My online bookseller of choice is “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/ rather than Amazon; unlike its larger competitor, it’s union friendly. But sometimes they don’t stock something and Amazon does. Here’s my beef: when Amazon claims that something is “usually available in 24 hours,” my experience is that three times out of four it isn’t. On average, I’d guesstimate that it takes 2-3 days for Amazon to ship something that is supposed to be available immediately. Is this just persistent bad luck on my part? Or do others have similar experiences?

Peter Levine wants to know what parents want their kids to be like. He reports the results of a decade-long survey asking parents what single quality they valued most for their child. The winner by far is honesty. For me, there’s no question: kindness. And you?

It seems that even his familiars must be careful when supping with the devil.

Of whom was this said? And where?

bq. Beneath his leftist pseudo-sophistication X is a manipulative intellectually dishonest person, … and his like masters required to guide the rest of us poor great unwashed to achieve their utopia dream – which is a documented nightmare to date built on hundreds of millions of human corpses.

and

bq. typical Fabian Society International Socialist that will never say a bad word against a fellow leftist such as Noam Chompsky [sic].

Details via “Matthew”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/02/oliver-kamm-interview.html .

Over at 2 Blowhards, Michael Blowhard has “a nice piece about Jane Jacobs”:http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/002592.html . It was kind of hard to stop myself writing ‘about “the great” Jane Jacobs” in that last sentence”! There’s a useful set of links too. I’m kind of surprised by some of them. I know that Jacobs defies left–right categorization, but Jacobs as an unwitting reproducer of “Austrian” economics? That’s hard to square with her somewhat nutty views on import substitution. It illustrates something, though: that people are so taken with Jacobs’s brilliance in “The Death and Life …” that they really really want to believe that she simply must fit into their own worldview somehow. Usually, she doesn’t. She’s just too angular to fit neatly into anyone’s system or ideology.

Ken Macleod has “a sharp and interesting post”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ on what he calls “the liberalism of fools”:

bq. If anti-semitism is, in an important aspect, a rage against the machine, against progress, is there an opposite rage: a rage against reaction, a fury at the recalcitrance of the concrete and the stubbornness of tradition? A rage against what is sacred and refuses to be profaned, against what is solid and doesn’t melt into air, against ways of life that resist commodification, against use-value that refuses to become exchange-value? And might that rage too need a fantasy object?

Ken discusses the way in which the Catholic church met that need in the 1930s.

After that Superbowl nonsense, time to get back to the sports that really matter! I just watched the “second semi”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/4683448.stm in the “African Nations Cup”:http://www.egypt2006.com.eg/english/ . The referee bottled it just before time when Senegal had a stone-wall penalty denied, so Egypt are through. Will Mido play in the final after squaring up to the Egyptian coach after being substituted and then looking a prat as his replacement put the ball in the back of the net? Who knows? My money’s on Egypt in the final, since they’re the home nation, but with Drogba upfront Ivory Coast will always carry a threat. Predictions?

And while we’re about it, the “6 Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/default.stm is wide open after favourites France were turned over by Scotland at Murrayfield. Italy look a lot better than usual too and gave Ireland a scare. So my guess: a grand slam for England with last year’s winners Wales competing with the Italians for the wooden spoon.

UPDATE: I see that Mido has been “chucked out of the Egyptian squad”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/4692714.stm .

Don Luskin may be the “stupidest man alive”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000216.html, but this is small beer compared to John Lott, whose career strives to maximize a three-variable function defined by stupidity, error and sheer bad faith. Whenever you think there are regions of this space that he could not possibly explore further, “he proves you wrong”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/02/lotts_correction_policy.php.

I’m just going to reproduce this, which I found at “Lenin’s Tomb”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/02/charming.html . “John Derbyshire at the the Corner”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/06_01_29_corner-archive.asp#089253 wrote the following:

bq. In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don’t care about Egyptians.

Compassionate conservatism anyone?

It’s not the most important issue in the world, but I thought it was striking that the Pajamafolk are seem genuinely tickled by the same exchange that lefties think is hilariously pompous. Just one of those things, I guess.

I’m offended. Those people, by their actions, have demonstrated the essentially corrupt nature of their society and culture. Their behaviour, which all right-minded people should be offended by, should be universally condemned. If anything shows that we are right and they are wrong, this is it. And I call upon all of those who agree with me to take action, while there is still time. To those who say that our side has also erred, I agree: there have been errors of judgement. But if anything our mistake has been to do too little and too late. We now need to wake up and respond to the danger that confronts us. In any case, to suggest that what we have done bears comparison with what they have done is itself deeply offensive and such sentiments betray the inner corruption of those who utter them. Some principles are absolute and this is one of them. Some have suggested that it is hypocritical of me to take offence at what those people have done whilst ignoring or excusing what some other people have done. Such critics thereby reveal their own inability to distinguish between those people and the other people (who have surely suffered enough and deserve a break). Others have intimated that I spend my time trawling the internet looking for obscure TV clips and articles in foreign languages to be offended by. Frankly, I find such comment offensive: the price of what we hold sacred is eternal vigilance and someone has to take on the responsibility of telling our people about the grave danger they face from those people.

# I hope next year Burger King Corporation just make a pile of 2 million dollar bills and set it on fire, rather than taking the roundabout method of pointlessly wasting money they opted for this year.
# I am at a loss to understand commercials like the Diet Pepsi one, where the can of Pepsi gets a record contract from P. Diddy, etc, etc. How do those even make it out of a creative’s sketchbook?
# If the denial of the Seahawks’ first quarter touchdown was the correct call _and_ the awarding of the Steelers’ first second quarter touchdown was the correct call, then we’re obviously living in a world where I’m going to win the Nobel Prize for Physics next year. I’ll start writing my speech.

I have a piece over at Lifehacker on unique photo gift ideas. I covered personalized gift cards, movie posters and magazine covers, a memory game from photos, magnets and a few other ideas. I have already given some of these as gifts, not all. I’d be curious to hear what personalized gifts others have given or received that were especially big hits. I enjoy giving gifts to people – and have a bunch of gift-giving occasions coming up -, but prefer the personal touch to the off-the-shelf options. Budget-conscious solutions are especially welcomed.

A couple of unrelated thoughts as we wait for the Superbowl parties to start…

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One of the lazy journalistic tropes I most dislike is the generation game. It’s essentially a young person’s game, so lately we’ve mostly seen people under 45 (the so-called generations X and Y) putting the boot into those aged between 45 and 60 (Boomers). The results have been reliably silly, and also repetitious – the complaints and responses are little changed from 30 to 40 years ago, when boomers were mouthing slogans like “Never trust anyone over 30” .

But the game is even sillier when played by those old enough to know better, like Richard Neville. In Salon, Gary Kamiya gently skewers the latest of the genre, a book claiming that the Boomers are a “Greater Generation” than the one that fought World War II by virtue of their struggles for civil rights, equality and so on. Crucial quote

Leaving aside the obvious definitional and chronological difficulties — many of the boomers’ achievements were set in motion by men and women from the Greatest Generation — is it really fair to say that a group consisting of millions of people “did” anything?

I look forward to a time when the idea that you can classify a person by the date on their birth certificate is accepted only in the astrology columns.