Doug Arellanes reports that Czech soccer commentators are… not brilliant. Some things seem to be constant across cultures.

Likewise, have you ever wondered about the fact that in every culture known to man, there’s a political left and right? Even if they aren’t called such, the two (or more) sides co-exist and thrive by deriding and scheming against each other. (Ever wonder about those those cave-drawings of donkeys and elephants?)

Is it that, as with the Y chromosome or the gene for left-handedness, we’re all born with some marker that tells us which side of the aisle or barricade to stand on? Or that we’ve all got some kind of natural born political IQ; some people are simply smarter and get “it,” the political truth, while the other dummies just see things from the wrong side?

More likely, it’s that humans are hard-wired to cluster into groups and then define our groups in opposition to other groups. The stakes are social as much as they are ideological.

Doug Arellanes reports that Czech soccer commentators are… not brilliant. Some things seem to be constant across cultures.

Likewise, have you ever wondered about the fact that in every culture known to man, there’s a political left and right? Even if they aren’t called such, the two (or more) sides co-exist and thrive by deriding and scheming against each other. (Ever wonder about those those cave-drawings of donkeys and elephants?)

Is it that, as with the Y chromosome, we’re all born with some marker that tells us which side of the aisle to sit on or which side of the barricade to stand on? Or that we’ve all got some kind of natural born political IQ; some people are simply smarter and get “it,” the political truth, while the other dummies just see things from the wrong side?

More likely, it’s that humans are hard-wired to cluster into groups and then define our groups in opposition to other groups. The stakes are social as much as they are ideological.

WSJ: “In January, Kodak forecast a 10% to 12% industrywide decline this year in unit volume of rolls and single-use cameras — essentially a single roll with a disposable case. But in 2004 through May 16, IRI charted a 16% decline compared with the same period a year earlier. And in the four weeks to that date, the drop was 19%. For both periods, the decline in overall dollars paid at retail was smaller, as pricing remained firm for single-use cameras.”

Sometimes the wheels just fall off all at once. I was short Kodak stock for a few months in 1999. Right trade, wrong millennium. General rule of thumb when investing: things usually take ten times longer than you expect. Be patient. And then be patient some more.

Just noticed Republican National Committee ads on a few blogs. Given all the ink sprayed about liberal advertising on blogs, I wonder if any journalists will notice this entrant.

My comrade-in-ink Matt is back in the mysterious East of Europe. Emmanuelle will have photos here soon I hope.

We went to see HP last night, celebrating the end of school. The Pythonesque ballooning-aunt-to-bus-ride-to-hunchback-butler-to-Weasley-warning sequence had me thinking “this could be the greatest movie of all time!” But then HP lost its manic jag and slipped back to being merely a very good movie for kids-at-heart.

Championship T-ball game at 1PM today. With Sabermetric precision, we’ve determined that 22.1% of (our) outs come from jogging to first base, so we all practiced running to first base last night.

Update: Everyone played lots of positions. Pirates were the home team and didn’t get our last at-bat when the Dodgers fell one short of matching our 15 runs.

Ads that make you think, win says a new advertising manifesto. Points 4-6 are particularly relevant to blog advertising, I think:

4. Active learning, or high involvement processing, produces enduring attitude changes.
5. However, most of us tend to process most media passively.

6. Despite appearances TV is a relatively low attention medium.

(Via Steve Hall.)

Here are more reader results from Blogads’ survey of 17,159 blog readers May 17-19, 2004, this time broken out by party affiliation. This page contains the results for:

Greens,
Democrats,
Republicans,
Independents,
Libertarians

To recap: here’s the aggregate survey. And here’s the breakout of women and men.

As a long-time Prairie Home Companion listener, I’m thrilled to have made a brief glide today across the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio. I put in plugs for Wonkette, Talkingpoints, RealClearPolitics, Dailykos, Instapundit and the rest of the blogosphere.

Here’s the spot and here’s the blog for John Gordon’s radio show.

Only one problem… uhm… I thought they had a machine to edit out the “uhms.” With my tendency towards elipses and subclauses, you can see why I like the control that writing affords. Will do better next time, I promise Mom.

Lunch Friday with a couple of execs from a successful gaming website.

As we parted, we exchanged cards. On the back of each of theirs was an odd sounding name.

“Those are our player names,” they explained.

Hmm. I joked (or was I serious?) that I really haven’t played an interactive game since Pong, when name choices were limited to either “left” or “right.”

I returned home to find that my (similarly ancient) friend Steve has just programmed a java version of pong.

A map of media mogoliths in Manhattan. And collection of photos of the new “no photos, please, we do the filming!” notices before movies. Insert insightful essay about dinosaur grave-yards and the resourceful longevity of microbes here:

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