NY Gov. Makes Unusual Remark on Bush’s Drunk Driving. When his nominee for Motor Vehicle Commissioner admitted that he had DWI and speeding convictions on his record, Gov. Pataki replied, “I guess that qualifies you to be President of the United States then. “

Clues to why every snowflake is different are revealed in a California “snowstorm in a can.” New Scientist And, while we’re on the snowy subject, consider Frosty the sexist snowman: the snowman figure reinforces gender stereotypes and male domination of life outside the home, says a British art historian who studies popular imagery. White, invariably male, rotund, with a jolly countenance, he is said to represent carnal enjoyment and lusty fulfillment. National Post

Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good. A long Atlantic exposé on the flavor industry and its manipulation of our palate for profit.

People usually buy a food
item the first time because of its packaging or appearance.
Taste usually determines whether they buy it again. About 90
percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes
to buy processed food. The canning, freezing, and dehydrating
techniques used in processing destroy most of food’s flavor —
and so a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make
processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry today’s
fast food would not exist…

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies
will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the
identities of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for
protecting the reputations of beloved brands. The fast-food
chains, understandably, would like the public to believe that the
flavors of the food they sell somehow originate in their
restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run by other firms. A
McDonald’s french fry is one of countless foods whose flavor
is just a component in a complex manufacturing process. The
look and the taste of what we eat now are frequently deceiving
— by design.

Jeanette Winterson reads porn: “Feminism seems to have had no effect on pornography. There is
much more of it than in the 60s and 70s, and it has become
both mainstream and acceptable. I travel a lot, here and abroad,
and at airports and railway stations, I have noticed the old top
shelf is often double the size and halfway down. What does this
signify? That more men buy porn than ever before? That men are
shorter than they used to be? That women want it in their face?
That pornography is just a lifestyle magazine?

Reading the message is not easy. In the white corner are the
likes of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon who have
argued, with varying degrees of success, in the American courts
and media, that all pornography is violence against women. In
the red corner are the good-time guys, such as Hugh Hefner,
Paul Raymond, Richard Desmond, who claim it’s just business
as usual and the girls enjoy it. Desmond has recently bought
the Express, further blurring the line between business and
exploitation. When a porn baron takes over a national
newspaper, how do we read the signs?” Books Unlimited

This looks a nice place to stop… “Motels are places for assignations and
illicit sex, for planning crimes and dividing
the spoils, for insecure people in transit or
desperate people on the run. There’s
always the chance that you’ll wake up
alone, robbed after a night of passion, or
that the place will be surrounded by cops…” Reflections on the place of the motel in the American psyche, and particularly Hollywood’s, on the 75th anniversary of their advent on the scene. The Observer

Phone flirts. New sociobiological research conducted over four months in a Liverpool pub suggests that men flaunt their cell phones in public as if they were “lekking” — a term I just learned from the article, from animal behavior terminology, referring to competitive mating displays. The degree to which the subjects showed off their toys was proportional to the density of the male audience. From other aspects of their research, the investigatorsconclude that women would be more attracted to the flaunters, but this last seemed an inferential stretch to me. New Scientist And Lionel Tiger explores the sociobiological significance of the visit to the nail salons that seem so ubiquitous. New York Press

“The Census Bureau releases congressional reapportionment figures from the 2000 census, and the
results are good news for Republicans …. Add these numbers up, and they mean that if Bush wins the same states in 2004 that he carried in
2000, he will win by 18 electoral votes, 278-260, instead of four.” WSJ Opinion Journal

Bigfoot’s Buttocks: I’m among those who wonder if there’s a serious chance an unknown, large hairy hominid roams the most remote wilderness areas of the far west and northwest. Most accounts are scoffed at as hoaxes or misidentifications. It’s a pity that serious inquiry into the possibliities of unknown species is thwarted not so much by innocent credulity as by the deliberate play upon others’ credulity of sensation-seeking hoaxers. There have been numerous findings and castings of supposed footprints, but now a Bigfoot-hunting party has found the imprints of forearm, hip, thigh and heel in a muddy bank where the night before they had placed some tempting apples. The impression appears to be from a hairy hominid at least 2.5 meters (8 ft.) tall, according to an involved anthropologist. The team feels this is the strongest hint that Bigfoot exists. New Scientist

Invasion of the ‘Blog’: A Parallel Web of Personal Journals. The New York Times takes a snapshot of the phenomenon. Welcome to new readers pointed here from the article, which mentions FmH (“wide-ranging articles and links compiled by a psychiatrist”). [Do I now qualify as a ‘partner’ of the Times, able to post links to its registration-free URL partners.nytimes.com??] I quibble with one of the piece’s themes, which is that any fool can now produce a weblog without knowing any HTML, given how easy it’s been made by Blogger etc. I beg to differ; I think any fool still needs to know some HTML to pretty up their blog enough to keep it readable.

Outlook Not So Good: “… it was a curious
convergence of events that saw the National
Intelligence Council issue its soothsaying report
on America’s role in the New World Order, Global
Trends 2015, just as a president-elect who has
never traveled across the Atlantic set about
appointing a cabinet disinclined to cast the
world’s only superpower as a leader of new global
consensus…

At such moments, you can sense the growing
desperation in the precincts of high spookery:
There just has to be an enemy out there,
mastering the conventions of ‘nonmateriel’
combat subterfuge. Then again, this particular
judgment call may well prove inadvertently
prophetic, after all: There probably is every
reason in the world to think that a Bush-led
America, however extravagantly armed, runs a
much greater risk of being simply outwitted.” Feed