Cheap shots 8/3

Rick Santorum is back! At least for a visit. And commenting on the Jerry Sandusky case, about which as you can imagine he knows quite a lot. Or at least as he can imagine, and does. Via Minjae Park at Washington Monthly,

In an interview with Dallas-Ft. Worth’s KSKY 660 AM on Friday, Santorum, a Penn State alum, called the evidence “pretty darn thin” and said, “I’m sort of sitting back and waiting for the facts to out as opposed to, at least as I’m being told, a version of the facts.”

Speculation is that he thought Sandusky was a priest.

Romney, explaining why Jewish Israelis are more prosperous than Palestinian Palestinians, at breakfast in Jerusalem:

"And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognise the power of at least culture and a few other things," the presumptive Republican candidate told his audience. He cited a climate of innovation, the Jewish history of thriving in adversity and the "hand of providence".

Sounds an awful lot to me like, "You people are just so good with money." But it took the Arabs to call him out for racism.

"Not so sure about those krep--those krep--those dumpling thingies, they wouldn't have any chopped Christian baby in that, would they? Get 'em at 7-11?"

Attack of the killer snails: the giant African land snail, achatina fulica, has been invading the Americas—well, South America and Florida, anyway—according to BBC News.

In one Colombian town alone, Buenaventura, more than eight tonnes of snails have been collected since an invasion began two years ago. In Ecuador the problem is so widespread that they have been found in half of the country's 24 provinces, including the Galapagos Islands.

In the fields, they are an agricultural nuisance. In the cities, they clutter up the sidewalks and rip the stucco off houses. Such is the density with which they congregate at the height of an invasion, that they have even been known to cause slicks on highways.

The good news would be that they are not likely to give you eosinophilic meningitis—

The parasite that causes eosinophilic meningitis is called rat lungworm (angiostrongylus cantonensis). It has evolved to use snails as hosts and also spends part of its life cycle in a rat's blood system and brain.

After a rat eats an infected snail, thousands of worms - up to 60mm long - may grow in its brain. In human brains, it seems the worms cannot find their way out again. The worms soon die, but this causes a huge immune reaction and brain swelling.

—unless you hunker down and eat one. The bad news is, we already have rat lungworms anyway, in tiny slugs that can hide out in inadequately washed lettuce.

The BBC says you don't see them this big any more—just an inch or two. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Ruy Almeida.

I don't feel as sorry as I might for Jonah Lehrer, the youthful science writer at the New Yorker who was busted for making up Bob Dylan quotations and lost his job, horrible as that must be, because if you want to fabricate Dylan you should at least make it sound interesting:

“But then,” Mr. Lehrer wrote, “just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. ‘It’s a hard thing to describe,’ Dylan would later remember. ‘It’s just this sense that you got something to say.’ ”

I mean, what the hell kind of Dylan quote is that? That's not Dylan, that's any soulful guitar player in Long Island showing up on NPR to pimp his first album. Dylan doesn't say he finds something "hard to describe," and if he has something to say he doesn't talk about saying it.

"Yaz," said Bobby, looking up innocently, "it would be a hard thing for you to describe, but that's only because you're so fucked up. Do you realize that man in the only animal that looks in the mirror and sees something that isn't there?"

Like, gnomic.