this morning. "I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."

Harsh words from a guy who literally works from home every day. Fortunately, Ellis Turner, teh head of the Sidwell Friends school that Obama's daughters attend, had a quick response:

No question, the president is right. The next time it snows, we would like to invite him to help us make the decision. His involvement will make it much easier to explain to our students why they won't be able to spend the day sleeping and sledding."

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 28 January 2009 at 4:07 PM

The fact that Diablo Cody is attached had me worried, but so far I'm really enjoying The United States of Tara.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 January 2009 at 9:33 PM

To most Beatles fans, choosing between the songs of the Fab 4 is a bit like choosing between children. But, on the JamsBio exclusive, Playing The Beatles Backwards, one intrepid fan dares to rank the original songs of The Beatles and give his reasons why in a worst-to-first countdown.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 23 January 2009 at 6:50 PM

Even if you don't do all your online shopping in the virtual megamall that is Amazon.com, the site offers a way to let you remember the things you want to buy from other places.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 23 January 2009 at 6:49 PM

The Prague National Museum, which has Brahe's moustache in its collection, sent a few of the hairs to Denmark. Lab tests revealed mercury levels more than 100 times above normal.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 18 January 2009 at 6:25 PM

"If you don't read music and you can't identify the music in the strips, then you lose out on some of the meaning," said William Meredith, the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed "Peanuts" strips.

When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters' state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 15 January 2009 at 8:22 AM

My expectations had been less than low. Lexus introduced a self-parking system on its LS 460 that was slow, balky and maddeningly useless. In one of several glitches, the Lexus unit only worked on dead-flat ground and needed six feet of surplus space to even attempt an automatic park, putting any utility into serious question.

The Ford system works on grades and can squeeze the car into impressively tight spots - for the Lincoln, just 1.5 feet in front and back - and works in both forward and reverse, allowing drivers to easily carve back and forth into position. For Ford to offer a system that so thoroughly whips the one from Lexus - a formidable luxury brand - is an impressive technological display.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 January 2009 at 2:39 PM

"If you can eliminate those big aero-drag mirrors and just put a little camera there, it can help improve the fuel efficiency of the vehicle," Welburn tells NPR's Robert Siegel at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Cars like the Cadillac Converj have been designed with two screens, one for each side of the car. Welburn says the camera provides a better view than the conventional mirror.

"In the Cadillac, we placed those screens ... inside in locations that are very similar to turning your head to look at a rearview mirror," he says. "I think, in some ways, once you get used to it, it's actually a whole lot easier."

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 January 2009 at 2:32 PM

St. Louis County is raising the speed limit to 35 miles per hour on Big Bend Boulevard from Forsyth Boulevard to Laclede Station Road.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 11 January 2009 at 9:14 AM

So I set out to try a number of new and old desks, capped the budget at $1,000 and sought professional advice along the way.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 9 January 2009 at 10:07 AM

According to a new study, youg people today like to sit down to meals, but feel like they don't have enough time in their schedules to do so.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 January 2009 at 4:06 PM

Clearance sales at the stores begin next week.

Time to pick up some new dress shirts.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 January 2009 at 11:52 AM

Virtually all the flu in the United States this season is resistant to the leading antiviral drug Tamiflu, and scientists and health officials are trying to figure out why.

The problem is not yet a public health crisis because this is a below-average flu season so far and the chief strain circulating is still susceptible to other drugs -- but infectious disease specialists are nonetheless worried.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 January 2009 at 11:47 AM

Politico.com is reporting that Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) will not be seeking reelection in 2010. Early polling had Bond wining a narrow victory over Robin Carnahan, Missouri's current Secretary of State, although Carnahan has not yet committed to running. The open seat in Missouri becomes the latest in a string of GOP Senators who have announced that they will not be seeking reelection in 2010. This could lead to further Democratic gains in the Senate.

One thing that seems nearly certain is that, given the narrowness of Claire McCaskill's victory two years ago and Barack Obama's close loss here in November, this 2010 election will be hard fought and narrowly won.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 January 2009 at 10:10 AM

Matt Ygelesias thinks Diane Fienstein is "go[ing] rogue" and "making trouble." Maybe so, but if not wanting to look as stupid as Hary Reid does on the Burris issue and responding to an obvious snub from the Obama transition team is going rogue, she probably needs to do thsi more often.

I have no problems with Feinstein's positions on anything this week. She pretty much exactly mirrors my take on Roland Burris, so I obviously have no problem with her there and won't dive into the issue anymore than I already have here.

