Identifying Earth

Judging from the complete lack of guesses on the last four entries in the Unidentified Earth series, and to judge from the lack of response when I mentioned closing down the series last week, I assume that the series has run its course. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever, right?

Anyway, to give away the last four entries: UI 69 is Chimney Rock in Nebraska. UI 70 is Newgrange, the ancient building in Ireland that aligns with the sun on the solstices; UI 71 is Taughannock Falls, near Ithaca, NY; and UI 72 is the B&O Warehouse beyond the right field wall at Camden Yards in Baltimore, MD.

And there we have it. Thanks for playing, folks!

Labels: Unidentified Earth

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness Linkage

I don't have much by way of weirdness for this week, but I do have some linkage to offload at clearance prices, so here we go!

:: The "Cultural Anniversary" thing is gearing up for the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but there's a mildly-less-important 30th anniversary today, an anniversary that marked a major shift in pop culture history. Thirty years have passed since Disco Demolition Night.

:: One of the niche sports you don't hear much about at all, even at Olympic time, is kayaking. You certainly never hear about Extreme Kayaking. To that end, here's an article about Extreme Kayaking. What is extreme kayaking? It's doing things like kayaking over waterfalls -- some up to 100 feet in height. (To envision a 100-foot waterfall, the American Falls at Niagara vary between 70 and 100 feet from brink to the pile of rocks at the bottom. The Horseshoe Falls, by comparison, are more than 170 feet high.) I used to do a bit of kayaking, in my youth, but I never came near to being proficient enough to run any kind of waterfall, and the largest waterfall I ever saw that people would occasionally run was the Ohiopyle Falls on the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania. Those falls tower at eighteen feet in height, and even at that, I remember looking at them and wondering how on Earth any paddler could run them. Running a fall that's half the height of Niagara? The mind reels!

(This also reminds me that I have an unfinished short story about a pair of kayakers that I should finish one of these days, just as soon as I figure out how to end it.)

:: James Wolcott surveys one implication of the proliferation of digital media: that our media will become more and more private.

In the same car is another, older woman—do men not read anymore? (Seinfeld’s Jerry, defensively: “I read.” Elaine: “Books, Jerry”)—holding up a Kindle at an angle to catch the light. Unless you were an elf camped on her shoulder, what she was reading was hoarded from view, an anonymous block of pixels on a screen, making it impossible to identify its content and to surmise the state of her inner being, erotic proclivities, and intellectual caliber. She might be reading Alice Munro, patron saint of short-story writers, or some James Patterson sack of chicken feed—how dare she disguise her download from our prying eyes! And reading an e-book on an iPhone, that’s truly unsporting. It goes the other way as well. How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

I love it when people notice the cover of a book I'm reading and either comment on it or ask about it; likewise, I tend to be one of those people who will crane my neck to see what someone nearby is reading, on the off chance that it's something I know well and love. "Oh my!" I'd say. "Isn't that Locke Lamora a scream?" Or something like that. Oh well.

:: I've been meaning to link this for a few weeks but keep forgetting. The annual Bulwer-Lytton contest happened recently, honoring bad writing in the name of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a writer once prized but who is now seen as the poster child for overly purple prose. Jess Nevins makes the case that Bulwer-Lytton's negative legacy is unfair, and he makes his case pretty convincingly. (Not that I'd know, having never read Bulwer-Lytton.)

:: Huzzah! I finally managed to break through and win an installment of Becca's weekly movie quotes/pics quiz.



Of course, my win this week wasn't so much a function of me knowing more than her other readers, but my being in the right place at the right time. Her quizzes operate on a "who answers right first wins" plan, so if you happen to get there an hour after the quiz has been posted, you're almost certain to join the party after all the queries have been answered. This time, though, I was first. Yay, me! (One time I got there when no one else had commented, but in the course of typing in my responses in her comments thread, someone else managed to type faster than me and get their answer in first. Aieee!!! But this time I was first, fair and square.

:: I don't know anything about the Green Lantern, so do any of my readers have an opinion on Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern? I've only seen Reynolds in one thing -- the romantic comedy Definitely Maybe, in which I liked him while not finding him especially charismatic -- so I have no real opinion here.

:: Lard! Whiskey! Sexy! (I may have linked this before, but as I did not delete the bookmark if I did, here it is again.)

And with that I should be able to clean out my bookmarks a bit.

