Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Q How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to change a light bulb?

A It takes 10:

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed.
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either “for” changing the light bulb or “for” darkness.
5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb.
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing
on a step ladder under the banner: “Light bulb Change Accomplished”.
7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally in the dark.
8. One to viciously smear #7.
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along.
10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

Honky Tonkers for Truth is burning up airwaves with a new country foot-stomper–
“Takin’ My Country Back“.

I downloaded the 30-sec sample, loved it, pulled the whole four-minute song, and set up my iTunes to play it again and again.

I got the link from buridan in #JoiIto and two minutes later saw it getting plugged over at Joho. It’s a meme, folks, pass it on to the next blog!

Yee haw, as we country music fans holler in West Cambridge!

Podcasters Dave Winer and Adam Curry just keep adding bells and whistles to their product. The latest is the addition of “Morning Stories,” a wonderful public radio series from Tony Kahn!

I don’t know when (or if) they’ll be broadcasting the show I did for Tony–the one with a gladiator striptease soundtrack–about my first year of blogging.

In case they don’t, you can hear my five minutes here. You have to wait for the end to hear Russell Crowe’s armor hit the floor, piece by piece…..

There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics*–but there’s lots of math involved in Nobel Prizes. Word problems….

1. If 7 of us fly to Stockholm on the redeye,
   plot our best distribution onto airplane seats, bearing in mind that
   Amity’s husband Colin has very long legs and neither of Frank’s parents
   should have to
   sit immobilized for too long.
2. Which will be harder and take more time: to find the required
   white-tie-and-tails Nobel outfit in Boston and lug it to Stockholm, or
   to figure our how to take 8 different measurements of my husband and
   then convert them all into metric so that someone in Stockholm can rent the outfit for him?
3. Rank
   these four events in order of probabability: Lightning will strike Mel
   Gibson, Lightning will strike Mel Brooks, Betsy Devine will have
   triplets nine months from now, Frank Wilczek will need to wear
   white-tie-and-tails to some event unrelated to Nobel Prizes.

Show all calculations, and remember, neatness counts.

MIT webcast of his Nobel Prize press conference 56K | 220K | 450K.) Hmmm, I’m afraid that person is Betsy Devine–but what’s with her haircut?

Having eyes in the back of your head might be a good thing–having eyes *on* the back of your head can be pretty embarassing.

If you’re coming in late to the NH phone-jamming scandal, no jars of
jelly or marmalade were involved.

Multiple hang-up phone calls were the tool used to stop NH
Democrats (and Manchester
firefighters) from running their usual ride-to-the-polls services on election day in 2002: 
summary
here.

Political columnist John
DiStaso played a major role in getting the Justice Department to investigate. After a very slow start, the Feds handed down two indictments in July 2004. 
The feds questioned but didn’t indict (or publicly identify) a
highly-placed member of the Bush-Cheney campaign who helped Defendant
#1 find Defendant #2 for the purpose of interfering with the election.

I’m amazed that nobody in the national press is pursuing this name of
this person, but right now John DiStaso is the only reporter covering
it.

NH Democrats, unsatisfied by the Justice Department’s work so far,
filed a civil suit to try to get more information. Republicans
succeeded in getting the civil suit postponed until criminal sentencing
was completed.

Now it seems their cover-up will be continued until after the presidential election–they just got the sentencing postponed as well.

If only more press and more bloggers covered this story, maybe the bad guys here would be the ones in a jam.

My old hometown paper just ran a piece on Frank’s Nobel Prize.
The headline gives you the flavor of the whole thing: “Manchester
Family Proud of Newest Nobel Prize Winner.” Manchester NH has 100,000
people but every one of them knows it as a small town.

In the 1950s. the Manchester Union Leader was run by a right-wing nut* named William Loeb who gained some nationwide notoriety during the 1972 primaries.

My mother–a Rockefeller-type Republican from Massachusetts–refused to
allow “that filthy rag” in our house, which meant we had to look in a
neighbor’s copy to find out which movies were playing. She warned us never to talk to strangers because they might be Union
Leader reporters trying to dig up dirt about my dad. (My dad held various
unpaid offices in the NH Democratic Party and attracted some nasty
attacks from Mr. Loeb.)

In those days, I imagined reporters hung out at playgrounds all over the city, so they could ask unsuspecting children about
their fathers.

Times change. Mr. Loeb left the planet long ago, and the Union Leader,
though still right-wing, shows some admirable attempts at balance. Its
editorials strongly favor George Bush, but the paper’s star
political columnist John DiStaso played a major role in exposing Republican wrongdoing in the NH phone jamming scandal.

And now the paper has kind words to say about some Devines. I just wish my mother were here–she’d be smiling too.

I’m part of a class known as “taxpayers”–aren’t you? Check out these Bush campaign web pages our dollars are buying…

Office of Management and Budget main page

“President Bush has focused on winning the war on terror, protecting the homeland and strengthening the economy to create jobs. He has built an impressive record of accomplishments. His FY2005 budget built on that record with important proposals to support our national priorities”.

“eGov” home page

Contains no useful information but features a big photo of Bush taking credit for “E Government”. Links to articles promoting Bush role in E Government are central and prominent; a few small text links in the sidebar target online government information.

The US government’s official web portal

“FirstGov” contains exactly two “Also of interest” banner ads–both link to pro-Bush pages described above.

“The President’s Record of Achievement” hosted on the official White House website

“Such times demand a leader of clear convictions and determination, hope and vision, integrity and the courage to act. These qualities are the hallmarks of the Bush Presidency. There is much that remains to be done….”

How can we fix campaign financing when tax dollars get sucked into one campaign’s treasure chest?

And how can we have campaign fairness when that candidate gets a free hourlong TV ad by claiming he plans a “major policy speech“?

I guess those are the kinds of tricks you have to try when your candidate needs all the help he can get.

It’s been great getting email and phone calls from old friends. Frank
went out to dinner tonight with some physicists–when he got home he
had 110 new messages. (Mostly not Nigerian viagra offers, because MIT
has a pretty good spam-filter system.)

We’ve heard from former
professors, long-ago babysitters, sixth-grade school friends, plus
several members of the “Princeton Eulers”, a softball team I organized
at the Institute for Advanced Study. And my blog friends have been
generous with their link-love!* Our kids, parents, siblings, etc. are
getting similar deluges of congrats.

If I’d known 15 minutes of
fame would be this much fun, I would have wished harder for it to
arrive. OTOH, if I’d known 15 minutes of fame would be this much work,
I might have decided to hide under the bed.

“[Frank Wilczek] thanked his family and colleagues and said his work
was a ‘vindication of the idea that it is possible to understand nature
precisely.’ He also cast his award in political terms, pinning on a Kerry-Edwards button before posing for cameras.”

Boston Globe, Oct. 6, 2004

[Emphasis–and link to buttons–added by me.]