April 2003

I am currently ludicrously behind on my reading list. I’m in the middle of six different tomes and there are another ten or twelve waiting next to the bed. The LA Times Festival of Books was probably not the best way to make any progress. I bought:

• Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan’s America, by Joe Queenan
• Outtakes, by Dan Patrick
• The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963, by Laurence Leamer
• The Lighthouse Stevensons : The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Bella Bathurst
• A Civil War: Army Vs. Navy a Year Inside College Football’s Purest Rivalry, by John Feinstein
• Five Against One: The Pearl Jam Story, by Kim Neely
• The Best American Sports Writing 1997 and The Best American Sports Writing 1998

I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks - Bloodhound Gang

She seemed like a shy girl when they met, but a few drinks later, they were throwing the rubber bald-headed chutney.

If you haven’t installed the Nutshell Toolbar yet, do it today. This is one of the most useful things on my computer and I use it probably fifty times each day.
(I linked to it many, many months ago. I just gave it to a friend today and thought I should hand out some extra props.)

ATHENS, Ga. — Five University of Georgia football players were suspended for two games Tuesday after they and a basketball player were charged with misdemeanor drug possession.

Football players Tim Jennings, Bryan McClendon, DeMario Minter, Mario Raley and Randall Swoopes, and basketball player Wayne Arnold — all freshmen — were booked and later released from the Clarke County jail.

Football coach Mark Richt suspended the five players for the first two games of next season. He also ordered them to perform 30 hours of community service and participate in additional physical activity.

Your homework project:
Compare and contrast the information contained in the article quoted below with Keats’ assertion (poetic, true, but an assertion nonetheless) that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

NBC is planning to make a movie about Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued American POW, even if it doesn’t get her permission. Can the network do that? Doesn’t NBC need to buy the movie rights to her life?

Yes, it can, and, no, it doesn’t - so long as NBC sticks to the facts.

File this under “Things I Can’t Remember How I Learned but Have Often Been Handy to Know”:

Bananas like the weather
At the tropical equator
So never ever put one
In the refrigerator.

All that time spent in Model United Nations in high school did not go completely to waste. It only took me about two minutes to complete this map of the Middle East game. Bahrain and Armenia threw me for a while there, but I got them eventually. This is really a great teaching tool. I’d be interested in learning how long it would take the average 20-something in the U.S. to complete a game like this of the 50 states.

Double-Take Thursday!
Last Kiss / Soldier of Love - Pearl Jam

If You Don’t Start Drinkin’ (I’m Gonna Leave) - George Thorogood & the Destroyers

Got My Own Thing Now - Squirrel Nut Zippers

This One - from Paul McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt

In-depth reporting from Staples.com:
The Refrigerator: A Source of Workplace Stress

So these two cows are out in a field, chewing the cud.

One of them looks over and says, “So … what do you make of all this ‘mad cow disease’ nonsense?”
[click to continue...]