It’s safe to say, now that he’s confirmed his impending retirement, that 2009 was a terrible year for Evan Bayh. Pummeled by both the left and the right, Bayh evidently decided he didn’t need to endure any more abuse. That didn’t stop him from taking his time — he waited until just a few days before the filing deadline to let the news slip. Indiana Democrats, already facing a very tough electoral climate, now have little time to collect the necessary 500 signatures from each of state’s Congressional districts to qualify a new contender.

As Chris Cillizza pointed out two months ago, Bayh’s future in the Democratic Party was over long before this announcement (perhaps not coincidentally, Cillizza was also the first to report Bayh’s decision). But more than Bayh’s dimming political prospects, my guess is that what got to Bayh was the distinctly personal tone attacks on him had taken — particularly those on his wife, Susan, who serves on the board of WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers.

–Huffington Post, 2.15.09

Worthwhile to point out something I posted as a comment:

The charges against Susan Bayh — which, as I noted, are political fair game even if her board work is legal — aren’t personal in the sense that they’re about her weight or looks. But they do necessarily touch on a family relationship.

There is nothing particularly illuminating to report about the barney that followed, except perhaps to mention that her Ladyship astounded me with her sofa-work. Up until then, I had always regarded the sofa as a rotten romping-ground, though heaven knows I had been forced to use it often enough with the London debutantes while the parents were snoring away upstairs. The sofa to me was a beastly uncomfortable thing surrounded on three sides by padded walls and with a horizontal area that was so narrow one was continually rolling off it onto the floor. But Lady Makepiece was a sofa-wizard.

My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl

Of the furniture in the room, only the sofa seemed to have understood our moral situation, for it offered the services of its wickerwork so insistently that we accepted and sat down. The particular opinion I have of sofas dates from that moment. They unite intimacy and decorum, and reveal the whole house without one having to leave the living room. Two men sitting on a sofa can debate the destiny of an empire, and two women the charm of a dress; but only by some aberration of the laws of nature will a man and a woman talk of anything other than themselves. That was what we did, Capitu and I. I can vaguely remember that I asked her if she would have to stay long…

Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis

In the meantime, you’d expect the DPM Talk page on Wikipedia to be blowing up. There are brief references to a couple culture war hobbyhorses — flag amendments, an apocryphal quote about “infanticide” — and an intriguing query (from an Ulster Unionist?) asking whether he was “the senator who used to provide the organisations that raised funds in the US for Irish Republican terrorism campaigns in the UK with political protection?”

No, Wikipedia user Chicheley, I was that senator.

Grad students working on some obscure sub-footnote of “The Negro Family” should be doing battle. They could be defining neutral point of view before our eyes.

If this is unreasonable, I don’t want to be reasonable.

There’s a lot of source material in the Creative Commons already, and I’d wager that a niche community of enthusiasts who feel the same way as I do (soothed by the phrase, driven by the hope of someday owning one’s own) would contribute more.

Breakfastnook.com is a cynical exercise in search engine optimization and a thinly veiled shell for Google Adwords. No need to improve their Google ranking by actually linking. A competitor could quickly corner the market, no doubt a highly educated and affluent one.

Image (CC) Maggie T.

Found out!

And: “Critically-acclaimed Understated Foreign Movies“

I feel like the obnoxious guy behind Woody Allen in the movie line.

And if you ever wondered why your typing wasn’t significantly more efficient …

In 1956, a General Services Administration study by Earle Strong, which included an experiment involving ten experienced government typists, concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. The study was a large obstacle for the wide adoption of Dvorak for many firms and government agencies. [...] Strong’s objectivity with regard to the Dvorak keyboard was questionable at best. [...] there is other evidence that Strong and Dr. Dvorak had a strained business relationship. It is also notable that when researchers had asked Strong for the data to his study, Strong had destroyed the data.

1. Feature-length adaptation of one or more R.L. Stine novels. There’s a market.

2. Expansion of “Controversy” section of Wikipedia entry on Mikhail Prokhorov.

Rikers Island (top) and LaGuardia Airport.

Hijacking:

“An invisible island in the city, Rikers squats in the East River barely 100 feet north of Runway 22 at La Guardia Airport.”

A view from İcadiye Caddesi.

‘Today, the winding side streets of Kuzguncuk appear often in Turkish television shows. The colorfully painted 19th century wooden houses are used as backdrops to evoke a sense of the “old” İstanbul. In many ways, the feeling of old İstanbul still permeates the village. Artisans have workshops in storefronts all through the tiny valley, and much of their artwork adorns local businesses.’