The Answer May Surprise You

Q: Is Barack Obama Muslim?

2008-05-26T12:59:00.003-04:00

A: Of course not! I mean that's, you know, that, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him, ah, on the basis of what he says. And there isn't any reason to doubt that. No, no, why would I? There is nothing to, to base that on. As fas as I know.

Q: Could please someone do something about the fact that "biweekly" means both "every two weeks" and "twice weekly"?

2008-05-26T06:49:00.008-04:00

A: Seriously, guys, wtf? No one anticipated that perhaps this might result in some scheduling confusion? Do you realize that a bimonthly magazine is published exactly as often, and simultaneously 16 times less frequently, than a biweekly? Is this some kind of scam by the publishers of Scale Aviation Magazine to confuse the elderly into thinking teenagers are stealing their mail?

As you may recall from your fifth-grade history curriculum, Merriam & Webster had planned to sort this out at their "biannual" meetings, but after Merriam didn't show up for the first three, a despondent Webster descended into the secret chamber behind George Papadopolis' grandfather clock and died of a broken heart and autoerotic asphyxiation.

The moral of the story is, when ordering bisexual hookers, take care to clarify the terms of the agreement in advance. Remember: Every time you're stabbed to death in a dispute with a pimp, T.A.M.S.Y. loses one-third of our remaining readership.

Q: Why have I soured on the Clintons?

2008-05-19T10:51:00.003-04:00

A: A few weeks ago, The Daily Show summed up this primary season pretty nicely...

The new(-ish) Daily Show site kicks ass, by the way. Aside from their tiny embed player, but I digress.

Q: Are you Blu da ba dee da ba die?

2008-05-19T10:42:00.002-04:00

A: Someone in Buenos Aires has a lot of free time and also apparently a lot of hallucinogens. Pretty amazing, though:

Via Wires & Stars via Susie.

Q: What am I doing in Cleveland this week?

2008-05-17T17:24:00.000-04:00

A: Reviving the blog, dammit!

Q: Do video games cause violence?

2008-04-06T16:18:00.004-04:00

A: Somebody else made this chart, using stats from the Dept. of Justice):

The biggest surprise here is the number of murders caused by Super Mario Bros. 2.

Q: How am I taking Charlton Heston's gun?

2008-04-06T15:56:00.001-04:00

A:

R.I.P.: Charlton Heston (1923-2008).

Q: Where is T.A.M.S.Y.?

2008-04-05T21:53:00.001-04:00

A: New research indicates that I may have blogged myself to death.

Q: Where is Osama bin Laden not hiding?

2008-03-31T17:21:00.003-04:00

A: Once again proving that any footage is terrifying if you play the Requiem for a Dream score under it:

Civilization is crumbling, or something. In other news, go Tribe!!!

Q: Gay abortion doctors caused 9/11?

2008-03-19T17:09:00.003-04:00

A: That's the takeaway from the New York Times' coverage of Barack Obama's Philly stemwinder:

“The thing that would really help him is if Reverend Wright came out and apologized,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies religious issues and public policy. One of Mr. Wright’s most criticized comments is his assertion that corrupt United States foreign policy brought about the Sept. 11 attacks; now he must retract that statement, said Mr. Cromartie, just as the Rev. Jerry Falwell apologized after he blamed the attacks in part on gay people and those who have performed abortions.

See? Gays and abortion doctors are no more to blame for 9/11 than corrupt United States foreigh policy!

By which I mean THE GAYS CAUSED 9/11. Possibly aided by the Teletubbies.

Q: Am I prepared to call the media wrong about Missouri?

2008-02-06T00:37:00.002-05:00

A: Most media outlets are calling Missouri for Clinton, but Obama has a 5K vote lead with 98% of precincts voting. By my math, there are only 17,000 votes left to be counted.

WTF, most media outlets?! YOU RACIST BASTARDS NEED NEW ABACUSES.

That's all I got for now. More soon. Go Obama.

UPDATE: This was a world exclusive. You're welcome. -- 04/05/08

Q: Is T.A.M.S.Y. back?!

2007-12-03T12:24:00.000-05:00

A: Let's say yes.

Q: In Soviet Russia, wrist slits you?

2007-12-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

A: Russian Firm Buys LiveJournal. [via apophenia]

Q: Why does Jake Westbrook look like he's about to throw up?

2007-10-21T19:58:00.000-04:00

A: I don't know, but it terrifies me to find out.

