Speaking of naming babies, I am reminded of the Onion parody of “Most Popular U.S. Baby Names.” The list under White included Dakota, Caitlin, and Madison. The list under Black had Antwaine, Shawanda, and Tamiqua. The Asian names were Tim, Sue, Amy…

This morning it was announced that the name of the baby panda born at the National Zoo will be Tai-Shan, which means “Peaceful Mountain.” Isn’t Tai-Shan on Marlon Brando’s headstone?

Of course I can’t let this day go by without commenting on the biggest news from over the weekend. No, besides the vote in Iraq. No, not the impending indictment of Karl Rove. Yes, I am talking about the atrocity of the Redksins loss, 28-21, to the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrow Head.

Don’t get me wrong–it’s no easy thing to pull off a win at KC, one of the most raucous venues in the league. But what bothers me is the lack of forced turnovers. And the inexplicable benching of physically fit, three-time Pro Bowler LaVar Arrington. It’s the question on everyone’s minds. As Chiefs QB Trent Green said, “I thought, ‘Okay, this is the week where they put [LaVar] in there.’ Look, LaVar is a beast. He creates a lot of problems for an offense. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, and I don’t know the reasons. But when I heard some of the comments coming out of Washington later in the week, I said, ‘You know what, this isn’t going to be the week.'” The Post‘s Michael Wilbon asked Green if he was relieved LaVar was out: “Oh yeah. It’s not that [a quarterback] can ever relax, but it’s nice to know he’s not going to be breathing down my backside.”

Wilbon goes on to quote a future Hall of Fame QB as saying, “[Arrington] and Sean Taylor are the guys that scare you, and if they want to sit him for whatever reason, every quarterback on their schedule will take that.”

So what is the coaching staff’s problem? Still bitter after those salary talks? If so, they better get over it or my prediction of a 7-9 season will start looking optimistic. Or is it something else? As one of my colleagues speculated, “Perhaps he has yet to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior?”

Time to start praying.

Really, this is the best blog I’ve ever seen from a TV guy–and it ranks way up there with everyone else. Seriously. Jon Stewart hasn’t been this funny since his junior year at Williamm & Mary.

I’m sure everyone else has already seen it, but it’s new to me (thanks Jack Shafer): It’s the Apple iProduct:

Apple iProduct. You’ll buy it. And you’ll like it. . . .

Will it be merely an incremental improvement? Will we simply increase the storage capacity of an existing product and increase the price? Or will we remove features and capacity and reduce the price? It doesn’t matter. We’ll still trumpet it as a brand new product, and you’ll buy it. You know you’ll want it. And you know you’ll pay big for it. Steve Jobs could take a dump, put it in an off-white plastic case, add two grey buttons and a small LCD display, and you’d pay $600 for it. Just fucking admit it.

What is it?

We’re not saying yet. But we know that won’t stop you.

The tag line is even funnier:

Apple iProduct

Your life. In a small, shiny, plastic case.

I grew up on PCs, but I switched to Macs after college and I’ve never looked back. I love them. But Sweet Jesus, I can’t stand the culture of Mac worship. There are no retail employees on earth as insipid as those black-clad hipster dweebs at the Apple Store. I actually buy my Apple stuff online and pay the shipping even though I live 10 miles from an Apple store–just because I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.

Anyway, the author of this brilliant parody seems to be my kind of guy. His disclaimer reads: “Please take note: don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m dissing Apple products. Apple makes good stuff. I’m not making fun of Apple products, I’m making fun of you.”

Those of you who sometimes “drive by Braille” or use your car’s Autopilot feature after having drunk some–but feel well-assured you are below the legal limit–may want to think twice about even getting a whiff of alcohol before turning the ignition. From Wednesday’s Washington Post:

Debra Bolton had a glass of red wine with dinner. That’s what she told the police officer who pulled her over. That’s what the Intoxilyzer 5000 breath test indicated–.03, comfortably below the legal limit.

Bolton thought she might get a ticket. Instead, she was handcuffed, searched, arrested, put in a jail cell until 4:30 a.m. and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.

