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Take a look at this chart from a Discover Magazine blogpost that shows people who drink more have more extensive vocabularies.

The chart is based on WORDSUM scores (a vocabulary test included in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) compared to percentile groupings of people in the survey who identified themselves as drinkers. 

There are many more drinking graphs in the post including drinking by demographic categories, by regions of the United States, and by political and educational categories.

Go read it and then pour yourself a drink.

Ever since Democrats passed the stimulus bill in early 2009, Republicans in congress have attempted to portray themselves as born-again deficit hawks, eschewing their profligate ways during the George W Bush years.  Fortunately, this fiction has not survived the question of what to do about the Bush tax cuts for the rich which are due to expire.

The Obama administration intends to let them expire, thereby saving the treasury some $697 billion over 10 years.  GOP leaders, however, support an extension of all the Bush tax cuts because (and they even manage to say this with a straight face) they don’t add to the deficit at all since they stimulate the economy and actually pay for themselves.  This nonsense has been disproved so many times you’d think even Republicans would be embarrassed to trot it out again; but it does highlight, in addition to a certain obtuseness, their hypocrisy on the deficit.  According to the GOP, extending unemployment benefits to those hit hardest by this recession must be paid for with offsetting cuts elsewhere in the budget, but the rule shouldn’t apply to tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans least touched by the downturn. Sweet!

McConnell and others in the GOP explain the difference in terms of their opposition to government spending adding to the deficit, but this hardly concerned them when they were passing the Medicare drug benefit or appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – none of which were offset with spending cuts elsewhere.  Even now when pressed to identify specific and significant cuts to government spending in programs such as Medicare or Social Security or the defence budget, GOP spokespeople dodge and weave and obfuscate shamelessly without ever giving a straight answer.  Indeed, if you listen to them in other contexts, they insist not enough is being spent on things like border security.

This incoherence is fundamental to today’s national Republican Party and is guided by an essential right-wing conviction:  that an unfettered free market is paramount, and that government has no business and is essentially ineffective in all but a few areas such as national security.  The party therefore has no incentive to make government work efficiently or effectively either when they are in power or in opposition, since this would undermine their guiding principal.  This explains, for example, the utter incompetence of the Bush years when the GOP controlled both the White House and the congress, and the intransigence of today’s congressional Republicans as they strive to thwart any and all initiatives of the Obama administration.  For Republicans gridlock is good.

Voters should remember this as they go to the polls this fall.  By any reasonable standard, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have accomplished a great deal in the last two years, virtually all of which I happen to believe, will be to the long term benefit of the country.  In the short term, the stimulus really did soften the blow of this deepest of economic downturns.  Yet the number of jobless is still way too high and Americans are feeling unsettled and grumpy; Democrats, unfairly or no, are likely to feel the brunt of their ire.  Republicans will benefit simply by being the party out of power. But a party as bereft of ideas as the GOP and whose policies and ideological devotion to deregulation largely caused the mess in the first place should not be rewarded with increased power and influence.  That is simply a recipe for prolonged national pain.

What should an American do to celebrate La Fête Nationale?

Drink!

I’m always looking of an excuse to open a bottle of French bubbly, and a day celebrating the French people’s freedom from monarchy seems like as good a reason as any.

So right now I am watching le Tour de France, listening to Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz, and drinking a bottle of Domaine Vigneau-Chevreau Vouvray Brut method traditionnelle, and toasting the French.

…not much left in the bottle now.

It’s all good….

Cheers!

Summer finally arrived in Seattle the day after the 4th of July weekend.  That’s pretty normal around these parts.

It’s been getting warmer every day since the 4th, and today the weathermen say it’s going to be 94 degrees.   Too hot for some folks around here.  I can hear them complaining now…

Driving in to work today, (Why is the weather always the nicest during the work week?) I was listening to KPLU, and today’s installment of “Record Bin Roulette” was titled “Summertime.”  One of the bits they played was Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch saying: 

“Let me just go put something on.  I’ll go into the kitchen to get dressed.  When it’s hot like this you know what I do?  I keep my undies in the icebox.”

I went searching for a clip of this on YouTube and did not find it, but I did find this one, and it might even be better.

