Tyler Cowen has the skinny.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know….

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The nanny state run wild.

Actually, we ought to be grateful to San Francisco — they do all the stupid things so we don’t have to.

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A Russian woman died of a heart attack at her own funeral, after waking up to find praying mourners filing past her coffin.

Not something you see every day.

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The motif reminded an audience in little peril of forgetting that the occasion solemnized a transition from one phase of life, marked by potty-training and learning to sit criss-cross applesauce for story time, to a period of loftier pursuits: tying your own shoes, sounding out words, being the line leader, and other such stuff as dreams are made on.

How precious.

Cynics, of course, are fond of scoffing at occasions such as these. Graduation ceremonies—for pre-kindergarteners? You cannot be serious!

No. They cannot. Pre-schoolers have not yet learned what a serious place the world can be—which is why they remain, to borrow a phrase from Robert Brustein’s Letters to a Young Actor, “the living embodiment of the audience’s joys and fears.”

Not to mention a bottomless hole for cookies and juice.

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If Oxford is the home of lost causes, California appears to be the Quonset hut of stupid ones. The latest to excite municipal legislators’ brains (in San Francisco and Santa Monica, anyway—Barstow and Fresno appear unaffected at this writing) is anti-circumcision. The author of ballot measures banning the practice in both burgs is one Matthew Hess, who has composed a comic book to further the cause. More of that momentarily.

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The man, who has not been identified, is married to a Frenchwoman, but does not allow her to leave the family home freely, it was claimed.

I hate to see evidence that the French are ahead of us in anything, but this….

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This is, of course, like members of a synagogue distributing free copies of Mein Kampf. What are these morons thinking?

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The Rt. Rev. Brian Marsh, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in America, has decided the ACA cannot accept Pope Benedict’s offer, via Anglicanorum Coetibus, of an ordinariate wherein Anglicans may be received into the Catholic Church but still preserve much of their worship tradition. The reason for rejection of this remarkable offer from the Pope, it seems, is His Grace’s horrifying discovery that when one is received into the Catholic Church one becomes (brace yourself) Catholic. Nobody told him, I guess.

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Ms. Abramson, 57, said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Well … that explains a lot.

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Students banned from a Central Coast school for wearing a white t-shirt. On Wednesday, Soquel High School suspended at least two students. The students say it’s because of allegations, they’re part of a white supremacist group.

And of course if you ask school officials for an explanation they dodge any accountability by citing ‘student privacy rights’.

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Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, author of Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo, described Mr Whitmill’s claims of ownership as insufferable arrogance. “It is astounding that a Pakeha tattooist who inscribes an African American’s flesh with what he considers to be a Maori design has the gall to claim that design as his intellectual property,” she said.

Be careful when you sue, for someone might sue you.

Charlie Stross, socialist, seems unaware of the connection between his politics and those of the Yellow Peril.

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Gotta love Australians.

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“Explain something modern/Internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900.” When faced with that prompt for a design class, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, elected to describe the Amazon Kindle e-reader to Charles Dickens. “I chose to explain the Kindle to Charles Dickens because I thought it could’ve been a helpful piece of technology to have,” Walsh explained to me in an email. “He must’ve lugged a lot of heavy books around with him in his day!”

Check it out.

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Lesson: Bad taste pays when correctly monetized.

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Julien Moise envisioned a device that’s powered by blown air, displaying the time only when you want to see it.

We do these silly things so you don’t have to.

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Now all he has to do is change his name to ‘Barack’.

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Well, of course. What else could she do with it?

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Lyralisa Stevens was born as a male, but for years has received estrogen therapy in the process to become female. Stevens was convicted in 2002 for murdering a woman in San Bernardino over a $400 clothing debt.

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The 34-year-old, from the island, regularly features Carl Douglas’s 1974 number one hit in his set when he performs at the Driftwood Beach Bar in Sandown.

But after striking up the melody in front of customers at the weekend he noticed a man of Chinese origin walking past with his mother, making gestures at him and taking a picture on his mobile phone.

He said that he later received a telephone call from police – while he was dining in a Chinese restaurant – asking him to meet officers about the incident.

