We took a very nice five-mile roundtrip to the library today, the first time we had done a double ride together. The M30 is rougher and tougher on me than the Bobcat, but performed fine, wonky crank and all. I need to raise the seat. But it’s not bad for a garage sale bike. The…
Not having biked in almost five years (my last bike rides were through rough neighborhoods in East Oakland, and while nothing ever happened to me there, I came to realize that there were probably smarter things to do than to ride through those hard streets on a new bike, not to mention more efficient public…
Page Six reports on a contest in which 25 celeb-writers were asked by BlackBook Magazine to write a short story in no more than six words. (This was evidently a follow-up on an episode in which Ernest Hemingway, given the same challenge, wrote: “For sale: Baby shoes, never used.”) Here’s Rick Moody’s response: “Grass, cow,…
From The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch: ‘They had no chance of knowing the strange tangled history of the Christian Church: how a small Jewish sect had separated from all the other Jewish identities of first-century Palestine after it proclaimed its founder, Jesus, to be the Messiah whom all Jews sought. Over four centuries the little…
My hands hurt worse than ever. I don’t understand it. They were fine before May and then grew steadily worse in June. And now I’m beyond frustrated with the situation. I’ve never felt this kind of consistent pain and achiness before. Have appointments with physical therapy and the surgeon in two weeks. Can’t wait, believe…
Much more temperate today than it’s been the past few days. I enjoy the sunlight and the warmth as long as there’s a dip in the humidity and there’s a breeze, or even a wind. I had lunch at Frank’s today and the waitress/customer chatter was all about the upcoming Fair onslaught. There are actually…
Bush was today driven in a campaign bus around the UP. The first appearance of a president in that part of the state since Howard Taft visited in 1911, according to the Washington Post. (Fact-checked though that factoid must have been by the researchers at the Post, I wonder ….. Gerald Ford’s never been up…
The announcer deriding the American pronunciation of the word “soccer” (“sah-kuh”), a word which is already in itself apparently an object of derision because the word the rest of the world uses is “football.” (And then he says “George W. Bush played rugby. What on earth was he doing playing that?”)
According to a brief article on the back of the front section of today’s Ann Arbor News, a recent poll by EPIC/MRA found that 61% of Michigan residents favor amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Such an amendment is under way, since the Lansing-based group that is pushing the issue (after having lost…
Whoever said that Ann Arbor is deserted in the summer? If anything, it seems more hectic during the summer than it does during the winter, when everybody’s indoors unless they absolutely have to go outdoors. There are all kinds of businessy conferences going on around the area of Michigan Union, there are hordes upon hordes…
Like I said, I’ll never understand Michigan drivers, no matter how long I live here. This afternoon I was waiting to cross the street (at Division and William, I think) and a driver of a sports car stamped his accelerator and sped through the green light as though it had just turned yellow or red….
A list of all posts since April (when we switched from Movable Type to Textpattern) is now up and running. Now if I can salvage all the MT entries from April back through last August, we’ll be in bidness.
RSS and Atom feeds are working again; you can find links to them in the ‘Remember’ section of the navigation list on the left. Let me know if there’s a problem with them. I’m still working on the ‘Ask’ and ‘Contact’ sections of all the journals, as well as an archives page listing all entries….
