Month: June 2004

Post-skunking, the dog is asleep here in the basement with me, exhausted but otherwise okay. The spraying was unpleasant, but it could have been much worse; it seems that the bugger only got the side of the poor beagle’s face, although his harness was drenched with spray and needed to be tossed outdoors. The dog…

Tonight’s lesson, boys and girls: When the geriatric dog suddenly comes up off the floor like a rocket and runs over to the screen door, fur a-bristling, and howling like a banshee, don’t simply shine a flashlight around the yard and assume the source of the to-do is gone and then allow aforementioned howling beagle…

And then there’s bulldozing the library as a solution to life’s problems.

According to Cicada Mania, cicadas in southern Ohio and Indiana, eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Long Island ….. still nothing in Washtenaw. The weather’s supposed to warm up significantly this coming week, though (apparently it will be over 90 by Wednesday, yuck), so we’ll see.

Amazing (at least to those of us like me who have not yet figured out that phones are more than phones) but true.

Goodspeed is signing off. Too bad. I’m not alone, I know, in saying that I’ll miss his blog.

….. would Jennifer Granholm fall (for nine minutes) for a radio “morning crew” stunt in which the person supposedly on the other end of the line was Ahnold Schwarzenegger but really wasn’t. [Courtesy whatevs.]

No strange critter sightings today, but it was mordantly amusing (then completely irritating, then vaguely humiliating) to stand waiting for over 15 minutes for a Link bus to come by. They’re supposed to come by “every 8 to 10 minutes,” which is never true, but this was ridiculous. After a certain juncture you feel like…

Ann Arbor didn’t make the first wave of Cool Cities grants; Ypsilanti, however, did. Hearty congratulations, Ypsi.

Stolen from I Love Books: Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary [1911] Greil Marcus: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’N’Roll Music [1975] David Nasaw: The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst [2000] Claire Tomalin: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self [2002] Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass [1855, 1856, 1860 …. ] This is not the…

They were in the back of the bus this afternoon, two off-duty AATA drivers, exchanging war stories about belligerent passengers, snotty passengers, or moronic passengers who ring the stop bell and then change their minds at the last possible second as the bus is pulling over for the stop, but mostly shaking their heads and…

Michigan’s full of them. What was that strange, frightened critter (light brown, about the size of a small dog but very rodent-like, resembling a squirrel on unbelievable doses of steroids) I saw dashing across the north end of central campus this afternoon, stopping and starting and eventually dashing across State under a bush and barely…

Almost a month later and still no cicadas ….. A quick check of Cicada Mania shows there have been sightings in Cincinnati and southern Indiana, but nothing here yet. There is a moderately amusing photo at Cicada Mania of a cicada chasing George W. Bush, though.

Question of the Day while subbing at one of Ann Arbor’s two high schools: ‘Hey, Mr. Sub Man, Sir? What’s a Baroness?’

A story on Michigan Radio a few minutes ago mentioned that this past month was the rainiest May in southeast Michigan on record—8.6 inches (the previous record was apparently 8.4 back in 1943). It’s sure sunny today, though. For the time being, anyway. (Always have to throw that disclaimer in.) Update: According to the Ann…

As Steve mentioned, XM Radio had a Memorial Day special on one of its channels in which they played all 253 #1 songs from 1970-1979. It was cheesy, nostalgic fun, a nice escape. Some of the songs I hadn’t heard in years and years and years. We turned on the radio a little late—we came…

Ann Arbor blogger Edgewise has an interesting self-debate over what is possibly the ultimate bugaboo of politics these days, abortion. He brings up some very good points. My own position has been, as usual, to straddle the fence in the middle. Abortions should be safe and very, very rare, but legal. Alternatives should be easily…