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President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.

Of course. Rules are for the little people.

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Belgium has won Guinness World Records recognition as the country with the longest time without government as it approaches a year of life without elected rulers.

And the fact that nobody else appears to have noticed ought to tell you something about the essential, absolutely essential nature of government in the modern world.

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One of many questions I am not required to deal with by avoiding the practice of law.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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People actually get paid to do this….

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The Staten Island terror charged with viciously bashing a young female middle-school classmate while demanding to know “Are you a Muslim?” is himself the son of a Muslim woman, his dad revealed today.

“How could a Muslim have another hate crime against a Muslim?” asked Frank Davies, 32, about his son Osman Daramay.

Makes sense. Few people hate Muslims like other Muslims, judging by the way suicide bombers operate.

Osman, who has a history of disciplinary problems at the school, yesterday allegedly began assaulting the Muslim girl just outside the school building with a 13-year-old female accomplice, and tried to rip off the victim’s hijab headdress covering her hair while yelling, “Are you a Muslim?” authorities
said.

Sound like a typical New York City kid to me.

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Can Klingon be far behind?

In fact, I’m surprised that they didn’t do Klingon first.

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What’s racist about a Russian waving a banana at a soccer player?

I’ll tell you: I don’t know.

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The world’s worst YouTube video as seen through the eyes of a metrosexual English major. Theme: ‘Taking nothing and spinning it out to 1700 words.’ Epitaph:

Dana Vachon is a writer living in Manhattan, followable on Twitter.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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Supporters of Bradley Manning stripped down to their skivvies outside the office of US Senator Dianne Feinstein to protest the treatment of the suspected WikiLeaker, who is being held in solitary confinement, often without being allowed to wear clothes.

I’m sure that’s the top item on Feinstein’s priority list.

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Fears of range anxiety have loomed over EVs since their inception, and those fears were validated courtesy of a couple unfortunate souls whose Nissan Leafs apparently died on them while driving. The drivers put their faith in the Leaf’s remaining range calculation, and were sorely disappointed when the car’s dash said they had enough juice to go 10+ miles, but the batteries had other ideas. Turns out, the Leaf needs some time to get to know you and your lead foot before it can accurately determine the bounds of its own range.

Pardon me while I LAUGH LIKE A MANIAC at these putzes. There.

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John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, lets loose.

Our nation’s actual military is ahead of VMI in these matters. They are aiming for an organization that exists not to fight wars, still less—heaven forbid!—to win them, but to celebrate diversity.

Most Americans first heard news of this development on November 8, 2009, when General George Casey, reacting to the Fort Hood shooting, told a TV interviewer: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” We were further enlightened shortly afterward on learning that Fort Hood, like most US military bases, is a gun-free zone.

Turning military bases into gun-free zones is merely a rest stop along the road to making them testosterone-free zones. That in turn appears to be part of a scheme to fold the military into our culture of grievance, complaint, “rights,” and teeming swarms of lawyers stripping all the sense and virtue from the populace like locusts on wheat. A correspondent who knows the territory tells me: “Guys who served a single tour will get out and join the post office where veterans get very preferential treatment. Then they retire from the post office and head over to the VA claiming service-related handicaps.”

Hey, military men have government jobs, too.

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I’m not even going to speculate.

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Some days it doesn’t even pay to get up in the morning.

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A teenager girl collapsed and died from sudden adult death syndrome (SADS) minutes after she was kissed her for the first time, an inquest has heard.

‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome’? WTF? Can’t they just say ‘She died, and we can’t figure out why’?

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Witches could soon be required to get a permit under proposed Romania legislation which would make it possible to fine or even imprison one whose predictions turn out to be false.

And God forbid they should put clocks back an hour in winter.

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Preparing for the jobs of tomorrow?

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These days, growing numbers of young Swedes about to marry are not only choosing flatware patterns but also picking new names. Sometimes it is an older family name; more often it is one they simply concoct.

Mr. Ekengren recalled a case a few years ago in which an immigrant family requested permission to be called Mohammedsson.

“Permission was granted,” he said.

