Pun Salad

• ABC News reports that stimulus-package projects will be stamped with the magic logo:

  

  In the laugh-because-otherwise-I'd-cry department, this set some creative folks a-photoshoppin'. Michelle has two collections here and here. My personal fave:

  

  (Via Betsy Newmark, who titles her post "The new Blue Eagle", referring to FDR's fascist NRA symbol.

  

  Good article on that here.)

• In all our Democrat-bashing, it's easy to forget that Republicans are stupid too. The latest data point comes from the New York Times, where the Bits blog reports:
  A lawmaker in California wants to force Google Earth and similar services to blur images of so-called "soft targets" like schools, hospitals, churches and government buildings to protect them from terrorists. Assemblyman Joel Anderson, …

  … oh, please, dear Lord, not a Republican …

  … a San Diego Republican, …

  Dammit!

  … said he decided to introduce his bill after reading reports suggesting that terrorists used online map imagery to plan attacks in Mumbai and elsewhere.

  Fortuntely, the Bits blogger quotes Bruce Schneier, so I don't have to look up his take on this myself:

  Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven't seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are -- by and large -- small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular.

  If GOP pols want to do something non-stupid on the anti-terrorism front, they should try sponsoring legislation encouraging an armed citizenry.

• NYT "conservative" op-ed columnist David Brooks: Robert Stacy McCain is not a fan.

• And it's rare that fictional New Hampshire congressmen make the national media, but here you go: Congressman Offers Preemptive Apology For Extramarital Affair

A sweet little romantic comedy, although with PG-13 levels of (as the MPAA puts it) teen drinking, sexuality, language and crude behavior.

Nick and Norah are New Jersey teenagers on the brink of college. Nick is not recovering well from his breakup with Tris. He still produces CDs for her to listen to, complete with cover art; Tris—in a sign that she is a total bitch on wheels—scornfully tosses them into the trash after she gets them.

Norah retrieves them from the trash, though. Although she doesn't yet know Nick, she's impressed with his sensitivity and musical taste.

One night, Nick and his friends, and Norah and her friends, head into New York City to frequent the club scene. Nick and Norah finally meet, and set off on a series of zany madcap adventures. The course of true love does not run smooth, but they eventually get there.

One problem: Norah's smart, funny, and beautiful. But the script portrays her as being insecure about her looks. That would have made a lot more sense if she were played by an actress a couple notches further down the gorgeous-scale. Maybe they couldn't find one of those in Hollywood.

The "sexuality" thing mentioned above made me feel uncomfortably dirty-old-mannish at a couple points in the movie. Also, I kept asking myself: where's the adult supervision?. Parents don't appear at all, nor do teachers, and the only grownups are in menial jobs: janitor, shopkeeper, ticket seller. It really is a young-person fantasy.