“Everything I know about politics, I learned from that Popeyes incident I made up.”

Donald and Lorne, embracing each other in a desperate mutual bid for continued relevancy.

Exactly. This guy is the equivalent of a ‘protestor’ showing up in Ferguson with a “WHAT ABOUT TOWER 7?” sign. He's grafting himself on to someone else's cause.

They have also been desperate to legitimize their new museum. There was an article in WaPo a while back about how they had hired a leftist (quelle horreur!) head curator to basically tell everybody that the museum would actually operate like a museum and not an event hall for pregaming pro-life marchers.

What you’ve described is a super basic conservation environment, and it exists all over the world in museums and labs. There’s nothing magical and distinctive to the U.S. about UV museum glass and lighting. Whether of not they run a museum that’s up to current museum standards (a low bar as it is) has nothing to do…

An even better example (and a contemporary one at that) would be the Iraqi Jewish archive that U.S. forces found in the basement of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency. Years after its conservation, it's still unclear when these items will be repatriated (a goal that was already hard to negotiate before the IS…

The Elgin Marbles are a really difficult case from a legal standpoint. Basically, there’s a viable legal argument that they were legally exported with permission from the Turkish authorities who were the recognized government of Greece in the early nineteenth century (the original document is long lost but a duplicate…

The problem is that once Wakefield’s fraudulent study was published, it took on a life of its own, and the crazed anti-vaxxers probably trust him more now than when he actually had his license. He hasn’t suffered nearly enough for his crimes.

This is an absolutely insane hard line to take. It’s entirely dependent on who the property owner is and what their particular standards are. What you’re writing may be a summary of best practices in general commercial real estate leasing, but I’ve seen endless numbers of leases written for new business in expensive…

Can 7-Eleven sell booze in PA? I live in Philly and here (and in surrounding counties) the only places that can sell beer are beverage distributors and small corner stores that also sell food. No chain convenience stores. I had assumed that was statewide, like the state store system for liquor and wine.

“Bioluminescent” would also have been an acceptable answer.

Boehner absolutely should work out a debt ceiling deal in the month he has left, and may well do so as a parting fuck you to Cruz & Co. But there’s a better chance of Barney Frank becoming the next pope than us ending up with a Tea Partier as speaker. That faction has nowhere near enough votes in the conference to…

Str8 Acting Masc for Same: The Movie.

On the whole I agree with you, but I think your calendar is a bit off. For a practicing Catholic (let alone a pope) to even say something like “who am I to judge?” isn’t mid-20c, it’s 2011 in America. It'll probably be 2035 in Italy before a mainstream politician says something like that. I agree he's exactly as…

Kenny appears to have a Brain Problem, so I’m happy to reply to you instead.

Who is this mythical demographic crossover population that consumes both Kenzinger and Newports?

I can’t believe that killing a few Hungarian tourists wasn’t enough to get rid of the duck boats. They’re gonna have to run over some cop’s kid for the city to ban them.

I think one side effect of opting for the solar compactors is that we ended up with fewer of them. I was in DC recently and there was a trash can like every ten feet. This would not totally solve Philly’s cultural problem with litter, though. People simply don't care, and it's accepted practice to leave mounds of…

Philly streets and sidewalks are covered in trash, even the nice neighborhoods, but there are like a dozen city trash cans for the entire city. Like you can make a mental map of them because there are so few. The same guy stealing manhole covers is probably selling them for scrap.

AKA a very long and fancy ad