…who knew that a state’s natural beauty correlated so well with the manufacture of good beer?

Here’s proof.  Norm Dicks (D-Washington) looks like a porcine Huey Long.  I wonder if he uses Brylcreem on that hair, or if he’s a Dapper Dan man.

Carolyn Maloney of NY represents the “Silk Stocking” district on the Upper East Side (does anyone even call it that anymore?  Probably not since NY lost so many seats [...]

The red-blue divide is useful but reductive.  A presidential campaign symbolizes a national party but doesn’t encapsulate the complexity of a given state’s local politics or experience with that party.  For example, California, Hawaii, Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island all have Republican governors.  Massachusetts had three in a row until Deval Patrick came along.  Infrared [...]

This was sort of the culmination of our road trip, the capstone of remote and gorgeous Americana. Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork sculpture has only been exposed from the Great Salt Lake for a few years after a decades-long period submerged. As we were there at the end of the summer, the lake’s edge [...]

RoadsideAmerica.com is seriously indispensible when driving across the benighted continent of North America.  Where else would you learn about Salem Sue, the World’s Largest Holstein Cow (who faces I-94 from a rocky outcropping near New Salem, North Dakota)?
It’s kind of a crappy website in terms of design, although not as singularly irritating as Evite.  A [...]

When we got there it was closed, but it really exists:
It reminds me, then as now, of O’Boisies, whose tagline was “O’Boisies Are O’Boisterous.”  Seemed like it was tough to fail with a campaign that merges memories of the Irish potato famine with the spud-studded home of the Aryan Nation — plus a healthy dose [...]

Here in Bernal Heights, a high concentration of Latinos and a history of lefty politics can only mean one thing: murals! Naturally, they cluster on the walls of schoolyards and other public areas where children can be exposed to the thriving, pre-literate tradition of pictographic pedagogy. Here is a nice one from some [...]

Now that Mark Begich has beaten Ted Stevens for real, I hope the two remaining Senate races go for the good guys — Al Franken in Minnesota (quite possible) and Jim Martin in Georgia (who knows?). But that hope is tempered by the crushing reality that the Democrats’ chief principle remains, as it basically [...]

Here is an irritating development within journalism, buried within an article detailing yet another stupid Republican exercising his right to terrify voters in our theocracy:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic [...]