Sunday morning mini-linkfest

I was going to leave you a mini-linkfest on my way out of town for the weekend, but it happened too fast. So with your indulgence, I'm going to give it to you a little late.

1. 1. S.Weasel has discovered Abraham Lincoln's YouTube account. It's actually a Joe Biden joke.

2. Out of concern for the sensibilities of certain very quiet and unassuming people, the Brits are installing toilets at the 2012 Olympics that face away from Mecca. (via HotAir) You can't face Mecca when you're doing your business. Brits have previously dealt with this in their prisons. As the article notes: "Muslim prisoners complained of having to sit sideways on toilets so as to not break code." They're in prison and they're worried about breaking the law? I've always complained about Jewish prisoner who commit crimes and then demand to keep kosher in prison. Same thing there.

3. Maybe we should check with Muslim prisoners first, but PETA wants Ben & Jerry's to use breast milk for its ice cream, instead of cows' milk. (also via HotAir)

4. An article that actually exists: 5 Insane Devices From Kids Cartoons (That Actually Exist) (via Ace)

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Sunday evening linkfest

Passover has (finally) ended, and now, once again, it's time for a linkfest of links that have been forming plaque on the walls of my intertubes for the past two weeks or so. Some of them are seriously OLD, but I want you to have them, anyway. Please stay with me till the end, because way at the bottom of this post, I have a couple of future classics from the Sunday New York Times that are almost worth the price of the paper.

1. In the past couple of weeks, the biggest issue in politics, in case you're a Japanese World War II fighter who's been holed up in the Pacific until yesterday, has been whether Obama flipped the bird at Hillary while speaking to his supporters following the final debate in Pennsylvania. The Hillarosphere demands to know. And Baseball Crank has another photo that may provide circumstantial evidence.

2. The Democrats' Nightmare Scenario (via Instapundit)

3. More popcorn, please!

4. McCain goes to NOLA, and an African-American participant at a town-hall meeting says this: "I want to inform you that everybody in the camp here is not a Republican." Does he mean (a) literally no one is a Republican, or (b) colloquially, not everyone is a Republican? Who cares, anyway, besides anal-retentive grammar wackos like me?

5. As Warner Wolf might have said, if you studied math in school since about 1961 . . . YOU LOST! On a related topic, Hillary Clinton does some math trolling for delegates and votes from Michigan.

6. Gov. O'Malley calls a special session of the legislature to pass a law declaring the official state dessert of Maryland. (Only kidding about the special session. Beats the hell out of raising our taxes, though.)

7. The man-cave: "Like most stories that end up with a man mowing his friend's lawn in a dress, it started out innocently enough." (via Fark, of course)

8. Sometimes it pays to test your personal machinery before reporting its theft by voodoo to police. As the police chief himself put it: "'I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke,' Oleko said.
'But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, "How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it",' he said."

9. Public Service Announcement: Be careful when eating in Canadian restaurants.

10. "Le Petit Singly is a farm that specializes in making cheese from women's breast milk." (via Ace)

11. This one's so old, it's already been overtaken by events. You remember the McLean school that banned tag in the schoolyard? Well, tag's back, but not before a week of "reorientation lessons on playground safety." I swear I'm not making that term up.

12. Patch (for women) aims to make you (not you, you) feel sexy. (via Ace)

13. Rick Monday saves the flag. In 1976. But now, there's a video.

14. American expat in Paris whines about the falling dollar. My heart bleeds.

15. False advertising from Moron Pundit: a very non-moronic defense of the tax deduction for child dependents.

16. Doubleplusundead on more misery with McCain. For me, if you want to know why McCain hasn't sealed the deal with conservatives -- I'm going to vote for him, anyway -- read George Will's column this morning. Two words: campaign finance.

17. The Children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt by a Pharaoh who took great pleasure in persecuting gays, who were brutally forced to arrange flowers for the Egyptians. Hence, the orange on the seder plate. Funny, I had always heard that it was supposed to represent Pharaoh's fear of the vagina.

18. And finally, the moment you've been waiting for -- the two classics from today's New York Times: (a) In the travel section: "In 2007, nude recreation represented a $440 million industry — up from $400 million in 2001 and $200 million in 1992." (b) In Sunday Styles: A family adjusts to the father's sex change -- "Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change."

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Visitor of the Day -- 11/1

I seriously recommend that she see a doctor, dude.

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The milk of human kindness

I've previously discovered how useful Craig's List can be, so I wasn't terribly surprised when I learned from Maryland Conservatarian that some folks in the Bible Belt of Berkeley, California, posted an ad offering a free room to a woman who agreed to provide breast milk for the other roommates. The text is reprinted in BoingBoing:

We are offering a free room for a woman who is willing to provide breast milk for consumption to the household. We are an otherwise vegan house but have recently read A.O. Wilson's study of the benefits of human breast milk to all human beings of any age. This is not sexual. Neither appearance nor sexual preference are of any concern to us.

We are willing to accept one child into the house as well. We do not want to take breast milk away from a nursing child however. We also don't need gallons of breast milk but whatever you can muster; it is a nutritional supplement for members of the house who want to partake.

The room is 10'x 15' in a sunny house in Berkeley. There are 7 other people in the house and we live largely communally - shared food and house supplies. You must still pay for food, only rent is free. Reply to this posting and we will set up a time. Contact Dana.

This, of course, raises some extremely vexing questions. Such as:

1. Are these people discriminating against men and non-lactating women, or are they exempt from moral condemnation because they live in Berkeley? I'll have to pose that question to Randy Cohen, the "ethicist" at the New York Times.

2. Is human breast milk truly vegan? I don't think you'll ever get a serious response to this question from vegans. More like: "That's not funny!" Which is basically the tenor of this thread I found at a vegan forum. My personal favorite line in the thread is this: "If the breast milk is given freely (by the wielder of the breasts, of course), it is vegan."

3. Is breast milk kosher? The general rule is that animal milk is kosher only if the animal is kosher, but people aren't kosher. So how can a baby drink it? That's different. I once had a frum guy tell me a story about a frum woman at the airport who was ordered to drink some breast milk she had with her in a container in order to prove it was actually breast milk. She said she couldn't because it wasn't kosher. It turns out that this isn't quite accurate.

Breast milk is kosher and pareve. The reason is that only the milk of animals we eat is "milk" for kashrut purposes. (In simple terms, milk of a non-kosher animal is not kosher, just like the animal it came from, but a person is not an animal.) You can mix breast milk with cereal in whatever bowl matched what the rest of the family is eating.

So go ahead and enjoy it with your corn flakes! (So long as your corn flakes are certified kosher.)

4. If you marketed breast milk as a nutritional supplement, what would you call the product? Cafe Hayek has one answer, but the first commenter there wins the prize.

5. Why isn't there a government program to provide breast milk to all Americans, especially those 247 million who have no lactation insurance? The folks in Berkeley should demand such a program from their congressperson, Barbara Lee, and from the one across the bay, Nancy Pelosi. Are we done with the first 100 hours yet?

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