While flipping through the pages of the August 2010 issue of MOJO Magazine last night, I came across and advertisement for Grinderman’s upcoming European tour that I thought was pretty funny.  I went surfing around today for a digital copy of the ad, and I found it on a website called Nick Cave Fixes.  It’s “a blog for Nick Cave addicts & devotees.”  I definitely fall into that category.  So, please welcome this blog to the Blogroll.  You Nick Cave fans are now just a click away from all the latest news about Nick, the Bad Seed, Grinderman, The Birthday Party, and other related artists.

Here’s the ad:

The US release of Grinderman 2 is scheduled for September 14th.

Check out the Grinderman website for more details. You’ll lover the intro…

No US tour dates yet.

This post is all about catching up with Nick Cave and Grinderman, so I might as well direct you to this story in Paste Magazine about Nick’s recent novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, being made into a TV movie directed by John Hillcoat. He directed The Proposition, screenplay by Nick Cave, and The Road, soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Happy Fourth of July.

Now why don’t you maggots skip on over to R. Lee Ermey’s official website for a quick video lesson on what it mean s to be an American.

Maggots?   Oh come on now… maybe you need a refresher course on R. Lee Ermey.  Watch this famous motivational speech scene from Full Metal Jacket:

…and then watch him in the new Geico commercial.  Makes me laugh every time I see it.

You should be listening to the new Alejandro Escovedo album, Street Songs of Love.  You can listen to it in its entirety on this NPR page before it is released next Tuesday.

You New Yorkers should go see him at City Winery on June 30th and/or July 2nd.

You Seattleites should get tickets to the No Depression show on August 21st.

In certain parts of rural Colorado, this is what happens if you light a match next to your running tap water.

The documentary film by Josh Fox titled Gasland explains how flammable tap water came to be.  The film airs on HBO tonight, and the network’s synopsis of the movie includes:

Fox reveals alarming facts about America’s natural gas industry.  In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, championed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, which exempted fracking [hydraulic fracturing] from numerous long-held environmental regulations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act.  Natural gas companies have installed hundreds of thousands of rigs in 34 states, drilling into huge shale fields, tight sands or coal bed seams containing gas deposits trapped in the rock.  Each well requires the use of fracking fluids – chemical cocktails consisting of 596 chemicals, including carcinogens and neurotoxins, as well as one to seven million gallons of water, which are infused with the chemicals.  Considering there are approximately 450,000 wells in the U.S., Fox estimates that 40 trillion gallons of chemically infused water have been created by the drilling, much of it seeping or injected into the ground across the country.

And we thought the BP gulf spill was bad.  It is, but pumping trillions of gallons of toxic chemicals into the land that seeps into our nation’s waters supply could be just as bad or worse.

Regulations?  We don’t need no stinking government regulations.  The huge corporations in the trillion-dollar extraction industries have nothing but our best interests in mind when they drill wells 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and pump trillions of gallons of flammable carcinogens into the earth that seep into our groundwater supplies.  There’s nothing to worry about here…  No need for government watchdogs to get involved!  I mean really, what could possibly go wrong if companies that exist solely to create profits go fracking around the country in search of natural gas?

via The Guardian:

That makes a tie something tolerable to watch.

That and the absence of a hundred thousand vuvuzelas making a very loud and annoying, never-ending buzzing beehive sound.

The U.S. Military invaded Afghanistan 9-1/2 years ago to topple the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden.  Our number one reason for being there vacated the caves of Tora Bora just months after we arrived and, since then, the mission has been one of keeping the Taliban at bay and instituting some form of modern democracy in a country populated by people that aren’t to keen about change. 

Obama’s strategy has been to stabilize the country, get the Afghan military trained well enough to do the job themselves, and then get out. 

But today we learned that there’s gold in them there hills!  Well not so much gold, but a lot of other minerals that we need to keep our high-tech, battery powered economy going.  Today’s NYT reports:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

…

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

Finally a reason to get greedy extraction-industry corporations interested enough in this war to wanna fight harder.   Maybe they’ll even be willing to help pay for it.

Mr. Fish delivers the news perfectly with this comic about the importance of what we’ve discovered that “was hidden beneath the feet of the worthless population” of Afghanistan.