Will the prophecies be fulfilled? Or will your months of constant worrying be proven valid? Is this blog still running? All of these answers and more, on the next scintillating edition of T.A.M.S.Y.

Q: Why do I hate the media?, pt. 7,593: Why do I hate the tech media?

2007-10-02T19:30:00.001-04:00

A: Fake Steve Jobs sums it up nicely.

Q: Inefficiently and incoherently?

2007-09-27T17:25:00.000-04:00

Nations must fight climate change like terrorism, Rice says

A: Done and done!

Q: Are you there, Margaret? It's me, Blog

2007-09-22T18:27:00.000-04:00

A: Sorry for my recent absence, and for any wailing or gnashing of teeth that might have resulted.

So yeah, I live in San Francisco now, where I took a job working for the Internets. My goal here is to change the very nature of how human beings perceive and interact with information architecture, hopefully by around January.

Going forward, T.A.M.S.Y. will probably be a little more about tech/Bay Area living than before and also probably a little more sporadic, but I promise always to make room for Dick Cheney jokes.

On to business, the business of surprise: Baltimore's Dan Deacon is some sort of performance artist/musician/balding hipster. His performance of the song "Ohio" on WSAV's local morning show in Savannah, Georgia is a delight for at least two of the senses.

Check out Scott C.'s LJ for the complete interview, which is also fairly entertaining.

Deacon will be playing San Francisco and L.A. next week, but it's sold out [sked]. Tix still available for his forthcoming shows in NYC, Ohio and various other places. Recommended, maybe!

Q: Is our children vlogging?

2007-09-10T20:11:00.000-04:00

A: Hey kids, look! A series of unrelated videos, presented in no particular order for your immediate viewing pleasure free of charge! What a wonderful world!

1999 A.D. A clip from a prescient 1967 film foretelling a glorious future in which mail is sent electronically, shopping can be done from home, and parenting has been replaced by espionage. They got pretty much everything right, except in reality, the only people secretly filming your children are NSA agents.

The Iron Man trailer. Dan Hopper at BWE thinks it looks like a retread, but I'm totally excited anyway. And not because I give a shit about Iron Man (no one does, as far as I know), but rather for one simple reason, and I'll give you a clue, it rhymes with Shmobert Shmowney Shmr.

Cop Gone Wild, which finally addresses the Q: Who's crazier? A crazy cop, or a crazy guy who drives around with a camera installed in his car's ceiling hoping to be brutalized by a crazy cop? A: Crazy cop. After a few minutes it gets boring, but the screaming part is fun. Oh policemen, you so crazy!

BONUS, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Oh Quebecois policemen, you so crazy!

Steve Mahanahan's Child Clown Outlet. I hear good things about Adult Swim's Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but this is the first bit of it I've seen. If you're here because you Googled "stuff that's better when you're high," and you meant "high on meth," this will do splendidly.

Osama bin Chomsky. Everyone acts like it's all weird that bin Laden is talking like a liberal blogger now. But bin Laden has always channeled liberal bloggers, including in the interview he gave immediately following Sept. 11th. Of course, no one really read that interview, except for the 9/11 Truth crackpot brigade, because the mainstream media was too incompetent to tell you about it. Luckily, T.A.M.S.Y. will be happy to fill you in! Later.

Q: How do you calculate a team's magic number (or more specifically, how do you calculate the Cleveland Indians' magic number)?

2007-09-10T19:28:00.000-04:00

Talkin' baseball: Why, don't mind if I do.

A: The magic number (the number of wins + opponent losses a team needs to clinch the playoffs) can be calculated via this guy's method — essentially:

M# = 163 - W_team-1 - L_team-2

Thus the Cleveland Indians' Magic Number over the Detroit Tigers, per today's standings, is (163 - 83 [CLE wins] - 66 [DET losses]), or 14.

Baseball Prospectus' magical robotic prediction machines put our odds at making the playoffs at 97.5% (on Aug. 15th, it was 49.5%, so the past few weeks have gone about as well as possible, unless you're a Tigers fan, in which case, sorry).

The way we're playing now, behind the pitching of Sabathia, Carmona and Westbrook, we should have a shot against anyone in October. Unfortunately, "anyone" will probably turn out to be both the Yankees and Red Sox, both of whom terrify me.

(Specifically what terrifies me is the prospect of the unbearable pain of losing to either one of those loathsome teams' loathsome fan bases. But then, beating both teams in one postseason would be eventually looked back upon as the greatest accomplishment of our entire mutual lives, so it's an exciting kind of terror).

