Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

A Switch in Time

This is awesome.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the […]

Dept of Truthiness

Your clown show dollars at work:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. … FEMA announced the news conference at its headquarters here about […]

They Have Landed, and Want Extra Cheese

Sign seen on the way home, outside a pizza joint on Broadway:

Mooninites Eat Free.

Insidious. Someone call the mayor of Boston. But—what they don’t know is that I ate there once and the pizza is terrible. Ha! Who’s laughing now, you little bastards.

You Know, Like Squirrels

Back during the Katrina Disaster, we learned that whereas black people loot things from grocery stores, white people find things in grocery stores. Now that a container ship has foundered off the English coast we can see what it is the English do under similar circumstances. Not looting, obviously (perish the thought). But not […]

First as Tragedy, etc

ABC news runs a story under the headline “Warning Signs about Foley Ignored for at least Five Years.”

“No one in the Republican leadership, nor Congressman Shimkus, saw those messages until last Friday when ABC News released them to the public,” said Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL). But there were lots of warning signs. […]

Cover Stories

Via Unfogged and ThinkProgress, Newsweek’s current cover as it varies by geographical region:

I commend them for sparing the world from Annie Leibowitz. The funny thing is that the graphic is right there on Newsweek’s own site. I went back and looked for others. Here are the covers from the week before last.