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The beagle is once again in his customary final exam support role, next to me down here in the basement as the wind from the approaching thunderstorm howls outside. Superstitious though it may seem, I know I’ll make it through as long as he’s around.

Well, ugh. That’s my reaction after completing the first three assignments for the first of four undergrad courses the University of Michigan is forcing me to take before I will be permitted to join that exclusive club, grad school, on 29-June. UM’s School of Ed pointed me to, of all places, Brigham Friggin’ Young University’s…

Between converting this site to Textpattern—since LunarPages is no longer interested in helping resurrect MovableType (if they ever were)—and starting my 12 hours of undergrad courses in preparation for grad school 29-June and substitute teaching, I’ve had very little time for updates here, sorry. But let’s take a quick look at how the Boy War…

Blender and VH1 have teamed up to list the 50 worst songs of all time. I would agree that Starship’s “We Built This City” is a plenty bad song, but the worst? The worst? Have these people never heard Bryan Adams’ ”(Everything I Do) I Do It for You?” Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed…

How long will it be before all the ash trees in southeastern Michigan die out? I heard a figure on the radio just now of 6 million ash decimated by the emerald ash borer and almost did a double take. Unbelievable.

A howling wind tore through the boulevards of the southeastern Michigan town, stirring up dust motes, leaves, beetles, and memories of regret, pathos, and anomie.

This year’s Lyttle Lytton Prizes (a spinoff from the better-known Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored every year by San Jose State University) have been announced. The winner: This is the story of your mom’s life. Runners-up: I am pleased to announce that, although attitudes have improved immensely, the beatings will continue. And: While a hellish yowl…

Tornado weather, says Hillary ….. great! The one that passed through the day we arrived last August was enough for me, but I suppose that’s wishful thinking. (On another subject, Hillary has a great post about John Negroponte, Bush’s new “ambassador” to Iraq.)

Let’s see. Prediction from the National Weather Service: possibility of thunderstorms 20%; temperature will rise to 76 by noon then fall to 67; and the winds will be between 25-30 mph, with gusts as high as 49 mph. Great. I don’t know whether to dress for wind and rain or for a luau.

This weather is almost astonishing in its California-ness. Blue skies, sunlight for most of the daylight hours, temperatures in the high 70s, and lots of dry wind. I suppose, on second thought, it’s more like a typical spring day in Merced, but that’s neither here nor there. Wildflowers are popping out all over the complex….

The dog was back to his old tricks today, though he seemed to be somewhat more drowsy than usual (which is to say, he spent somewhat more than his usual 22.5 hours a day asleep). He ran without much apparent impairment down the stairs to be let out this morning, darted speedily over to the…

The nightmare that is the last few weeks of school is almost over ….. yet it seems right now as though it will never be over. April 29 seems very far away.

We no longer have cable, so we’re already unwittingly doing it, but if you have cable and are of a mind to do this, it’s something to consider. [Link courtesy LibraryJuice.]

   [First pic: We’re going somewhere? Now? YAHOO!!! Second pic: Ummmm, this is a really long hike, dude. Third pic: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!] Today, we demanded too much of the geriatric and overweight in our house. And I’m not referring to myself or Frank. We took the beagle on a very long (too long) hike around Pickerel…

The archival permalinks are now working. I missed a step in the Textpattern setup regarding ‘clean URIs’ that I didn’t see the other day. So, we should be back running. No word yet on if or when LunarPages can resurrect Movable Type; the server is scheduled to go down Sunday at 04:00, so even accessing…

« Here’s how the Boy Emperor supports our troops ». Dr. Strangerummy made the announcement: ‘The Pentagon formally announced Thursday that it had stopped the planned return from Iraq of some 20,000 American troops, giving commanders the extra firepower they believe necessary to confront an insurgency that is taking a mounting toll on the U.S.-led…

    Proof that Ann Arbor is not always a ‘sunless horror, devoid of joy and hope,’ was provided by a gigantic orange ball in the sky the last couple of days; beagles were especially grateful as they took the opportunity to get in some serious tanning. (No, he’s not mad in that last pic, he’s…

