Embryonic stem cells (here we go). Kerry says he respects the question and feeling, invokes Nancy Reagan and Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve. We can do it ethically. Embryos from fertility clinics not from abortions are available. It is respecting life to reach for that cure. Bush has chosen a policy that makes that impossible. Emperor whines a justification...

Defend the Orwell Act, Boy Emperor … Bush says your rights aren’t being watered down. Every action being taken against terrorists requires court order and scrutiny. (?) Justification, oversimplication, lie, idiotic statement, blah blah blah. TERRA!!!! It doesn’t abridge your rights. Kerry reponds. Republicans want the act changed. Many folks are concerned about it. Inspector general of Justice Dept. found...

Manufacturing competitiveness: Kerry talks about ways to be competitive, cites examples of administration failure … incentives to move offshore. Tax benefits for companies that stay. Manufacturing and new jobs credit. Cost of healthcare is hurting business more than anything. Boo-YEAH! Education is important … especially science and technology … energy independence … great entrepreneurial spirit to free ourselves from mideast...

Emperor on the environment: Off road diesel engines … increase wetlands … refurbish inner city sore spots … Clear Skies Orwellian Initiative … conservation reserve program … Healthy Forests Orwellian Initiative … hydrogen auto technology … unClean Coal Orwellian … I’m a good steward of the land … LOUD GUFFAW!!! Kerry: Emperor isn’t living in reality. Don’t throw labels around,...

Explain your spending and lack of vetoes. Emperor: We have a deficit because of Clinton recession. It ain’t my fault. We’re at war. TRIFECTA!!! Money, ammunitions and pay! Security! We have an obligation to spend that money. Everybody got tax relief. Trickle down!!! Voodoo economics! Haven’t vetoed anything because we’re working together (?). I won’t shortchange our troops. Kerry responds....

What about Trial Lawyer Edwards? Kerry says he and John are for tort reform, look it up. Is it a problem? Yes. Do we need to fix it? Yes. But it’s less than 1% of the total cost of healthcare. $3,500 up in Missouri, 64%. 5,000,000 have lost healthcare under Bush. I have specific plans. It can happen, but we...

Why did you block importation of Canadian drugs to save 40-60%? Bush: I want you to be safe and protected and all huggly-wuggly and safety-wafety. Slams the third world. Pisses off his Big Pharma buddies by weakly touting generic drugs. Shillls for drug card scam. Blathers on and on. Kerry: Notes that the Emperor four years ago was asked same...

Why no more terrorist attacks and what will you do about our safety? Kerry notes that Emperor has told us it’s not a question of if but of when. These people wait and plot and plan. I agree we have to go after them. I can do it far more effectively. We need the best intelligence. We need better cooperation...

The Emperor on the draft: Rumors on the internet: We’re not going to have a draft period. Volunteer army is best to fight 21st century wars. We don’t need as much manpower on Korean peninsula. I can’t follow him any longer. He’s off the rails, making no sense. But promises no draft while he’s the emperor. Kerry responds that he...

Asks Kerry about Iran. Iran is a huge threat and you can’t just rely on sanctions, notes that threat has grown while Bush was preoccupied in Iraq. Talks about North Korea’s capabilities and notes Emperor’s failure to engage. We were safer before he came to office. We have to join with the Brits and French and Germans and lead the...

A woman’s family travelled overseas and noted intensity of hatred to US … Emperor says, ‘We’ve got a great country and I recognize I’ve made some decisions …’ Invokes Reagan and the Cold War. He made decisions because it was best for our security. Slaps Arafat. Slaps Europe. It was unpopular but the right thing to do. Democracy. Blah blah....

To Kerry: Proceeding with same plan in Iraq? Kerry responds of course not … trots out Republicans who oppose the way things are being handled in Iraq. Attacks vociferously the current way things are going in Iraq. Talks about training troops faster and getting allies back in the game. Bush says ‘From tyranny to elections! Iraqis love to be free!’...

To the Emperor: ‘What about the whole WMDs in Iraq thing … is this a reasonable justification?’ Each situation is different … you have to use diplomacy first. [Lying sack of …] From there on, he’s just repeating, ‘9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!’...

First question to Kerry: Do you have a reply to the Fascists calling you a flip-flopper? Answer: Bush is running a campaign of mass deception. No duh. His answer encompasses a whole lot of ground. The Emperor just repeats his campaign stuff. ‘He’s wishy-washy because he is.’ Pathetic.

