This isn’t brilliant Mark Steyn, but it’s interesting:

In the end, it

Mark Bittman, the author of the great cookbook How to Cook Everything, has a new cookbook out titled, The Best Recipes in the World. To promote his book he is posting a large number of recipes on the New York Times website (where he writes the column, The Minimalist).

Last friday night my girlfriend cooked his recipe for roasted vegetables, Thai style. It was wonderful. I really can’t say enough about the recipe. That dish alone made me glad I had purchased his new cookbook. Here

The Washington Post makes it hard to find it’s dining guide on it’s website after the original spalsh. Here’s this year’s guiding guide. Half the reason I post the Washington Post Dining Guides is so I can find them later. If you live in the area, check it out.

The New York Times has an interesting article about productivity and productivity with computers. One of the interesting things researchers Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski have found is big computer screens make people 10-44 percent more productive in office environments. The pictures on the left is Mary Czerwinski computer. I have two monitors and I think it really helps me be more productive, but 3 large LCD monitors would be wonderful.

Here are a few snips from the article:

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Continue reading →

I have posted some pictures I have shot of Washington on my Flickr page (click on the picture above for the link). Enjoy.

A couple days ago I read a post at Kottke.org that mentioned cameratossing. I checked out the link he included to Flickr and I found the pictures to be very interesting. Tonight I went out with my old digital camera, took a few cameratoss pictures, and posted them on Flickr. I photoshopped some of the pictures, as you can tell.

Kottke frequently mentions Flickr, but I hadn’t really checked the site out, or set up an account, until tonight. It is a very cool site. Check it out. I should have some more pictures uploaded soon.

Read this post by Ann Althouse and check out the comments. They are great.

A while Drudge linked to this article that says that there are multiple steaks in Las Vegas that cost over $150 dollars. It turns out that the most expensive steak is made from Kobe beef. I had not idea what Kobe beef until I read this article in the LA Times. I think I need to figure out where I can buy some Kobe beef. It sounds delicious.

According to John Fund of the WSJ:

“[B]usiness may not be getting quite what the White House packagers are touting. . . . One White House source says the positions she took in staff meetings might surprise her business supporters. He said she leaned conservative on social questions and liberal on economic issues. Bruce Packard, a former partner at Ms. Miers’ law firm, also cautions that she may be more complicated than people expect. ‘She is very reticent to ever discuss her own views and liberal on issues other than abortion,’ he told me.”

Great! So Miers thinks that the government can tell you how to run your business and how to run your lief. That’s great. Would another Justice Ginsburg be any worse than a Justice Miers?

Via The Agitator (I’m just going to lift Balko’s entire post since I like it):

Your Drug War:

An Army veteran who fled to Canada to avoid prosecution for growing marijuana to treat his chronic pain was yanked from a hospital by Canadian authorities, driven to the border with a catheter still attached, and turned over to U.S. officials, his lawyer says.

He then went five days with no medical treatment and only ibuprofen for the pain, attorney Douglas Hiatt said.

Steven W. Tuck, 38, was still fitted with the urinary catheter when he shuffled into federal court for a detention hearing Wednesday, Hiatt said.

“This is totally inhumane. He’s been tortured for days for no reason,” Hiatt said.

[...]

Tuck suffered debilitating injuries in the 1980s when his parachute failed to open during a jump, and those injuries were exacerbated by a car crash in 1990, Hiatt said. He said Tuck was using marijuana to treat his chronic pain.

In 2001, while he was living in McKinleyville, Calif., his marijuana operation was raided for the second time. He fled to British Columbia to avoid prosecution but asylum was denied.

Last Friday, he checked himself into a Vancouver hospital for prostate problems, and it was there that he was arrested.

Richard Cowan, a friend who runs the Web site marijuananews.com, said in a telephone interview from Canada that he was with Tuck at the hospital when Canadian authorities arrested him.

“I would not believe it unless I had seen it,” Cowan said. “They sent people in to arrest him while he was on a gurney. They took him out of the hospital in handcuffs, put him in an SUV, and drove him to the border.”

He was turned over to Whatcom County Jail officials, who called federal marshals. The marshals took him to the King County Jail in Seattle.

…Remember after Raich how federal officials told us sick patients had nothing to worry about? Yeah. Bullshit.

I’ve never done drugs, for Pete’s sake I don’t even drink or smoke, but this is absolutely ridiculous and wrong. I watched a great documentary about the Killing of Pablo Escobar last week. Fighting Pablo Escobar who murdered innocent people at willing is one thing, fighting guys in pain is stupid. We should be able to choose for ourselves what drugs work for us. We don’t need the nanny state making our lives miserable.