Y'all know I don't usually just post a link to something else sans commentary, but Adam Felber of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me has a short must-read about the media/political mess in this country: "Imaginary Bubba" .

... –noun 1. sleight of hand. 2. trickery; deception. 3. any artful trick. Or more generally: "A show of skill or deceitful cleverness: financial legerdemain." So this word came about on Sunday when I was with Britt and Jessica at Brandon's place after the Chinese New Year parade. Jessica asked how pictures stayed on the wall (because Brandon...

Once again, thank you all for your kind condolences - the community support means more than you might guess. I'm doing better in some ways, not so sure in others (I didn't get drunk, but since that was...short in our supposedly-sapient brains. This also gets used a lot IRL in interpersonal debates, so being aware of AASWAG as a deflection/derailing tactic can be helpful at home and at work, too.

One of the few digital newsletters I subscribe to is the Powell's Review-a-day, as a way of learning about books I might not otherwise hear about. Their reviews are often quite detailed and informative...absolutely GLORIOUSLY tacky, unbelievable stuff in the Museum of Naples and in some of the overflow galleries in Rome, which I tried to take pictures of but didn't have a good enough camera back when.

...have to shut up and accept my authority unquestioningly!" only usually a little more sophisticated, not so blunt, with more ellision of premises to give the illusion of solidity. It's another kind of legerdemain, a verbal sleight of hand (as all rhetorical arguments are) a substitution of emblems for reality - in this case, careful, honest dialectic - and a diversionary tactic, designed to make the...

The phenomenon of paid comment spammers, who pose as Real Live Commenters with more or less success to leave "cleverly" camouflaged advertising in blogs, recently came up again at ML , and by a curious...opinions of other fans - or our own judgments based on the primary source materials of producer/director/actor interviews? Again, what was that about the infallible wisdom of the Free Market