Listening to the Town Hall debate on CSPAN Radio on XM … and thanking Good God Almighty that I don’t have television in my home.

I’m on way in a couple of hours to get an MRI done of my hands and wrists. Yes, in a couple of hours. My MRI is scheduled for 00:20 … that’s 20 minutes after MIDNIGHT. Weirdest time for a medical test I’ve ever heard of. It’s been scheduled for over a month and I wasn’t given much of a...

My government docs class took a field trip to Lansing this morning to see the Library of Michigan. (No pics, because I thought there would be security checkpoints, which, surprisingly, there weren’t.) Very handsome newish (1990 or so) building, impressive collection, a cool assortment of rare books, sharp librarians. We didn’t see much else of Lansing other than a few...

The start of October last year was unseasonably cold, although according to the National Weather Service, on October 8 last year it got up to 80 degrees. So far, this year seems to have been much more on the Indian summer side of the ledger. No rain yet this month, and it’s supposed to get up into the high 70s...

Time is on my mind. Time is always on your mind when you get to be a certain age, and while I’ve always been obsessed to a greater or lesser extent with the passage of time (when I was in college I kept tally of where I’d been on a given exact date five and ten years previously and made...

School is very busy; I’m not feeling quite as crushed with the volume of labor that I was last term, but that’s not to say I’m coasting by any stretch. The schedule I have, I think, is what’s kicking me up one side and down the other. I have classes in the evening from 5-8 twice a week (Monday and...

I spoke too soon when I said autumn was stomping in; it’s more like a tentative creep. The temps are noticeably lower each night. We had to drag in Steve’s pepper plants from the patio last night because the temperature was expected to drop to 29 degrees. But this morning, while chilly, was not as chilly as yesterday morning, and...

Seems that a misprinted Michigan absentee ballot for one precinct made some news in the last few days. Lordy is 2-Nov gonna be wacky or what?

An undergrad talking to her friend on the bus tonight: “And she was like, ‘You told me to shut up!’ and I was like, ‘I tell all my friends to shut up!’”

I was startled to hear the opening synth line from Prince’s “1999” as a ringtone on a cellphone this afternoon. I guess Prince has no copyright control over his Warner Brothers material, though, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at that as much as I should that that particular song’s being used as a ringtone.

Another day, another weather pattern. Much more summery and mild today. It was pleasant weather to walk home tonight in short sleeves.

No sooner had I posted the last entry when, boom, in stomped autumn, ready to open a can of whoop-ass. Today was cold, windy, overcast, dreary, and even drizzly at points. When I was in the area around Liberty and Fifth around noon, the streets were almost deserted. Nobody wanted to be out unless they had to be out. Campus...

Weather’s getting gradually cooler, but it still feels like late summer (despite the change in our page colors). Today there was scarcely a cloud in sight, the temps were up in the 70s, and it felt more like May than September. (Well, it felt like May would have felt if May hadn’t been rainy and cold.) It was windy on...

I saw a guy studying at a desk this afternoon who was wearing a big white sweatband and a powder blue sweatshirt. I felt like I was looking at a Xerox of John McEnroe circa 1981. And was that old-school KRS-One I heard blasting from an SUV tonight while I was waiting for the bus? It sure sounded like it.

An ‘incendiary device’ discovered on a Virgin Blue 737 in Sydney « may (or may not) have been a hoax ». But buried in the article on the find is this priceless ‘graph: ‘A baggage handler found the device on Monday in the cargo hold of the plane when it landed in Sydney after an internal flight from the state...

It was inevitable, I just wondered how long it would take. « Southwest Airlines has been sued over its oversize passenger policy »: ‘An Oakland man who describes himself as being of “ample proportion” is suing Southwest Airlines, accusing the carrier of humiliating him by asking him to buy a second seat. Lionel Bea, 40, said in a lawsuit filed...

Exhausted. Finishing a two-week guest teaching stint at a northwest Ann Arbor middle school. Seventh grade social studies. Some of the kids weren’t even born when Bush 41 got his butt handed back to him by Bill Clinton (thanks, Ross!). Hands/wrists still messed up, so trying not to use them too much, even though it’s next to impossible. When toilets...

A car coming up behind a bus stopping to let passengers off at a bus stop on Packard this evening and honking at it. What are you going to accomplish by honking at a bus, for crying out loud?

