Author: AirBeagle (S P)

It’s somewhat amusing to see that John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel that was on Stanford’s Summer Reading List for incoming freshmen when I was getting ready to enter college, is still a fixture—this year it’s on the UC Berkeley Summer Reading List. (Oddly, Stanford doesn’t seem to have its reading list—if...

An Okie brings new meaning to the term ‘Activist Judge:’ ‘While seated on the bench, an Oklahoma judge used a male enhancement pump, shaved and oiled his nether region, and pleasured himself, state officials charged yesterday in a petition to remove the jurist. According to the below complaint filed by the Oklahoma Attorney General, Donald...

I’d never really listened to the lyrics of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” before (it was playing in the Village Apothecary when I went in yesterday afternoon). Not bad for a pop song, but what unbelievably irritating lyrics: “I’m gonna soak up the sun/Gonna tell everyone/To lighten up.” God, the combination of Pollyanna-ish reverie...

Lollapalooza 2004 has been cancelled this year due to crappy ticket sales. Perry Farrell, in a message posted on the festival’s official site, wrote, “It is with heart gripped despair that I inform you of Lollapalooza’s disbandment for the summer of 2004.” Yes, well. It seems that unless you’re a crowd-pleasing baby-boom act like The...

People like to refer to places like San Francisco, Austin, Ann Arbor, Madison and Berkeley, etc., et al, as leftist bubbles … Ann Arbor is often described as something like ‘50 square miles surrounded by reality,’ or some such nonsense. Sometimes, it appears there might just be something behind it, I must admit. Case in...

June is much busier in ASquared than May, I’ve noticed. Besides the usual skateboarders and bike riders and summer students, there is now also an abundance of elderly polyester-wearing gawkers making their way through the arches and along the pathways of central campus. The immigrant cab drivers are now waiting for fares outside Michigan Union...

It’s a gorgeous, temperate evening. The beagle and I walked down the street and just sat on the lawn for quite awhile, watching things go by. In the distance, you can clearly hear the UM band blasting away at Hail to the Victors at the practice field. The summer is starting off beautifully.

So how do you like our new clothes? Much better, I hope. Here are some notes about the new design/location: You might not have noticed, but our URL is now asquared.airbeagle.NET; thanks to our new Textdrive hosts, I can finally, without extra cost, use the .net domain I’ve been paying for for two years. Since...

Bill Clinton: ‘I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski.’ George W. Bush: ‘I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture.’

Pardon the mess around here, but we’re getting very close to finishing this one off. As of today, you can read the main posts, but other things may be wonkiy or not work. I still have to work on archives and comments. But I’m getting there! Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Yesterday, I left work and it was raining, and it was even approaching cold out. Glad I wore a long-sleeved shirt. Today, on the way to work, it was back to high 70s and high humidity. Glad I got my hair cut today because longer hair and humidity don’t go so well together. Oh, well....

Re the recent cicada infestation, the eminent arbiters of the New York Times have pontifically decreed that it was all a huge hypefest: This article is based on the latest available scientific information, which is: If you haven’t seen your Brood X cicadas by now, you probably aren’t going to for another 17 years. Complaints...

Fair warning after visiting two Targets in two days and being fed up: Next time I’m in a store and I hear some fool idiot shouting on her cell phone screaming, ‘Can you hear me now?’ I shall do violence to that cell phone. Ain’t nobody gonna be able to hear nobody now after I...

A nice day (again). Perfect for a drive out to Matthaei Botanical Gardens, where, as you can see in the photos in the previous post, I finally got my cicada fix. We saw tons of cicada wings littering the pathways, a couple of dead cicadas, and we encountered one actual live cicada sitting on a...

An incredibly beautiful day ….. and surprisingly temperate given the last several days of high humidity. The most amazing thing I saw today was outside the kitchen window, along with the usual array of unidentifiable birds hopping around in the grass: a bright red cardinal on the telephone wire, standing out against the slate-blue sky....

Reading it so you don’t have to ….. Laura Miller thinks I’m OK – You’re OK and Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, which were on 85% of the bookshelves in California in the 1970s, were “brainy and challenging … by contemporary standards.” (Relevance? The former is being reissued in paperback next month.)...

Very humid today (though not that hot). But I have a feeling this is just the beginning. The real pressure-cooker heat days haven’t even started yet. It’s days like this that places like Juneau start looking attractive.

I think we’re finally getting a handle on this TextDrive/TextPattern thing and it’s beyond cool, once they get the jams kicked out. Now that TextPattern is working again for the most part and the servers are reasonably stable (momentary e-mail hiccup was tonight’s problem), I was able to add the other airbeagle domains that I’ve...

I was wrong when I wrote a while back “Nothing in Washtenaw.” Apparently the cicadas are all over Superior Township. Weird.

There’s a thread over at LISNews about Bloomsbury and James Joyce and Ulysses and the whole hundred-year mark thing. I’m greatly enjoying the history. It’s a nice break from non-stop Reagan worship and electioneering news. But I have to say that, although I had a brief moment a week or so ago when I thought...

We’re back, it seems. Thanks to some hard effort by David in San Francisco and advice from Jason at TextDrive, the Beagle is back. Did you miss us?

A hot, humid, sauna-like day is just turning interesting … they announced a tornado warning for Washtenaw County and blew the storm sirens in Ann Arbor. Radar indicates a possible tornado 14 miles west of Chelsea, moving east at 35 mph. I tried to call Frank at work, but the UM Libraries are evacuating staff...

There will be some sorta higgledy-piggledyness on airbeagle.com today and maybe into tomorrow; I’m switching the site to a more sane and less snarky, less corporate hosting provider. Had enough of LunarPages … their trashing of my Movable Type installation and subsequent arrogance about it, plus their ‘maybe Textpattern is okay and maybe it’s not’...

There will be some sorta higgledy-piggledyness on airbeagle.com today and maybe into tomorrow; I’m switching the site to a more sane and less snarky, less corporate hosting provider. Had enough of LunarPages … their trashing of my Movable Type installation and subsequent arrogance about it, plus their ‘maybe Textpattern is okay and maybe it’s not’...

The funny thing is that the Ann Arbor News ran an article today indicating that the first Washtenaw cicada sightings have occurred: The emergence of the periodical cicada in the past week in northeast Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor Township is the first sighting in the state, according to Michigan State University entomology professor Howard...

From the ‘Sorry we tortured your uncle, raped your wife, blew your kid’s legs off and destroyed your home and livelihood, but at least we’re giving you cheap gas!’ Department: We’re paying $2.09 in Ann Arbor for a gallon of gas this week. Meanwhile, « Baghdad drivers are paying 5 CENTS a gallon, » thanks...

No cicadas in Philadelphia this year. The Philadelphia Inquirer theorizes that it’s possible that an increase in concrete in areas where cicadas may have laid their eggs in the past 17 years may account for the absence, but an entomologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia says that the outbreaks of cicadas were...

The hagiography being written (presumably with an eye to sainthood and a spot on Rushmore, as well as his name on everything that will sit still and some things that won’t) claims the dearly departed had the highest approval ratings and was the most beloved president of modern times.’ Facts: The highest approval ratings recorded...

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...

A brave statement for a librarian to be making these days: A children’s book depicting a masked burglar pointing a gun at a woman will remain in Evanston Public Library despite complaints that the image is too violent for young readers. “A good library collection should have something to offend everyone,” said Jan Bojda, head...