Nothing can stop us this time, we’ll mount the word on high

Nothing can stop us this time, we’ll mount the word on high August 2, 2014

• “As it stands, the city-owned Department of Water and Power is on track to replace main water lines only once every 300 years.”

Europe once had aqueducts, and then they didn’t anymore. This is how that happens.

Annual budget deficits are nowhere near as big a problem as our escalating infrastructural deficit. Interest and fees pile up far faster on deferred maintenance.

• This is a good question, but it doesn’t mean anything like what the people who keep asking it seem to think it means: “What would politicians in Arizona, Texas and California do if Mexico were shooting rockets into Scottsdale, Houston or Los Angeles?

They would do what any thinking person would do in such a scenario: Ascertain why Mexico was shooting those rockets.

Any other response that didn’t do that first would be nonsense liable to only make matters worse.

And anyone who thinks Mexico and Gaza are analogous doesn’t know anything about either Mexico or Gaza (except maybe that the people who live there aren’t “white).

 

30Billion

• Katherine Cross writes about the “terror dream” described by many male gamers: “Time and again, this leitmotif of gamer-speak arises: the idea that someone, somewhere is going to take your games away.” 

This ain’t just about gaming. It’s that zero-sum of all fears — the idea that if others aren’t deprived, we will be. So very, very many good things could happen in this world that would be, as Kiwi MP Maurice Williamson put it, “fantastic for the people it affects” and no big deal for anyone else. But this zero-sum fear prevents those things from happening.

• I, for one, did not remember seeing Oberyn Martell get dusted during Season 4 of Buffy.

Procter & Gamble announced this week that it will begin shedding many of its more obscure brands in order to focus on the company’s 70 or 80 largest and most successful brands. Since those large brands include best-selling household names like Tide, Dawn, Swiffer and Cover Girl, analysts anticipate P&G’s continued success, meaning they won’t have to cut back on their donations to the Church of Satan.

I went shopping for P&G products the other day, but when I got to the store I couldn’t remember whether I needed Gain with Febreze or Febreze with Gain.

• OK, yes, it might seem really stupid for someone who runs a language school to fire an employee because he wrote about homophones and “now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality,” but it’s no more stupid than a college president refusing to provide health insurance for women because he claims contraception is the same thing as abortion. And as the Hobby Lobby ruling reaffirmed, it doesn’t matter if such religiously motivated discriminatory employment practices are, in fact, false — it only matters if they’re sincere. So language-school administrator Clarke Woodger’s sincere confusion of same-sex attraction and same-sounding words is no different than Wheaton College president Philip Ryken’s sincere confusion about emergency contraception. They’re both defiantly, astonishingly ignorant, but they’re both sincere about it, and apparently that’s all that matters.

(Well, that’s all that matters legally. If you’re looking to learn English, you’d do well to avoid Woodger’s silly school, and if you’re looking to learn human biology, you’d do well to avoid Ryken’s.)

• Here is an elegantly simple joke about “backward masking“:


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