And You Thought Electing a Convicted Crack Smoker to Public Office Was Weird

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Only the city that keeps electing Marion Barry to public office could pull this off:

Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty lost the Democratic primary, but the city's Republicans want him as their candidate.

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics announced Friday that Fenty won the Republican primary as a write-in, but Fenty has said repeatedly that he has no interest in being the GOP candidate in November. The Republican party was not running any candidate in the mayor's race, but a total of 822 Republicans wrote in Fenty's name.

On a totally separate note, why didn't the Tea Party come up with a candidate in DC?

Millionaire’s Club

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Greenwald's reaction to the O'Donnell reaction is spot on I think:  

You want to know why it's so unusual for a U.S. Senate candidate to have what Rove scorned as "the checkered background" of O'Donnell, by which he means a series of financial troubles?  In his interview with me earlier this week, Sen. Russ Feingold said exactly why.  It's not because those financial difficulties are rare among Americans.  This is why:

"It's not a new thing; it's been going on for a couple of decades. If you look even in the Senate, I'm one of the very few people in there who doesn't have a net worth over a million dollars; my net worth is under half a million dollars, after all these years. "

And as poor as Russ Feingold is relative to his colleagues in the Senate, he's still a Harvard Law School graduate who owns his own home and has earned in excess of $100,000 as a U.S. Senator for the last 18 years.  People with unpaid Farleigh Dickinson tuition bills and home foreclosures just aren't in the U.S. Senate.  And there are a lot of people — those who see nothing wrong with the U.S. Senate as a millionaire's club and as an entitlement gift of dynastic succession – who want to keep it that way.  

If you don't feel like clicking through to Greenwald's column I can summarize it for you: he disagrees with much of what O'Donnell says and stands for, but he thinks a big part of the establishment reaction to her is the fact that you're more likely to find her at WalMart than at Macy's. I think he's right.

And Yet She Still Married Me

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For some unknowable reason a study of what makes gals dig guys on the dance floor has been completed.  According to the results this is a good dancer:

And this is a bad dancer:

Here's the abstract from the study:

Male dance moves that catch a woman's eye

Male movements serve as courtship signals in many animal species, and may honestly reflect the genotypic and/or phenotypic quality of the individual. Attractive human dance moves, particularly those of males, have been reported to show associations with measures of physical strength, prenatal androgenization and symmetry. Here we use advanced three-dimensional motion-capture technology to identify possible biomechanical differences between women's perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ male dancers. Nineteen males were recorded using the ‘Vicon’ motion-capture system while dancing to a basic rhythm; controlled stimuli in the form of avatars were then created in the form of 15 s video clips, and rated by 39 females for dance quality. Initial analyses showed that 11 movement variables were significantly positively correlated with perceived dance quality. Linear regression subsequently revealed that three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee. In summary, we have identified specific movements within men's dance that influence women's perceptions of dancing ability. We suggest that such movements may form honest signals of male quality in terms of health, vigour or strength, though this remains to be confirmed.

Never have so many multisyllabic words been used to explain how you know a guy's a dork.

For what it's worth this explains my fondness for pubs over clubs.

Found via bookofjoe.

Only in Florida

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It appears that I'm going to have to ease up on teasing Florida for all the whacky news it produces.  Apparently we here in North Carolina have our fair share of weird news too, and sometimes residents of our state even team up with residents of Florida to create unique news event. Exhibit A would be the folks from Hickory, NC who tried to bury a loved one at sea off the coast of Florida and it just didn't work out right:

They chartered a local fishing boat, the Mary B III, and Lasky's widow, Sharon, her pastor and other family members, along with the boat's captain and crew, motored four miles offshore from Port Everglades. They tendered their final goodbyes and consigned Lasky to the deep. Family members then fished for a spell in his memory…

But the sea proved no resting place. Though weighted down, Lasky's body resurfaced Saturday. About 9:30 that morning, a fisherman reported a man's body floating about four miles offshore. Its wrappings had come undone. Sheriff's marine deputies raced to the scene, along with the Coast Guard. Homicide detectives waited onshore…

Collins said his office usually handles three to four sea burials a year, most off the shores of Florida or North Carolina, whose Outer Banks are a popular area.

Who knew?

A College Dies

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I spent my freshman year of college in Nebraska attending Concordia Teachers College in Seward (now Concordia University).  I played on the school's soccer team and one of the schools we played against was Dana College in Blair, Nebraska so when I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about Dana's closing it kind of hit close to home. From the article:

Nestled amid cornfields in eastern Nebraska, Dana and Blair have grown up together over more than a century. Blair, population 7,700, was established in 1869 by railroad baron John Insley Blair. Fifteen years later, Danish Lutheran pioneers opened a seminary, which later became Dana College.

