Read This, You Knob

Rick Moranis, once better known as his Hoser alter ego Bob McKenzie, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today:

I ran a hot iron quickly over the front of a previously worn shirt, saddened at the thought of the jolly staff at my local dry cleaner who will suffer because of my thrifty initiative and tolerance for rumpled, mildly aromatic haberdashery.

I jumped into a cab, thinking about the MTA's budget deficit and my part in not helping to reduce it.

The traffic was terrible. Here I was, going nowhere, idling in a quick-ticking metered medallion taxi, driving up the price of oil, edging the country further into runaway inflation while spewing noxious fumes into the precious air around me. I am such a horrible person.

The driver, a pleasant Middle-Eastern man who I did not suspect was part of, or supporting, any terrorist organizations, was sipping a very large cup from one of several dozen popular coffee shop locations within a three-block radius of my home. I was pleased that at least one of us was supporting the hardworking baristas of this great nation.

I wondered out loud if the driver thought the price of his beverage would be higher or lower if baristas were unionized. He told me that in his country only men could be baristas and if a woman was caught even trying to be a barista she would be roasted, percolated and covered in scalding, foamy nonfat goat's milk. He said "Only America is free. Only America is great. God Bless America."

Beauty, eh?

Heh

Jonah Goldberg:

Very soon Wikipedia will go dark for a day to protest something called SOPA. During this event — future historians will call it a “knowledge eclipse” — no one under the age of thirty will know how to confirm or disprove a statement of fact.

It’ll be awesome.

Tomorrow you should go up to a 20-something and tell them things like “the fern is the world’s most popular carnivorous plant” and “Henry VIII invented the internal combustion engine, but kept it secret to protect the environment” and they will have no choice but to believe you as they will have no idea how to use, never mind find, a “reference book.”

Can't Wait For the Bye-Ku

To the disappointment of literally dozens of people (many of them named "David" and collecting checks from media organizations), Jon Huntsman stopped running for president today.

The 99% of you who just muttered, "Jon who?", carry on. You didn't miss anything.

UPDATE: Taranto's Bye-Ku was, in fact, worth the wait.

¡Salud!

Stephen Green, better know as the VodkaPundit, celebrates his ten-year blogaversary today.

I stumbled across Steve's site sometime in 2003 or so, thanks to nothing more than seeing the words "VodkaPundit" on Glenn Reynolds' blogroll and thinking, "That's a cool name."

It turned out to be a cool blog as well. Steve was a natural for the new media: smart and witty, with an omnivorous curiosity and an uncanny knack for sniffing out not just interesting stories, but also the various dogs lurking within them that had mysteriously failed to bark.

Somewhere along the way I dashed off an email on a topic I happened to have personal knowledge of, and we've basically been friends ever since. In early '04, just before taking off on vacation, Steve sent me a login for the site and basically said, "Go nuts while I'm gone!" I wound up hanging around as a co-blogger for the better part of the next four years.

That was an interesting week for me. From 1997 through the beginning of 2001, I'd been what would eventually be called a blogger, publishing a twice-weekly opinion column to my original site (creatively called "Will's World"). But--establishing my well-known sense of impeccably-reversed timing--I'd burned out just before blogs broke through as a feasible mass medium, and hadn't joined in with the rest of the crowd up until that point.

"I'm not a blogger," I said to myself. "I don't do this one- or two-line, 'hey, go read this' stuff--I write columns." A couple of days guesting for Steve cured me of that myopia, and I've been happily blogging ever since. I stuck around at VodkaPundit until it and Steve were assimilated into the PJ Media empire in 2008, and along the way wound up as a columnist for two national sites as well as starting two blogs of my own, and even broke through to the dreaded Mainstream Media on occasion.

And it probably never would have happened if Martini Boy hadn't had to go run off to Mexico and drink with his new bride, leaving the keys to his bar in my surprised digital palm. Funny how life works, isn't it?

¡Salud, 'mano!

Krushed

I confess that I pay very little attention these days to anything written either by or about the New York Times' stable of editorial propagandists, but this Kevin D. Williamson demolition of the most recent Paul Krugman effluence is well worth a read.

Reminds me a bit of this old instance of Brad Delong indulging his inner Pauline Kael...

Crumbled Curtain

Check out these stunning photos of the Russian NPO Energomash rocket factory, just outside of Moscow. Despite the rundown appearance, it's a working operation that supplies Soyuz and other rockets for civilian and military purposes (although given the recent rash of Soyuz failures, perhaps that's not so surprising).

As io9's Jesus Diaz notes, this one in particular is amazing, it looks like Geiger concept art from an Alien movie:

The pictures were taken by a young Russian blogger who hopped over an unguarded fence, and apparently had the run of the place for quite a while. To no one's particular surprise, the Russian authorities are not terribly happy about all of this; hopefully young Lana will get some kind of commendation for revealing lax security instead of a "friendly" visit from the current revision of the KGB.

Dang

Larry Downes of Forbes has an absolutely brutal--and accurate--article on why Best Buy is a dead company walking. Shorter version: Best Buy's management is focused on making things easier for themselves, while successful companies (Amazon is Downes' example) make it easy on their customers. A sample:

[Best Buy] Management, at least, still believes it has competitive advantages–advantages that even make it attractive to shareholders. According to the company’s most recent annual report,

"We believe our dedicated and knowledgeable people, store and online experience, broad product assortment, distinct store formats and brand marketing strategies differentiate us from our competitors by positioning our stores and Web sites as the preferred destination for new technology and entertainment products in a fun and informative shopping environment."

There’s just one problem. Not one word of that, at least in my experience, is true. Their “people” are not knowledgeable; they are annoying. The store “format” is entirely generic; perhaps a little confusing. The stores and Websites are not “preferred destinations”—they are destinations, at best, of inertia, or in the case of exclusives, destinations of the only resort. The “shopping environment” is the opposite of fun and informative. It’s depressing and humiliating, as in “I can’t believe I had to go to Best Buy to get this.”