Rance checks in with a postcard from the Hamptons, where he may or not may be or have been: I was on the fence about going until he mentioned “We’d be having three-and-a-half pound lobsters at his dinner party Saturday night. I’d always thought that smaller lobsters tasted better, but Bill assured me, “That is a myth invented by poor people.” Bill fits in very well in the Hamptons, by the way. In any case, as you may have surmised from previous entries, quality has always taken a back seat to quantity for me when it comes to crustaceans. So…
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I ran across this article in Chicago Magazine and couldn’t quit reading. Once upon a time, Chicago’s nightlife was full of big stars, and Irv Kupcinet was the guy that reported on them from Booth 1 at the Pump Room. Makes it sound almost fun to be famous, except for the sad parts. Fascinating reading.
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Mmmmm. Somebody here at work did an Oberweis run. Mmmmm. Tin Roooooooof. Mmmmm. [long pause] I can’t stand Jim Oberweis’ politics, but I love his ice cream. I’d have linked to his campaign site, but I get one of those “This website has been suspended – please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible” pages.
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Listening to KUNC‘s music webcast – they’re playing a lot of Ray Charles’ music just now. Sounds good. It helps. (Why do I listen to a Colorado station? That goes back to a trip with David in 1995. Don’t worry about it. Just listen.)
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Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me’s Charles (Charlie) Pierce imagines a letter from Heaven to Peggy Noonan. Read it here and laugh or cry, you takes your pick.
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If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined–even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today. The scariest part: “[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil…’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners,…
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Sci Fi Wire — The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel>Cartoon Network is developing an expanded version of its Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series, Variety reported. The network and Lucasfilm will create five new 12-minute Clone Wars segments, expanding on the original three-minute toons, the trade paper reported. Okay, that makes the fact that the third (actually sixth) installment of Star Wars less “meh” for me. Far less meh, in fact.
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Richard Dean Anderson, the star and an executive producer of SCI FI Channel’s original series Stargate SG-1, told SCI FI Wire that he has reduced his shooting schedule in the upcoming eighth season, but not necessarily his appearances in the show’s episodes. Speaking in an interview on the show’s Vancouver, B.C., set, Anderson (Jack O’Neill) said that he has reduced the number of days he shoots in Canada to allow him to spend more time at his home in Southern California, where he cares for a 5-year-old daughter. Nice for him. Maintaining radio silence with difficulty on one of my…
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The shrines, which began in a major way with the death six years ago of Diana, Princess of Wales, almost instantly became an expected part of public mourning, flourishing after the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the victims of the 9/11 attacks. This aspect of public grief reveals a paradox in our supersized culture: the outsized, media-driven theatrics of the Reagan funeral are punctuated by small personal gestures and people waiting eight hours in the sun to file past his coffin for a minute. These individual acts are attempts to break through the weeklong wall of official mourning…
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cow orker n. [Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in Usenet, with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal. This term was popularized by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) but already appears in the January 1996 version of the scary devil monastery FAQ. There are plausible reports that it was in use on talk.bizarre as early as 1992. Compare hing, grilf, filk, newsfroup. There are co-workers and cow-orkers. I work with both types. Many of the latter are parents and think that everything that their child produces is interesting. I beg to differ. It’s difficult to…