Because of distance and three adorable and energetic kids, my best friend and I rarely have the luxury of spending time alone. But last Friday, we had the pleasure of spending an entire afternoon together. After lunch, we found ourselves at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and after wandering the galleries for about a half-hour, I asked an innocent question about other museums in the area. With a mischievous grin, my friend informed me that the Creation Museum was just a short drive over the state line into Kentucky.

So, I'm assuming that plenty of people have seen this gem by now:

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party's principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

From the Guardian:

In a breakthrough that could have huge implications, British and Canadian scientists have found a way of reprogramming skin cells taken from adults, effectively winding the clock back on the cells until they were in an embryonic form.

The work has been hailed as a major step forward by scientists and welcomed by pro-life organisations, who called on researchers to halt other experiments which use stem cells collected from embryos made at IVF clinics.

Been away all week on business, listening to my colleagues and the talking heads on CNBC bitch and moan about Obama's budget and economic policies. They believe he's declaring war on the wealthy and is going to destroy the economy with his increased tax hikes.

Are you fucking kidding me?!?

Oh yeah, I feel a rant coming on ...

I didn't really believe the headline when I read it, but here's the deal:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sending strong signals that President Obama - who as a candidate said states should be allowed to make their own rules on medical marijuana - will end raids on pot dispensaries in California.

So, I've gotten kind of impatient with waiting for Geithner or Bernanke or someone to explain exactly what they're going to do with the banking system.  I know that nationalization is way too scary to contemplate, despite the fact that the process the word actually refers to in this context has been ongoing with smaller banks and doesn't represent anything even remotely approaching permanent government ownership of these institutions, but what is the "public-private partnership" of which they speak?

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. - Umberto Eco

Where the fuck is my wisdom?

Seriously, wisdom was supposed to part of the deal, the salve that soothes amidst aging's unceasing, unending parade of insults and torments. I am now well into my 36th year - my hair is thinning, my back is creaking, my sex drive is waning.

Wisdom should be accumulating, dammit.

The U.S. Presidential election of 2000 still evokes uncomfortable memories of election regularities, former Secretaries of State waxing legal and some stodgy butthole named Chad.  Even though the whole debacle had to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which seemed to take for-eh-ver, the resolution was reached in a tidy 38 days.

This is the house that George built!
These are men who lie in the house that George built.
This is the war that killed the men
That lie in the house that George built.

This is the fraud that started the war
That killed the men that lie in the house that George built.
This is the Dick that contrived the fraud
That started the war that killed the men
That lie in the house that George built.

I am going to try and keep this as short as possible because I'm off on a biz trip tomorrow (expect a lot less blog activity from me for about a week) and have things I need to get done before then.

But I just had to comment on the statement released jointly this afternoon by the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), and the Fed.

In contrast to my last post, I'm going to keep this one brief.

There's been no shortage of lot of talk lately about bipartisanship as a way forward.  Of course, we all know that the President has made this one of his central themes in assuming office.  Over the course of watching the stimulus legislation, many pundits have been all too happy to pronounce this notion DOA.  If you want to be completely cynical about it, you could say that it was a naive notion to begin with.

I usually hate happy endings in movies. They may be fine for movies like Rudy, but for many films, happy endings often ring false and feel like cheap cop-outs. Yet for reasons I explain in the video below, I actually enjoyed the ultra-gooey finale of Slumdog Millionaire.

Perhaps because America's economic story and outlook has become almost as depressing as the childhood of Slumdog protaganist Jamal Malik, it's somehow fitting that we allow ourselves to be gloriously deluded by inspiring, well-earned Hollywood ending bullshit.

And the nominees are:

• Josh Brolin in Milk;
• Robert Downey, Jr., in Tropic Thunder;
• Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt;
• Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight; and
• Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road.

Loyal readers have been anxiously following dagblog.com's financial troubles in this difficult economy. On Tuesday, after dagblog's appeals for federal assistance were rebuffed, I sadly announced that all the other members of the dagblog team would have to be let go.

Right now over 300 college kids are parading around in sponsored spandex performing the President's Fitness Challenge for a bunch of googley eyed grown men. Well-paid football professionals and numbers geeks are oohing and aahing over tenths of a second in an effort to figure out which specimen they'll hand over the $50 million "Deal or No Deal" briefcase. Endless numbers of greased up Mel Kiper wannabees are plotting these numbers into formulas trying to find the NFL equivalent of e=mc2.

Three months ago, I noted that Japan entered recession before us.

We're in the homestretch now! Only three days left and, frankly, on Sunday night, I'm going to be more concerned with whose dress is pretty than who actually wins. But for now, let's soldier on.

The nominees for Best Supporting Actress are:

I can't stop stewing over the fact that the South Carolina sheriff decided to investigate Michael Phelps' notorious bong hit, with an eye toward possible prosecution.

I know, I know, the sheriff dropped the investigation earlier this week after deciding there wasn't enough evidence to convict Phelps, who wisely did not admit to smoking the funny weed but merely apologized for using 'bad judgment.'