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if as a grad student you just become used to sitting at attention through three-hour classes several times a week, but it was fascinating to sit at the back of a room this afternoon during a presentation and watch a class of undergrads (who were, for the most part, polite, attentive, and...

Oh, the oozing contempt with which the BBC reporter pronounced the phrase “to plant her spring garden” tonight (in reference to Martha Stewart’s stated desire to get out of prison by next March to attend to her horticultural obligations) …

Holy crap, that was a great ride I just took. Yes, the surgeon said stay off the bike for two months, but … I miss it too much. It’s almost an addiction/high today. I rode the long circuit around, just five miles, but got a total rush from it, particularly in the legs. And my upper arms feel good too....

Pleasant: Walking home at twilight on a mildly warm Monday night, the streets of my neighborhood almost completely deserted. Looking up and seeing the crescent moon in all its glory. The sunsets and twilights this time of year are absolutely unparalleled. Unpleasant: Harried and rude shoppers rushing around Kroger, acting like jerks even when the store was virtually empty. Memo...

Laura Miller writes in today’s New York Times: I doubt I bought a single new hardcover book for myself (as opposed to for a class) until sometime after I’d turned 30. Being underemployed and unencumbered by children like a lot of people in their 20’s, I read a lot, but the only new books I could afford were paperbacks. So...

This afternoon we took the beagle to the grounds of Forsythe Middle School, where he had a great time chasing squirrels and sniffing the ground (and making up for the ignominy of this morning, when he was tormented by a neighborhood cat who loves to saunter past and revels in ignoring him when he howls at it). The school grounds...

I read a column in Thursday’s Michigan Daily (called, appropriately enough, “Get Over It Man: Your Favorite Band Sucks”) that made my jaw drop. Some writer made a point of slamming Coldplay, Dashboard Confessional, and David Gray. Not only that, he actually cited Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours and Joni Mitchell’s Blue as classics. He gave them the...

Wow … I don’t remember who it was, but something that somebody said about Michigan weather has stuck with me, which is that if it’s been one mode of weather for five days in a row, you can guarantee that the sixth day will be completely different. So after roughly 5 or 6 or so days of warm and/or humid...

Last night I was waiting for the bus at the corner of South U and State. I guess srah’s right — the Gideons are out in force. Or at least I think it was the Gideons. It’s so hard to tell the different factions apart. Anyway, a guy with a bullhorn was standing on a stone bench in front of...

Seen on the way home from teaching middle school social studies Friday afternoon: 1. A minivan with New York license plates and the bumper sticker, ‘I’d Rather Be In Ann Arbor’ and … 2. The happiest dog in the world, riding in a car with gleeful abandon. He was quite sad when they had to stop for red lights, though....

This pretty much sums up the hypocritical state of the Empire. « Says Mike Reiss, a writer for The Simpsons »: ‘The rules governing what we may or may not say are a little hard to follow. This year, for instance, Howard Stern’s trash talk lost him six radio stations … then gained him nine more. The FCC imposed a...

From Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 classic The Image: Nowadays everybody tells us that what we need is more belief, a stronger and deeper and more encompassing faith. A faith in America and what we are doing. That may be true in the long run. What we need first and now is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what...

Speaking of missionaries, I guess the Mormons have a new trick going. One night last week when I was waiting to cross State, a guy appeared out of the corner of my vision and pressed a Book of Mormon card into my hand. He was in plainclothes, and he was flanked cleverly on both sides by two guys in the...

There was a Jesus freak standing in the middle of the Diag at noon today railing against secular humanism and the evils of going to college, getting an education, and “getting ahead,” which he described as self-serving folly and as a sure road to hell. Sounded exactly like every line I was fed by fundie churches and fringe cults in...

Not only did Johnny Ramone die today, but when I stopped during my hectic day to get a bite of lentil soup at the Rendezvous annex on South University, the kid behind the counter, as she was taking my order, said, “It sucks that all the great music was made the year I was born.” I couldn’t resist. “What year...

Haven’t been posting here thanks to the ongoing drama with my hands. But I hope to get to regular posting soon. The hands are healing, but I have to take it easy. It’s a total pain in the tuckus ..

Motley Fool says it best: ‘Think about it: Would shutting down the nation’s seventh-largest carrier really be such a tragedy? On a human level, yes, undoubtedly. The sting of more displaced workers wouldn’t be easily sedated. And yet, on paper, US Airways has been a net destroyer of shareholder value for years. The owners — that is, the shareholders —...