Labels: Burst of Weirdness, Geek Stuff, Movies, Sport

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Tasting Buffalo

Yesterday the Family and I made our annual trek into downtown Buffalo for the Taste of Buffalo festival. For those not from 'round here, this is a two-day food festival at which dozens of restaurants and purveyors of food set up shop and offer small sample-sized portions of their menus. Or rather, it used to mainly involve sample sizes; nowadays, many of the participating venues are offering either full-size portions or something between "sample size" and "full size". The result is that we came home much more full than we have in the past.

There's something of a balancing act to Taste of Buffalo. On the one hand, you want to try new things because you can attend year after year and never eat everything. On the other hand, you have old favorite dishes that you want to have year after year. So it was that we had the same slices of white pizza that we've had the last three years, and the same Caribbean Jerk Chicken that we've had the last eight years, and the same Italian ice for the Daughter and the same Anderson's ice cream for us that we've had for the last however-many years. But on the other side of the ledger, we had one joint's fried calimari (The Wife and I love us some calimari), another joint's ribs, and yet another joint's roasted turkey legs. (Of course, the turkey legs may not count as we always have those at the Sterling Renaissance Faire, and as fun as they are, a turkey leg's pretty much a turkey leg.) We also had the Chicken Wing Soup from Danny's, which The Daughter continues to pronounce as not quite as good as my Chicken Wing Soup. Huzzah!

The other thing different this year was the weather. In years past, Taste of Buffalo has tended to land on the first really hot weekend of the summer, but for some reason, this summer is stubbornly cooler than usual. (Fine by me; I hate hot weather.) Yesterday, though, the weather started out downright cruddy, with storms barreling through Buffalo during the first couple hours of the festival. We went down an hour later than usual, and we still got rained on quite a bit, despite our umbrellas. The rain stopped after we'd been there about an hour, and then it was merely overcast for a while, and eventually that, too, cleared on out. The nice effect of the weather was that it kept the crowd size down. The Taste can be immensely crowded when the weather is good, so it ended up being a lot nicer to attend yesterday, once the poor weather had vanished. It certainly cut down on a lot of the dumb behavior of Taste attendees. I also didn't notice any homeless people, who are usually haunting the peripheries of the Taste for begging purposes. Also, the last couple of years, one particular street corner has been the haunt of a fire-and-brimstone preacher dude, but I didn't see him, either.

In other thoughts, when I was looking for someplace to refill the water bottles we'd brought with us, I ended up inside Buffalo City Hall for the first time. I was of two minds of what I saw of the interior of the building: it's impressive enough, but it's really dark and grim in there, isn't it? Wow. The main interior has very high ceilings of stone and marble, with not a whole lot of light coming from the electric fixtures hanging from those ceilings. It was nice to see that big new building going up, though; they're erecting a new Federal courthouse in downtown Buffalo. New construction in downtown always makes me happy, even if directly opposite the new building is the Statler Tower, which is to be auctioned in August after the last owner, some Brit who sailed into town with lots of promises of spreading money around, ended up leaving without spreading any of that money. Oh well, life goes on in Buffalo, doesn't it?

Labels: Buffalo

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The Terror

For my second "Make Me Read!" poll, I offered a choice between two horror titles: The Terror by Dan Simmons, and It by Stephen King. I was sure that It would prevail, as it's been around for a couple of decades now and my sense of things is that the book is generally considered to be one of King's best, where The Terror is only a year old and thus doesn't have the reputation behind it that It does. Right? So, of course, The Terror was voted by my readers, by a fairly large margin out of the dozen votes cast (or thereabouts). The finally tally was something like 9-3 in favor of The Terror.

Of course, this whole reading-by-poll thing works out pretty well for me regardless, as I'm the one picking the two choices each time, so I'm guaranteeing that I'm still reading something that I actually want to read. Basically, the exercise serves to help me get through some of the indecision I often suffer when it comes time to choose a new book to read. That indecision can be even greater when I'm choosing what to read after finishing a book that I actually love a great deal, which is the case with all of this Guy Gavriel Kay re-reading that I'm doing along the way. So, as always, thanks to my readers!

And now, onto discussing The Terror.

I was about halfway through the book at one point when I was reading it whilst enjoying my lunch break at work, and a co-worker asked me what I was reading. "It's called The Terror," I replied. "It's about a group of sailors who, in the 1800s, are on one of those expeditions into the Arctic Ocean to seek out the Northwest Passage. Their ship is frozen in and they are marooned up there, on the cold ice, not entirely knowing where they are. Supplies are short, winter is coming, there are the conflicts of personality that you would expect, and to make matters worse, there seems to be a creature of the supernatural variety stalking the crew and killing them horribly. The book is told from a number of viewpoints, and some of those viewpoints are told months or years before others, so the book hops around in time a bit."