Southeast Michigan seems to have missed most of the Brood X periodical cicada event, but the regular “dog day” Tibicen cicadas, which are apparently more of a loner species than the Magicicada, are now gracing us with their shrill hissing mating song. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to see much of the Magicicada, but…
On the afternoon of the so-called “Marriage Protection Sunday,” Steve and I went out to the Michigan Theater and saw Vincente Minnelli’s “An American in Paris“ (1951), which I’d never seen all the way through before and has got to be one of the all-time great musicals. Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Ira and…
I was over in Ypsilanti today, taking the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification at Willow Run High School, and had almost three hours between the morning and afternoon sessions. So I went to explore Ypsi, where I haven’t spent that much time since we moved here a year ago. Driving down a street, I noticed…
The other day I startled myself by referring to a carbonated beverage as “pop” without thinking about it. Today the heat was in the 80s and the humidity was in the mid-to-high range, weather that would have made me whiny and irritable in California, but I actually said, out loud, “If this is the worst…
The first commute ride with the new Marin Bobcat went absolutely great. Especially since I’m not in shape for it any more. The only problem is that it was not only the first, but the last, commute ride to grad school. I had to defer my enrollment for a year (« see the entry on…
This one caught my eye for two reasons: First, and most importantly, it’s a ringing denunciation of the bloody Cabal over the body of a 19-year-old Scottish Fusilier from a true Man of God and Peace. Second, it occurred in the historic ancestral Land of Pollok in Glasgow, which may (or may not) be whence…
With a great deal of sadness and regret, I withdrew from grad school classes yesterday morning, deferring my enrollment/involvement with the program until next June. I’ve had tendonitis for 3-5 years now and had surgery on my left wrist in Sept-01. Things haven’t been too bad since, because I don’t hold/grip pens and write—I type….
Bought a cheap little odometer for the Bobcat that works really well and was easy to install. Nothing fancy or expensive, just a way to tell how far I’ve gone …
Interesting Michigan developments ….. According to a story in Entertainment Weekly quoted by Daily Kos, the GKC Theatre chain, which owns 13 movie houses in Alpena, Traverse City, Battle Creek, Big Rapids, Fort Gratiot, Jackson, Ludington, Marquette, Saginaw, and Sault Ste. Marie, with a total of 268 screens, has booked “Fahrenheit 9/11” on only one…
Crashing waves of anxiety, depression, nausea and panic. Not much else to report. Grad school is running better than expected, yet I’m not that happy with the program so far. More on that over in the ‘Teach’ section. But the same old stuff that’s been going on for forty years is happening again: Adjustment Anxiety…
A little late this time ….. A glowing review by Larry McMurtry of the Bill Clinton memoir that covers the front page and two pages inside besides (“Some people don’t want Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant’s”). Not atonement for the scathing Michiko Kakutani…
A brand-spanking-new red Marin Bobcat Trail bike is in my living room and it’s a wonderful bike. I’ll write more and post some pics after tomorrow’s first commute with it.
It’s been amazingly temperate for at least the past week, if not the entire two weeks since summer began. There have been a few days of mid-80s temps with some high humidity, but those days have usually been followed in quick succession by days in the 70s with virtually mild humidity or (as was the…
We finally saw “Fahrenheit 9/11” this afternoon. An amazing piece of work, in many ways, and also infuriating in other ways (as everything Michael Moore does is). This isn’t going to be a review of the film, though. What happened as I was buying the tickets was almost more startling than anything in the film….
The magical check arrived at 2:30 this afternoon, so I hotfooted it over to Ann Arbor Cyclery to make a certain purchase. Curses. Foiled again. AAC closed today for the long holiday weekend. I’ll be bike-less for another three days. Oh, the agony. Oh well, I’m sick anyway and should be in bed (won’t bore…
Best slogan for the Boy Emperor’s campaign I’ve seen yet: ‘Bush-Cheney ‘04: Don’t Change Horses in the Middle of an Apocalypse’
Still waiting on the magical check to fund my bike purchase. Feeling very under the weather with an infection, so it wouldn’t matter anyway. But looks like Wednesday might be the day!
