I know it’s plucking at low-hanging fruit to pull anything out of the rubber room that is National Review’s The Corner, and it’s particularly low-hanging fruit to call out a reader anecdote sent into that site’s Jay Nordlinger, but there was something about this one that just struck me as so telling. Can you guess what it is?

A man from California wrote to say that he was talking with a local radio host — a woman of about 70 who told him, “This November, for the first time in my life, I’m going to vote straight Republican. I know they spend too much, too. But they won’t be as out of control as what we have now. We have to do something.”

Our reader said, “Jay, this is the spirit of the Tea Party: people who pay every tax, vote in every election, do jury duty, never call 9–1–1, never complain, never protest — and who have now reached the point of saying, ‘Enough.’

This, then, is the spirit of the Tea Party: They never call 9–1–1. You know who does call 9–1–1? Black people. And, once, Duran Duran. Not that it helped any.

“He’s recently appeared in all the publications that matter, including a featured excerpt in New York Magazine, and a photo shoot in Vogue that makes him look exactly like the very healthy, very handsome preppy power bottom that he was, is, but claims he never thought he’d be.”
-The number of people who are angry about and horrified by agent turned crack addict turned memoirist Bill Clegg is large!

Worried about the economic impact of the Gulf Oil Disaster? Don’t be! There’s still money to be made! “Clean Harbors (CLH) is highly involved in the GoM cleanup effort; we estimate CLH will generate $1.0 bn of revenue from the cleanup effort over the next three years,” writes a Goldman Sachs analyst. The math in their report, issued yesterday, is based largely on Exxon Valdez: “Exxon spent approximately $8,100 per barrel of oil spilled in cleanup efforts. Adjusting for inflation (we have assumed 3% per year), we estimate the cost of the cleanup to be $15,000 per barrel in 2010.” And what of BP? “GS European analyst Michele della Vigna, who covers BP, estimated the pre-tax liability assumed by the market for BP to be $36 billion.”

Huh. Honey helps sea-turtles recover from life-threatening injury. Turtle rescuers at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center have been healing gashed-up loggerhead turtles with a new medical balm called “MediHoney.” The makers of MediHoney claim that it,

“Promotes a moist environment conducive to healing
Is highly absorbent
Cleanses and debrides
Helps to lower the wound pH, for an optimal wound healing environment
Is non-toxic, natural and safe
Is easy to use and easy to apply”

Medihoney is indeed made with real honey-special, high-test honey from New Zealand. So expect Winnie the Pooh to come ringing the bell at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, any day now, disguised as a hurt sea turtle.

And speaking of Pooh: Also from Discovery, a video clip about the study of otter poop. It’s more interesting than you might imagine. (I was thinking, “Mostly shellfish, right?”) But, warning: does contain graphic images of sea otter poop.

And then there’s this: “A bolt of lightning struck the ship capturing oil from the blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, igniting a fire that halted containment efforts in another setback for the embattled company in its nearly two-month struggle to stop the spill, the company said.” BP expects to resume operations later this afternoon, unless it is confronted by boils, locusts, lice and darkness, which it almost certainly will be.

Hey, have you ever worked in a job? Maybe you have! (Lucky dog.) And when you have worked in that job, when someone up the ladder from you tells you to not do something, except on special occasions, don’t you agree to not do it? Correct! Why would you antagonize the executive class? So you know, Times standards editor Phil Corbett is disputing that he “banned” the word “Tweet” from the Times. To be fair, “ban” is a broad word for his-what’s okay to say?-”shaming request”? “Not quite demand”? “Not-an-order-but-what-else-is-it”? Whatever gradations you want to put on this proposition are too Byzantine and complicated for me. Now, all that being said? I’m still not on the side of the people who think the Times is stupid in their quest to not use the word “Tweet.” Take it away, Tom Scocca: “What’s infuriating about all this modesty is that ‘Tweet’ deserves to be banned, for precisely the reasons Corbett says it does: it is a colloquialism, a neologism, and a piece of jargon. It is a stupid, unnecessary, trivial word, and it makes the writing in which it appears seem stupid and trivial.” Also, still not future-proof!

What’s going on on the Internets? Glad you asked! Michael Pollan launched a website and Devo is streaming its new album for 20 cats. Also Feminist Hulk now has 15,000 Twitter followers. Oh and there’s a new single-serving site, it is called Is AT&T; Still A Bag of Dicks? The answer may surprise… someone.

