A Hot Dog In Its Beak

Before I moved there from New York, a young assistant professor told me Southern California was "a three-story-high plastic Donald Duck clutching a hot dog in its beak."

Here's Wretchard's take on a piece by Niall Ferguson on the wars of the 21st Century:

Yet those effete-looking internationalists probably grasp Niall Ferguson's point at a gut level: without an American gorilla under "internationalist" direction, The Next War of the Worlds may be in the offing. Yet to America, as the Ring was to Tom Bombadil, empire is too much of a burden. America's mystical faith that all countries desire freedom may partly be at bottom a wish that the world would leave it alone; leave it alone to watch a baseball game with a cup of weak beer in one hand and soggy hot dog in the other, neither knowing nor caring where Iraq or Kazakhstan was. And so it was until the airliners crashed into Manhattan in 2001. Who knows what it is now?

Still too much of a burden, is my guess.