I have long been convinced that one of our cities will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb in my lifetime. Gerard Van de Leun reminds me of this with a pair of excellent and depressing posts: The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: The Event and The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: Sleepwalking.

Call me a moron if you like — you wouldn’t be the first — but I was mostly unaware of this Iowahawk guy before today. I think I remember going to his site once from Instapundit. I remember him as the guy with the goofy pipe coming out of his mouth.

But the guy is a comic genius. I stumbled upon him again as a result of this Pejmanesque post, and man! the guy is Jeff Goldstein-funny. I mean that funny.

As I said, if you already knew this, you can call me a moron and move on to the next post. But if you didn’t, go read his two most recent entries (the first of which is a recycled post from 2001):

Bush Country Faces Grim Shortages of Latte, Galleries

He or She Is The Wrong Man or Woman For The Court

Genius, I tells ya!

UPDATE 8-8-05: He has a new post today, here.

Daniel Weintraub has a great post about the oral argument over whether Prop. 77 stays on the ballot. His post is titled ‘Stop thinking like a lawyer’ — a quote from one of the justices to the lawyer for the A.G.’s office:

[Presiding Justice Arthur Scotland] had the quote of the day when he asked Vickie Whitney, the deputy attorney general arguing the case for Bill Lockyer, to “stop thinking like a lawyer” and put herself in the shoes of the “average voter” looking at the discrepancy in this case.

“Don’t you honestly think,” Scotland asked, “that the voter would say, ‘What’s the big deal?’”

Based on the post, it sounds like the decision will issue on Tuesday and is likely to be 2-1 — though which way it will come out is anyone’s guess.

Jeff Goldstein expresses the outrage I felt upon reading some condescending leftist cretin’s comments about Michelle Malkin and the reasons for her success in the blogosphere.

Well said, Jeff.

P.S. He draws a connection to the NCAA ruling.

Today’s L.A. Times article about John Roberts’s memos on civil rights issues is untrustworthy, and therefore essentially useless.

The article is based entirely on memos written by Roberts — but the paper’s editors don’t bother to show their readers the actual memos themselves (even via a Web link), so that readers can verify whether the article has fairly and accurately interpeted the content of the memos.

This is of particular concern because the article is written by David Savage, who has a documented history of misrepresenting the holdings of court decisions, to the detriment of conservative judges or judicial nominees. (For a couple of examples, see here and here.) For whatever reason, Savage’s errors generally benefit a leftist viewpoint, at the expense of the conservative position.

At least when Savage describes a court decision, readers like me can look it up to see whether it has been accurately reported. But when (as in today’s article) Savage discusses legal memos, and the editors fail to show readers the original documents, we have to just hope against hope that the paper got it right.

In essence, editors are saying: “Trust us.”

I’m just not willing to do that. There’s no reason to believe that Savage will do a good job of fairly summarizing documents that aren’t publicly available, especially given his shoddy record of misreporting legal opinions that are.

My advice to Times editors is simple: either give us the source documents, or find somebody who is better at accurately interpreting legal documents and opinions. Better yet, do both!

Until then, don’t ask your readers to trust you. You’ve abused our trust too many times already.

I’m unwilling to take a chance on a movie unless I know it will be good. I can fritter away hours on the computer — but if I see a bad movie, I feel like it’s two hours of my life that I’ll never get back. So it often happens that my wife watches videos downstairs while I’m up in the loft on the computer.

One afternoon, Christi had put on Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam.” Our daughter Lauren, who is five, came down from her bedroom, where she had been playing. As Lauren walked down the stairs, I heard a steady stream of profanity coming from the T.V. “Uh, Christi?” I said. “Lauren’s coming down. You might want to pause that or something.”

I heard Christi tell Lauren: “You should probably go back to your room, honey.”

Lauren asked: “Can I watch the movie?”

I heard more profanity. Christi told Lauren: “You should go back up to your room. This really isn’t a movie for kids to watch.”

“Why is it not a movie for kids?” Lauren asked. I could hear that she had made it all the way downstairs, right next to the television set.

“Because they say bad words,” Christi said.

On cue, a character named Vinny yelled at his wife, very loudly and very distinctly:

I CAN’T BE A WHORE, ‘CAUSE I’M A MAN, OKAY? YOU’RE THE FUCKING WHORE, YOU STUPID LESBIAN FUCKING WHORE!!!

Lauren’s eyes went wide.

“Oh,” she said. She nodded to show that she understood.

“He said STUPID.”