This is why I can't stand Monty Python—or even a movie that was once my favorite, The Princess Bride.

The ring is very nice—but it was the rubber-band hearts that got me.

Or, as a very smart friend rephrased it: "It was the rubber, not the band."

Oh wow. Someone finally invented the eternal sunset. And eternal sunrise.

(As previously conceived here.)

This is why I reacted so strongly to the news when I began reading it in earnest in college, 'cause that's all it seemed to be, esp. among the D.C. press corps: people getting outraged and calling each other out over trivial, minor offenses. "Who cares?" I thought. "There are much more important things to occupy ourselves with."

But outrage makes careers these days. And it's a habituating drug—the more you read, the more it takes to create the same high. I can often tell when someone's been paying too much attention to the news by his or her overall agitation level.

This is also (one of the reasons) why editorial cartoonists are difficult to date.

Just one line into Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece, "The Great American Bubble Machine," and I'm already grinning:

So I wasn't wrong when I saw Goldman mentioned in this Boston Globe story Tuesday and immediately thought (and wrote in my delicious comments), "Goldman is involved with fucking everything—you see a disaster, and there they are."

Nice to know my instincts were telling me right on this one. Or at very least that my instincts are in line with Taibbi's.