That is One Noisy Rattlesnake...

Well, I had this mess wrangled down to a few small piles by the beginning of May and since then all the papers underwent mitosis and stuff hid (that key was under the clock, where it had been for years, but last week?  Vanished without trace.  And still unfound.  Aaarrrggghhh) and at the other end of the tunnel is a very long freight train.  That's why I've got Billy Joel up today; there are some admittedly rare times when only Billy Joel will do.

• Jurassicpork has an elegy to Johnny Pesky.
• Doghouse Riley has been paying attention to both politics and the Olympics:
• "Look, fifty years ago your party fell under the spell of Western 'movement' 'conservatism', in an effort to halt the onrushing tide of the sixty-three-year-old 20th Century, and simultaneously adopted the idea that Bill Fuhbuckley was an intellectual, in an effort to cover your embarrassment. Neither worked; to survive, the party separated itself from the rest of the political spectrum, then from Reality Herself. Your elder statesmen now are people like Will and Dick Cheney, still pissed off that hippie girls wouldn't lay them in the 60s, and your middle-aged mouthpieces, when they aren't starkers, are toadies like Brooks, who bought the program when they were adolescents and still cling to it like Douthat clings to his St. Christopher medal, hoping Zombie Reagan will rematerialize if they just Believe. Of course Mitt Romney has no ideas. Your entire party has but one, and that one was disproved a generation ago."
• "Usain Bolt is the greatest Olympian since Aleksandr Karelin, and the greatest Track and Field champion since Al Oerter. And he gets no respect from the American media, for being insufficiently American. And for "showboating". This from a country so besotted with itself that every one of its winning athletes is required to parade around using Old Glory as a bath towel.
  
  "He's up to his antics again," I heard someone voice over some video, and even if I remembered who or where I'd be too embarrassed to admit what I was watching, because there's an outside chance it was Today. The man left daylight between himself and the first 100 meter field in history where everybody broke ten seconds. And that's the second time he's done it. If you don't understand how astonishing that is then quit watching sports."
  
• "[A]ren't you the same Bob Costas who rather hurriedly hosted Maurice Greene after the men's 4x400 in Sydney, so you, and he, could excuse the preening and clowning and flag-snapping he and the team had done during their victory lap and on the medal podium? I mean, once it became known to you both that Nike wasn't happy about it?"
• Arabella Flynn on social awkwardness v. possible autism spectrum behavior v. creepy entitlement.  Note to all:  Do not gronkulate my fleebwanger.  Ever.
• Actual study of voter "fraud" using proper statistical methods.

  Voter-impersonation fraud has attracted intense attention in recent years as conservatives and Republicans argue that strict voter ID laws are needed to prevent widespread fraud.
  
  The case has been made repeatedly by the Republican National Lawyers Association, one of whose missions is to advance “open, fair and honest elections.” It has compiled a list of 375 election fraud cases, based mostly on news reports of alleged fraud.
  
  News21 examined the RNLA cases in the database and found only 77 were alleged fraud by voters. Of those, News21 could verify convictions or guilty pleas in only 33 cases. The database shows no RNLA cases of voter-impersonation fraud.

  And that's not even the main study.
  
  "Voter fraud" is beginning to sound like the "Satanic ritual abuse" of the Republican Party.  Speaking of which, Scott Horton notes:

  The problem, of course, is that the truth can’t be found by triangulating between Democrats and Republicans, so the story’s structure serves the interests of the Republicans—indeed, it implicitly legitimizes their tactics. In an interview on On Point, [Ethan] Bronner ultimately conceded the point under pressure, “It’s a little harsh to say that the only point of these things is to suppress voting for Democratic candidates,” he said, “but that clearly will be the effect.” Harsh? It’s not only the obvious truth, but one even Republicans can occasionally be caught admitting. Why should Bronner struggle so mightily to suppress it? And why does he seem to think it makes his writing more professional if he avoids “harsh” truth?

• Lots of links concerning Mr. Ryan.  Via Twistedchick on Dreamwidth.  Because face value is a mask.