My co-worker considered this, and then she said: "So it's like a steampunk-Arctic version of LOST, then?"

"Huh," I said. "I guess it is. Strange, because I don't like LOST."

In the 1840s, two ships set out from England – the Erebus and the Terror -- on an expedition to find the ever-elusive Northwest Passage, which expedition leader Sir John Franklin is convinced can still be found, somewhere amidst the thousands of islands of Arctic North America. Of course, everything that can go wrong eventually does, and the story quickly becomes one of those "man against nature" stories, where nature wins without so much as breaking a sweat. The two ships are frozen in ice in a place where the crews aren't even entirely sure where they are, and that's when "the thing" starts coming at them – an immense monster who seems to appear out of nowhere and kills men sometimes without a sound, and other times with a great deal of sound, mainly shrieking followed by the crunching of crushing bone. Add to the mix the arrival of a mysterious Eskimo woman whose tongue has been removed at the root, dwindling rations, a crew that is partly mutinous, and you have the makings of a pretty amazing tale.

What was even more interesting to me was something I didn't learn until I was nearly three-quarters of the way through the book: The Terror is based in fact. There really was en expedition on the dates indicated in the book, where two ships named Erebus and Terror were lost in the wilds of the Arctic. It seems that Simmons has taken the historical event and created his own narrative around it, which is an interesting approach. Sufficiently little is known of the fates of the sailors of the ships – no one survived, and scrappy evidence left behind is all that allows us to know what probably happened to the crew – that Simmons is able to work with a fairly broad brush here, and work he does, creating one of the most suspenseful stories I have read in a long time. The book is, by turns, harrowing, claustrophobic, irritating (Sir John is one of those characters you just want to be able to reach into the book and throttle), and, toward the end, downright mesmerizing.

I can't recommend The Terror highly enough.

Labels: Books

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The trains on the plain mainly avoid the rain

What this blog needs is, quite clearly, more trains. So, first up, one of my dream vacations: riding trains through Switzerland.



Trains show up in Hayao Miyazaki's films, such as this from Spirited Away:



Here's the world's highest railway, which runs in Tibet:



For more exciting viewing, check out what happens when a train and a tornado meet each other. It doesn't look too bad at first...until you realize that Sir Isaac Newton hasn't had his say just yet....



Along with that, here's Richard Feynman explaining why trains stay on their tracks:



And why not a model railroad layout based on Star Wars?



Trains are very cool. The world should have more trains.

Labels: Geek Stuff, Science

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Something for Thursday

Decades before movies like Ben Hur, Spartacus, and Cleopatra, there was the opera Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. Here, in a concert presentation with ballet interlude, is the Triumphal March (it's in two parts owing to length of YouTube video constraints, but the break comes at a decent musical spot, in any case -- hit start on the second video just as the first one ends). Note the herald trumpets during the famous second theme:

Labels: Something For Thursday

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MY son realized!!!

There's a blog called Texts From Last Night which solicits the submission of text messages, which are then posted bereft of identifying marks or context. The result is often humorous, but sometimes creepy or head-scratching in nature. One recent entry put me in mind of something:

(206): Sometimes I get depressed that my son is too young to understand how hot his babysitter is.

This reminded me of Little Quinn. With his degree of disability, Medicare provided for in-home nursing care for him. This care, while accompanied by more than a few headaches in getting it all set up (since we were literally turning our home into a workplace, there were certain OSHA-related concerns we had to think about, for example), was a lifesaver for us, allowing me to work my full work schedule along with The Wife working hers. We had several nurses, provided by an independent agency with their charges paid by Medicare, who would come into the apartment and care for Little Quinn for several hours each day.

Each of the nurses loved Little Quinn; it helped that he was a cute little guy. (Man, did a lot of girls who will be eighteen in 2022 get screwed by Little Quinn's lot in life; he would have been a heartbreaker.) The nurses were all older women, mostly in their 40s, except for one: she was a young woman in her 20s, with long blonde hair and a figure that...well, let's just say that she was not unpleasant to behold, OK? I honestly don't recall her name (in fact, I only recall one nurse by name, although one whose name I just don't recall for the life of me does shop in The Store from time to time) so for our purposes we'll call her "Krissy".

