Pun Salad

… tonight we sail, on a radio song:

• Whoa. Sarah likes Kelly. It probably goes without saying that this gives Kelly Ayotte some conservative street cred that she was kind of weak on.

• Many have noted the 180:
  1. President Obama vociferously denying in September 2009 that ObamaCare was a tax increase, in order to get it passed.
  2. The Obama Administration in July 2010 vociferously relying on the fact that ObamaCare is a tax increase, in order to defend its dubious constitutionality.

  See the definitive takedown from Matt Welch, who deems it "brazen bullshittery". Here at Pun Salad, it's just another episode of Barackrobatics.

• Also at Reason, a wonderful interview with Mickey Kaus by Nick Gillespie. Mostly about immigration, but also about unions, the media, and how Mickey got the Velvet Underground to play his high school.

  I think California Democrats chose poorly in their primary.

• The genius that is xkcd makes a devastating point about TI graphic calculators:

  

  Probably coincidentally: check out Slashdot on how TI is attempting to (um) discourage its calculators' owners from doing their own coding. Sounds suicidal to me.

A pretty good oldie, especially if you can enjoy hard-boiled dialog: "Oh, wake up, Brown. This train's headed straight for the cemetery. But there's another one coming along, a gravy train. Let's get on it." (Sounds like it could be a math problem: "The gravy train leaves Albuquerque at 8am at 80mph…")

That line is uttered by Marie Windsor, playing a mob widow. The train to which she refers is on its way from Chicago to L. A., where she's ostensibly due to testify in front of a grand jury. The mob wants to rub her out, and has sent a team onboard to accomplish that. Opposing them is the guy to which the line is offered, Detective Brown, played by Charles McGraw. Making things difficult for the mobsters: they don't know what the dame looks like.

The suspense level is high throughout, with unexpected humorous flashes. There's a big old plot twist, but it also opens up some big old plot holes. But you're not supposed to think too much about it. It was remade in 1990 with Gene Hackman.

I loved this bit from the IMDB trivia page:

Filmed in 1950, not released until 1952. According to director Richard Fleischer, when the film was finished RKO Pictures owner Howard Hughes heard good things about it and ordered that a copy of it be delivered to him so he could screen it in his private projection room. The film stayed in the projection room for more than a year, apparently because the eccentric Hughes forgot about it.