Tuesday night mini-linkfest

A short mini-linkfest tonight.

1. Headline of the day: "Fake penis under attack for staying limp." (via BOTWT)

2. Quotation of the day from the same link: "It's easy to think that it's pretty strange to approve prosthetics that can't get erect, because that is after all what penises do - get erections."

3. How to hide your booze at the stadium.

4. Speaking of booze, here's a beer that uses gene technology and might extend your life.

5. And on the subject of inventions, here's a device for the kid in all of us: a gizmo that makes and throws snowballs.

Click here to read more . . .

Backing discrimination

From the "What Media Bias?" files.

Several months ago, Montgomery County passed legislation to protect transgender people from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. Some groups, citing problematic applications of the law to bathrooms and locker rooms, have tried to get the measure on the ballot in a referendum in November. That process is in litigation.

A local judge has now ruled that advocates for the law missed a deadline for challenging signatures. It's kind of a technical matter. But if you want to know what happened, check the Washington Post article.

On the other hand, if you feel like having a laugh at a less than neutral headline, check out page 11 at this PDF link (warning: large download) to the Washington Post Express, the free, junky -- er, even junkier -- version of the Post handed out at Metro stops.

The headline reads: "Judge Sides Against Transgenders," but the subhead is priceless: "Montgomery County judge rules in favor of discrimination backers."

Well, I guess if you oppose an anti-discrimination law, you're a discrimination backer. The same way, if you oppose a law restricting abortion, you're pro-abortion. I know the Post would agree.

Click here to read more . . .

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."

Click here to read more . . .

Transgendered poplars

In another major initiative by the Chinese government -- so far as we know, unrelated to the 2008 Olympics -- about 300,000 "female" poplar trees will be given hormonal treatment to deal with the changes brought about by arborial menopause.

Only kidding, I think. It's a little hard to tell what's serious and what's not when a news article says that "female" poplar trees will receive "sex changes operations." Apparently, the pollen produced by these trees in Beijing is causing health problems for people with asthma and allegeries. The trees will be injected with some unspecified substance, perhaps testosterone, to reduce the female pollen. I don't really know that it's testosterone, but if you suddenly begin to notice that the trees in Beijing are punching each other and making loud belching sounds, I think we'll know how that happened.

Next initiative: Circumcising the males of the species.

Click here to read more . . .