Noted Here and There ...

The Da Vinci Code, anyone? Over at No Loss for Words, Danny Loss reviews Dan Brown's best selling novel, The Da Vinci Code and asks the important question: why does bad writing + bad history = best seller? But you'll have to scroll down to find it. Give a guy a degree from Swarthmore and he'll blogger his links or screw up his coding every time.

Would you rather call John Kerry a liar or explain why what he said is not true? Andrew Sullivan would rather just call him a liar. Kerry said: "We've got more African Americans in jail than we do in college. That's unacceptable." Kerry's statement is correct for African American men, but becomes incorrect without the gender distinction. The numbers are remarkable. In 2002, 818,900 African American men were in prison and only 802,000 were in college. In the same year, 65,600 African American women were in prison and 1,476,000 were in college. There are far more important things to say about those numbers than that"John Kerry is a liar."

Finally, in case you need a good laugh, Tom Bruscino at Big Tent recommends this, which is pretty good, but for a laugh on both their houses try this.