Oh, Thursday.

* Water discovered on Moon.

It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.

I can't wait to drink bottled moon water. Delicious.

* NeilAlien has some good links about the Kirby heirs' attempt to reclaim their Marvel copyrights in the wake of the Siegel heirs' successful lawsuit against DC.

* Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore about who hates America more.

* For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table. In the past three decades, the earth's dominant carnivores have tripled our average per capita consumption; in the next four decades global meat production will double to 465 million tons.

* Salon on the end of oil and the era of extreme energy.

* Moammar Gadhafi vs. the World Cup.

I caught The Other Final tonight as part of Duke's "Soccer Politics" series. Personally I thought the movie actually flinched a bit from the difficult political issues it (briefly) raises, especially those regarding race and coloniality—but it's good fun anyway. Must-watch for soccer fans. Unbelievably, the film seems not to have a U.S. distributor, but it is (for now at least) on YouTube.)

Wednesday 3.

* First Read considers the curse of the 2012 GOP candidate, noting that only Mitt Romney has avoided total credibility implosion. But stay tuned: it's a long way to Iowa, and I believe in the Mittpocalypse.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Obama's political opponents tend to be cursed in this way: consider that his main opponents for Illinois State Senate were pulled from the ballot for insufficient signatures, that his original run for Senate was facilitated by the scandal surrounding the divorce of Jack and Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan, and that his opponent for the presidency actually thought Sarah Palin was a credible vice presidential candidate.

* More on Kay Hagan and health care from Triangulator. Contact information for Hagan's Senate office is here.

* The MTA is trying to sell name rights for subway stations. Can't we get a court to bar this kind of silliness? "Atlantic Avenue" is a useful and informative name for a subway station; the name of a bank in London is not remotely. UPDATE: I'm 99% less outraged upon realizing that Barclay's is building a basketball stadium near that subway station.

* Michael Bérubé on the futility on the humanities. Said futility is not a bad thing.

* Žižek on Iran (at least allegedly).

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

* Soccer in South Africa, at the Big Picture.

More evidence emerges of Obama's European-style communofascism: he plans to attend the opening ceremonies of the 2010 World Cup.

Night.

* Glenn Beck, lunatic, openly calls for secession.

You can't convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn't allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: `I don't want to go there, because that's suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right -- people have a right to not commit economic suicide...

...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it's about time that somebody says that again.

He's riffing off some similarly histrionic language from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. When is Fox going to pull the plug on this guy?

* New York joins the future: Gov. David A. Paterson on Thursday will announce plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriage, according to people with knowledge of the governor’s plans.

* Roasted Peanuts: a blog devoted to the best of classic Peanuts. Via MeFi, which points one I'm rather fond of.

* Barack Obama, great president or greatest president? The president recently sent a video praising Chicago in its bid to hold the 2016 Summer Games. Now he has endorsed the United States’ effort to hold the World Cup of soccer either in 2018 or 2022.

* After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more.

Today's the first day of play for Group C in Euro 2008, which the ESPN announcers are calling the Group of Death. (There's always one.) France and Italy are the favorites in their games, but Romania and especially the Netherlands have a chance at upsets, and I know I'll be rooting for both—I haven't forgiven either Italy or France for 2006.

I'm showing up just four minutes late into the first Group B game and Croatia has already scored. Austria's making its debut appearance as one of the host nations, so it's reasonable to expect they're going to get slaughtered.

The afternoon game, Germany v. Poland, might be a little bit closer, but not by much. Germany's a strong favorite to win the whole thing, so Poland will be lucky to keep it close. Which is really too bad—in any contest between Germany and Poland, it's pretty hard not to root for Poland...

11:50 AM EST:
Switzerland vs. Czech Republic
2:30 PM EST:
Portugal vs. Turkey

When I did the World Cup in '06 my blogging was mostly along a Winners & Losers, Heroes & Villains line, and I think I'll probably stick with that.

These aren't that hard to choose on either register. One of my best friends from high school grew up in the "Little Prague" section of Randolph and so Czech Republic was one of the teams I was most rooting for in the World Cup 2006. Though they underperformed a bit in that tournament I think they're pretty likely to advance in this one. I generally like Switzerland, and I'll probably be rooting for them in later games, but today it's all about the Czech.

Portugal vs. Turkey is easy: I have friends from Turkey and Portugal is probably my most hated squad from 2008, what with their constant dirty play and shameless diving. But they're going to beat Turkey, and they're also sure to advance, so I'll be resenting them for a while yet.

Longtime readers know that international soccer is the one sport I really get excited about. I spent a lot of my last summer before Duke blogging pretty obsessively about the World Cup—you can relieve the magic in the June 2006 and July 2006 archives—and so I'm pretty excited that the other quadrennial soccer tournament, UEFA Euro 2008, begins today. As is the case with the World Cup, my knowledge surrounding the European championship is spotty, hilariously incomplete, and primarily keyed to old nationalistic hatreds: that's part of what makes it so fun.

Most of the games will be aired on ESPN Classic; you can find a good schedule here.
And if you're really feeling ambitious you can build a fantasy team here and construct your bracket here.

I'm using this program to help me keep track of everything; it's available for both Mac and Windows.

Some uninformed bloviations about Group A in a little bit...