Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead: “I get really frustrated when people claim that the Daily Show is sexist when I’ve worked with Jon Stewart on four separate projects and he is the least sexist person ever. They’re not trying to not hire women, they’re trying to hire the best possible people for the show. You can call it a boy’s club, it’s not. It’s a nerd club… When I first launched that show, I got 150 writer submissions. Three were from women. Three, that’s it.” [Bloggasm]

If you’re not a geek, you probably don’t know that PHP stands for “PHP Hypertext Processor,” if you even know what it is. (Hint: You’re soaking in it!) For that matter, you’re even less likely to know about GNU, or that it stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.”

Geeks love those self-referential language games. They treat them like logic puzzles, thinking that such blandly clever constructions will Blow. Your. Mind.

Except that they don’t, no more than All Cretans Are Liars. (And All Cretins Are Assholes, but that’s just a mere tautology.) Language is not a mirror of the world. It’s not even a system of representation. It’s just a means of expression, better articulated than most. (Ask your cat.) We swim in language, and sometimes pee in it, but we shouldn’t mistake it for the stuff natural scientists deal with. It’s just hot air, dead trees, and excited pixels.

Which is why this annoys the hell out of us:

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Above: In a new YouTube ad, Joe the Plumber endorses Missouri’s Chuck Purgason for Senate.

Below: Next time, check your references.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a bone to pick with Stinque’s boneless Golden Vuvuzela champion:

The Iranian president accused the octopus of spreading “western propaganda and superstition.” Paul was mentioned by Mr Ahmadinejad on various occasions during a speech in Tehran at the weekend.

“Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values,” he said.

Next week: Ahmadinejad decries the decrepit Western values of Punxsutawney Phil.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacks Octopus Paul [Telegraph UK]

[CNSNews]

Happy Birthday President Obama [via “Michelle Obama” email]

• “I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn’t believe them at first — the thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was — how shall I define it? — the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.”
• “He’s got to be drunk, I thought. I didn’t want to offend the president of France, but this was getting stupid. I kept thinking, surely, someone will pop up and say something like, ‘OK, the five minutes are up,’ but the call just went on and on and on.”

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