Weekend Magazine, The Michigan Daily’s, well, weekend magazine, put out its Best of Ann Arbor issue today and a very well-deserved Best Blog award was given to Rob over at Goodspeed Update. We weren’t even mentioned. Alas. I’m beyond crushed. The nod to GU is great, but the article’s true genius is the final paragraph,…

Technology is a wonderful thing … until it crashes and burns spectacularly. We’ve had our own problems (obviously) with technology here around the manse this week; the crash of our Movable Type CMS punted us back into the dark ages of hand-coding web pages (oh the horror!). But at least we weren’t alone. I went…

Until I straighten out the fight between Movable Type and Textpattern over my single SQL database, older comments you may have made on posts will not be available, but they are not lost. However, the commenting system is working fine, so feel free to rant away … that is all.

Today really felt like the first day of spring. Classes were sitting out holding their sessions in circles on the grass, there was some massive groovy “Goodness Day” event going on in the Diag, and every available spot on the grass was covered with sunbathers or Frisbee throwers. A lot of out-of-town visitors now too,…

Well, Textpattern is installed and working … I hope. Comments are back and we’re Movable Type/CGI/Perl-free and mostly PHP (but still XHTML Strict compliant). There are some slight differences that I’ll have to work around over the next few days. There are still some issues; the recent articles and recent comments sections on the sidebar…

« This is incredibly disturbing and sad’ »: ‘Out here on the farthest reaches of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, they are calling it “The Silent War,” the one where Marines are mortared and maimed, bombed and blown up, ambushed and killed, and almost nobody but them and their families know about it. Out here on…

After pitching a fit with LunarPages, who finally apologized and agreed to restore the entire Movable Type installation, I spent an hour or so this morning trying to make the backup work. It doesn’t. MT is, to a non-programmer such as myself, often incomprehensible and beyond cranky. If you don’t hold your mouth just right…

The content management system I use to control all facets of AirBeagle.com was obliterated by my hosting provider, LunarPages, today, without notice or warning and with extreme prejudice. I only found out about it in a back-handed sort of way. Therefore, there will be no updates for a day or two or three until I…

Walking down Liberty tonight after a movie at the Michigan, we saw the planet Venus rising low in the sky to the west. It would be difficult to think of a more beautiful sight.

A guy from Lansing talking about the two halves of Michigan on a radio call-in show this morning: “We don’t worry about the UP, and they don’t worry about us trolls in the south.”

A random question (inspired by a recent srah post): Does anybody know of any good places to buy tea (as in loose-leaf or bags in stores, store sections, etc, versus cafes that sell tea by the cup) in the Ann Arbor area? I am getting a tea jones and would like to try something other…

It was sunny late this morning when I got up (had my first long sleep in almost a week). But the cloud cover rapidly rolled in and the National Weather Service is predicting a 20% chance of showers. April in Michigan.

I’ve talked to a few of the second-year students in the past couple of days. The adjectives I’d use to describe them and the looks on their faces: relieved, relaxed, and, in some cases, resigned. One of them got a library job offer that you could see made his face light up. The look on…

It would seem that I’m going to have to start using a peak flow meter on a regular basis, at least until the pollen season is over. It’s a very simple device, actually; the best analogy I can come up with is to those “Hi Striker” carnival attractions in which you strike a platform with…

Apparently we’ve made it to another milestone: a listing in Google Directory. (We’re under Reference -> Libraries -> Library and Information Science -> Personal Weblogs, if you’re interested.) I wouldn’t agree with the brief description of our blog that appears there. Because this blog is all about the beagle. It’s that simple. And very zen.

