Popularity is a "poof of air... Principles are enduring..."

Said George Bush, who is trying to "reclaim anonymity."

"If we can do public water fountains..."

"... why can't we do public ChapStick stations?"

"(I'm picturing a 2 ft. log of ChapStick, that any citizen could walk up and rub their face against.)"

In Wisconsin, we call drinking fountains "bubblers," so I guess that would be a rubbler.

"Just because it was a crappy movie doesn't mean it was a crappy idea."

Things overheard at Meadhouse.

So, you have this idea, and you think it's pretty good, possibly brilliant. But then it turns out that's what people did in this movie that was a monumentally bad movie. Must we reject the idea?

Try to guess the idea + movie we were talking about.

"Wary of ideas ..."

"...perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real..."

Was this a bad year for ideas?

The annual "year in ideas" issue of the NYT Magazine seems so much less interesting this year. Is it me? Is it the slideshow format? Or was there something about this past year? Do you think ideas are not the delicious, crisp morsels they once were?

Ideas, ideas, ideas.

It's time for the annual "Year in Ideas" issue of the NYT Magazine. It's always fun to page through this to see which things catch my eye. Here they are:

The Ambient Walkman. I would love to have one of these, at least if the sound was pleasing enough, if it would work to mellow out distracting room noise in a café or office or waiting room. Currently, I have to play music when I don't want to listen to music, and I don't want to be cut off from the feeling of the room.

The Beer Gut Flask. It's just so wrong. See it here -- where the models almost make it look attractive.

Bicycle helmets put you at risk. But save your cheers, libertarians. It's not because the biker takes more responsibility without a helmet. It's about the drivers.

Cohabitation is bad for women's health. Oh, it's just about food. I thought it was going to be more interesting!

Empty Stomach Intelligence. Wow! You shouldn't have a good breakfast before that exam? Stay hungry! You need that ghrelin to get ahead.

The eyes of honesty. Amazing that it's this easy to manipulate minds!

Hyperopia. This is "an excess of farsightedness." Just do it! “In the long run... we inevitably regret being virtuous and wish we’d been bigger hedonists.” Dangerous info!

Oh! I can't make it through the whole list right now. Suddenly, it seems hyperopic. I'll get back to the rest of the list later. If I feel like it.

"The Year in Ideas."

I open this week's NYT Magazine with great excitement. It's time for "The Year in Ideas." Blogging, I'm in a position to notice a lot of the ideas that make the news, and, generally, I'm more interested in ideas than events, so I wonder how many of the things the magazine has chosen will be things that I've blogged about. Actually, I only found 3:

1. The anti-rape condom. I blogged about the "Rapex" here.

2. "Pleistocene Rewilding," I blogged that here.

3. "The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution." Blogged here.

So, I found lots of new things to fascinate me, especially:

"The False-Memory Diet"

"The Hypomanic American"

"Microblindness"

"Preventing Suicide Bombing"

"Splogs"

"Stoic Redheads"

There's a good idea that isn't on the list but is exemplified by something on the list. That is: MSM referring to blogs. A great strategy for traditional news sites to get more readers is to say something about blogs in their stories. Bloggers will tend to notice -- it's about me! -- and devote a blog entry to the story. I know this strategy works on me. For example, last week, I wrote about "food swings," and I'm sure part of the reason the story jumped out at me as bloggable was because there was some material in there about how some of these food swing types blog about their adventures in hunger management.

"The Year in Ideas" makes its plea for attention from bloggers with this entry: "Conservative Blogs are More Effective." Throw that into Technorati and see if there isn't a hot new idea deserving a mini-article titled, perhaps, "Tossing in a Reference to Blogs Is More Effective." Oh, and it helps if the reference to blogs also says something that a lot of bloggers are going to feel isn't quite right, so that we'll instantly fire up a compose window and start typing out the little insight they could so easily have predicted. "Conservative Blogs are More Effective" is a perfect example of this. You know all those conservative bloggers, always ready to go, always monitoring the MSM. They will surely bite at this one!