The Blog of Record

Someone was selling this on a Toronto classifieds Web site today as a coat and hat hanger.

If you define “best” as “most popular”, that is.

Look for Haiti to become staggeringly prosperous very soon:

For an island with a population of fewer than 10 million, there is at least one NGO per 1,000 people.

From the comments at the link:

Go to the capital of any third world country. Look on a map for a cluster of nice international hotels in a scenic part of town not too far from where all the embassies are. Look for internationalish restaurants (say Italian or French), bars with blackboards outside showing scores of European soccer matches, and that kind of thing. Walk inside the first such establishment you find. Swing a cat. You will have hit members of at least 20 NGOs. At least one of these people will work for the WWF, Greenpeace, or some other NGO explicitly opposed to cat swinging, but they will probably not harass you over it as they will be too busy enjoying the lifestyle – really very pleasant in these sorts of places on what the NGOs pay.

Or U.N. humanitarian agencies.

Laws, like taxes, are for the little people.

A tax solely on whites to fund health coverage for the uninsured (mostly non-whites), brought to you by the Democratic Party:

Tanning enthusiasts will have to shell out more to achieve the golden shade. The health care law imposes a 10 percent tax on the service.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out who will pay pretty much all of this tax. How many dark-skinned people use tanning beds?

And how did the Democrats arrive at this tax? By rejecting a more race-neutral option:

Lawmakers had considered taxing elective cosmetic procedures, but changed the language to tax indoor tanning services instead.

If Republicans introduced a tax that hit minorities while excepting – and primarily benefiting – whites, media cries of G.O.P. racism would rise to high heaven. But CNN, needless to say, sees nothing remarkable about the new tax.

The rule of the Clinton White House internship: whether you interned for Bill or for Hill, you got screwed:

A relative of mine worked as an unpaid intern in the Clinton White House writing Hillary Clinton’s daily briefing. After a year of that, she asked Hillary’s chief of staff, Evelyn Lieberman, “I feel guilty living off my parents. You have me doing important work for a year now. Could you see your way clear to paying me?” Evelyn responded, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are to have an internship in the White House?!” My relative, incensed at the hypocrisy of Hillary, who gives speeches on behalf of labor [but] wouldn’t even pay her, who had won her university’s outstanding student award, minimum wage. She quit.

Regular marathoners have been found to have more calcified plaque in their coronary arteries than people who were tested for symptomatic or suspected heart abnormalities:

A group of elite long-distance runners had less body fat, better cholesterol and blood lipid profiles, and better heart rates than people being tested for cardiac disease. Paradoxically, however, the runners had more calcified plaque in their heart arteries, according to a study reported this week. . . .

Researchers looked for the amount of calcium plaque on the inside of the subjects’ arteries. Past research has suggested that the more calcium plaque inthe arteries, the higher the risk of heart attacks and death from heart disease.

In the non-runners, the calcium plaque volume was 169 cubic millimeters, compared with 274 cubic millimeters for the elite runners, the researchers reported at the American College of Cardiology meeting.

You mean routinely beating up your body with huge amounts of catabolic, muscle-wasting, inflammation-causing endurance running isn’t as healthy as people, for some mysterious reason, believe? Shocking.

Some people want us to believe that animals aren’t that much different from us. By which they really mean that we aren’t that much different from animals.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know what’s coming next: the same people telling us about plant suicide and plant self-awareness.

Not all of them are retired, though, even in their 60s.

Parts 2 and 3.

That’s how cool she and her boyfriend are:

“I think we’re both deeper than normal people — what they think and how they feel. He’s very grateful for what he has, but he doesn’t let it go to his head. I’m like that too.”

I wonder how many normal people she knows in her beautiful life.

Trying to survive under Robert Mugabe: When an elephant dies of old age in a Zimbabwe national park, hundreds of starving villagers fight and stab each other for its meat:

Photographer David Chancellor said: ‘Just after dawn a villager spotted the carcass as he passed on a bicycle.

‘It was in the middle of nowhere, but within 15 minutes hundreds of people had arrived from all directions.

‘The women formed a ring around the elephant and the men stood inside, fighting and stabbing each other to get to the meat.’

He added: ‘The meat was taken back to homes. Some was eaten immediately but most was dried on washing lines and stored to eat later.

‘There were celebrations in the surrounding villages for the next two nights.’

Look at the photo. This is what Zimbabweans should do with Mugabe.

It is supposed to achieve such remarkable (one might even say too-good-to-be-true) results by transforming the fuel mixture into a state that is part way between gaseous and liquid – a supercritical fluid:

Transonic Combustion, based in Camarillo, CA, has developed a gasoline fuel injection system that can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by 50 to 75 percent, beating the fuel economy of hybrid vehicles. A test vehicle the size and weight of a Toyota Prius (but without hybrid propulsion) showed 64 miles per gallon for highway driving. The company says the system can work with existing engines, and costs about as much as existing high-end fuel injection. 

Company engineers have doubled the fuel efficiency numbers in dynamometer tests of gas engines fitted with the company’s prototype SC fuel-injection systems . . . . A modified gasoline engine installed in a 3200-lb (1451-kg) test vehicle, for example, is getting 98 mpg (41.6 km/L) when running at a steady 50 mph (80 km/h) in the lab.

A vehicle that combines the advantages of the ekranoplan (wing-in-ground-effect vehicle) and the hovercraft:

“I had a moment when I looked around . . . and just thought, ‘If someone from the West could see us right now, they would think we’re a bunch of fanatical jihadis on some kind of an insane mission’.”

Some of them do look like they could do that:

When a gunman stormed a Simi Valley dental office last summer and shot Lydia Carranza in the chest, salvation may have come in the shape of her size-D breast implant.

That’s the theory at least of a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon who hopes to drum up support to defray the costs of Carranza’s reconstructive surgery.

“She’s just one lucky woman,” said Dr. Ashkan Ghavami, who says he will perform the surgery for next to nothing but has urged Carranza to tell her story in hopes of getting implant companies to donate the supplies.

Ghavami contends that the implant absorbed much of the bullet’s impact, limiting most of the damage to the breast itself.

“I saw the CT scan,” he said. “The bullet fragments were millimeters from her heart and her vital organs. Had she not had the implant, she might not be alive today.”

Like all cults, the global-warming religion attracts a certain kind of people:

A seven-month-old baby girl survived three days alone with a bullet in her chest beside the bodies of her parents and toddler brother.

Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.

Their son Francisco, two, died instantly after being hit in the back.

But their unnamed daughter cheated death after the bullet from her dad’s handgun missed her vital organs. . . .

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note discovered by police.

Tiger gets words of support from a kindred spirit:

Bill Clinton offered his support to Tiger Woods in a phone call with the embattled golf star, a spokesman for the former president confirms.

“President Clinton spoke with Tiger and wished him well,” Matt McKenna tells PEOPLE confirming a report in Golf Digest that the two had spoken.

It wasn’t clear when the former president spoke with Woods or how the phone call came about. But Clinton, who has navigated his own infidelity scandals, offered words of encouragement to the golfer, who is reportedly in an Arizona rehab facility for therapy.