Peter Krupa

From the New York Times:

Five years after famously dodging questions about steroids during a nationally televised Congressional hearing, Mark McGwire admitted on Monday to using them throughout his career.

From the most excellent Baseline Scenario:

… yes, bankers are like athletes. Their individual contributions are overrated relative to their supporting environments; they are overpaid; they are paid based on where they randomly fall in the probability distribution in a given year; and paying a lot for bankers is no guarantee that your bank will be successful in the future. Team sports, like banking, are an industry where the employees capture a large proportion of the revenues. And one with negative externalities, like upsurges in domestic violence around major sporting events. Neither one should be a model for our economy.

I have this thing where I watch commercials on American television and I say to myself: There must be something wrong with Americans. This is one of those commercials.

It reminds me of the part in Idiocracy where, 500 years in the future, Luke Wilson learns that modern medicine is extinct because researchers wasted all their time and money finding cures for erectile disfunction and hair loss.

I guess add “inadequate eyelashes” to that list.

Fox News continues to polish its reputation for sophisticated thought and intellectual rigor by signing on Sarah Palin as a contributor. No word yet on whether she’ll be teaming up with Mike Huckabee for a special Alaska episode of his Praise the Lord Hodown Conservative Variety Show Hour Thing.

If there were ever a scandal made for headline writers:

The sex scandal that has transfixed Northern Ireland in recent days has a cinematic echo: a 60-year-old Mrs. Robinson who was caught in an affair with a man who was 19 at the time, and is now at the center of a scandal that threatens to bring down the power-sharing government that has steered the province out of 30 years of sectarian bloodshed.

From the New York Times:

… as the administration moves to increase oversight within [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] , the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

A best-to-worst ranking of 200 careers is making the rounds. Number 184 on the list is Newspaper Reporter, ranking just below Seaman and Machinist but just above Stevedore and Sheet Metal Worker. Glad I went to college.

This fascinates me. From the New Yorker:

The gradual devastation of the Amazon—the felling of thousands of square miles of forest, the clear-cutting of the jungle—has produced, paradoxically, one of the greatest archeological discoveries: a vast and complex ancient civilization. In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization. According to a new report published in the journal Antiquity, the archeologist Martii Pärssinen and other scientists have documented more than two hundred and ten geometric structures, some of which may date as far back as the third century A.D. They are spread out over an area that spans more than two hundred and fifty kilometers, reaching all the way from northern Bolivia to the state of Amazonia in Brazil.

Probably not the best way to make such amazing discoveries. Anyway, it reminds me of the Guayabos site in Costa Rica. In general, Costa Rica doesn’t have much – no monuments, few artifacts, no large indigenous population – to suggest that any ancient civilization beyond the hunter-gatherer variety ever lived here.

But there it is, out in the middle of the jungle, a stone road 10 feet thick and wide enough for two cars, along with a system of aqueducts and a few houses. Clearly (and delightfully), there is still much we don’t know about our world.

Excellent Fresh Air interview with author Bob Sullivan on how to avoid getting screwed by banks, credit card companies, and cell phone contracts.