The credulous mind: religion and Nigerian e-mail scams.

A must-read article about a sophisticated Christian psychotherapist who gets taken in by Nigerian e-mail phishers for hundreds of thousand of dollars.

The New Yorker: Fact: "Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. "I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them," he said. Worley wasn't sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. "Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters," he said. "

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Kristen's moments.

"I'm so sleep deprived that I actually can't see things as solids right now. Everything is pixels and particles and vapor."

Kristen is having a Marxist moment.  "All that is solid melts into air."  The revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie!  You loved the movie, now play the game.  Coming soon to a Gameboy near you.  Play.  That's a order.

"And all I want to eat are things like pineapples and plums."

Food products from tropical colonies.  Kristen is having a Mercantilist moment.

Coffee and smokes.

Kristen wakes up in the morning and immediately begins reading about bituminous coal.

You don't say.

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Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

Off in her head again, thinking about bituminous coal.

Colbert's "biting" satire. But who got bitten?

"Several veterans of past dinners, who requested anonymity, said the presentation was more directed at attacking the president than in the past. Several said previous hosts, like Jay Leno, equally slammed both the White House and the press corps. 'This was anti-Bush,' said one attendee. 'Usually they go back and forth between us and him.' Another noted that Bush quickly turned unhappy. 'You could see he stopped smiling about halfway through Colbert,' he reported.

The WH Correspondents' Dinner: institutionalized satire: the system's internal safety valve. Which may be why Jon Stewart's out-of-character stunt on CNN's "Crossfire" made more of a splash. For all its "biting" mockery of the POTUS, Stephen Colbert seems to have given the media a pass, by comparison, restricting his mockery to more obvious right-wing media targets. And regardless of how one feels about the POTUS, the media is the target of the more subversive critique. The more radical break with tradition would've been to stand up there and deliver a detailed, objective, scientifically valid press-ownership analysis a la Chomsky. Or to have smuggled Chomsky himself in, and handed the mic over to him. Or lined up a bunch of Iraq bereaved. Or stood up there for 15 minutes of silence while the cameras rolled and the audience squirmed. Or peppered the president with direct questions, highlighting the absuridty of this "WH press corps" housepet. Anything that didn't play for laughs. It's the capacity to go off-message -- to know when NOT to play for laughs -- that enables a critique to ruffle the system's feathers. It's why Stewart's ploy got play. Colbert's a comic and he performed his standard routine. When you give the people the product they regularly pay you to deliver, that's entertaaaaaaainment! Ergo I think Snow's characterization of it as such was correct, despite the dismissive way he meant it.