Category: Uncategorized

Former rightwing attack shill David Brock has « a new website, Media Matters », ostensibly dedicated to combating the same Fascist claptrap he used to produce. How the worm turns. Still, donkeys are flying; let’s not criticize them too much and see how far they fly …

« Here’s how our Tough-on-Terror Boy Emperor is protecting us from evil »: ‘The Treasury Department agency entrusted with blocking the financial resources of terrorists has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s money, documents show. In addition, the Office…

The Boy Emperor’s twin ideological tenets, tax cuts for wealthy people and privatization of everything so that those wealthy get even wealthier, is « trickling down all over »: ‘This summer, when backpackers, hikers, and families—with kids in tow—pony up to get into America’s national parks, they could be in for a rude and crude…

Says Pat Boone, « ‘Censorship is healthy‘ »: ‘A healthy society needs censorship to survive, 1950s musical icon Pat Boone said yesterday. He added that he would welcome strong content restrictions governing movies and other artistic works. “I don’t think censorship is a bad word, but it has become a bad word because everybody associates…

Doing some catchup as to what’s going on around the world: Since it was in the Village Voice, it wasn’t much noticed, but « James Ridgeway noted how … slick the ties are between the Royal Bushes and the Royal Sauds » in fact, the two familes are ‘locked together.’ Yeah, locked together in an…

The BBC is all atwitter tonight about the 25th anniversary of the accession to power of Margaret Thatcher (or should I call her Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven?). I’m not sure how history will judge her. I lived in Britain when she was running for her third term in office, and even then Britain seemed a…

My favorite artificial language. [Link courtesy Political Theory Daily.]

I must plead guilty to causing the cold snap. I lowered the roof on the Jeep for the first time since we moved to Michigan, because I wanted some sunshine and air the other day. Now it’s too freakin’ cold to go out there and mess with putting it back up. I had a rather…

All you can do is laugh (unless you’re kicking yourself for forgetting your gloves): The National Weather Service in Detroit/Pontiac has issued a freeze warning for all of Southeast Michigan from midnight until 8 am EDT Tuesday. Temperatures will fall below 32 degrees after midnight across Southeast Michigan. Low temperatures will bottom out in the…

My undergrad university’s alumni mag has this article on blogs in its latest issue. Nothing out of the ordinary, that is, nothing beyond the usual cliches and cant: low readership, cool photos, rants, inside jokes, personal reflection, you can be anybody you wanna be on the Internet (yeah, right), linking to random crap “just because…

It was great to hear Loretta Lynn, God bless her, shock and tweak the boring Melissa Block on NPR today during an interview about her new Jack White-produced album, Van Lear Rose. (“It’s been good talkin’ to you too, honey.”) Sounds like an awesome album too.

According to Total Guitar Magazine (via BBC), these are the Top 20 Riffs of All Time: Guns N’Roses “Sweet Child o’ Mine” Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Led Zeppelin “Whole Lotta Love” Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water” Metallica “Enter Sandman” Derek & The Dominoes “Layla” Metallica “Master of Puppets” AC/DC “Back in Black” Jimi…

Morrissey at the Apollo????? It’s true. According to a link from Gawker, he’s playing there tonight through Friday. That is truly surreal. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, Moby at the Whisky a Go-Go. Anyway, Morrissey’s new single (“Irish Blood English Heart”) is great, 2:39 minutes of spitting, droning glory and fury. I doubt…

Bush was reportedly in Niles, Kalamazoo, and Sterling Heights today on a “bus tour.” His bus has the slogan “America, Yes We Can” on it. Tell that to all the folks in Michigan who’ve lost their jobs in the past three years, Mr. President. On another somewhat related topic, I was in Borders this afternoon…

It’s May 3, but the wind was astonishingly cold and biting this morning, so much so that I regretted leaving the house without coat and gloves. Same story at 12.30, still, though it had grown more temperate within an hour.

