We’ve touched on the Julie/Julia Project, and I just wanted to give a tip of the spatula to Julia Child who passed on after 91 years of eating well.

May we all take our eating lessons of exceptionally good food in moderation from her.

I’ve got to be like the only guy in the US who actually, honest to god, loves station wagons. All the room of an SUV, all of the handling and economy of a car, and seats that fold down giving hauling capacity like a truck, they’re the best of all worlds. The Magnet-ites on the page will doubtless remember my trusty poop-brown Datsun Wagon outfitted with $2/each used tires and 30+ MPH efficiency. I’m still convinced it was the finest car I’ve ever owned (though Missy’s Miata is possibly the car I’m most emotionally attached to), and am pretty much dedicated to picking up a Passat or Jetta TDI wagon after the Subaru dies or we save enough to buy one (mostly) cash.

TCS has a bit on wagons today, wondering (as I do) why they aren’t more well respected: A strange lack of respect for station wagons continues to this day. Nobody seems to want to admit they are selling or buying station wagons. … Warren Brown, the down-to-earth and always entertaining automotive editor of the Washington Post, noted the industry’s ambivalence about these cars with the extra room in the back, and condemned “all nomenclature ruses designed to fool buyers into thinking they are getting something more exotic than a station wagon.”

Maybe we can entice a comment from bt about parking stories with a post of Sunday’s Dilbert strip.

“The Scream” and another painting by Munch were stolen by a group of thieves who walked into the Oslo museum in which it was hanging, pulled it off the walls, walked out with it, got into an Audi, and drove away.

E-voting machines disenfranchised 687 voters in a state that Gore won by 366 votes in 2000.

New Mexico is the only state to have an elaborate, three-step audit process of voting results. Precinct results are checked by the county and state and then by a certified public accounting firm. The federal Election Assistance Commission, established after the 2000 Florida recount to help states establish new voting systems, has cited the audit as a “best practice” to be used elsewhere. … In fact, the audit could show only that the programming error occurred. There was no way to recount the missed votes. They were simply gone.

Yep. “Best practices”.

(Sorry for the Friday moving through to the Monday – I wasn’t in a ranting mood Friday, and was busily playing with the boys over the weekend)

Opensecrets.org is rapidly becoming one of my favorite websites. Extremely interesting to me is the 527 big money donor page. Of the 25 top donors, and the $55.9 million listed on the page, exactly one (1) donor has given any money (about $1 million) to GOP 527’s.

Which party is the party of the rich again?

(Link is SFW, commentary borders on WRONG)

Proving that Finch’s dream that all women are only 2 drinks away from a girl-on-girl adventure (Just Shoot Me, Season 3, episode 6) is universal, even in oppressive muslim countries, Zanzibar has “banned gay sex,“http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,12592,1287876,00.html with guy-on-guy sex being somehow “gayer” than woman-on-woman sex. (it’s only 7 years for hot girl-on-girl action, and 25 years for hot guy-on-guy action.)

Alice Cooper, Prince of Darkness, is a Bush Supporter:

“To me, that’s treason. I call it treason against rock ‘n’ roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics,” says the 56-year-old Cooper, who begins a 15-city Canadian tour on Aug. 20 in Thunder Bay, Ont.

“When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I’d run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick.

“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”

Maybe Johnny’s right when he says Rove is Satan. But tell me you wouldn’t want to see Cooper bite the head off a bat at the GOP convention? (Or am I having rock star confusion – that’s Ozzy, right?)