Yes, it's a great time to be a Cleveland sports fan. Too bad we don't have a football team, or this fall would be really exciting!

Because four of you care, here are some Cleveland sports blogs worth subscribing to:

Let's Go Tribe
Mistake by the Lake Sporting Times
Vinny & the Hornless Rhino
Many Go; Few Understand
Brian Windhorst's Cavaliers Blog
Why Wahoo Weeps [pending me starting it]

And Joe Posnanski's The Soul of Baseball is great no matter which team you follow.

Q: Why did Dick Cheney have David Halberstam killed?

2007-09-10T12:40:00.001-04:00

A: The History Boys, by David Halberstam [via Bill Simmons, for some reason]

In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman—unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated—while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.

EARLIER: R.I.P. David Halberstam

Q: Dixit? I barely even know it!

2007-09-10T12:25:00.000-04:00

A: I know I've already covered lame sex researchers this month, but then I found this Psychology Today story on the front page of reddit, and not only is it even lamer than the last one, but author Jay Dixit has the gaul to claim "the answers may surprise you." T.A.M.S.Y. will be the judge of that, Jay Dixit.

Mixed in with the pseudoscience and old news, though, was one stat that actually did manage to surprise me. If it's true. Which, how can it be?

But the truth is that HIV isn't nearly as easy to spread through heterosexual sex as many people think. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, men almost never get HIV from women. A healthy man who has unprotected sex with a non drug-using woman has a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, the odds drop to one in 50 million. And though it's easier for men to infect women, the odds that an HIV-positive man will transmit the virus to a woman through sex are less than one in 1,000.

I know the American Medical Association is full of crackpots and everything, but this seems like a stretch, even for them. How were 2.7 million Sub-Saharan Africans infected with HIV in 2005 without having sex, like, 300 trillion times?

EARLIER: Why is Dr. Alfred Kinsey rolling in his grave?

Q: Why is Osama bin Laden putting the lime in the coconut?

2007-09-09T22:43:00.000-04:00

A: As I noted here, Osama bin Laden "was last known to be suffering from health issues that include a weak kidney, diabetes, osteoporosis, an enlarged heart, low blood pressure, a probable chest wound and possibly cancer." I should note I forgot to mention two important conditions: (1) typhoid, and, more poignantly, (2) hypochondria.

But if he thought his health problems were a drag before, now he's got real trouble.

Bin Laden 'virtually impotent' [CNN Int'l]

Bet he could still get it up for Whitney Houston.

ELSEWHERE: Queer Eye for the Jihadist Guy [Sully]

Harry Nilsson
Coconut
Nilsson Schmilsson [buy], 1971

Q: Is the GOP a man trapped in a woman trapped in a man's body?

2007-09-09T21:55:00.000-04:00

A: Moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzeneggar got terminated at his own state convention by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and a bunch of lunatic homophobe racists. [SF Gate]

Q: How do you say "damned lies" in Arabic?

2007-09-07T17:47:00.000-04:00

A: From yesterday's Morning Edition, NPR's Guy Raz illustrates that statistics are BS, especially in Iraq and especially especially when the Pentagon's involved. Case in point:

Sometime around February 2004, a top military official in Iraq estimated that there were about 15,000 total insurgents. About a year later, U.S. military leaders in Iraq announced that 15,000 insurgents had been killed or captured in the previous year.

In private, a skeptical military adviser pointed out to commanders that the numbers didn't make sense. "If all the insurgents were killed," he asked, "why are they fighting harder than ever?"

Hey, good question.

Karen DeYoung, in the Washington Post, came to the same conclusion: The Pentagon manipulates numbers. DeYoung's been on this beat for a while.

The Pentagon lying isn't exactly news, no matter what year it is, but under the Bush administration, these lies are intended as more than just a means of boosting American morale — they're the casus belli. More on this later.

RELATED: NPR's Day to Day talks to Karen DeYoung

Q: Oh British press, what won't you say?

2007-09-07T16:14:00.000-04:00

A: Lindsay Robertson thinks she's soooo special, just because she reads past the second paragraph of the stories she blogs about. WHO HAS THE TIME!?

In my previous post, though, I did forget about my rule not to pass along the insane gibberish of the British press, without confirming the story through a trustworthy (i.e., non-British) source. I couldn't be more embarrassed if I had been proven wrong about Osama bin Laden being dead. Which I won't be.

The Smiths
Bigmouth Strikes Again
The Queen is Dead, 1986