Blog

Looks like « someone wrote a really good letter to the editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal », right there in full red-meated Dubya country. Congratulations and keep your head down; those Texas fascists...

I had this conversation with a friend not too long ago: If you have a ton of books to choose from to read, what’s your strategy? I am myself addicted to having way more books around than I’ll possibly have...

We went to the downtown area today and did some window shopping. West Side Book Shop was one of our stops. I’d never been there, and it’s a cozy, well-stocked store, if a little crowded and tilted more to...

Meanwhile, 140 miles away, in Kendallville, IN, a petition is being circulated to stop a proposed $7.9 million library building. Once the opposing signatures are submitted, the library will have 30 days to gather...

On Tuesday night, Frisinger Park was jam-packed with cars and trucks and a girls’ softball team and their parents and boosters. Passing through the park, which I normally do on my way home as a shortcut, was...

It was virtually impossible for me to sleep last night. The heat is upon us, and it definitely rises to the top in our house. It was only 65 degrees outside last night but it felt like a Dutch oven indoors, even with...

In between thoroughly (and devastatingly, I might add) trashing the new Wolfgang Petersen “Troy” movie and bemoaning the scariness of having just graduated, two women in Ambrosia were discussing this...

It just doesn’t get any more Fascist FunDumbMentalist than this: ‘The Roman Catholic bishop of Colorado Springs has issued a pastoral letter saying that Catholic Americans should not receive Communion if...

Three girls coming into the ‘Media Center’ for Career Day presentations on cosmetology today: ‘See, this say media center, but a media center where you go to use computers and stuff. And this...

I guess I was grossly mistaken when we moved here; I thought we would be paying much less for gas per gallon than we did in San Francisco. A week ago, I was waiting for the interminable light at Packard and Stadium to...

Ann Arbor isn’t the liberal bastion I thought it was; while ‘guest teaching’ today at a central AA middle school during a Career Day assembly, I passed a science classroom which was empty except for...

Yesterday I was riding one of the Hatcher elevators with an undergrad who was helping a co-worker cart some ficuses somewhere (aren’t ficuses always either standing in a corner of an office or being carted...

Three weeks ago, NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty recently did a report on Catholics and John Kerry that has raised some temperatures in the blogopshere. I won’t go into all that, but one blog quotes the...

It’s an absolutely lovely night outside. Humid, but a perfect temp, with the Big Dipper directly overhead, night sounds all around—it would be a great night to camp out, if my tent wasn’t in Oklahoma...

Frank pointed out the cover of Section E ‘Connection’ of tonight’s Ann Arbor News (Motto: ‘Still the World’s Worst Website). Headlined Highs and Lows of Clothes (ain’t that...

A bicyclist and I came to the same narrow passageway in the sidewalk on Maynard in front of Ambrosia and Madras Masala at exactly the same moment today. (There were people at the outddors tables in front of Ambrosia...

Speaking of the local election story, the front page article on the subject mentions that Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje has a Republican challenger in this year’s election—former City Council member Jane Lumm...

In today’s Ann Arbor News, there was a huge (why so huge, I don’t know, but it obliterated a far more important story about upcoming local elections) front-page article about high school kids and their...

On tonight’s broadcast of The Connection (an NPR-affiliated radio show): Blogs offer a constant rush of political opinion: the gloating, the jeering, and those knockout punches. But not everyone thinks bringing...

From this morning’s Free Press: Historically, Brood X has sidestepped Wayne, Macomb and most of Oakland counties. They were, however, spotted in Bloomfield Hills the last time they came out in 1987. Go a little...

Nancy Pearl was on NPR this morning, recommending older political novels to serve as an antidote to all of those scary partisan election-year non-fiction diatribe-tomes on sale at your favorite bookstore. (Some of her...

We’re having regular thunderstorms and thunderstorm forecasts this time of year. Having never experienced thunderstorm season in the Midwest, I find it fascinating. Last night, for example, a fairly rambunctious...

It amuses me, I’m not sure why, that there are more articles on the upcoming cicada infestation in the Washington Post (a search of the Post website shows 17 separate articles on cicadas in the last week alone)...

My god I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s true; the Boy Emperor is incable of learning from his mistakes and « is beginning the march of war on Syria »: ’[The Boy Emperor] will order...

