This just came in the mail today:

I’m only going to own it for 10 days, but still. I never thought I’d have a copy in my possession for even that long.

Seriously.

If you’ve ever fantasized, however briefly, about what it would look like if Steve Sailer had a column on the New York Times’s op-ed page, this is probably a pretty good embodiment of that fantasy.

It’s got it all: Direct engagement with Dowd; a willingness to talk about racial and ethnic stereotypes; and some actual datapoints with which no one would ever be willing to seriously engage.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ngpzdazsbs&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Good thing the president didn’t have to follow that.

Unless you’re waaaay into videogames, you probably never heard of Nintendo’s “Project Atlantis”–a secret, high-powered hand-held system that Nintendo planned to succeed the original Game Boy, but which never materialized. Like something out of DARPA, Atlantis’s existence has long been the stuff of half-rumor. Now Galley Friend M.R. sends us this amazing link to a story on Atlantis which should be of interest even to non-gamers because there are a bunch of business lessons in it:

Presumably [Atlantis] established a baseline for the GBA [Game Boy Advance]; Nintendo president Satoru Iwata mentioned in his keynote today that the company’s game design guru, Shigeru Miyamoto, has a tendency to recycle good elements of failed projects years down the road, and that philosophy likely extends to hardware as well. (In fact, Kuwahara showed off a GBA touchscreen peripheral he had worked on that never saw the light of day but almost certainly mutated into the DS.) But the 1996 target date for Project Atlantis and the GBA’s 2001 release is quite a gap. Why the delay?

My guess is: Pokémon. Game Freak’s socially-driven cockfighting RPG was an unexpected end-of-life hit for the Game Boy, and its out-of-left-field success added years to the fading system’s life. The popularity of Pokémon might actually have been the first time Nintendo realized that technology and profitability don’t go hand-in-hand. This happy windfall let them subsist for a few more years on the far more lucrative Game Boy Color, whose components were downright ancient by the time it launched — making for a machine that was very, very inexpensive to manufacture, and thus a much-needed way to soak up money while N64 sales fell behind PlayStation and third parties began to drift away.

That in turn gave Nintendo time to perfect their 32-bit handheld . . .

I think that in the past I’ve said some not-nice things about Mickey Kaus, his cleverness, etc.

I take it all back. All of it.

Kaus has posted a thread from inside Ezra Klein’s JournoList. Go read it now, before it disappears. You can’t imagine how awesome it is.

Seriously, you cannot possibly imagine the hotness.

But Mickey, I beg you: Unleash the redactedness!

Update: Galley Friend M.L. emails, “Feeling this much pleasure must be bad for you.”

Kind of like this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnU2xJMR5A&hl=en&fs=1]

Ezra Klein, who Ross Douthat calls “the William F. Buckley of movement liberalism,” had a heart-felt post the other day about President Obama’s historic address to the Iranian people. Said Klein,

There are times when it’s hard to believe that this is how my country acts now. That somewhere in government, some young bureaucrat had the idea that the President should publicly honor the Iranian New Year, and that bureaucrat felt that her superiors would also think this a good idea, and, indeed, the thought went all the way to the President, who agreed that a display of engagement and goodwill was consonant with our national values and foreign policy goals.

Of course, as Mark Hemingway notes, President Bush did basically the same thing last year.

The entire thing seems pretty indicative of the problem with having 20-something pundits who don’t actually know anything. They feel free to hold forth about the weaponizing of space or getting rid of the Air Force or caucus politics in Nevada without knowing anything more than what was in the major papers that day (and what other bloggers said about those stories).

(Just to be clear, that weaponizing space link isn’t a jab at Galley Friend M.G., it’s an example of actual reporting taking apart glib pontificating.)

Variety is reporting that the Farrelly brothers are working on a remake of The Three Stooges. If all works out according to their plan, Sean Penn will play Larry, Jim Carrey will be Curly, and Benicio del Toro will be Moe.

While they’re at it, how about a score by John Williams, Janusz Kaminski as d.p., with a screenplay by Steve Zaillian?