It was not empty in Ambrosia this afternoon, but it wasn’t packed, either. The atmosphere was more relaxed than it’s been in a while. Campus had a similar feel. Fairly empty at 9 when I got there, but enough people around when I left the office around 12.30 for it not to be a ghost…

More slurpees today. I’m developing a serious addiction to FCB’s slurpees, particularly coke and wild cherry and white cherry. Nirvana. Thank god they’re downtown and have inconvenient parking at best, or I’d be spending what’s left of our money on them. We went downtown to return movies to the library and I didn’t want to…

We were visited by two beautiful birds today, a resplendent bluejay and a shyer cardinal (hence the not-so-hot picture of it). They muscled in on the squirrels and scored some bread. The squirrels pretty much didn’t care, but kept their distance. Even with the cool weather this weekend, spring around here continues to be fabulous,…

The town does appear to be clearing out. We took a little drive this afternoon. The area around our neighborhood was quiet, way quieter than usual (as “usual” has been for the past eight months, that is). There was some traffic (foot and cars both) in the Liberty area, but it was nothing compared to…

There’s a big fat front page story in the Ann Arbor News today headlined “Library considers big changes for main branch downtown.” Apparently the fight is between the District and the Downtown Development Authority, and the issue is the parking lot next to the library building on South Fifth. The library doesn’t own the parking…

Can’t express my disgust for LunarPages and their sysadmin ignorance in terms strong enough or colorful enough. I’m just now putting the pieces back together of this site, and doing multiple installations of Textpattern for each individual subsite. Whatta pain. Fortunately, Textpattern is easy, straightforward and quick, thank God. It’s very nice to work with…

Nuggets from the current issue of « Harper’s »: ‘The phrase “national security” undoubtedly will make numerous appearances in the campaign speeches between now and the November election, and if the ritual holds true to form it will add to the country’s inventories of fear instead of increasing its store of courage. To define the…

Perhaps I’m doing something right in the classroom … As I arrived at a northeast Ann Arbor high school this morning, I met a student who was in a history class I guest taught over a month ago. He stopped me and asked me if I was going be in that class again today and…

And Sunday’s “move-out today,” or so goes the scuttlebutt (heard as I walked by a couple of people sitting out in front of Ambrosia this morning, one of whom was talking about how much she was looking forward to the atmosphere of the town once all the students are gone).

Helicopters circling over central campus, lots of clueless out-of-towners wandering around, lots of ties and shirts and trousers as opposed to jeans and shorts, people scrambling around to assemble poses for video cameras, the worst traffic on State and South U that I’ve seen in weeks if not months ….. yep, today must be graduation…

I’m done. The end of the year has come for me, and I seem to have survived. (The true test will come when grades get posted, but I’ll assume for now that I did okay.) Damn. One year under the belt, one to go. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.

Today’s Duke Ellington’s birthday. A tip of the hat to the incomparable Sir Duke.

One of the north-south streets through East Pasadena is Michillinda—it starts up in Sierra Madre, near where my sister lives, and descends into San Marino. Something I never knew (I always assumed it was just a corruption of an Indian or Spanish name) was that Michillinda was named by the original families that settled in…

Things are beginning to look up; I should be able to get back to posting soon … and lord knows there’s plenty to post about. Unfortunately, LunarPages has officially trashed my MovableType installation and it’s all dead. The other sections of this site which I controlled with MT are temporarily dead until I get TextPattern…

I had no earthly idea that I was living with a closeted “Love Will Keep Us Together” fan. Good lord, you think you know someone … But having said that, I suppose I am forced to disclose myself. I’m more comfortable, as mentioned before, with movies; I’m a real Homer Simpson when it comes to…

Meanwhile, record-breaking temperatures back on the left coast. Pasadena, my hometown, hit 99 degrees (breaking a record set in 1992 by 7 degrees). The weather station at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, near where my friends Kit and Erin now live, recorded a temperature of 103. Normally temperate Santa Barbara hit an intemperate high of…

srah said it was snowing this morning ….. and sure enough, when I took the dog out, there were unmistakable flakes in the air. I never thought I’d see the stuff this late. Amazing.

