Indiana Jones

The sweetest moment in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystall Skull was discovering that by 1957 Dr. Jones had gotten tenure. It's good to know that this rejection letter wasn't the final word on that subject.

Accent accident?

Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that Paul Giamatti's Colonial New England accent on John Adams sounds pretty much identical to Eddie Izzard's American accent on The Riches?

MSNBC thought

MSNBC would be ever so much better if they got rid of all their on-air talent not named Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann. And maybe brought Chris Matthews down from the attic for election nights.

Billy Mays outtakes

Follow the money

Remember, all I know about forensic accounting I learned from The Wire. That said, the timing and increments of Hillary Clinton's loans to her campaign strike me as telling: $5 million on April 11, $1 million on May 1, and $425,000 on May 5. The Clinton campaign has been using this as an indication that Clinton is all in on the final 6 primaries, but the downward amounts over time strike me as the kind of thing you'd see from someone who's running up against a hard limit on their resources. I'd be surprised to see further loans for the closing weeks of the campaign, but then again, I was surprised when John Kerry lost in 2004.

Rants! Getcher rants!

Here are two lovely rants that should brighten your day:

• National Review's John Derbyshire rips into Ben Stein's creationist apologia Expelled
  

  And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

  The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism.
  

• This one argues that bicyclists suck, and reminds me once again to ask why "Share the road" apparently only applies in one direction:

  Bicyclists drive me nuts. In Philadelphia, as in cities across this great country, bicyclists routinely flout the law, riding on the sidewalk when it's convenient and holding up traffic in the street whenever possible. I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a bicyclist at a stop sign or even a red light, or wait behind a car that is correctly stopped at such an intersection. Instead, the man or woman on the bicycle will weave between parked, stopped, and moving cars to gain a fractional advantage. Yet if an automobile so much as grazes a bicycle lane, all hell breaks loose.
  
  Yes, I know that an automobile bears greater mass, velocity, and force than a bicycle and that the consequences of a motorist's mistake almost always outweigh those of a bicyclist's. But come on. Half of these people on bikes are just jerks.

Exit strategy

Is it just me, or is the way many Democratic Party leaders are studiously avoiding suggesting Hillary Clinton drop out of the presidential race somewhat reminiscent of the way folks delicately tiptoed around telling Nixon he should resign?

Update: So it begins.