17 February 2010

Cognitive Dissonance

Just a couple of double-takes from the last few days:

At the library, on the new books shelf, I spotted The Sexually Transmitted Disease Sourcebook right next to Living With AIDS, and was tempted to see if the former might have a condom on it.

Illinois has joined the list of desperate states participating in MegaPowerBall. How do I know? Because I've been incessantly bombarded by a commercial of a guy falling joyfully, in slow motion, into a pile of PowerBalls... set to some of the music of my misspent youth: Boston's "More Than a Feeling." Yeah, the lottery — the ultimate popular exercise in ignoring basic math — being advertised via a band formed around a guy with a master's degree from MIT.

And there's more snow in DC than at the site of the Winter Olympics... even excluding the snow jobs in DC. Which isn't too surprising, really.

Sarah Palin and her daughter are busy demonstrating that not only do they just not get satire over The Family Guy's (frankly inept) references to Down Syndrome, but that the stereotypical Down Syndrome baby is a lot smarter than they are.

As Jay Lake points out, the Mad Tea Partiers are a bit oversensitive about the label applied to them. In the grand tradition of the word analogies section of the SAT — a sadly defunct artifact, I've been told — I offer the following:

conservative political theory is to "movement" conservatism
as
the theory of democracy is to People's Democratic Republic