over at Ta-Hehisi’s Anti-Boomerism thread here.  Not much to his post, but it only takes a wisp of a mention on this topic for a pile-on to happen, which I couldn’t resist myself.  If you’re lucky, you can still join in the fun! (or whatever it is.) I don’t know whether there’s a closing window on accepting comments.

How about that, it’s the very topic that inspired the creation of this blog in the first place, which I absolutely haven’t gotten to since the election. I’m finding there’s not a whole lot of time left after trying to hang onto my job and pick up some extra work in case the whole deck of cards comes crashing down (may it not; knock on wood). But in the meanwhile, I certainly welcome comments, and one of these days in the not too distant future I will swing back into gear.

Like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, Hubble catches an instantaneous glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest and best-known globular clusters in the northern sky. This glittering metropolis of stars is easily found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules and can even be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

M13 is home to over 100,000 stars and located at a distance of 25,000 light-years. These stars are packed so closely together in a ball, approximately 150 light-years across, that they will spend their entire lives whirling around in the cluster.

Near the core of this cluster, the density of stars is about a hundred times greater than the density in the neighborhood of our sun. These stars are so crowded that they can, at times, slam into each other and even form a new star, called a “blue straggler.”

 . . . Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in the universe. They likely formed before the disk of our Milky Way, so they are older than nearly all other stars in our galaxy.

Bad enough that a Sarah Palin book will be an inevitability. Although, what do you want a bet

I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.

she’ll have a ghostwriter? (yes, that’s Palin’s response to Matt Lauer after the election. Make of it what you will. If you can make anything of it.) So we won’t even get the benefit of enough fun Palinisms to fill a 365 desk calendar for our trouble. But that’s a ways out. For now we have the travesty of the forthcoming book by Joe (no, I’m not going to link to it. ew. Because there’s nothing to see yet, no cover image, even, up on Amazon for a book supposedly releasing in December.)

Timothy Egan nicely skewers the rush to publish nonwriters:

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

And, perhaps most pertinently, as publishers have laid off hundreds of employees this week, Egan asks,

Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Stay tuned for news of a six-figure advance for Palin’s book. Publishers can’t lay off that crack.

FORT WORTH, TX—Cash-strapped American Airlines announced a new series of fees this week that will apply to all customers not currently flying, scheduled to fly, or even thinking about flying aboard the commercial carrier.

The fees, the latest introduced by American Airlines in a continuing effort to combat its financial woes, will take effect on Monday. According to company officials, these charges will include a $25 tax on citizens traveling with any other airline, as well as a mandatory $30 surcharge for passengers who decide to just stay home for the holidays instead.

. . . In response to American’s move, other airlines have begun offering more competitive rates. United this week unveiled a new $99 “spend the weekend quietly reading indoors” offer, while Southwest is introducing a $125 round-trip fare for those walking to their corner store for some groceries.

oniony. click to enlarge. seriously. go on.

The Daily Dish quotes Vanity Fair (and links to a simliar Newsweek article). I’m supposed to feel bad for the “hedgie” who had to cut out the private jet but can still afford first class??

Now many bankers, along with discovering $15 bottles of wine, are finding other ways to cut back—if not out of necessity, then from collective guilt and fear: the fitness trainer from three times a week to once a week; the haircut and highlights every eight weeks instead of every five. One prominent “hedgie” recently flew to China for business—but not on a private plane, as before. “Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane,” he said to a friend, “when I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?” The new thriftiness takes a bit of getting used to. “I was at the Food Emporium in Bedford [in Westchester County] yesterday, using my Food Emporium discount card,” recounts one Greenwich woman. “The well-dressed wife of a Wall Street guy was standing behind me. She asked me how to get one. Then she said, ‘Have you ever used coupons?’ I said, ‘Sure, maybe not lately, but sure.’ She said, ‘It’s all the rage now—where do you get them?’”

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the neverending hypocrisy and lies of the GOP. But man, the gall of these people. Even as “clothesgate” unfolded and the McCain campaign made some noises of contrition, they just kept running up the bills.

Despite the furor over a $150,000 campaign shopping spree for GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the Republican Party continued to spend money on clothing and accessories for her in the contest’s final weeks, new campaign reports show.

The party also paid $55,700 in “consulting” fees to Lisa Kline & Co., a New York fashion stylist. And the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, which was funded with $84 million in tax dollars under the presidential public campaign financing system, dispensed $34,384 to Amy Strozzi, a celebrity makeup artist. The campaign had previously paid Strozzi $36,000, disclosed in earlier campaign finance reports.

The latest buys ranged from $4,383 at Saks Fifth Avenue and $2,130 at Nieman Marcus, to $148 at Victoria’s Secret locations in Philadelphia and Cincinnati. Another $430 was spent at Aldo, a shoe store. The buys were listed under the heading of “campaign accessories.”

007 Gromit.

              (h/t Daily Dish)

 More lists to be had out there, no doubt. GalleyCat supplies a twofer:

As the recession-gripped holiday season approaches, your gifted books need to be carefully picked. To help you shop, W. W. Norton has built a Tumblr page where fifteen Norton authors talk about the books they will give to friends and family over the holidays.

. . . Last week, Penguin created the What To Give & What To Get guide that featured 37 big writers explaining which books they want for the holidays and which books they will give as gifts.

As ever, Mssr Krugman provides important context and makes sense of the current chaos for your average noneconomist:

The claim that budget deficits make the economy poorer in the long run is based on the belief that government borrowing “crowds out” private investment — that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy’s long-run rate of growth. Under normal circumstances there’s a lot to this argument.

But circumstances right now are anything but normal.

. . . The idea that tight fiscal policy when the economy is depressed actually reduces private investment isn’t just a hypothetical argument: it’s exactly what happened in two important episodes in history.

Arggh! Can’t get this to embed from Funny or Die, and it’s currently not available on YouTube. But click here for the star-studded musical, in all its three minutes fourteen seconds of glory.