… there was a huge Good Friday concert in the Diag today complete with a big wooden cross on the steps of Hatcher and an electric Christian rock band that sounded like a washed-out version of Live circa Throwing Copper, performing a retooled rendition of “O come all ye faithful,” so you really never know…

There’s a long column in yesterday’s Chronicle on Higher Education advising Ph.Ds on how to make the transition to librarianship, “because the library profession consistently offers a deeply satisfying career with multiple rewards that are too often missing from the faculty positions within reach for most Ph.D.’s.” The column includes tips like: “Librarians and human-resources…

It’s always amusing to watch hypocrisy in action — as when certain conservative library blogs that normally get into conniption fits about any e-mail or posts on any other library-related site (including their own) that “don’t have anything to do with libraries” write reams on their own blogs about such library-related topics as gay marriage…

I lay in a hot tub for a half hour tonight and felt as though it were the first time I had had a chance to breathe and relax in days. I had to think for a couple of minutes to recall what day it actually was. I have been buried in the basement and…

Morrissey may not be making great music anymore, but he’s still good with a one-liner (this one’s from tomorrow’s Guardian): Q: What do you feel when you look in the mirror? A: Extreme reluctance.

Census stories fascinate me. This one, from today’s Associated Press wire, shows that San Francisco County lost more residents in 2002-2003 than any other California county (Steve and I left the month after the July 2003 cutoff point). Meanwhile, Los Angeles County gained the most residents (which is ironic, considering that people used to flee…

My presentation was serviceable; it was supposed to clock in at 5 minutes and the professor signaled when I was going over the clock (which I don’t think she did with others who seemed to go over 5 minutes). I suppose that there were some advantages in going first (there were 19 presentations of 5…

I went to Ambrosia this morning to sit and do some last-minute prepping for my final 643 presentation. A grad seminar (apparently in Mideast politics, because every other word was “Islam” or “Baathist”) was holding court at a bunch of tables in a circle in the back. I sat at an empty table next to…

It’s nice to know that there are good people in the world. I was in a rush this afternoon, picking up a slice of pizza on my way to work, and I knocked my tray onto the floor in the Union with my awkwardly-positioned backpack. The slice of pizza was dust. An undergrad woman walked…

Well, time to break out the inhaler. Asthma has returned. By the way, thanks, Steven and Bentley, for the Sudafed advice. I bought some today and it helped a lot.

It’s good to know that some people have nothing better to do with their time than write letters to their local newspapers (in this case, the Aberdeen American News in South Dakota) and ask whether any local libraries “carry” a “children’s book out right now that advocates homosexuality.” The newspaper’s News Line helpfully identified the…

No wonder my allergies have been so nightmarish the past few days. I took a look at Pollen.com. A lot of the pollen here is nothing I’ve ever really been exposed to before, at least not on any prolonged basis: cottonwood, poplar, cedar, juniper. The pollen I dealt with in Oakland was mostly mulberry, oak,…

Two acquaintances talking on the 5 Packard: “Happy Spring!” “Yeah, right. I’m just glad to see a few hours of sunlight.” Actually, it was fairly warm today, once the sun rose high enough in the sky. The morning was pretty damn miserable, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky (or, I keep forgetting,…

What AirBeagle would look like if he did a guest shot on South Park (No, I don’t have a goatee in real life. I just thought it looked bitchin’. And I don’t always have a pissed-off look on my face either. Well, at least not all the time.) Create your own character at the South…

That horrible sandpaper feeling in the back of the throat, endless post-nasal drip, a pseudoephedrine-induced sense of doped-up zombie lethargy all day long … yep, allergy season is definitely upon me. Yuck. This is why I can’t stand the spring.

« Here is what happens in Canada when two soldiers wish to get married »: ‘Jason Stewart has become the first member of Canada’s military to marry a same-sex partner, exchanging vows this weekend with his fiancé Joey Schwehr. The couple eloped Friday when Stewart arrived at Schwehr’s Kingston, Ontario home in a white stretch limousine. Stewart…

The light of day is dawning and the rats are scurrying. The truth will have a way of coming out. Just ask Richard Nixon and his aides, one of whom, « John Dean, this week judged the Bush presidency as trumping Nixon’s in ‘secrecy, deception and political cynicism’ » which is ‘potentially the most corrupt, unethical and…

Yep. Sneezing fits, congestion, a sudden need for constant Kleenex, itching eyes, and a scratchy, irritated throat and roof of the mouth. This after just 5 minutes out of doors this afternoon. The allergy season is here. I hope it stays just allergies and doesn’t trip over into asthma.