Following the article, many more complaints began flooding the city council’s offices. Can the police really do this? According to one officer in today’s Post: “If you get behind the wheel of a car with any measurable amount of alcohol, you will be dealt with in D.C. We have zero tolerance.”

And by “zero,” they mean it:

One Thursday night two years ago, computer software worker Lamon Lyles, then 27, remembers following a friend out of a parking garage next to Club U and into a gas station, going the wrong way on a one-way street. They were pulled over and asked if they’d had anything to drink. Lyles said he’d had one Heineken because the next day was a workday. The officer gave him and his friend field sobriety tests and then had them blow into breath machines. Both, he said, registered 0.0 blood alcohol.

Lyles and his friend were kept overnight in a D.C. jail and taken to court to be arraigned at 9 a.m. There, he said, within two minutes, both cases were dropped. Lyles, who said the arrest prevented him from getting a top clearance to work at the National Security Agency, spent a year trying to clear the incident from his record.

Good thing there aren’t any rapes or murders that would distract DC police from these necessary crackdowns.

A very smart friend of mine once remarked that David Frum was the only man he’d ever met whose intellect was so formidible as to be intimidating. This Frum response to Matt Scully seconds that emotion:

2) Notice next the antipathy to ideas, the little curl of the lip about those opeds and policy conferences. Notice the refusal even to acknowledge let alone rebut the concern that Miers has shunned ideas her whole career. It is no reply to say that Harriet Miers is a very nice person. Nobody ever denied that Harriet Miers was a very nice woman, capable of generous acts. We all know about her work for Meals on Wheels. It’s just that niceness alone is enough to qualify one for the Supreme Court. There are a lot of nice people in America. There are a lot of nice people at Valley View Christian Church. They cannot all be appointed to the Supreme Court.

The first and most famous slogan of the American conservative movement was: “Ideas have consequences.” But if Matt fairly represents the state of mind inside the Bush White House, and on this I fear he does, then the main consequence of ideas seems to be ineligibility for service on the nation’s highest court.

3) Note next the implied hostility to the larger American conservative movement. The ideas that are disparaged in this oped are not any old ideas. They are the ideas that moved millions of people to sacrifice time and money to build the movement championed by for example this magazine – and the ideas that (at least theoretically) led American conservatives to overcome their reservations about the son of George HW Bush and support the candidacy of Governor George W. Bush. The promise to appoint judges in the mold of Scalia and Thomas was the “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge of the younger Bush’s candidacy. But even Miers’ strongest senatorial supporter, John Cornyn, admits that Miers is no Scalia and no Thomas. The inability to read the conservative reaction to this betrayal as anything more than personal pique on the part of American conservatives bespeaks a very serious clouding of the vision at the Bush White House.

4) And speaking of the clouding of vision, there is a real problem here of the inability to see ourselves as others see us. That line about the critics of the Miers nomination and their $20,000 speaking fees – is that really, um, well-considered? Does Matt expect anyone to take seriously the claim that those of us who oppose Miers are self-serving cynics, while those who silence their doubts and say “yes sir” to an erring president are self-sacrificing idealists? We’re supposed to believe that Robert Bork is in it for the cash, while Ed Gillespie fights for the principle of the thing?

In my little private fantasy land, I like to think that Frum went and downed a couple lamb-chops after hitting the “publish” button.

Uncle Grambo has an excellent anti-Sports Guy rant. Excellent because it’s funny, not because I necessarily agree with him. Want to see the funny?

What all the people lined up to swing on the bozack of “sports’ moral arbiter” are conveniently failing to forget is that we’re talking about a guy who as recently as Wednesday vomited out 2,600 words (!!!) on the new Matt McConaughey / Al Pacino gambling movie. Are you fucking seers? Even the normally reliable and altogether best ever dudes like the Information Leafblower (aka Leaf) spend two hours standing in line to spend 30 seconds talking to him; dude, I did that a few years ago for Liz Phair but it’s mainly because I thought I might be able to bang her!

Yeah, baby! That’s the magic of RSS. Grambo disappears for 5 months, but because of RSS, we never lose touch with him.