« Delta Air Lines says pay cuts or bankruptcy »; in other words, pilots should screw themselves out of a third of their paychecks or we’ll take our marbles and go home: ‘Delta Air Lines said...

Seems a little lazier, a little more mellow here than last week (well, except for the freeways, but that’s another story). There were a few people sitting on porches along State Street Row, but less in a party...

Just woke up from another spectacularly weird dream … this one was a first, since it was just like watching a TV show and I wasn’t in it. In fact, it was a TV show … Dallas, of all things. I...

« Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still beating ‘em »: ’… The first plane to hit the first Twin Tower The last plane to hit the last Twin Tower The only plane to ever hit the Pentagon The birth of...

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t perfect, but he was on to a good thing when he wrote that separation of church and state was a good and desirable thing. Case in point is Colorado, an increasingly Fascist FunDumbMentalist...

The Torture Roundup for tonight: « A pregnant Lynddie England gets hung out to dry ». She’s been turned into the face of American torture by the media and the military, her family is angry at the...

Publicly, the NeoCons want us to think everything is a-okay and hunky-dory. Privately, « as the Washington Post reports », military officials are unhappy with the Dr. Strangerummy/Wolf-of-Dimwitz lunacy:...

Downtown was (if possible) more packed today than usual. Must have been the nice weather and lots of out-of-towners. We saw a couple of movies at the State (“Latter Days” and “Good Bye Lenin...

I don’t think it’s a particularly uncommon thing to want to eat out at a restaurant and (if you’re a non-smoker, or if tobacco smoke makes you physically nauseated or you’re allergic to smoke)...

Here’s a familiar one. A newspaper (in this case, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) interviews a handful of undergrads (in this case, at the University of Minnesota) about their research practices. One student says...

Repetitive stress injury workers’-comp costs as a justification for implementing RFID ….. hmmmmm. That’s a new one on me. I can’t say (as a public library patron) that I wouldn’t check out...

As usual, Librarian.net puts it way better (and way more succinctly) than I ever could: Of course, any librarian knows that the best thing to do is to call your librarian [who is at the library already] and then have...

Nicholson Baker has announced that Duke University Libraries has agreed to house his American Newspaper Repository collection. To make a long story short, Baker saved a lot of old newspapers in their original runs by...

Humidity was fairly high today (now yesterday). I brought a sweater, but the library complex was strangely warmer. It felt like the first really humid, warm day of the year (though I’m sure there have to have been...

There’s an attention-grabbing Library Journal article about “NextGen” users (born between 1982 and 2002) and their attributes. (Courtesy Creative Librarian.) They’re “format...

Why does it take the publicized photos of humiliated and abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners (which has arguably further ruined our tattered image and made the nation even more vulnerable to terrorist attack) to get the...

There is a website devoted to the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, at which you can view a slide show and order a video of the episode. The originator of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo (whose Psych 101 course...

You know, I’m sorry, but I’m on an our-culture-is-crappy kick tonight. While at that notorious southeast AA middle school, I served a couple of hours in the ‘media center.’ It was fine, I always...

While subbing today at the city’s notorious southeast-side middle school, I noticed one thing during a geography class viewing of a movie about South Africa and apartheid during the 1980s: The kids were talking...

I just woke up from two very weird dreams. In the first, Frank died and I started dating Julia Roberts. Yes, really. And after a month, she proposed. And her mother was talking to me about stuff and saying that I was...

“Friends” and “Frasier” are broadcasting their final episodes this week and next, respectively. “Friends” I watched occasionally but never really got the point of. Tina Brown has...

It’s supposed to be over 80 outdoors today. No problem, right? Well, in the past two weeks or so, the huge turn-on-the-air-conditioning project has taken place all over campus (I presume); Scott tells me that they...

According to this account, seven students from Kalamazoo College were banned from entering Bush’s campaign rally at Wings Stadium on Monday. So much for inclusiveness. If you’re not a verifiable Bush...

I’m a little late on this, but here goes. Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. “But this is...

Without going into details, my grades this past term were either as good as or better than I expected. So I came off all right (not perfect, not even close, but better than I expected) in 503, the Search and Retrieval...