There is not a whole lot one can add to this local dispatch about a sasquatch sighting in North Carolina. I mean, one could, but one thinks it is pretty much perfect on its own.

For the next three weeks, Christopher Hitchens will be on book tour. He leaves the east coast next week, and then travels from Seattle on south, ending by looping over to Denver and Texas in early July. He is not, however, taking questions from the audiences on any matters not pertaining directly to himself, as he is now promoting his memoir, Hitch-22. “Wrong book!” he says, and he says it often, and he says it in a sad, huffy way, each time people ask him questions about God or Iraq or anything not directly pertaining to his personal written history, which was published all of two weeks ago. (Parts of which are about God and Iraq, but hey.) He really seems mystified as to why anyone would ask about any of the other topics of his many books, which were arriving at least once a year throughout the 00s until, in 2008, things stopped, as he began to assemble this latest. He is, however, very entertaining! He has colorful stories and he is, now, old enough to have aged well into his feisty, learned high-class manner and accent. The wonderful thing about Hitchens is that he is better-read and smarter than you, and that’s very relaxing. But one of his many colorful stories he is telling is about Hezbollah.

This story tracks to a piece published in May, 2009, in Vanity Fair. Hitchens was in Lebanon. (He has a bit about how, in cities that begin with the letter ‘B,’ he feels likely to be the victim of violence, including Beirut and the former Bombay. His book tour, fortunately, took him just to Boston and not Baltimore.)

So there, in the southern area of Beirut, Hitchens attended a rally in a big tent. The tent was decorated, Hitchens reported in VF: “a huge poster of a nuclear mushroom cloud surmounts the scene, with the inscription oh zionists, if you want this type of war then so be it!” (James Kirchick has seen the same).

Oh, Hezbollah. There’s not a lot of scare-mongering that needs to be done to make that particular group scary to Americans.

Yet, Hitchens is trying his best. On his book tour, he has paraphrased and recast his own telling of this story. This was at a stop on the tour that took place in a crowded temple, where the audience was at the very least 80% Jewish. (Hitchens greeted the crowd by saying “Shalom”-his wife, daughter and mother are Jewish.)

In his retelling, Hitchens described this as a, or the, “Hezbollah flag,” and he said, when you “decode” the Arabic text, that is formed in the shape of a mushroom cloud, this “flag” says “Watch out Jews, we’re coming for you.”

When he said this, the revulsion and fear in the room was very real. Why wouldn’t it be? Angry Shias, coming for the Jews! Watch out, Jews!

But it wasn’t even true, according to Hitchens of last year. The stupid Hezbollah poster was typical revolutionary (and conditionally-phrased!) chest-pounding-really, bad enough! Just not bad enough for the telling.

Everyone knows that apart from being hopelessly attractive, effortlessly charming and erudite, all while projecting a tiny jolt of danger and longing in those who come into contact with them, white men with brown eyes convey an immediate aura of dominance. And that is not just the theory of a hopelessly attractive, effortlessly charming and erudite white man with brown eyes who projects a tiny jolt of danger and longing in all those who come into contact with him (give me this one, okay?), that, my friends, is Science!

Czech researchers asked a group of 62 people to look at photos of 80 faces — 40 men and 40 women — and rate them for dominance. Then the investigators Photoshopped the faces so the brown eyes were replaced with blue ones and vice versa. A separate group of participants rated the altered images for dominance.

The results were the same in both cases: Faces of brown-eyed men were rated more dominant than those of blue-eyed men, even when their eyes weren’t brown.

Researchers have a bunch of hypotheses for why this should be the case (they always do), including the observation that “brown-eyed men had broader chins and mouths, larger noses, more closely spaced eyes and larger eyebrows than blue-eyed men,” which, you know, DOMINANCE. There is also speculation that since brown-eyed boys appear so much more manly and DOMINANT at an early age they are coddled less than their babyish blue-eyed counterparts, who grow to be considerably less DOMINATING than the dashing men with the umber orbs who make all the ladies swoon like generals testifying before Congress. Whatever the reason, I think we can all agree that white men with brown eyes and large noses and thick brows and broad jaws, well, you just want to let them DOMINATE you, don’t you? Completely unrelated: My e-mail address is on the home page.