And regarding Panetta, her position makes perfect sense. She had a preference for the head of the CIA, and the Obama team chose to go another direction, which was fine. But they also chose to brief junior members of intelligence committee on their choice before leaking it to the media, but not the incoming or outgoing chairs. The Obama team is calling that a "mistake." Clearly it was, but to be honest, I have a hard time understanding how they could make that mistake unintentionally. They knew enough to schedule briefings with other members of the intelligence committee, but just forgot to give a heads up to the person who was going to chair the confirmation hearings? That sounds like an intentional snub to me. So Feinstein played the game, put her back up about the nomination, and now likely has the Obama camp making some concessions to her in exchange for a smooth confirmation hearing. Probably a lot of concessions, since this was a fairly public snubbing. So, on this issue, I think Feinstein did exactly what she needed to do to make sure that she stays in the loop on intelligence issues in the future and reminded Obama that they can both play hardball if that's what he wants. That's Washington politics at work, and if you want the legislative branchto perform their proper oversight role, this is what needed to happen in this case.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 January 2009 at 9:34 AM

St. Louis has chosen To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee for The Big Read 2009.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 January 2009 at 2:33 PM

The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey is a hard-boiled, modern detective story set in Chicago. It features a PI, cops, murders, a femme fatale, and DNA evidence. It's a page-turner that you'll probably enjoy.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 January 2009 at 1:33 PM

Everyone is talking about how this guy shouldn't have been texting while ATVing, but a better question is what he was doing with his two year-old in his lap while he was driving an ATV.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 9:58 PM

St. Louis Fed:

Our results suggest that tickets are used as a revenue generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 9:35 PM

If written about Roland Burris more than I want to, but if someone could answer this for me, I'd appreciate it:

What does Harry Reid want to have happen here?

I'm not at all sticking up for Blagojevich here, but I haven't yet heard any arguments as to why -- legally -- Burris isn't the junior Senator from Illinois. It's done, and I don't like the Democrats -- like the GOP did for eight years -- thumbing their nose at the law when they don't like the law.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 2:42 PM

Lawyers for Roman Polanski, who fled the country more than 30 years ago on the eve of sentencing for having sex with a minor, on Monday asked that his case be moved from a Los Angeles justice system they say is too seriously tainted by its own misdeeds to treat the Oscar-winning filmmaker fairly.

It seems to me that Polanski has been treated more than fairly, so far. Do we not have an extradition treaty with France? It seems hard to imagine that if the circumstances of this crime were to repeat themselves (the 13-year-old victim told the grand jury that she was "was plied with alcohol and Quaaludes, and objected repeatedly as she was subjected to vaginal and anal sex"), that we'd happily let the defendant live his life in France if he weren't a well-known director. The fact that dismassal of the charges is being sought even though Polanski has admitted the crime and fled the jurisdiction is just crazy. Polanski can make this out to be a procedural issue all he wants, but if he gets a pass on this, it will be clear that America has a different standard for celebrities than it does for others when it comes to justice.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 2:06 PM

In summing up which Cardinals deserve HoF consideration, Viva El Birdos delivers a strong argument for not holding Mark McGwire and other steroid freaks guilty for something that was tacitly accepted in baseball at the time:

To pillory McGwire and the other nineties sluggers for something nobody cared about at the time is moving the goalposts a little too much for my taste. Lots of people used steroids, we'll never know who did and who didn't, and that's the way baseball was at the time. People seem to want to let the dust settle, or wait for things to clear up, but it's not going to get any clearer than it is now: Major League Baseball tacitly accepted steroid use from the late 80s to the early aughts. That we feel guilty about it now is no reason to whitewash the things that happened in that decade. I hate to use a football analogy, now or ever, but if you're going to throw the challenge flag you should do it before everybody's moved on to the next play.

Also, I'm in the Jim Edmonds HoF camp as well, so I found his discussion of Edmonds's credentials to be pretty interesting.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 1:10 PM

Stranger associate editor Charles Mudede regrets meeting Rostam Batmanglij, the keyboardist for Vampire Weekend. Mr. Batmanglij dragged Mr. Mudede into a heated argument about why the third tower ("building seven") collapsed on 9/11. Because Mr. Mudede's knowledge was limited to the two buildings that fell on that terrible day, he was ill prepared to defend himself against Mr. Batmanglij's ferocious attacks on his experience, intelligence, and character. Mr. Mudede also regrets returning Mr. Batmanglij's iPhone to him after he left it in a cab they shared. Mr. Mudede wishes he had taken the prone iPhone home, extracted all the numbers, messages, and pictures, and posted them on the web.

The rest of their regrets -- there are quite a few of them -- are perhaps even funnier. But this one is great because I always suspected those Vampire Weekend kids were 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 11:04 AM

If history is any guide, the housing market might not bottom until 2010, a stock market rebound isn't in sight, the unemployment rate could exceed 11% and government debt is about to soar.

