What Ampersand is reading today

• Artichoke Heart discusses “the ____ sex she’s ever had.” One of the best-written posts I’ve ever seen on a blog. The permalink is bloggered, so scroll down to May 6th’s entry (currently at the top of the blog).

  And after that, you can read her brief touch on the topic of cat puke. Those two entries show why AH’s pock-marked girl baby is well-deserved.

• I’ve been just generally reading Blog Baby, a new-to-me blog that I found out about via my blog’s comments. Lots of cool posts about environmental and privatization issues.
• Julian’s Lounge discusses property rights, relating to file-swapping software’s victory in a California court last month.
• Language Hat discusses the mistreatment of the Sapir-Worph hypothesis at the Times (they chose an umpire who clearly prefers the other team), but I found the second half of his post – a discussion of if creativity is impaired by non-alphabetic writing systems – more interesting. (Langauge Hat says “no,” and I agree – even a glance at Japan’s pop cultural output shows that they don’t have a creativity deficit). The readers’ comments are good, as well.
• Salam Pax is back, which is a relief, and has resumed his fascinating commentary from inside Iraq.
  
  The whole issue of American presence and Iraqi government makes us argue until we are too tired to talk. Usually Raed ends up calling me and G. pragmatic pigs with no morals and principles. He wants to stick a sign on my forehead saying “Beware! a Pragma-pig”. He talks of Invading forces and foolish loonies (me) who believe that the US will help us build a democracy. But what we all agree upon is that if the Americans pull out now we will be eaten by the crazy mullahs and imams, G. has decided that this might be a good time to sell our souls to the (US) Devil.
  
  

• Eve Tushnet has written an interesting series of posts responding to Jack Balkin. The issue at hand, summed up in my patented stupid way: Is Bush v. Gore a worse corruption of lawmaking by political ideology than Roe v. Wade? I tend to agree with Balkin – naked partisan manipulation is worse – but Eve makes a good case. Eve’s permalink is bloggered, but you can visit Eve’s blog and look for the entry on May 7th entitled “The Constitution, High and Low.”

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