Randomness:

A few quotes you might not have otherwise seen (these and many many others are stacked here):

[on eating in flight:] True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelette has already ended up in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled to the brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has no congealed around your waist. In business class the hostess pours the coffee directly into your lap, hastily apologizing in Esperanto.-- Umberto Eco

"And are you married?" called Reg. . .
"Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I'm not married to."-- Douglas Adams

Let's be honest-- access to pornography is not part of the cost of the Internet; it's one of the benefits.-- Steven Landsburg

We spend more of our time doing dishes than making love, but which is more important to the story of our lives?-- Marge Piercy

In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.-- Lawrence Summers

I ought to just ignore her, but she's so very intriguing. Kind of like an eagle wearing a hat.-- Jonathan Baude

Able, Ed:

Consider this passage from an unfinished novel by the late Douglas Adams:

He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, "This is a respectable private investigation business. I . . ."

"Respectable, she said, "or respected?"

"What do you mean?" Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time.

"Big difference," the Melinda woman continued. "Like the difference between something that's supposedly inflatable and something that's actually inflated.

Poison Pills:

Suppose you're a mean legislator, and you want to see some popular bill quashed, but you haven't got the votes to keep it dead in committee, to have it voted down on the floor, or even to filibuster (that is, we're supposing either that you're in the house or that this is after 1917 or so, when the Senate first introduced debate-ending procedures). What do you do? The answer, some say, is to introduce a "poison pill" amendment, which is the word my teacher used today for the amendments you tack onto a bill with the hope that other people will find them so noxious that the bill will get voted down.

From the point of view of strict rationality, there are plenty of reasons to believe that "poison pills" don't happen very often, or don't work very often if they do. I'm pretty sure (correct me on this!) that it takes a majority, once a bill is out of committee, to amend a bill, so you'd have to "trick" people into voting for the amendment in the first place, but it would have to be the kind of thing so bad that your opponents wouldn't accept it even now that they'll lose the bill they do want. That is, it has to be something that your opponents will vote for by itself, but won't vote for even to get what they want. Hopefully you can see why coming up with such an amendment might be a little hard.

Now perhaps you're very good at trickery, or at passing legislation the day that all the other guys stayed away. Or . . . something. But it seems to me that actual poison pills ought to be incredibly rare (if introduced outside of committee; I don't know enough about congressional procedure to know how committees rewrite the bill). Does anybody know if this is so?

There are caveats of course; a poison pill package might make more sense in systems with separation of powers, like ours. Perhaps a majority of house republicans know the president will veto a campaign-finance bill if it also contains some provision about homosexuals. This would only make sense for reasons of political rhetoric though, because if a majority of the house is prepared to "poison" a bill, they could also simply vote it down. So, does anybody have examples of actual poison pills throughout history? I'm not sure how to study this rigorously, but it would be interesting to see how often those who "poison" bills end up swallowing a dose of their old medicine.

The conventional example, (which may well be false) is the inclusion of women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Supposedly, Republicans in the house were sure the senate would never vote to give rights to women, so figured that adding women to the bill would be force the senate to kill it. As you probably know, this didn't happen. I've also heard that the Republican congress did something like this with U.N. dues during the Clinton years, adding various awful amendments to their resolutions to pay our U.N. dues (which I think are still outstanding). Yet the Republicans didn't seem to reap any particular political credit from this; Clinton hardly seems to have suffered in popularity from his refusal to pay U.N. dues (maybe because it was the least of his worries, popularity-wise).

So do poison pills happen? Do they work?

A final backfiring example, based in literature based (loosely) in history, from Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love:

Labouchere: (The) Criminal Law Amendment Act is badly drawn up and will do more harm than good, as I said in my paper. . .

Stead: Item! The age of consent raised from thirteen to sixteen. . . Item! Girls in moral danger may be removed from their parents by the courts.

Labouchere: That'll be a dead letter.

Stead: But it was your Amendment.

Labouchere: Anybody with any sense on the backbenches was pitch-forking Amendments in to get the government to admit it had a pig's breakfast on its hands and withdraw it. I forced a division on raising the age of consent to twenty-one!, and two people voted for it. My final effort was the Amendment on indecent between male persons, and God help me, it went through on the nod-- (it had) nothing to do with the Bill we were supposed to be debating; normally it would have been ruled out of order, but everyone wanted to be shot of the business, prorogue Parliament, and get on to the General Election.

Stead: But-- but surely-- you intended the Bill to address a contemporary evil --?

Labouchere: Nothing of the sort. I intended to make the Bill absurd to any sensible person left in what by then was a pretty thin house . . . but that one got away, so now a French kiss and what-you-fancy between two caps safe at home with the door shut is good for two with or without hard labour. It's a funny old world.

Precious:

How Appealing is, apparently, pornography.

Like My Father Before Me:

Oxblog and the rest of the world have gotten here first, but as a Star Wars nut, I have to join the fray: nearly 400,000 Brits declared their religion as "Jedi" on the last Census. That's more than the amount who called themselves Jewish, Sikh, or Buddhist. Is that cool? Or is that scary? Or both?