Many days when I would get home, if any of the other nurses was in charge, Little Quinn would either be on the floor sleeping or sitting in his chair receiving a feeding or something similar. However, on the days when Krissy was our nurse-on-duty, every time I got home, Little Quinn would be in her arms, and invariably she would tell me how she could not go more than five minutes without holding him because that was literally the only way she could get him to not fuss for her. The other nurses? He'd hang out in his chair and be quiet as a clam. Krissy the cute blonde who looked nice in jeans and had a tattoo in the small of her back? Little Quinn insisted on being held by her.

Yeah. I think that kid knew exactly how hot his babysitter was.

Labels: Daily Life Stuff

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Twenty-five cents (part 5)

Oops, I seem to have once again gone quite some time without updating this series...I gotta quit spending so much time on Facebook and looking for food-related porn. Anyway, let's continue rating the Statehood Quarters!

Kansas

I can't be mean about a quarter that features a grazing buffalo. It's a simple design that works well. (And to be honest, if any state was going to include their motto, I'd have picked Kansas, since I like their motto - As astra per aspera, "To the stars through hardship" – a great deal.

Kansas's quarter: $0.19

South Dakota

Is the South Dakota quarter the only coin in US history to feature the heads of more than one President? It might be, with Washington on the face, and Mount Rushmore on the reverse. I just wish they'd gone with Mt. Rushmore by itself, and not felt the need to include a bird and the plants rising up the side. Those feel like committee additions.

South Dakota's quarter: $0.21

North Dakota

I look at this and almost wonder if North Dakota decided to teach Kansas a lesson: "You put a bison on your quarter? Well, we're gonna put two on ours! Heh!" Still, this is another favorite of mine. I like the sun rising in the background and the rocky form of one of the Badlands there. (However, they could have been perverse and put Marge Gunderson puking in the snow-filled ditch on their quarter...but then, most of the movie's action takes place in Minnesota, so that probably wouldn't work.)

North Dakota's quarter: $0.22

Nebraska

Maybe it's all those grade school units on the Oregon Trail I had to sit through when we were living in Portland in my youth, but the design of this quarter really makes me think back to those stories of hardship my teachers used to tell us in those studies. This is a wonderful design; I love the stagecoach making its way past Chimney Rock, and the bright, full sun hanging above it all. It's just a bummer for Nebraska that it's chiefly known for being a place people have to pass through to get to other places.

Nebraska's quarter: $0.23

Wyoming

Well...er...well...aww geez, I hate saying this, but...I hate this quarter. With a passion. I can't believe this is what Wyoming came up with. I look at this quarter and I think, "Really?" We're talking about a state that has Yellowstone National Park in it, and Devil's Tower, and the Grand Tetons; instead, they came up with a silhouette of a cowboy ridin' a buckin' bronco. And not even a picture of the cowboy, just a featureless outline. And what does the cowboy have to do with the inscription ("The Equality State")? I can't imagine the creative process that led to this, the most boring quarter in the entire program. Ugh. This is like the work turned in by the kid in the class who would do the exact minimum amount of required work to avoid receiving a Zero on his assignment.

Wyoming's quarter: $0.02

Montana

The inscription "Big Sky Country", and some of Montana's many mountains, rendered small at the bottom of the quarter, in order to leave room for the looming skull of a dead bull! This quarter always makes me laugh a little, which I'm sure isn't the intended effect. I just find the whole Western motif of dead cow skulls to be a bit funny. I'm not sure that if I was tasked with choosing a design for a quarter honoring one of our country's largest and most beautiful states, I'd go with the bleached bones of a picked-over carcass.

Montana's quarter: $0.13

Next time we'll finish up the fifty states. Huzzah!

Labels: Statehood Quarters

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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Which song was better: "Beat It" or "Thriller"?

Labels: Wednesday Dichotomy

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That oughta be the shortest news feed ever....

I was just on AOL.com to check e-mail, and here's a screenshot of the welcome screen that greeted me, with something that caught my eye:



I'm not sure what the utility of that is supposed to be; after all, we're not really expecting a sudden change in his condition, right?

Labels: Unclassifiable

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Head, meet desk.

Here's a state legislator in Arizona opining on something or other:



Note that when she says twice that Earth is 6000 years old, nobody says anything. Nobody gives an audible "Wait, what?!" Nobody says, "Oh my God, are you an idiot." Everybody just sits there. Unbelievable.