The paper is refreshing because it's straightforward -- it isn't overloaded with Greek formulas and questionable regressions. Instead, they look at what happened to 22 economies ranging from Indonesia in 1997 to the U.S. in 1929 after a major crisis.

There's a lot of "on average" assumptions in this piece, but it is definitely provactive to think that all this talk of economic stimuli and the end being in sight may not be worth much.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 9:27 AM

The episode suggests one reason that the crisis went unchecked: A dangerous all-or-nothing orthodoxy had come to dominate the policy debate, where one was either for free markets or against them.

Link (via TPM)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 9:20 AM

When he talks about being post partisan, having seen these people and knowing what they would do in that situation, I suffer from post partisan depression.

Barney Frank is a witty guy. I certainly wouldn't want to be on the other end of one of his sound-bites.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 January 2009 at 8:30 AM

If you're in the market to buy new furniture, it seems like now might be the right time to act. All the big retailers seem to have end of the year sales going on right now. As an ardent follower of my own advice, I have been actively shopping the sales. So far I've nabbed a floor sample bed from Ethan Allen, a nightstand and dresser from Crate & Barrel, a side table for my living room from Restoration Hardware. This is the second year in a row that Crate & Barrel's post-holiday sale has been too good for me to resist -- last year I got a coffee table from them. I guess Ethan Allen doesn't really have a sale going on (they never seem to have sales these days), but plenty of their merchandise is available as floor samples if you visit their store. But the best deal for me was at Restoration Hardware. There's a coupon code available online that will knock an extra 10% off the price of any of their sale items, which makes for some pretty decent prices.

Now if only I could find a nice entertainment unit...

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 January 2009 at 6:40 PM

Frank Rich on GWB:

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting "highlights" of the administration's "accomplishments and results." With big type, much white space, children's-book-like trivia boxes titled "Did You Know?" and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to "My Pet Goat" than "The Stranger."

This document is the literary correlative to "Mission Accomplished." Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don't count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving "market economy" (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a "democratically elected president" (presiding over one of the world's most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He "led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief" (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 January 2009 at 2:52 PM

Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing.

The Blagojevich transcripts were the impetus for William Safire to use his On Language column to discuss the difference between the profane and the obscene.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 January 2009 at 2:02 PM

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico confirmed in a statement released Sunday afternoon that he has withdrawn his name as the commerce secretary nominee, citing a pending "investigation of a company that has done business with New Mexico state government."

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 January 2009 at 1:53 PM

How is it possible that the governor's soon-to-be son-in-law, Levi Johnston, is working as an apprentice on the North Slope?

The governor, in trying to dispel rumors the father of her grandchild is a high school dropout, released this statement this past week,

"Levi is continuing his online high school work in addition to working as an electrical apprentice on the North Slope."

But federal regulations require all members of apprentice programs, union or otherwise, to first obtain a high school diploma, something the governor's soon-to-be son-in- law does not have. Some apprentice programs even require the completion of high school level algebra or the post-secondary equivalent.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 January 2009 at 9:42 PM

Franken's lead now stands at 225 votes after gaining 176 votes more than Coleman in Saturday's review of the formerly sealed absentee ballots. Franken started the day with a 49-vote advantage.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 January 2009 at 9:30 PM

The big exhibition of the winter season, "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," which runs from Jan. 30 to April 27 at the Kemper Art Museum, will take a fresh look at Saarinen and hisachievements through 50 of his projects, completed and uncompleted. The exhibition has been on an international tour since 2006, and its stop at the Kemper underscores once again how important the recently expanded museum is to the cultural and intellectual life of the community.

I just missed this show when I was in Washington last fall, so I'm pretty happy to see that it's coming to the Kemper. Doubly so since I was given the associated catalog for Christmas, and have found it rather fascinating to flip through and look at the pictures (it's a bit of a daunting read as it's coffee table sized and has over 400 pages). Slate's architecture critic, Witold Rybczynski, also covered the exhibition in a slideshow essay from back in June, and I recommend that as well.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2009 at 10:16 PM

At this point, I don't think there are any good options left for the Senate Democrats when it comes to Roland Burris. From a strict rule of law perspective, I think he has to be seated. Rod Blagojevich, as much as we might wish it otherwise, is governor of Illinois. Whether he remains the governor for very long is up for discussion, but he clearly has the authority to make this appointment. And coming after eight years when I government cleared showed great disdain for the rule of law, refusing to seat Mr. Burris puts the Senate Democrats in the same camp as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- not company they'd usually be eager to keep. It's also not clear that the delaying tactics currently being contemplated by the Senate Democrats will make much difference. Blagojevich might get impeached next week and removed from office the following week, but he still made the appointment last week when he was the governor of Illinois.

