• Blogs Wot I Read - Hot Off The Presses - Politics, Schmolitics

    Not Unexpected, But Strangely Compelling

    It’s been a busy couple of weeks around here and my blogging has dropped off by quite a bit – not that there’s anyone making note of that or anything, but some spammers may be slightly disappointed. Nyah, etc. I’ve read 3 books in the last week or so, and hope to get around to reviewing them. I’ve been busy being team leader of something called “Inviting Team” at Holy Moly. More on that later. I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, but not blogging about it. There’s a lot going on at worked – swamped, job task list about…

  • Home Improvement

    Steaming Hot Rainy Chilly

    WGN Weather Center Blog Monday afternoon’s thunderstorms brought an abrupt end to a hot, steamy day here. Outflow from the thunderstorms brought a rush of dense cold air to the surface dropping temperatures nearly 30º in less than an hour’s time. The heat relief is only temporary, however, with heat and humidity expected to return Tuesday, along with more thunderstorms. Here are some of the largest temperature drops as recorded on our WeatherBug network. Hoffman Estates 93º down to 64º a drop of 29º Wilmette 94º down to 66º a drop of 28º Algonquin 92º down to 67º a drop…

  • Mini-Posts - Radio

    Streaming at last

    kink.fm – Homepage Portland, OR’s FM stalward KINK-FM finally gets their broadcast streaming – I’ve been emailing them off and on for… well, years now, begging them to stream their stuff. I used to listen when I lived in Oregon – one place I lived was particularly good for listening to their distant signal from Portland, because it was a third-floor apartment in an old boarding house in Eugene, with a northward facing window and nearly direct line-of-sight. Ah, it’s good to hear this station again.

  • Connections - Hot Off The Presses

    A Hipper Crowd of Shushers – New York Times

    A Hipper Crowd of Shushers – New York Times ON a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists. My friend Debbie will probably have seen this, but I’ll send her a link anyway – she’s a librarian, and once did a paper on the stereotype of the be-bunned, shushing librarian in…

  • Hot Off The Presses - Mini-Posts

    Funny for the wrong reason

    CORRECTED: Estonia dominates wife-carrying championship – Yahoo! News It’s not just funny that there’s a wife-carrying championship, or that Estonia is the powerhouse in the sport of wife-carrying, but that somebody cared enough to CORRECT this particular news item. And it keeps showing up in my feed, like it’s undergoing continuous tweaking.

  • Politics, Schmolitics

    Outrage Fatigue: Is Blaming Ourselves Necessary?

    Salt Lake Tribune – Rosa Brooks: Did Bush fool us or did we fool ourselves? So why did it take us so long to notice? Someday, historians will ponder our strange collective passivity in the face of Bush-Cheney madness. Why did the editorial boards of our major newspapers either parrot the administration line or raise only muted criticism on so many issues, and for so long? Where were the tough journalistic questions? Why didn’t more members of Congress protest the administration’s blatantly unjustified policies and transparent constitutional outrages? For that matter, when Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft and countless…