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Didn’t know that there was such a thing as ‘steel crotch Kung Fu’. I guess you learn something new every day.

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In some modern forms, the monastic way of life need not even include adherence to a particular faith. One can easily imagine cloistered communities focused on sustainable, ecological practices. Instead of daily prayers, members of the collective might spend a prescribed number of hours reading Thoreau and Wendell Berry; in season, they might cultivate organic heirloom vegetables for their own use and for sale at the local farmer’s market.

And you can play a Cleric in the video game.

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I’m definitely in the wrong line of work.

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Ever wish Angry Birds had more poop in it? Well look no further than the App Store today, as Apps Genius has launched Angry Turds. As a monkey in Angry Turds, you get to battle evil island explorers who have stolen your monkey babies with various projectile weapons.

You knew it had to happen.

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Airport officials ordered a holidaymaker carrying a toy soldier onto a plane to remove its three-inch gun – because it was a safety threat.

Ken Lloyd was stunned when he was told he could not go on the plane with the nine-inch model soldier because it was carrying a ‘firearm’.

Apparently the British figure that if the TSA can be stupid, they can be stupid too.

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The couple — who it should be mentioned are constituents of Alesi — were having a home built. While it was under construction, but no one was there, Alesi suddenly decided to just go into the house and have a look (he says he was checking it out “for a friend.”) The door was locked, but he walked around back and found a basement door that was unlocked. Once inside, he tried to climb a ladder to get to the first floor, since no stairs had been built yet… and suffered serious leg injuries, requiring surgery. And now, he’s suing the homeowners and the builder.

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WARNING: This is not a parody, however much it sounds like one.

The urge to insinuate herself into other people’s lives was evident in her earliest artworks. Ms. Nakadate (pronounced nah-ka-da-TAY) grew up in Ames, Iowa, and moved to Boston in the mid-1990s to attend a program sponsored by Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. A friend at Wellesley College introduced her to the social rituals at that women-only school, especially the legendary parties featuring young men from Harvard and M.I.T. who would arrive at the campus on a weekend shuttle bus.

“It was this moment in the girls’ sort of postfeminist movement where their way of empowering themselves was having these enormous parties where they didn’t apologize for anything,” said Ms. Nakadate, who was fascinated by peers “so unafraid of failure,” and seemingly unconcerned with “trying to please people, or trying to put on the correct veneer.” She spent the next four years shadowing students at Wellesley and other nearby women’s colleges, interviewing them and documenting their lives in photographs.

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It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog to use an iPad.

I haven’t seen such stereotypical SWPL prose since I first opened a Playboy magazine as a callow youth.

A member of a generation that seems to have lost interest in the idle pleasures of sleepaway camp, Anna has spent the last three summers working on an ibex farm in the Catskills, just ninety minutes from her Manhattan home. Anna’s parents, Leslie Wilhelm, an editor of style and fashion books, and Walter Gilliam, a partner at a boutique investment firm, love that they can see their daughter often. (Williams, Anna’s last name, is a portmanteau of her parents’ surnames.) How often? “The toll collectors on the New York Thruway are becoming close friends,” cracks Anna’s father, referring to the highway connecting New York City to the Catskills. “We’ve always let Anna pursue her dreams, but we like to be able to visit wherever they may take her,” counters Anna’s mother, who has accompanied her daughter on long trips to Uganda, Bangladesh and the Mississippi Delta.

At Yael Farms, Anna gets plenty of exercise. She spends the day herding ibex, drawing water from a well, and moving heavy stones. After a Deuteronomy-friendly dinner of figs, unleavened bread and honey-drizzled ibex, she practices her Mandarin. Like many of the ibex farms sprouting up across the northeastern United States, Yael offers an intensive Chinese-language immersion course.

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I don’t think this is how Prince Namor got started.

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There’s a little girl in Las Vegas who was hit by car. She’s 13-years-old and in a medically induced coma.

Allegedly, Takara Davis was jaywalking when she got hit. So a police officer showed up at the hospital and gave the ticket to her mother, Kellie Obong. Why did they hand the ticket to the mother? Because Takara was busy being rushed to the operating room as the doctors tried to stop the bleeding in her head…