When last we spoke, I was telling you about my Kindle’s sudden demise. Or rather the apparently sudden demise of its screen. One of the reasons I like sharing things with you is that I immediately find out more than I could possibly have learned on my own about the subject. So this is what I’ve found out so far.
First, my Kindle is pretty clearly toast. The screen is broken, which I guess is probably pretty obvious from the picture (but denial goes a long way). And this actually seems to happen a lot. It turns out that the eInk which the whole system is based on has a layer of glass in it. And it’s actually quite fragile. It seems like quite a few of you have had the same thing happen to yours. Read More
As I noted not long ago, a simple look at the public opinion data suggests that Charlie Crist is threatening to push Democrat Kendrick Meek out of the running altogether as the de facto Democrat in the Florida Senate race. See this graph to see what I mean. Eric Kleefeld looks at how Crist’s positioning is moving more and more conventionally Democratic as his independent run goes on.
I’ve written several times before about the uncannily functional Kindle, which, aesthetic discomfort notwithstanding, has pretty much totally weened me from physical books. But today I’m writing with a more tragic tale. More or less out of the blue, my Kindle’s screen has decided to commit suicide. No triggering event, no trauma and certainly no note. The result is one side totally gone, the other side totally bollixed. You can see the crime scene photo here.
Has anyone else had this happen? And is this thing has finished as it looks? At first I thought a little reseting or repowering or something might do the trick. But it seems not. Has anyone had to deal with Amazon trying to get one of these fixed? Good experience or bad?
David opened the question: who are you remembering this Memorial Day Weekend? I’m remembering Larry Rosenberg, or to cite his full birth name, Lawrence Isidore Rosenberg. He was a Navy electrician aboard the destroyer escort USS Fechteler when it was torpedoed by German submarine U-967 northeast of Oran, Algeria on May 5th, 1944.
Of course, I never met him. And even my father, his nephew, only had a small child’s memories of his Uncle Larry. But I remember him and feel I know him because of the echoes of grief that his death shook down through the decades until I was born and well into my adulthood.
Of the 215 on board the Fechteler 186 were rescued by the USS Laning, another destroyer escort in the same convoy. He was one of the 29 who died, probably doomed by the fact that at the time of the attack he was in the engine room where the torpedo struck the ship. Read More
You may remember Roy Ashburn, the staunchly anti-gay rights California legislator arrested in early March for drunk driving after leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento. Ashburn, now openly gay, is speaking out in favor of gay rights.
I remember my cousin Patrick Kelly Connor, a Navy flier shot down in Operation Desert Storm. Who do you remember? We’ve set up a open thread at TPMCafe for readers to share their remembrances this Memorial Day.
I hadn’t seen South Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley on camera until we found this video of her today addressing a hungry pack of reporters eager for any morsel about her alleged affair with political consultant turned blogger Will Folks. As a result, I didn’t realize what a consummate pro she is. She’s something to watch. Collected, sharp-witted, and always a smile, but not plastic. She’s got the makings of a national politician, were it not for the current messiness.
She has quite the personal story, too. She was born Nimrata Randhaw in South Carolina to Sikh immigrant parents. She became an accountant, married, and had two children. In 2004, she knocked off the longest serving member of the South Carolina House to win her seat, becoming the first South Asian elected to public office in the state.
She denies the affair, and he hasn’t produced proof of it yet. So I’m withholding judgment. But if it is true and the attractive first generation overachiever ended up in an affair with a scraggly blogger then decided to run for governor, doesn’t that make her pretty much a badass? I don’t condone it, but I kind of admire it.
We know that Joe Lieberman is now an ‘independent Democrat’ and endorsed a number of Republicans in the 2008 presidential cycle, including John McCain. But even for Lieberman this one is quite a leap. Today Lieberman said that he’s still deciding who he’ll support in the Connecticut Senate race.
Now, Blumenthal has clearly had a tough few weeks, though it doesn’t seem to have hurt him much in the polls. But this is really more about McMahon. Let’s remember that before the Iraq War became his biggest issue, Joe’s big claim to fame and public issue was his fight against coarseness and obscenity in American culture. So he’s going to endorse the CEO of American pro wrestling, which is basically a festival of cartoonish mock violence and copious T&A? Not that there’s anything wrong with that …
Late Update: The sad thing is that I’ve probably had to use some version of that headline a dozen or more times over the last few years. But it’s never the ultimate. There’s always more.
Paul Rieckhoff: For veterans, the civilian-military divide feels widest on Memorial Day.