Now that everyone has been backed into a corner, I'd like to point out that this was a totally preventable situation. Rod Blagojevich supported legislation calling for a special election to fill the vacant Senate seat, but the Illinois legislature apparently decided to roll the dice on Blagojevich not making an appointment, and decided not to pass any special election legislation (likely out of fear that the GOP would have a decent chance of winning on the back of this scandal). So here we are.

Incidentally, while I feel quite confident that Blagojevich will be impeached and has better than even odds of being removed from office, I am not nearly as confident that he'll be convicted of wrong doing in court. Patrick Fitzgerald, rightly I think, moved forward with a case that wasn't fully formed in order to stop possible future corruption. A perfectly fair use of prosecutorial discretion, but it may have seriously compromised his brief against Blagojevich.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2009 at 7:50 PM

During the three-hour UParty 2009 New Year's Eve special, Fox News asked viewers to send in text messages which aired in the ticker. Among the tens of thousands of submissions, this one got on the air...

Happy New Year and let's hope the magic negro does a good job. Love, Jen and John C.

Fox explains that the message was "inadvertently cleared for air" and that they "recognize [their] error." Call me a cynic if you'd like, but it for some reason I'm not surprised that Fox was that one that let this slip past their screening.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2009 at 7:24 PM

4. Give Neil Patrick Harris his Emmy, already. Neil Patrick Harris, the onetime teenage star of Doogie Howser, M.D., has elevated his How I Met Your Mother character, Barney Stinson, from a typical oversexed buddy sidekick -- think Larry from Three's Company -- to a guy who is, convincingly, both a total sleazebag and a stupendously devoted friend. His performances during the supposedly invulnerable Barney's estrangement from "bro" Ted were masterpieces of saying one thing and feeling another, and the wallop of his besotted stare when he realized he had feelings for his female "bro" Robin was considerable.

So why can't he get an Emmy? Because he works on a show that's a straight-up, crowd-pleasing sitcom in a world where all the love is going to supposedly "edgier" material, like Entourage. Entourage is the home of Jeremy Piven, who has stolen the Emmy that should have been Harris's for three years (one when Harris wasn't even nominated, and then two when he was). The fact that The Wire was endlessly neglected was depressingly predictable; the fact that Neil Patrick Harris can't get an Emmy from a group that gave three to Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond is just crazy.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2009 at 3:36 PM

Dr. Harold Carr, an orthopedic surgeon in England, was a recluse in his later years, according to relatives. He never married or had children. So when the doctor died in 2007 at the age of 89, few knew what to expect inside his dusty garage. The last thing Dr. Carr's relatives expected to find was one of the rarest cars in the world, a 1937 Bugatti 57S Atalante, which The Associated Press said was one of 17 in existence.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2009 at 3:14 PM

Paul Krugman on the GOP's failures:

Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party's champion, to the Bush administration's pervasive incompetence, to the party's shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to "make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second."

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. "Government is not the solution to our problem," declared Ronald Reagan. "Government is the problem." So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.'s "Southern strategy," which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: "You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites." In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Delusion, racism, incompetence, contempt for government: Krugman is swinging for the fences in his column today. I'll leave it to you to decide whether he succeeded, but he's certainly holding nothing back in his attack on the GOP.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2009 at 7:37 AM

Food trends in 2009, as reported by NPR:

lavender, cactus, persimmon, masala and chimichurri

This is good news for my grandmother, who is ahead of the trend by giving out lavender-flavor food items for Christmas, and my parents' friend Tom Stolz, who loves persimmon pudding.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 January 2009 at 9:16 PM

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson is an amazingly good mystery. Seemingly unrelated plots involving people with tragic pasts or unhappy presents eventually come together in a very satisfying way. The book is dark and its title accurately reflects what you'll be thinking for most of the length of the book, but that is pretty much by-the-bye. Atkinson's writing is engaging and her characters feel very alive.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 January 2009 at 6:23 PM

I just happened across a hyperlink to apple.com/hypercard that redirects to wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard.

Link

I suspect we're going to see more of this in the future, since wikipedia has stealthily taken over the internet. How often do you do a google search that leads you to a wikipedia article on exactly what you're searching for? It's fairly often for me, and in fact I'm usually just using google as a faster wikipedia search. Soon wikipedia will be our de facto source for most information, and it makes sense that companies will start leveraging wikipedia, especially for information about older products.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 January 2009 at 6:09 PM

Since 1906, football teams have needed to gain 10 yards for a first down. From the sideline, far from the action, two sticks connected by a chain have measured the required distance, their placement estimated by eyesight.

For a game of inches, it has never seemed an exact science. For a game long advanced by technological innovation, from helmets to video replays, the chains are antiques. Dozens of inventions have been patented to improve or abolish them.

Yet the chains stand the test of time, if not distance.

Link

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 January 2009 at 10:34 AM