. . . and some breakfast links.

The Christian Science Monitor continues to post daily updates on kidnaped journalist Jill Carroll. She has not been forgotten.

Screw the New York Times firewall. You can find your morning Dowdage at Jurassic Pork’s blog (Happiness is a Warm Gun). My favorite bit from the always scintillating Ms. Dowd:

As Carey Goldberg wrote in The Boston Globe, the most popular Harvard course is one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar about how to shed pathologies.

You’d think just being lucky enough to get that Harvard edge would cause elation. But Ms. Goldberg reported that more than 800 students left smiling and cheering after hearing Dr. Ben-Shahar offer self-help formulas like these: “Learn to fail or fail to learn”; don’t think, “It happened for the best,” but rather, “How can I make the best of what happened?”

He meditated with the students, telling them to “give yourself permission to just be.”

Learn to fail or fail to learn? Is that the sound of one ass-cheek farting, or what?

Although I might sigh over this, it also gives me a feeling of warmth and superiority. I retain a great deal of empathy for Berkeley freshmen, kids who have outshined their high school classmates but now find themselves in a hive populated by nothing but the best and the brightest. While they are working their butts raw to ace Chem 1, or English Composition, or Calculus, their Ivy League colleagues are busy trying to giving themselves permission to just be.

As we used to say in college, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.

Karen and I have had first-hand experience with both a public university (Berkeley) and a private university (Stanford), and we’re on agreement on this: One of the main differences between the two is their attitude towards failure. Public schools realize some kids won’t make the grade. Private schools don’t accept failure as an option. Public schools understand that without the possibility of failure, success is meaningless. Private schools see dropouts as a loss of donors (not only the student, but his parents).

But the Ivy Leaguers take care of their own, even Yale dropouts like Dick Cheney. We don’t live in a meritocracy. I dare you to consider our current administration as an example of this, and not say, No duh. Sorry for the double negative.

***

I’m going to our county’s Democratic Party fundraising dinner tonight. I predict: dry chicken breast, mushy peas, and lots of pissed-off libruls like me. I’ll let you know how it goes.

D.

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, Dick Cheney, Harvard, Ivy League, Jill Carroll

Evening linkage

Call it end of the week exhaustion, but this is all I’ve got.

sxKitten reports on, if not the best googlebomb ever, one of the best. Freedom Fries, anyone?

Dave Munger has long maintained that the anti-abortion movement is, in reality, anti-sex. This week, he provides a provocative link to Alas, A Blog, wherein Ampersand takes a close look at the policies supported by the anti-abortion movement, and asks: do these positions truly indicate a belief that abortion is the same as child murder, or do they merely indicate a desire to punish women for having sex?

Current top o’ the blog at Falafel Sex: a fine political cartoon, followed by a very naughty dog picture (which Bare Rump admirers will surely remember).

This post today from author Jay Lake gave my SiteMeter palpitations. Still cracks me up. Thank God I said some nice things about Jay’s story . . . I think some of these people really would like to bust me up. (Just kidding.) But now I’m wondering (cue whine): when do I get peon minions? Paul, you’re never going to live this one down.

Post script to the Ben Domenech plagiarism story, from Media Matters:

Summary: Ben Domenech, defending himself from charges of plagiarism, falsely claimed that one of the articles that apparently included plagiarized material “ran as inspired by [author P.J.] O’Rourke’s original.” There is, in fact, no mention of O’Rourke at all.

When is this idiot going to learn to stop lying about stuff which exists in the public record? You don’t win friends and influence people by lying your ass off after the fact. What. A. Dick.

From the Media Matters link, here’s a portion of Domenech’s defense:

In one instance, I have been accused me of passing off P.J. O’Rourke’s writing as my own in a column for the paper. But the truth is that I had met P.J. at a Republican event and asked his permission to do a college-specific version of his classic piece on partying. He granted permission, the piece was cleared with my editors at the paper, and it ran as inspired by O’Rourke’s original. [Emphasis added]

Even if it were true (which it isn’t; see above), “inspired by” does not allow you to lift sentences word-for-word from the parent work. Jeez.

***

Coming this weekend: the joys of hardboiled fiction. Have a good one, everybody.

D.

Ambien, Drug of Darkness

Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Woman has posted full text of Maureen Dowd’s Saturday column, Valley of the Rolls. (JP has it, too — and don’t miss his contest, either!) I have my own Ambien story to share, but first . . .

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