U.S. SuPeeps Court in the case of Bush v. Gore

It's an outrage that this clever and beautiful diorama has not received any recognition whatsoever from The Washington Post's Peeps diorama contest. It must be run by the same professionals who screw up Date Lab every week. That's all I have to say about that.

There are no words

I've been trying all day, but I've still got nothing. It's just too terrifying.

In honor of my CD player

Tonight, I was walking in the direction of my apartment building listening to my favorite song of all time when out of nowhere came a group of drunk college kids. One blond frat boy lunged toward me, pointed at my 2002 Sony G Protection CD player, Model No. D-SJ301 (Maybe. It's kind of wearing off) and shouted, "You need to get an iPod!," in a tone that suggested my precious CD player was greatly offending him.

He might as well have said, "You need to cut your right arm off!"

I left this country on a jet plane about two days before the iPod revolution. That's a guestimation. So I bought a nearly $100 CD player to bring with me to a place I knew nothing about. My father rolled his eyes, sure that it would break during the first week. I knew then that the CD player was going to become my most precious material possession, and it did. The CD player has been with me everywhere I've gone since then.

It survived dust storms wrapped in a handkerchief and a plastic bag. It kept me going on what had to be more than 100, 12-mile bike rides between my village and the closest town. It kept me company on hours-, and sometimes, days-long rides on ancient European tour buses or stripped down delivery vans retrofitted with benches and no doors. It survived months of 130-degree afternoons, even as the heat gave new meaning to CD burning. It ran three miles strapped to my arm every day. I dropped it on rocks more than once and it burst open, its two AA batteries spilling out. It has actually been to Timbuktu and back. It's also been to Thailand, Laos, Burma, Senegal, The Gambia, Paris, Madrid, and Cambodia, where it helped me keep my lunch down on a tortuously long and bumpy dirt road. I'll dare to say that it loved the Kuwait City airport as much as I did. When someone jacked my car stereo (the one thing in it that worked well), that CD player and some mini-speakers became my stereo.

And it's still kicking. Perhaps I'm being entirely too sentimental, but how can I so easily give up on something that never gave up on me? The drunk, blond frat boy assumed my CD player is just a nearly obsolete electronic device. I think we should make drunk, blond frat boys obsolete. They are an outrage.

Kill me now.

I guess I should be checking on the Vows videos more often. This one truly, truly could cause vomiting and is truly, truly an outrage. You'll see why immediately.

Plus, they let them in even though their eyebrows clearly are not on the same level.

Sure it's grand — a grand waste of $600 million

The Capitol Visitor Center is something that I love to hate, but they are making it way too easy for me these days (see above).

The Washington Post recently reported that the project's previous price of around $550 million rose by $50 million in just a few months. At the former number, the cost of the project would've already been double what it was supposed to be when Congress first endorsed the project. Lovers of the stone and glass underground structure have called it "grand" and "majestic." I can't see it since there's still a big wall around it, but I trust that those observations are true. After all, $600 million can buy a lot of Tennessee marble and massive glass skylights.

Consider this: We often see members of Congress throwing up their hands in frustration about balancing budgets and where to find funding for, say, health care and pensions for veterans (sorry, it's TimesSelect) of a war we are still losing. I think $600 million could put at least a minor dent in that problem. Even lawmakers who are against what one called a "boondoggle" of a project seem to do nothing more than shake their heads in disgust. Instead, Congress continues to appropriate money for additions to the visitor center, much of which the visitors will never see.

I suppose they will see the set of the new TV studio for members of Congress, and I'm sure they'll be grateful that their representative doesn't look so Richard-Nixon-versus-John-F.-Kennedy thanks to the built-in makeup room.

I wonder if they already have makeup artists on staff. If not, surely they'll need some now. It's an outrage.

Shut up about Big Brother

My answer to "Reader's" original comment, whose name is actually Katie, is that you have no idea whether my British counterpart is tracking your visits. Just because he or she doesn't have a Site Meter symbol up (see below and right) doesn't mean he or she doesn't have one, or one similar to it. Almost every Web site in the world has a tracker on it. I keep mine so I can have fodder for posts like this. Who wouldn't want to know that their site is the only one in the whole world that comes up when someone Googles "women like to see penis pictures" ? That's an accomplishment if I ever saw one. And that I rank at all on a number of combinations of "240sx Nissan pop-up lights stuck," and often near the top. Or second for "doritos suck." Really, can you blame me?

I'm not even smart enough to figure out all the things that Site Meter could tell me. So cut it off with all the Big Brother melodrama. And stop being so insecure about who knows what sites you visit when. Believe me, bigger brothers than me know a lot more about you than I do. And they care a lot more, since I couldn't care less. You should really be using your time to write e-mails to all those data-mining companies.

By the way, I also rank first for — you guessed it — it's an outrage.

P.S. My British counterpart's site doesn't appear to have been updated since 2003. I think you're going to run out of relevant outrages pretty fast, if you can stand to look at the mess of a site for more than 30 seconds.

P.P.S. Today, my Site Meter told me that I'm fourth for "yale graduate douchebag" and third for "big boobs german tennis player." I can't explain how much that warms my heart.

Oh no he didn't

CNN's Glenn Beck: I don't think you have to be famous. I think you just work in the average, you know, in the average environment in America now, somebody would get a picture of you, and then it would be posted all around, and you — it'll happen in your office.

US Weekly chick: Yeah, possibly.

Beck: You don't think so?

Chick: Well, it depends. You know, it depends —

Beck: Dina, I've got some time and a camera. Why don't you stop by? No? OK.

He's an outrage. No? OK.