I love this, and I’m not sure why: NPR’s ombudsman scolding NPR for producing and airing music commentary that’s too “hipper-than-thou.” The ombudsman (Jeffrey Dvorkin, whose last major public acts were to criticize those who got their information about NPR from blogs and to assert that NPR would continue to ask permission from people seeking…
Would we ever move back to California? Sometimes I fantasize about it, I admit it, despite being in complete agreement with Steve that there is much more room to breathe here in Michigan. I think of places I love in California, like the Bay Area, parts of Los Angeles County, the desert area around Palm…
We took a little drive to Saline, where we noted that the Dairy Queen is much nicer than the ones in Ann Arbor. We then went over to Curtiss Park and sat by the river for awhile. It was most pleasant … the nicest stretch of weather I’ve seen in quite some time. I tend…
I’m making progress on getting all the various pieces of AirBeagle working with new layouts. I added the new photo galleries portal page today as well as a new gallery. Here’s what works from the nav menu at left: Bike – Adventures in the bike lane Dayley – The return of the Dayley Bayley Fly…
It was a beautiful day and would have been perfect for riding, if only my first bike wasn’t still in San Francisco and the new one wasn’t still in the store, unpurchased. The nice man at the UPS store here in Ann Arbor tells me it will cost roughly $150 to ship my Bianchi from…
From the movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden: ‘The whole history of the world is the story of the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish … all that’s bad around us is bred by selfishness … sometimes selfishness can even get to be a cause, an organized force, even a government, and that’s called…
It’s been a very nice, temperate few days in southeastern Michigan. The high humidity of a week or so ago seems to have abated for the moment. No rain in the past few days. The highs have been mild, in the low to mid-70s. The sky has been a perfect shade of bold azure. The…
So, let’s see if we’ve got this straight. Virgin USA has its corporate headquarters in New York, but its flight ops headquarters will be clear across the country in San Francisco. They need to hire 3,000 people from pilots to baggage handlers in the next year and start running ‘low-cost’ operations to compete with JetBlue…
From the Jack Ryan 2004 Website: ‘Jack Ryan on the Defense of Marriage: ‘I believe that marriage can only be defined as that union between one man and one woman. I am opposed to same-sex marriages, civil unions, and registries. I believe that we are all equal before God and should be before the law….
A group of right-wing ‘bloggers, responding to President Gore referring to them as ‘Brown Shirts,’ have proudly donned the mantle and are featuring a logo on their sites which has a photo of Sturmabteilung leader Ernst Roehm on it. A swastika was on there as well, but was removed because it was ‘offensive to some.’…
I honor his accomplishments, but for god’s sake can we shut up about Lance Armstrong already?
Since I’m starting grad school and parking and transportation around central campus is a pain, I decided to start biking it. Only problem: My very good and nice and fabulous Bianchi Lynx bike is still in San Francisco because I had problems attaching it to the Jeep securely enough for a 3,000-mile trip to Michigan…
This appears on the front cover of the hyped-to-death Karen Joy Fowler novel The Jane Austen Book Club (Miss Austen would be most amused by her post-mortem fan club; or maybe mortified). What does this even mean? “If I could eat this novel, I would.” — Alice Sebold
Reading it so you don’t have to ….. A full-page ad hawking Toni Morrison’s new line of handsome paperback editions of her novels “with deeply personal forewords reflecting on each work.” (I’ve never been able to finish the first chapter of a Toni Morrison novel. Maybe it’s just me.) An ad for a new book…
‘Northwest Airlines is threatening to discipline, and possibly fire, union employees if they proceed with picketing that questions the safety and security of Northwest flights, according to a letter the airline sent to the mechanics union. “It seems like pure intimidation,” said Jim Atkinson, president of Local 33 of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association. The…
The man who exposed serious security flaws in airport security was « sentenced to probation this week »: ‘A college student who says he hid box cutters on airplanes to expose weaknesses in security was sentenced Thursday to two years supervised probation and fined $500. Nathaniel Heatwole also must serve 100 hours of community service and reimburse…
United is reporting that « it lost $94 million in May alone »: ‘United Airlines said in a bankruptcy court filing Thursday that it posted a net loss of $93 million in May its efforts to return to profitability complicated by near-record jet fuel costs. The nation’s No. 2 carrier, which is seeking an additional $500 million…
So after all the wrangling and expense, not to mention the Republicans’ largest expansion of the federal government in American history, « airport screening is being returned to the private sector » by the Transportation Sicherheits Dienst: ‘Airports that want to replace government security screeners with privately employed workers can do so by early next summer, the…
Just when I thought I’d never agree with anything Dale Peck said, he goes and says this in an interview with Ellen Heltzel: Why does literature have to be so boring? And why, when it is funny, does it have to be so juvenile? Dave Eggers does the post-modern, “I’m talking about the book that…
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…
