Not Buying It

Via digby, Andrew Sullivan wonders whether Sarah Palin's son Trig is named for the medical shorthand for the technical name for Down Syndrome, Trisomy-g. I would like to see a citation for "Tri-g" used in such a manner. Google hasn't provided anything except other bloggers repeating Sullivan's musings.

It's also weird that he's still pushing the "Trig isn't Sarah's" theory. I don't understand how both rumors could be true.

Update: Yeah, I'm calling this a hoax. The only thing I found with "Trisomy-g" and "Tri-g" on the same page that didn't refer directly to Palin was at http://slangrn.com/definition/tri-21, basically a medical Urban Dictionary clone. I didn't see a way to tell how recently the "tri-g" tag was added to the entry, but I'm going to chalk it up to Jukt Micronics style hi-jinx.

Andrew Sullivan['s ghostblogger] either got played by a right-wing agent-provocateur, or is acting as one on his own behalf. At best it's a distraction, at worst it can function as a your-side's-just-as-bad rejoinder to criticism of "birther" conspiracies on the right.

Bad Review, A Zillion Years Later

I recently finished A Frolic of His Own and looked up reviews on the excellent Gaddis Annotations, which featured one from the Times Book Review:

Other obstacles seem gratuitous, even perverse...[T]here seems little excuse for subjecting the reader to 50 pages of verbatim, tiresomely repetitious testimony in one of Oscar’s legal depositions.

While I can imagine that a lot of people did find the deposition scene tedious—all they want is blood and gore and her hand unbuttoning his trousers—I am really astounded that the reviewer thought there was "little excuse" for the scene in question.

It's not "one of" Oscar's depositions, it's the only deposition in the novel. It happens early on: the two lawyers in the scene appear for the first time, in their only scene together, and the whole remainder of the plot refers back to this encounter as the reader learns new things about each of them. And it's not the testimony that's repetitious, but the lawyers' constant objections and rebuttals, which take on a Laurel and Hardy type quality.

In any case, I think the deposition scene is literally essential to the novel.

Occamize It!

Ezra Klein doesn't understand why the administration would do something like call for a discretionary spending freeze without getting something in exchange. I think Matt Yglesias's speculation regarding Ben Bernanke from a few days ago might be relevant here.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that Obama just genuinely is a fiscal conservative who worries more about potential future inflation than current unemployment. Our last Democratic president thought trimming the deficit in a recession was a good idea on the merits.

AxWax Source

Source and Eclipse project files for the cryptic crossword thing available here. You can now sign in with a Google account and have it save your progress.

Cryptic Thing

I cobbled together a little (barely) interactive crossword puzzle engine. Here's a link to the puzzle I did a couple months ago, Transportation Alternatives.

It has some rendering problems, especially on IE, and there isn't any way to save your progress or check your answers yet, but the highlighting and everything seem to work okay, so I thought I'd link to it.

The interface is GWT which is very cool and fun. And sort of mind-blowing in that it even exists at all, let alone works as well as it does.

Update: changed puzzle link.

2010 NYC Alternate Side Parking Google Calendar

2010 NYC Alternate Side Parking Google calendar.

Nimbyism as Environmentalism

Atrios on nimbyism masquerading as environmentalism. I think there's some of this going on in the Gowanus Canal Superfund debate: certainly the popular pro-Superfund poster featuring a whale, of all things, seems to be trying a little too hard. I mean, they are on the right side anyway, but I'm just saying.