Wikimapia

Wikipedia + Google Maps = Wikimapia. Also known as awesomeness. You’ve got a complete map of the globe and can tag any spot as a point of interest.

Riddle Me This

When did John McCain become a Democrat? This commercial, which has been playing during the Olympics in my area, sounds like it came from the DNC.

“Washington’s broken” — “worse off than we were four years ago” — “taken on big tobacco, drug companies” — “reform Wall Street” — “battle big oil.”

Maybe there’s something to those Lieberman rumors after all.

Cheers and Jeers: Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency

I caught bits of Rick Warren’s pastor’s forum with both John McCain and Barack Obama last night during Olympic commercial breaks. Cheers first of all to Pastor Rick Warren and his questions, which were both tough and fair, and delivered in a friendly, non-confrontational manner. They were broad enough to give the candidates room to answer them by either talking points (McCain scored big with evangelicals last night) or speaking from the heart (Obama is well-read on Christian theology). The questions were also unusual enough–”does evil exist and how should we deal with it?” (McCain: bin Laden) or “what’s your greatest moral failing?” (Obama: drug and alcohol abuse as a young man; McCain: failed first marriage)–to be revealing. Warren also gets props for avoiding the gotcha questions that some wanted him to deliver. The only mark I have against Warren was the “which current Supreme Court Justice would you NOT have nominated?” question, which was tacky, and unfortunately both candidates gleefully answered.

Cheers also for the people of Saddleback Church. The audience was obviously more sympathetic to the Republican, as you might expect from evangelicals, but they were respectful and received both candidates well.

Jeers to CNN’s post debate roundtable. Even after being shown up by an evangelical pastor in how to interview people, they still couldn’t resist talking about how the event affected the horse race, rather than anything actually said there. Were the candidates’ answers clear? Were they honest? Were they addressing peoples’ concerns? Of course, CNN doesn’t tell us these things. My personal favorite response was from CNN’s David Brody, on loan from the 700 Club, who said (from memory), “This was a huge night for John McCain. He set the bar low and cleared it.”

Imagine that as a slogan: “McCain ‘08: Setting the bar low and clearing it.” Yikes.

Maybe the press should score these things on degree of difficulty like Olympic gymnastics. Is it too late to draft Nastia Liukin?

Save Some Money and Get Healthy

The 20 healthiest foods at under $1 a serving.

You Want to Kill My Dogs While You’re Here?

Radley Balko has been following a disturbing case out of Berwyn Heights, Maryland (D.C. suburbs), where SWAT agents charged into the house of Mayor Cheye Calvo, shot the mayor’s dogs (two black labs), and held the mayor and his mother-in-law in handcuffs and interrogated them at gunpoint as suspected drug dealers (the chilling details from the mayor himself). Apparently, someone in Los Angeles* mailed a 30lb package of marijuana to the mayor’s address, which undercover cops eventually delivered to the mayor’s wife prior to the assault. Local law enforcement is upset they were not notified first, and apparently, the raid has turned out to be a huge mistake. The mayor’s house wasn’t the intended recipient of the drug package, and the SWAT team didn’t have a no-knock warrant to conduct the raid anyway. Yet the Prince George’s County police refuse to apologize for the violent tactics or the puppycide.

It’s a fiasco on several levels, and apparently killing dogs during a raid is standard procedure, even if they are labs, who are only likely to slobber an intruder into submission. Really, it’s too much.

*Corrected. The package was mailed from LA but flagged as drugs in Arizona.

By George

Check this out. Starting today, the Orwell Prize is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. Orwell wrote diaries on domestic and political happenings from August 9, 1938, until October 1942. The Orwell Prize will be posting each diary entry as a blog post in real-time, 70 years after the fact, for the next four years. The events covered will be Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to Great Britain, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into World War II. It should be a fascinating look into Orwell’s mind.

The Eagle and the Dragon

As the Beijing Olympics begin, let me recommend a four-part series published earlier this summer in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper on the futures of China and the United States. It’s a whirlwind tour — from Appalachia to West Point to Detroit to Chongqing and to Beijing — and is definitely worth the time. Is the U.S. on the decline due to military and financial difficulties while China is on the rise? Are we on the brink of a new Cold War between the U.S. and China over economics, influence, and natural resources? Writer Mick Brown and photographer Alec Soth investigate these questions, the significance of the Beijing Olympics, and the U.S. election. Check it out. One. Two. Three. Four.

Virtuoso

Billy Joel plays “Prelude/Angry Young Man” so fast that the camera can’t keep up with his hands! And he does this with an injury to his left thumb — you can see the bandage several times, but especially from the 4:20 mark to the end.

Comments say this is from a show in Long Island in 1982.

Putting God in Your Pod

St. John’s Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Virginia, where my friend Braun Campbell is associate pastor, has a new web site and is now posting its sermons online in MP3 or Podcast form.  Check it out and download some good teaching to your iPod, Zune, or other portable music device.

Enthusiasm Gap

They must be up past theirs’–and their candidate’s–bed time. Yes Republicans, this is a problem.

As seen on the Boar’s Head Tavern blog.