'Bred Crumbs

04:18 PM Great things from today's Washington Post, relayed by NextDraft:

-- Chinese graduate students who were part of Dubya's question-and-answer session in Beijing made some incisive and unflattering observations about America's leader-by-default. "He wants people to understand the United States but I don't think he understands us," said one. "You can't have one without the other." Another student was even less impressed: "He just kept talking and talking about freedom. We get it. Does he think we're stupid?"

-- "'Enron' was a made-up name picked for the new company created out of the merger of Internorth and HNG in 1986. Naming consultants originally came up with 'Enteron,' but -- hours before it was to be made public -- an employee of the combined companies consulted a medical dictionary and discovered that 'enteron' is another name for the intestines."

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10:08 AM This is even better than all the phony Star Wars companies. In 1998, Enron gutted an entire floor of a building to construct a half-million-dollar fake operations center for a business that hadn't started yet and had employees "staff" it during a visit by financial analysts, a former executive says.

"You were assigned a shift and told when to show up, and they actually scheduled calls with prospective clients and routed them to certain phones. It was pretty stupid."

Amazing -- even not counting mass-murdering religious fundamentalists or John Ashcroft, lots of pure evil is popping up lately, like Kenneth Lay and the Georgia crematorium guy. <Looking at plush Cthulhu on shelf> What are you up to?

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01:03 PM Upon moving to California, I was astonished and baffled that the nation's most car-dependent state failed to do two key, sensible things everyone else does: mark its four-way stops as such, and number its freeway exits. But on the second point at least, we're finally getting somewhere. (The news is two weeks old, and I would have missed it entirely if not for Sam.) Even though the new signs are starting to sprout, the numbering remains a strange concept that has to be explained to the natives. If we can get it through to them, next we can tackle trying to get them to quit following the word "these" or "those" with "ones."

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I wouldn't have thought anything could get me excited about a forthcoming Superman movie, but something has: the news that McG, director of excellent music videos and Charlie's Angels, will drive the next one. (Goodbye and good riddance to Tim Burton and Nicholas Cage.)

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