"The Omnivore's Dilemma"

I say: WHOA. What a mindfuck. Look for more soon.

Ya so I'm on vacation

Just FYI. See you in the new year, bitches!

Comics on what to do when you realize what the universe is really all about

This is NOT progressive behavior, and I heartily disapprove.

While interviewing law students for jobs as paid summer interns and full-time associates for my firm, I noticed several had résumés listing their activities in the Federalist Society. Some of my partners have conservative views similar to those of the society, but I do not. These students’ politics would not affect their professional function, but my review is meant to consider their judgment and personality (though I don’t need to give reasons for the assessments given). May I recommend not hiring someone solely because of his or her politics?
-NAME WITHHELD, GREENWICH, CONN.

What did Name Withheld choose to do?

Believing that all the applicants were qualified, but able to hire only a few, this person recommended rejecting each member of the Federalist Society.

What else would you expect from a letter written by a hotel?

The lack of a Christian White Male [on the California Supreme Court] is important to the German hotel because

it was Christian White Males who founded this country, and it is unfair to completely passover [sic] them, to the detriment of our legal system. Also, overall, they seem to be the one [sic] with the most potential to be a scholarly ethical jurist [sick], and less likely to engage in shenanigan [sic], based on history and empirical evidence. Putting aside, of course, wise Latina females.

Zing. Once again, hard to argue with that evidence. We all know that Christian White Males are unlikely to engage in shenanigan. Everyone knows that, because of all the history and empirical evidence. Isn't that right, Ku Klux Klan? Like just the other day, I was talking to my White Christian Male friends, and I asked, "Hey, do you guys feel like engaging in any shenanigan today?" And everyone just busted up laughing because of how absurd that is. "Leave that to the Armenians!," Tom said, and everyone nodded in solemn agreement.

While Sua Sponte didn't survive the Law School Blog Ennui Disease, Nuts & Boalts--out of UC Berkeley--is thriving. Great blog, funny writers, good content, tons of comments. Hats off to the Boalties making it work across the Bay. Having tried it myself, I know how difficult it is to do what they do. In any case, the whole post quoted above is totally worth reading.

Whoa. Dude.

"Klebsiella pneumoniae is one such bacterium. It has resided in the human gastrointestinal tract for as long as we have been able to identify microbes. Each time someone is treated for strep throat, syphilis, Lyme disease, or any other bacterial illness, it learns a little more about our medical arsenal. In 1996, doctors identified a strain of Klebsiella that produced an enzyme called KPC, which has the ability to destroy virtually all modern antibiotics.

"The mutant Klebsiella is harmless in the G.I. tract, but if it escapes to another part of the body—because of poor hygiene or any number of other minor slip-ups—it can turn a routine urinary-tract infection into a life-and-death struggle. To make matters worse, Klebsiella has transferred the genetic recipe for KPC to other—sometimes more dangerous—pathogens. Doctors are now seeing strains of E. coli and Pseudomonas that can produce KPC. To combat the bugs, doctors can either throw a cocktail of antibiotics at the infection or dig up classes of antibiotics that were abandoned decades ago because of their intolerable toxicity.

"Mutant Klebsiella is now spreading around the world, jumping from person to person. It is a particular problem in New York City, where hospital studies have shown that as many as 60 percent of Klebsiella cells can produce KPC. When these bacteria cause an infection, more than one-third of the victims die."

Why Iran is crossed off my post-bar travel list

Maziar Bahari was imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on charges of espionage. What did he do? He gave an interview to The Daily Show's Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Clearly the Ayatollah didn't get the joke.

What follows is a snippet from his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart last night.

Maziar Bahari: I thought that maybe they'd cancel my press card or maybe they put me in prison for 2-3 days, maybe a week, and then they let me go, but charging me with espionage because of an interview with Jason, it was beyond my wildest dreams.

Jon Stewart: You know, we hear so much about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.

MB: It's--evil is stupid, you know. Whenever you take anything to the extremes, you see the humor in it and you see the stupidity in it. And I think what the Iranian government did, and what my interrogator as the representative of the Iranian government was doing to me, it was stupid and it was funny at the same time. It was not funny while I was in the interrogation room, blindfolded, in a dark room, and being beaten, you know, that was not funny. But when I was going back to my cell, I had to laugh. I mean, that was my defense mechanism.

JS: Well they say comedy is imprisonment plus time.

MB: Exactly, yeah. And you know, my interrogator, for some reason after a while he became my muse. And I never told him, but he gave me ideas. You know, he was so exaggerated in whatever he did, that he just gave me ideas. And I just, I just laughed at him.

JS: It's all so Dostoevsky--or this crazy existentialist nightmare that you entered into, but--he was obsessed with the idea that you had been to New Jersey.

MB: Yes.

JS: This is--this is true!

MB: You know, to him, New Jersey sounded like the most American place that you could be. And he thought that New Jersey is paradise on Earth. And, you know, he thought that New Jersey is a place where people drink all the time, they have sex all the time, and where there are no Jews.

JS: I'm apparently the exception to the rule, I didn't get to do any of that stuff.

MB: I never told him about you, yes.

JS: It's funny and tragic and horrible because this is a man invested with a great deal of power. He is in the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.

MB: He was a Revolutionary Guard and he was in charge of my life, you know. I had to be very respectful of him, I had to be very deferential, you know, I always had to call him "Sir," and whenever I wanted to answer back I was always saying that, "I beg to differ, but you're stupid." I never said that, but you know, I always had to respect him. And he had a lot of power. I mean, he--you know, one thing that was very smart was that I was not confronting the system, I was not confronting the government. They made him in charge of my life. So it was as if that he had a personal grudge against me, not that I was, you know, tried or imprisoned by the Iranian government. They made it more personal. He came to arrest me. He was my interrogator. And on the last day, just the night before I left Iran, he told me that "We can arrest you wherever you are, we can always bring you back in a bag."