Labels: Science

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The Sucking of Blood!

Christopher Moore is a favorite author of mine, but he's also an author I haven't much read in the last couple of years, for one reason or another. I adored Fluke, but I was less impressed with The Stupidest Angel (although that book, too, was amusing). I realized suddenly that I hadn't read Moore in a long time, so I decided to read one of his more recent books that I haven't got to, You Suck: A Love Story, which is a sequel to his near-classic Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. But I hadn't read Bloodsucking Fiends in many years, either, so I wouldn't have been entirely up to speed on the state of affairs at the outset of the sequel, so I decided to read them back to back. The verdict? Fiends is still a terrific book, and while You Suck has a lot of its virtues, it ultimately struck me as a bit of an unnecessary book.

In Fiends, young Tommy Flood, all of nineteen years old, arrives in San Francisco from his small town home in Indiana, having decided that San Fran is where you go when you're an aspiring writer. (He's already picked out his "official" writing name, C. Thomas Flood.) He gets a job as the night manager at a local grocery store (hmmm, I like this guy already), the guy who has to supervise the crew of ne'er-do-wells who basically restock the store overnight. Their signature pastime on these long overnight shifts is turkey bowling, which is exactly what it sounds like: they set up pins, such as 2-liter pop bottles, and then launch frozen turkeys across the floor at them. (I would be lying if I didn't admit, as a grocery store employee, to wanting to do this. We've also speculated on setting up a trebuchet outside the back of the store and using it to launch turkeys up and over the building to rain down on people in the parking lot. We're a weird bunch.)

Anyway, Tommy meets a girl pretty soon, a very pretty girl named Jody who has just had the misfortune of being made into a vampire by a much older, and more cynical, vampire who plans to kill her anyway after just a few days. Soon Tommy takes on another job, as Jody's personal assistant; he does for her all of the things that require day-time activity, which she obviously can't indulge because she's a vampire.

Meanwhile, a couple of cops are tailing Jody because they think she may have been involved in a murder; also along for the ride is a homeless bum who calls himself the Emperor of San Francisco. All of this stirs together into a terrifically entertaining story that ends on a slightly bittersweet note, and then I figured these characters were done. So when Moore returned to them in You Suck, I was curious. It's always a danger to provide a sequel to a work that doesn't really need one, and I think Moore fell victim to that danger here.

You Suck begins with Tommy saying those very words to Jody, because she's just decided, without asking first, that their lives together would be a lot better if they were both vampires, so she does Tommy the service of turning him into a vampire. He doesn't take terribly kindly to this at first, although he gradually warms to the idea, even as his former mates at the grocery store are now planning to kill him (they think he's a vampire, see), and even as the vampire villain from Fiends is released from...where he was imprisoned in the first book. (I don't want to give it away.) Hilarity and hijinks ensue.

Reading You Suck felt odd to me. I read it back-to-back with Fiends, and while with some sequels you're happy to re-encounter your old friends, so to speak, Fiends ended for me on such a satisfying note that I just didn't see the need for this story, and as I read it, I was never able to really shake that impression. The book literally feels as though Moore knew he needed to write a book and decided to revisit some earlier characters, so I found You Suck to be, largely, a disappointment.

Of course, a lesser Christopher Moore book is still a Christopher Moore book, so it's still worth the trip. Think of it as a lesser episode or two of a favorite comedy show on teevee, maybe one of those episodes of The Office that focuses on Phyllis or Oscar. It's still full of some wicked laughs and sharp writing:

It turned out that superhuman vampire strength came in handy when shaving a thirty-five pound cat. After a couple of false starts, which had them chasing Chet the huge shaving-cream-covered cat around the loft, they discovered the value of duct tape as a grooming tool. Because of the tape, they weren't able to shave his feet. When they were finished, Chet looked like a bug-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots – the feline love child of Golem and Doddy the house elf. [sic]

So, I strongly recommend Bloodsucking Fiends, but only regularly recommend You Suck. (Even though it is fun sitting in a public place holding up a book whose front cover reads, in big letters, You Suck.)

Labels: Books

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Winyum

WNYMedia.net has been around for a while, under several different incarnations. At first the site seemed to be a hub for Western New York area bloggers, but as it grew it became apparent that the powers-that-be over there envisioned something bigger than a mere blogging hub; they wanted to become an all-purpose online media entity, with varying styles of content over and above mere blogging. They've relaunched several times (the less said about the brown background, the better), and they've just relaunched again, with a much improved look and organization on the main page. They've also allied themselves with two other area media entities, alt-weekly paper Artvoice and a local radio station. This is the first incarnation of WNYM that really starts to look like what they've been working toward for a long time. Congrats to Mark Odien and company!

