The Beckyan Deli
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Thank God I was wrong!
Back in June, after the Lakers lost in the NBA finals, I said: I can tell you right now that the Dodgers will make it to the World Series and lose in six games, Michigan football will finally beat Ohio State only to suffer (another) embarrassing loss to USC in the Rose Bowl, and the…
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The hell with Pluto (the dwarf planet AND the minor Disney character)
I was recently reminded that I simply do not understand the emotional attachment that people had to Pluto as a planet. It’s another dinky ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt! I don’t want to get caught up in semantics, but we should at least lump it in with similar objects in terms of composition…
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I give the reviews 5 stars!
There are few things online I find more delightful than the Amazon reviews for wacky products. I recently was pointed to the reviews for uranium, which include the classic line, “I would have given this product 5 stars for the teeth and the project on embracing diversity, but I deducted one star because of the…
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Will, Fully Obtuse
On the NY Times site yesterday, William Safire complained about a line in (President!) Obama’s speech: He skirted the controversy about harsh interrogations with a facile “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” — when there are times when that painful choice cannot be “rejected.”…
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Comedy in a Post-Bush World
Just as 9/11 killed comedy, apparently so will the Obama administration. The NY Times interviewed a bunch of comedy writers on how they planned to cope with the apparent upcoming comedy drought. (Full disclosure: I would totally watch Letterman do household safety demonstrations.) I particularly liked the point made by an Onion editor: Too many…
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Tortured Logic
The NY Times recently posted a range of opinions on torture after the report of torture at Guantanamo. I disagreed with much of what Andrew McCarthy had to say (including his definition of what is and is not torture), but the logic of this particularly escapes me: On that last score, even those of us…
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Senator Stuart Smalley!
It is with great glee that I note that Al Franken has officially won his senate race. Not only will C-SPAN2 be more entertaining, but this is the final bit of proof that we live in our own alternate universe. I think a switch got flipped back in 1998 or so, giving us, among other…
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Unsustainable Lending (part II)
News has certainly slowed down at the end of the year (and the Bush administration has checked out entirely), but the Fed just announced that it will buy $500 billion in mortgage backed securities (MBS) by the middle of next year. There are a few obvious questions that I have: (a) isn’t this what the…
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Unsustainable Lending (part I)
I’ve been doing way too much reading about the mortgage crisis, and it’s kind of depressing how we got ourselves into this mess. The numbers just don’t add up…but I guess it never mattered for the people driving us into the ditch, since they get paid based on short-term results, long term be damned. There…
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Worst. Cookies. Ever.
Last week, Mark Bittman posted a new recipe for The Mother Of All Butter Cookies. His point was that this recipe was akin to a mother sauce and an easy and flexible base that could be turned into butterscotch cookies, chocolate chip cookies, citrus cookies… Sounds great, huh? Some of you might ask: the Tollhouse…
Got any book recommendations?