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• BoifromTroy was out at a California League of Conservation Voters meeting and swears he heard L.A. councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, the John Kerry campaign co-chair, say:
"After all, let's face it. Is anyone excited about electing John Kerry or do you really want to defeat George Bush?"
• Richard Rushfield scourges the LA Weekly for ignoring Hollywood in its news pages, writing that you "see 25 mentions of John Ashcroft for every Michael Eisner." ("Nikki Finke's column is the exception that proves this rule," he adds.) In the following Weekly description of a premiere party, where others might just see a writer going for color he sees "sophmoric Marxist analysis:"
The post-movie bash was an all-out Hollywood splurge staged with that old adage in mind — you’ve got to spend money to make money. And spend they did on costumed guards, elaborate film props, buffets, shrimp bars, booze, coffee kiosks, and decadent desserts galore. It was a trough.
• Mark A.R. Kleiman comments on reports that American soldiers at Abu Ghraib abused at least one teenaged Iraqi boy to get his detainee father to talk. Politics in the Zeros notes that Seymour Hersh has seen images of "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
• Steve Smith on The Funeral:
After a week of relentless hagiography, and genuinely classless and buffoonish antics by the media and my fellow citizens, I would be remiss if I didn't point out how genuinely moving the private ceremony at the Reagan Library was this evening...Anyone who has ever lost a family member or friend (and I would assume that would encompass almost everyone reading this post) can appreciate the dignity and charm the Reagan children revealed in their eulogies for their father.
• When Joseph Mailander worked for Reagan:
I didn’t expect to meet Ronald Reagan the very first day of the job. But Marko sprung him on me. There he was, the Governor, the candidate, sunning himself by his pool in Pacific Palisades, sitting on a patio chair, pouring over a campaign brief. He got up and came to the gate and said, “Hello Marko,” and I was introduced—twenty-two-years old, fairly freshfaced, recognizably Californian but probably not in any other way—as the guy who would be doing the “run”—from HQ to CFTR to D&H to “the residence”—Reagan’s residence at 1669 San Onofre, going forward. Reagan, standing there in swim trunks, looked me over and flashed that smile that took everyone in. That was it, right there, that was all it took—I may not be there politically, but I could swear loyalty, unflinchingly, to that winning smile.
• Rand Simberg asks in the context of Reagan and Alzheimer's, "Suppose we had a way of preserving brains, in some kind of suspension?"
We don't know yet how to transplant them, or how to reverse the progress (if that's the right word) of Alzheimers, but we could remove the brain and put it in stasis in the hopes that the future will both find a cure and the technology to replace it.If the brain is the seat of the identity and the person, why wouldn't it make sense to do such a preservation before the brain deteriorated, and the individual was lost forever to information death? Why would, or should, such a procedure be illegal (as it currently is)?
• Hyperbolic Mollusk and Seth Godin complain about the spam they get from the L.A. Times.
• Drain Bamaged advises: Never eat an entire bag of Pixie Stix by yourself.