That keep your coffee hot. Science!

Does the Death Star actually make sense for the Empire from economic and strategic perspectives?

Yes!

I’ve got a short item up at the Standard on Superman renouncing his citizenship. It’s another brilliant move from the crack team running DC.

In related news, I found a high-grade copy of Silver Surfer #4 last night . . .

Update: Here’s is a perfect example of a very particular kind of journalism. Over at Reuters, Alex Dobuzinski has a piece about the reaction to the news of Superman’s impending citizenship renouncement. He writes:

In the comic, Superman never actually renounces his citizenship, he only talks about his plans to do that.

But conservative commentators reacted with disgust to the new storyline, given that the fictional superhero has long proclaimed he stood for “Truth, Justice and the American way.”

In a blog post at The Weekly Standard, senior writer Jonathan Last questioned Superman’s beliefs, now that he seems to have rejected the United States.

“Does he believe in British interventionism or Swiss neutrality?” Last wrote. “You see where I’m going with this: If Superman doesn’t believe in America, then he doesn’t believe in anything.”

Maybe “conservative commentators” have reacted with disgust. And I’m certainly bent out of shape about it. But the point of my complaint–and I don’t think it was buried too deeply–wasn’t “hey, here’s another bit of PC nonsense.” It was: “Hey, Superman needs this anchor to give his character dramatic weight and meaning and what DC has done strips him of that.”

I realize this is a (slightly) nuanced argument but isn’t it pretty obvious that it’s a literary, not a political one?

Courtesy of Fatboy Roberts, that’s the insane premise of Chrontendo. It’s an amazing undertaking.

Last week the Czabe linked to this amazing clip of John Gruden interviewing Cam Newton. It opens with Gruden talking about how important playcalling verbiage is in the NFL. Gruden asks Newton to give him a sample play call from Auburn. Then it gets white-plasma hot. Keep an ear out for Gruden’s amazed, smart-ass response of “That’s awesome.”

The PUPNTTM (Positronic Universal Peggy Noonan Translator) has been dormant for a long while. But now it’s back, with a fresh translation of last week’s Noonan column. Here’s the originial:

let me offer a hunch based on conversations with people from many walks of life and all regions the past 18 months. . . . There are two things I have never heard, not once, in the past year: “I love this guy—I love Obama,” and “If only John McCain were president, everything would be better.”

Translation:

No, I do not know any black people, personally. But neither do I know any Republicans. What–do I look like a farmer?

From the NYT:

At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. They could come to practice whenever they liked, he told them, and would not have to travel with the team.

At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men. Texas A&M and Duke are among the elite women’s basketball teams that also take advantage of a federal loophole that allows them to report male practice players as female participants.

One Obama-affirmative action flare is random. Two is coincidence . . .

Trump paraphrases the complaint, but it’s close enough. As I said before, if this becomes part of the underlying populist critique of Obama, I suspect it’s very bad for him.

If Obama wanted to close off this avenue right away, he could just release his SAT and LSAT scores. As it is, the evidence of his claim to academic brilliance rests almost entirely on having graduated magna from Harvard, which may be slightly less impressive than it sounds.