Dana's red-and-white Viking logo decorates the town. Many loyal locals dedicate free nights to whatever the "Dana kids" are doing, said Vaughn Christensen, 79 years old, who met his wife, Clarice, at Dana about 50 years ago and sent their three children there.

"We went to everything—all the music, the theater, the basketball. I don't think we missed one home game," Mr. Christensen said.Enrollment at Dana peaked in the 1970s at about 1,000. Before closing, the college enrolled just under 600 and employed about 175 faculty and staff. A 2003 study estimated that Dana contributed $20 million annually to the local economy, largely through payroll and local expenditures….

Investors proposed to buy Dana and turn it into a profitable operation. But an accrediting agency effectively pulled the lifeline away by denying the college's application to change ownership. Such accrediting agencies were facing pressure from federal education officials, who accused some of being too lenient in certifying for-profit schools with lax standards. Officials said such schools often pushed students to take on heavy debt loads without preparing them for careers.

"I feel like Dana was kind of collateral damage," said Jeremy Bouman, former vice president for institutional advancement at Dana (which rhymes with banana). "There was never a chance to be successful because of the political scrutiny."

Protecting Our High School Kids from the President of the United States of America

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Today I received the following message from our kids' high school:

West Forsyth families… this message is to inform you that President Obama will be giving a back-to-school speech on Tuesday, September 14  at 1 p.m. He gave a similar speech last year in which he encouraged students to work hard, stay in school and graduate.

The school system will be showing the President's speech again this year. If you would prefer your student not watch the speech, please send a note with him or her on Tuesday.

Thank you.

I truly, truly, truly don't get this.  What have we come to when a back-to-school speech from the President is treated like sex-ed?  And I don't say this just because it's this President.  I'd say it if we were talking about either President Bush, President Clinton, President Reagan, President Carter, etc.  

What's even more troubling is that these are high school kids we're talking about. I can't believe parents feel like their kids aren't mature enough to take what they hear from the President, evaluate it, discuss it and then make their own judgments. 

For the record I don't really blame the school administrators; they're obviously reacting to feedback they received last year and are putting a system in place in anticipation of a similar reaction from parents this year. I'm just supremely disappointed that some members of my generation feel like they've raised kids who aren't smart enough to figure out for themselves whether or not a speech from the President is an innocuous message of encouragement, or some sort of "liberal propaganda" disguised as a back to school speech.  

Getting Emotional Over Dirt

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You'd think that a blog about land use and zoning law would be, well, dry.  Maybe you'd be right, but when you stop to think about it there aren't many things people get more emotional about than what happens to their stuff, and the most important "stuff" they own is their land/house.  Trust me, if you want to fill the city council chambers just propose opening a landfill in the middle of a neighborhood, or changing the zoning from residential to commercial near an existing neighborhood.

Attorney Tom Terrell writes a very good blog about land use and I really like his most recent post, Getting Emotional Over Dirt.  An excerpt:

Land use, like the political cauldrons in which land use decisions are made, does not always follow logical and linear decision-making processes.  We study the legal and logical aspects of land in our universities, but the critical decisions that affect its development and changes are propelled, more often than not, through emotional decision-making.  I’ve written and spoken about this relatively unexplored phenomenon on many occasions.  The world of litigation is full of studies on how and why juries do as juries do.  Although they probably exist, I’ve never seen similar academic studies of how and why elected officials make certain decisions on land use following presentations at public hearings.

When we do study the emotional aspects of land use, chances are the fears and anxieties are hidden behind surrogate issues and the fearful and the anxious are elevated in stature by calling them “stakeholders,” almost as if they had an equal right to the use of the land as the person who owns it.

This past Sunday New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blogged about public decisions being made because of fears of Islam (“Is Islamophobia the New Hysteria”), much the same as actions that were taken over the decades and centuries against Catholics and Germans and Mormons and Irish and Jews and Japanese where “fear spread in part because of misinformation.” When we are scared, he reminds us, we can do unconscionable things.

I Would Love to See Relay Race Here

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Those of you old enough to remember Webvan will likely greet news of any grocery delivery service with a healthy dose of skepticism, and rightfully so, but I think that the folks behind Relay Foods, currently in operation in Richmond and Charlottesville, are onto something.  Here's Bookofjoe's review of the service and here's the "How it works" page on their site.  Very cool and something I'd love to see in the Triad.