Time to talk books. You know. The things you read on iPads. Or I guess Kindles if you're color blind.

Seems like it's at least worth a diary. Watched the opening ceremony, or parts of it, with the Lovely Deanna, a Canadian from Vancouver so there's a rooting interest in the house....

Highlights?

The Canadian rep's stirring speech during which he invoked "the magic of television", ie "Tonight, thanks to the magic of television..." (Wow. And it's even in color!)

The same speaker when he referred to "human champions." (When are the animal Olympics anyway?)

For Esme, WIth Love and Squalor is one of my favorite short stories. And while I think Catcher In The Rye is somewhat overrated, there will always be a place in my heart for anything he ever wrote pertaining to the wondrous Glass family. (Franny & Zooey, etc.)

It was rumored, quite some time ago, that he never stopped writing. He just didn't feel like publishing. It will be interesting to see what he left behind.

A wonderful obit written by Charles McGrath, here.

The Coachella scheduled dropped at midnight last night -- always a big event in this household -- and it's shaping up to be the best festival in years. It looks likes this.

Well, sure. It probably won't be. Palin is adept at putting herself -- and more importantly, her many grievances -- at the center of our political landscape. And that is quite an accomplishment, in and of itself, when one considers what an empty vessel she is, a kind of tabla rasa for horny conservatives, bitter-enders, birthers and fundies, to write their future on. Palin is resentment personified, St. Joan for the angry and the marginalized. There's a kind of wacky value in that, I suppose. But God what a dead end she is.

So Apple Exec Tim Cook is talking to reporters and he lets drop the sentence that has the Mac rumors spinning...

Hmm. So we've got abnormal freight costs bringin' the fun goods from China. But what goods are we talking about?

The best guesses are as follows:

Apple Tablet
iPod touch with camera
iPhone nano

And my favorite...

So the town hall mobs were not a deep and important expression of patriotic unrest by patriots, whom, pretty much at the same time, decided they'd had enough and weren't going to take it anymore.

It was just political theatre written and directed by the usual scumbags. Sheep herded by cynics.

I first discovered Little Green Footballs the way a lotta folks did -- some lefty site linked to some impossibly vile headline Charles Johnson put up, or even better, the comments it inspired -- and even tho' I was banned the moment Charles read my first comment, I was able to get a good sense of the place, and it became, over time, a kind of pre-Redstate shorthand for Impossibly Vile and Stupid Wingtards.

So during the big health care address to Congress tonight, Obama is talking about how it's a 'falsehood' to suggest illegal immigrants will be covered under the new health care system -- and some yahoo from South Carolina -- a GOP congressman, of course -- shouts out, "YOU LIE!"

What a lovely moment that perfectly encapsulates the state of modern conservatism and the GOP. You can see it here.

We all know that Nate Silver can pick himself some presidential elections. But Nate started his run as a baseball stat monster -- he still does a lotta work in this regard -- and developed a sure-fire formula to assess any team's chances at post-season success. The metric was developed after running variables on thirty years of playoff data. One surprise? There is no correlation between any measure of team offense and playoff success. On the other hand, they discovered the things that matter. And call this metric 'The Secret Sauce.'