YOU ALREADY KNEW that Ann Coulter was an idiot, but she confirms it by putting the pseudo-scientific "Darwin on Trial" on her Christmas book list.

VERY IMPRESSIVE DC Ethnic Dining Guide from Tyler Cowen. (via Mooney, who writes about Cowen's theories that globalization diversifies culture, as opposed to reducing it to a melange of McDonald's)

LIBERTARIAN SELF-PARODY: In Defense of Scrooge.

A PRICE WAR between bus companies targeting Chinese immigrant customers has led to $15 round-trip bus fares from DC to NY, Chinatown to Chinatown. That's cheaper than the highway tolls alone.

INCIDENTALLY, APROPOS of the previous entry, the music in the "French Dictionary" Levi's commercial is "Playground Love" by Air.

Ads.com bit the dust and no one told me. It was a nifty site where one could look up advertisements, including names of songs in ads, or catch funny advertisements that people were talking about but you had somehow missed. It's funny that people have had so much trouble finding a way to commercialize content-providing sites, increasingly having to rely on annoying pop-up, pop-under, or, in the case of Slate, screen-obscuring advertising, and here's a site that couldn't make a go of it even though the content was the commercial.

DAVID FRUM IS appropriately upset at a typical New York Times headline:

“Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims.” Yes, those missionaries and those Muslims really hate each other: Bonnie Witherall showed her hatred by offering free prenatal care to indigent Lebanese; the local Muslim clerics were naturally goaded by this outrage and killed her.

The new Smarter Harper's Index is up.

MINUTES AFTER THE Anter family arrived at their hotel, their vacation was ruined by a suicide bomber. Dvir, 14, and Nor, 12, were killed; their mother is unconscious in an Israeli hospital. BBC coverage.

SO IS EVERYONE getting the "Spin the Dreydel" Orbitz pop-up ad, or do I have a hidden cookie that tells the world that a Jew is using the browser?