Health Food Update

From August 2016: The Pioneer Woman shows how to make Lemon Pancakes.

First Paragraph

The floor of the crimson and gilt Senate Chamber filled quickly as the senators and representatives took their places to hear Congressman Ben Butler of Massachusetts present the case against President Andrew Johnson. Twenty-five days earlier, on March 5, 1868, the president's trial had formally opened with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase residing over the fifty-three senators who sat as a court of impeachment. One hundred and ninety-two members of the House of Representatives, having voted to impeach Johnson for "high crimes and misdemeanors in office," were present as accusers. On March 3, the representatives had adopted eleven articles of impeachment, the most notorious, Article X, having been written by Butler himself. In it, he had accused Johnson of bringing Congress into disgrace by "inflammatory and scandalous harangues" and of degrading his office "to the great scandal of all good citizens." That ailing but most savagely vindictive Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens had taken the occasion to warn the president: "Unfortunate, unhappy man, behold your doom!"

- From American Heritage History of The Confident Years, 1866-1914 by Francis Russell

Quick Look

The trailer for "The Fifth Element."

Medusa

I've sometimes noticed that an answer will only become clear if I look at a matter indirectly.

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Quote of the Day

Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Celebrate Westerns

Quick Look

The trailer for "The Transporter."

An Amnesia to Remember

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

- Michael Crichton

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