In the interest of full self-disclosure (to a point), people in glass houses, etc., I hereby present a brief (and by no means exhaustive) list of songs that I love that would probably be highly likely to appear on a 50 worst list somewhere, and probably, in fact, do appear on such a list (double…

Says the National Weather Service: ‘Tuesday Night: Patchy frost. Otherwise, increasing clouds, with a low around 34.’ Oh, c’mon now, people, it’s pretty much frickin’ May already. This southern boy shouldn’t be seein’ ‘patchy frost and 34’ forecasts in the weather … Lord, will I make it another year amongst the yankees and eskimos? (No…

More candidates that I hadn’t thought of for 50 worst songs (from Stereogum): Chris De Burgh “Lady in Red” (truly horrific) Patrick Swayze “She’s Like the Wind” (ditto) Don Johnson “Heartbeat” (tritto) However, Swing Out Sister should not be on the list. “Breakout” is cheesy in retrospect but no other song screams 1987 quite so…

An amazing quote from a new biography of King James I by Alan Stewart that I’m saving to read until after the end of schoolwork (the quote is from a memoir by the seventeenth-century writer John Oglander): “If he had but the power, spirit and resolution to have acted that which he spoke, or done…

I went to work around 9.00 this morning and the campus seemed blessedly deserted. I saw maybe five people cross my path as I walked from the corner of State and South University to the Undergrad Library. By the time I got off work at 12.15, though, the campus was exploding with people. The fourth…

Saw this today on Metafilter—a nice place to compare statistics and see photos of cities all over the country. I pulled up the stats for all the place I’ve lived in over the last 40 years to see how they stacked up against each other and my current residence, AA, MI. Sorta kinda interesting. (All…

There’s a seven-minute (or so) segment in the bonus features on the DVD of Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 documentary “Spellbound” that features a semifinalist from Ann Arbor. There are a few seconds of footage of the town at the beginning of the segment, with interesting choices for shots—the Greyhound bus depot on Huron and the bridge…

Today, a first: a trio of homeless people kicking back with their cadged shopping carts in Frisinger Park. They must have been there because the police rousted them from the center of town for the Book Fair. I was surprised to see them—the homeless in Ann Arbor are virtually invisible, unlike in San Francisco, where…

It’s Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lady Ella, wherever you are.

Strange how you can have two very different experiences at two not-all-that-dissimilar chain restaurants. We had dinner at Macaroni Grill on Thursday night, and that was fine. The food was great, and although the restaurant was somewhat crowded, all we had to contend with was a loud cell-phone chatterer at a table behind us (and…

Pickerel Lake is hardly a unique appellation. Turns out there’s at least 22 other lakes in Michigan with exactly the same name.

We drove past campus today and saw undergrads dutifully trundling their belongings out to sidewalks and cars, along with a few half-hearted, exhausted lawn parties sputtering along and a ton of “For Rent” signs all the way from the center of campus out to past Zeeb Road as we drove out to Dexter-Huron Metro Park…

Maybe we didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I was kind of underwhelmed by the Ann Arbor Book Festival today. (It fills a portion of North University for a couple of days every year around this time.) There were a sizable number of people there, but nowhere near as many as I expected,…

I’m really, really going to have to take (and see through) 502 next winter. Damn. Having said that, I know (especially now that the term’s essentially over) that there’s no way on God’s green earth I could have taken it this year (along with my other courses and my job and my DFE) and survived….

Can’t recall the last time I slept for 10 hours straight, but that’s what I did last night. It felt great.

I was on the bus this afternoon and passed through Party House Row on South State. One of the roofs had about fifteen subscriber newspapers, still in their wrappers, scattered all over it. I wonder what that was all about.

Sometimes I wonder where the hell I’m living. It seems that the Michigan House has just passed a bill that, if it gets approved by the Senate, will permit doctors and other health care providers to refuse to treat a patient on “moral, ethical, or religious grounds” (with the exception of emergency treatment). Those grounds…

Done, done, done ….. up till hours I’m ashamed to divulge finishing it, but it’s done ….. don’t know how coherent the product is, but it’s done. Hallelujah. Now, the CS 810 paper awaits. But that will actually be fun to write (I tell myself).