Flying pigs

Stop the presses! President Bush has taken responsibility for the "African uranium" claim! (I spent a while on the Merriam-Webster site picking a noun; among the rejects were "mistake," which I deemed too innocent; "error," which implies only ignorance or imprudence; and "deception," which I decided would get me in trouble.)



Why should it be headline news for a president to take responsibility for his words and actions? Heck, Clinton needed a prime-time address just to own up to the Lewinsky affair. I'm not expecting every president to measure up to Honest Abe, but seriously...



(Or George Washington. "Did you chop down that apple tree?" "No, the CIA did." "Did you chop down that apple tree?" "That depends on how you define 'chop.'")

Change

Okay, okay, change really is money. I, personally, never treat it as such; I get it, I throw it on a table or a dresser or in a drawer, and I forget about it. J. actually uses his to purchase things occasionally, but also has accumulated a large change collection. Yesterday he hauled most of it to the bank—just the dimes and quarters, not the near-worthless pennies or the disproportionately large and heavy nickels—and dumped them in the change-to-real-money machine. When I got home, we had the following conversation:

J.: Guess how much money all that change turned out to be worth?

Me: Um...fifty dollars?

J.: Pfft!

Me: Seventy-five? A hundred?

J.: Two hundred and forty-one.

Me: Shit.

So, okay, yeah, it's money. At least if you wait long enough. Maybe in two or three years we'll have collected enough for it to be money again.

Whoa. Fuck.

If you don't get motion-sick and aren't prone to seizures, check out this bizarre optical illusion. My eyes still hurt.

Groan-inducing neologism of the day

Neologisms are invented words (the second definition in Merriam-Webster is "a meaningless word coined by a psychotic"), and I generally dislike, and occasionally actively despise, them. Recently I have been loathing the word "tween." But here's an even more annoying one: "celebutantes," to describe wealthy young women who are famous for being wealthy and young. (Fox coined it for their show "The Simple Life," in which hotel heiress Paris Hilton and Lionel Richie's improbably blonde daughter Nicole take the incredibly daring step of living on [gasp!] a farm for several weeks.)



Incidentally, what the hell is up with the name Paris Hilton? As J. put it, "Do you really want to give your daughter a name that implies that thousands of people have slept in her?"

Another one

Aw, shoot. John Schlesinger has died. I'm linking to the story on PlanetOut, because, unbeknownst to me, he was gay. (I thought I knew all the more obvious non-heterosexuals in show biz, but apparently I'm not as up on them as I thought.) Anyway, requiem aeternam.

Spam

Just when you thought Nigerian spam scams couldn't get any sillier: turns out at least one of the spammers is actually living in Texas, where he and a British citizen have been indicted. Yeesh. The least they could do is actually be in Nigeria.

Imponderables

Various things I and my family have wondered about:

• How did they describe distances before there were football fields?
• How did they describe the sound of tornadoes before there were freight trains?
• Where do they send people who commit crimes in Siberia?