Labels: Buffalo

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Sentential Links #176

Linking the linkable....

:: Let me say that I’ve really enjoyed this rare Friday-off three day weekend. I think it’s been a lot more fun than your traditional Monday-off three dayer. I think it’s the difference between a weekend that psychologically feels like it has two Saturdays and a weekend that psychologically feels like it has two Sundays. (That's pretty much the whole post, but I agree, which is why whenever I take long weekends from work I generally try to do Friday off rather than Monday. It just feels more like time off that way -- a day off and then my regular weekend is still there, which somehow feels more satisfying. I try to take four day weekends once in a while, although I can't do that nearly as often as I would like.)

:: If we use grinning, doomed Jeffy as a reference point, the monsters in the lowermost chambers have to be at least the size of a terrier. I’m sure all four of the children will make tasty treats for the Queen of this awful colony. (This is a first! I had the exact same thought when I read Family Circus in the paper yesterday: "Wow, the family's going to be eaten by Ants of Unusual Size! Awesome!")

:: It’s nice to know that the average sized, over forty, mother of five, grandmother of one rack can stack up to the 20 and 30-something mom bloggers out there. Thank you! (Yes, I voted. What can I say?)

:: That's why the song's so spare, why so much of nothing is going on in the opening strains: The music's become subservient to the video. (Interesting take on the Michael Jackson phenomenon.)

:: The question is whether changing enough to survive is really surviving. If you’re not who you were, aren’t you gone?

:: I am not unaware of the very real and legitimate problems that must be dealt with. But I am seeing them as just a piece of the puzzle, the shadow side of all that is light in my life. Without the dark side, I would never fully savor the sweetness of all I have that is good. So in a way, I can even be grateful for the bumps...while I do not eagerly invite them I recognize those are often my most powerful teachers in one fashion or another.

All for this week....

Labels: Sentential Links

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A metablog note....

I don't have a new Unidentified Earth entry for this week, and I've been considering bagging the series as I'm finding it harder to come up with puzzlers that work as puzzlers that aren't diabolically difficult. In any event, no entry this week. I just didn't get to it.

Labels: Meta-blog

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: Not actually "weird", but since I often treat this post as a dumping-ground for all-purpose linkage, I was surfing through the LiveJournal of author Scott Lynch (of The Lies of Locke Lamora), and found this nearly-three-year-old post in which he rants about media fawning over Brett Favre:

ESPN's Monday Night Football team was egregious about this during the Pack/Eagles game, too. Picture this, now: Donovan McNabb throws 178 passes for 9,762 yards and thirty-six touchdowns. He finds Osama bin Ladin during halftime and snaps his neck with his bare hands. One of his errant passes lands in the stands and touches a small boy with leukemia, curing his cancer instantly. The score is 593-6.

Green Bay is starting from somewhere in their own locker room with six seconds left in the fourth quarter. They have sixty-five yards to go for a first down on their own 2. And still, the announcers say things like "Don't count this team out yet, because the guy holding the ball is Brett Favre!"

Heh.

:: Speaking of football, I was feeling a bit more charitable toward Michael Jackson, following his untimely passing last week -- but not anymore. Grrrrr! (via)

:: Bad Paintings of Barack Obama. Keep refreshing -- some of these are hilarious!

:: Gordon Ramsay swears at you!

More next week!

Labels: Burst of Weirdness

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McNair

While the act of consummate sporting evil that was Homerun Throwback had me loathing the Tennessee Titans for a while, I never disliked their quarterback, Steve McNair, at all. He was just too classy of a player, with toughness that you don't see all that often anymore. I remember when he was being drafted, hoping somehow that the Bills might swing some kind of big trade to move up in the draft to get him (at the time it was clear that Jim Kelly was down to his last year or two), and frankly, the last twelve years of Bills history would certainly look different had they done something like that. (I don't recall any actual trade talk that year; it was just wishful thinking on my part.)

McNair was found shot to death yesterday. They don't know what happened yet. He had retired from the NFL a year ago, but even so -- this was a fine player, one of the best of the last fifteen years. Damn.

Labels: Football, Passages

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America v. 233.0

Happy birthday to America.

Labels: Unclassifiable

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