NPR : Robertson Predicts Mass Killing in the Coming Year We don't need any more of his kooky predictions, they just irritate the unchurched and rile up the unscienced.
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Stroger loses private elevator | Chicago Tribune Politics as usual at the Cook County board; "Baby President" Todd (son of the previous long-term incumbent) lost his "private" elevator, because everybody was pointing and laughing too much.
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WILL-FM Hadn't realized one of my favorite shows is available locally after all. Streaming content online.
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U.S. Death Toll in Iraq Surpasses 3,000 | Chicago Tribune Happy New Year?
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Wondermark by David Malki – 261: In which James Brown is … well, you know I listened to an NPR retrospective on James Brown the other day. I didn't know his songs were always in the same key. I hadn't realized how repetitive they were until I listened to several full length songs during the course of the show. And now I know that he's an artist best heard sampled on other people's tracks, because the funk should never be boring. There. I said it. Via Joey, whose new site redesign is lookin' sharp, but why is the accordion player headless?
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NPR : Notes on the Real Gerald Ford Just now on MSNBC's coverage of President Ford's funeral, an old Washington pol was trotting out the "Nixon and Ford had a deeper friendship than previously thought" meme. According to DeFranco on NPR this morning, it's utter bunk. Nixon used to say to anyone in hearing that Ford was stupid, while Ford was much, much smarter than anyone gave him credit for. Apparenlty, he's the only President who was able to conduct his own budget briefing, a complicated affair usually left to experts. Bet Bush leaves it to people with higher math skills.…
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Boing Boing: Grand Canyon bookstore still selling Creationist myth Unbelievable. BoingBoing reported years ago that the official bookstore at the Grand Canyon was selling a book that claimed that it was the result of Noah's flood and was therefore explicable in a fundamentalist, Bible-based world-view. I once had the distinct displeasure of arguing with someone who actually believed this kind of thing; the sciences of geology and stratigraphy were dismissed as some sort of side-effect of the first day of Creation. All the embedded fossils were held to be tricks of the Devil, meant to distract us from the Biblical…
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Caveat Lector » Trafalgar and Westminster Despite my mother’s enthusiastic recommendation, I found Westminster Abbey a difficult place to visit, and should I return to London, I don’t believe I will return there. The church itself is well-built and handsome, but its graceful old bones are impossible to see for all the plaques and busts and sculptures and coats-of-arms and regimental flags and inscriptions and decorated tombs and every other imaginable memorial created by the hand of man tumbling all over each other and fighting for attention. Many of them would be quite beautiful, were there enough negative space around…
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In the sky A bird? A plane? A … UFO? | Chicago Tribune It sounds like a tired joke–but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously. A flying saucerlike object hovered low over OHare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon. Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the worlds second-busiest…
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Great Performances . From Vienna: The New Years Celebration 2005 | PBS I've been listening to KUNC's "eclectic music" programming via streaming Internet just now, and they announced that they'll be broadcasting the annual New Year's concert from Vienna later this afternoon. I started crying. Last night at midnight, I was just dozing off when firecrackers and loud "reports" (guns or M-80s or whatever) started going off. It occured to me that 2007 was a year without Mom in it, and started crying. Yesterday, at the farewell liturgy for Holy Innocents (AKA Holy Moly), a former vicar came up to…