Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Today’s Greatest Headline?

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Farmer claims GPS led him to breed clams in the wrong place, as reported in The Risks Digest (a fun publication).

Posted in Completely Different | Comments Off on Today’s Greatest Headline?

Senator Lieberman Is Against ANY Health Care Reform that Actually Reforms

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

The Plum Line has the video, Watch Lieberman Endorse Medicare Buy-In Three Months Ago. Now he says that the inclusion of the very proposal he formerly claimed to support is why Lieberman opposes the health care bill.

It seems increasingly the case that the core of Lieberman's ever-shifting objections to health care reform is summed up in this classic song:

It would be nice if our Senate could transcend the Marx Brothers. I am not feeling hopeful about that right now.

Posted in Health Care | 3 Comments

The Medium is the Message

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

According to 8,702 news articles from literally around the world, Accenture is dropping Tiger Woods, but Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer stands by Tiger Woods, ‘the best in his domain’.

While it’s not difficult to understand why Accenture might want to drop an alleged serial philanderer with a taste for floozies, I wonder if doing so won’t undermine the exact message they were trying to send with their Tiger Woods campaign:

woods.jpg

Someone flunked a test?

(No points for speculating why a maker of luxury watches might not mind being associated with a notoriously successful philanderer.)

Posted in Kultcha | 3 Comments

Tame

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Seen on a maling list of folks I mostly knew in college:

It's 7 pm in uganda and raining cats and baboons. We've been on the road, if u can call it that, for about 5 hours, with no end in sight. Sent from my blackberry…

If you ask me the “Sent from my blackberry…” line (added automatically I'd imagine), sort of undermines what precedes it.

Meanwhile, here it's not yet 9am and it's already 78 (26 C) and muggy here. But no baboons.

Posted in Miami | 4 Comments

Public Service Announcement

Posted on December 11, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Here's a public service announcement: Don't get too excited about Jim Lindgren's post that Some of the “Homogenized” Temperature Data is False (which relies on Willis Eschenbach's The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero) until you have digested the debunking at Economist.com, Scepticism's limits.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 2 Comments

Telling Tails

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Brad DeLong has renamed his blog to J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail. (It used to be “J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands.”) I am not making this up. I have known Brad since grade school and I can testify that if he has a prehensile tail, it is either a recent growth or he hid it very well.

Incidentally, the page I linked to above includes the following line, which I quote out of context since it is funnier that way:

But when I look at Senators Conrad and Gregg, I don't recognize fellow members of my species.

Perhaps they lack a tail?

Posted in Blogs | 1 Comment