Me: “I’m going to put up our American flag, because it’s Memorial Day weekend, and Memorial Day is a very patriotic holiday.” Loyette: “Are we going to the holiday?” Me: “It’s not a holiday you go to, sweetie, it’s a holiday you celebrate with your family and friends and your community, to honor the brave soldiers who fought for our… Read more »
I’ve written extensively in the past on why I think preseason tropical activity forecasts are generally fairly useless. And indeed, trying to specifically predict a particular number of storms is pretty silly. Although hurricane seasons are medium-period events, occupying the gray area between long-term weather and short-term climate, individual hurricanes are short-period events, influenced heavily by other short-period events, which… Read more »
[Kudos to Terry Corcoran for coming up with an alternative title for this blog post: Brendan’s Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!!!!!! Hahaha. Brilliant. -ed.] I had an interesting conversation with Melissa Clouthier (and, chiming in at one point, Doug Mataconis) on Twitter today. It started with me criticizing Melissa for, in my view, propagating patently unfair criticisms about President Obama,… Read more »
From the “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but look at this pretty chart” files… Those are stock prices — specifically, the Dow and the S&P 500 — over the last 20 years. Visually, it starts to look a bit like we had 7 or 8 years of genuine growth, followed by Bubble #1 (the tech bubble), then Bubble… Read more »
One of my favorite blog posts ever, back on the old Irish Trojan’s Blog in August 2006, was on the topic of my favorite songs of all-time. The post got 48 comments, and ’twas fascinating to hear my readers’ takes on my favorites, as well as their own favorites. Anyway, the post itself had four postscripts, and it occurred to… Read more »
I got my wisdom teeth out this morning. All four of ’em. The white thing on my face is an ice pack. And I’m loopy from being put under. I blame Obama. UPDATE, 7:38 PM: [Bumped. -ed.] So, I’m doing well. Lots of apple sauce and yogurt, and Becky’s yummy homemade carrot soup. I’m taking Percocet (or rather, a generic… Read more »
In honor of the recent political chaos in Connecticut — land of Richard “Misplaced Words” Blumenthal and Susan “Active Practice (NOT!)” Bysiewicz — I have, as you can see, put up a new blog masthead, above, showing the beautiful view of the State Capitol from the ninth-floor room at the Holiday Inn Express where Becky, the girls and I stayed… Read more »
Ross Douthat has solved America’s deficit problem: Good news, America: Using the online budget simulator created by the good people at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, I’ve successfully reduced our deficit to a relatively stable 60 percent of G.D.P. by the year 2018. All it took was means-testing Social Security and raising the retirement age to 68, keeping… Read more »
Will my snap prediction that “Richard Blumenthal will survive misstatement-gate, and will be sworn in as Connecticut’s junior senator on January 3, 2011” go down in the pantheon of Great Brendan Loy Political Prognostications, alongisde Rudy Giuliani will win the 2008 GOP nomination and Hillary Clinton “will not win a single primary”? Twenty-four hours later, survey says… “The latest Rasmussen… Read more »
A cool time-lapse video of the Icelandic volcano: Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.