Public Service Announcement:

Oh hello, I’m beloved anchor Ron Burgundy.

You know lately I’m hearing all this talk about kids smoking pot, or marijuana, ‘reefer’. Hey, what’s the deal with that? What happened to just getting high on good old clean life? Maybe enjoying life looking at a rainbow? Or sitting underneath a waterfall, enjoying a big glass of scotch? Or enjoying a pack of cigarettes on a hot summer day? What happened to those simple pleasures? Did they die with the dinosaurs and the tyrannus rex?

In my book they didn’t…..And there’s only one book. That’s the Bible. So, give it a read when you got a chance. Hey, last time I checked, Bibles were in libraries. Hey…goodnight.

from the film Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie

Mohsen made it to Seattle. I took the first series 2 games to 1. In game 3, the score was 9-9, then… I don’t remember, but I think I won. Mohsen, did I win?

(edit: I remember doing a victory dance, but I don’t remember winning.)

Here’s the blog upon which I will be documenting every step of my journey into the Hellenic hinterlands of Greece and beyond (the Aegean Sea…. to Turkey).
I will be in Greece for 1 month beginning tomorrow and immediately will go to Turkey after that for 5 months of doner-eating bliss. I plan on getting wicked tan and blessed worldly. Check out my new blog for more infotainment.

Has anyone besides Joel seen Star Wars Episode III yet? Me has! And them beans be TAST-EEEEE!!!! The amount of CGI action that Lucasarts is able to pack on screen at one time is dizzying (and, in no uncertain terms, delicously satisfying) — the opening scene I thought was especially “whiz-bang.” Of course, everybody has been looking forward to the movie as the pivotal episode in which we actually see Anikin Skywalker transform into Darth Vader. This is the heart of the movie, the whole saga really, and I feel the scene in which the helmut goes on will go down as one of the most significant, and memorable, scenes in cinematic history.

While the movie is overall great, there are parts that I felt were a bit too maudlin, a bit too contrived. One especially stood out and I wanna get a reaction on it — I’m gonna go ahead and direct this question to Mohsen — Mohsen (if you have seen it), did you laugh out loud when Darth Vader first comes out of his transformation chamber and, upon learning Padme had died (supposedly, as Palpatine tells him, at Vader’s hands), gestures dramatically and exclaims “NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”? To me, that’s the quintessential kind of thing that Mohsen Manesh would find funny.

Neal Horsley is presently a right wing extremist who advocates the criminalization of homosexuality (although his past suggests that he’s probably not totally sincere or sane). But on Alan “Skeletor” Colmes’ radio show, he recently admitted that as a young lad his “first girlfriend was a mule.” [audio here, scroll down]
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According to Media Matters, esteemed conversative curmudgeon, Robert Novak likened the Democrats’ use of filibusters to block judicial nominations to the Holocaust, claiming that the Democrats’ effort to pick and choose which judicial nominations should be approved is “like going to a concentration camp and picking out which people go to the death chamber.” [video here]

Boy, and I thought the Jews had had it tough! But at least according to Novak, getting filibustered by the Democrats is just like “going to … the death chamber.” Poor Abe Fortas….

The bad news is that the New York Times will soon begin charging for access to parts of its online website. Starting in September, you will need a $49.95 annual subscription to view op-ed columns online. This means that I will be no longer be able to read things like today’s excellent column by Paul Krugman. The good news is that all of other material on Nytimes.com will remain free.

While NYT is contracting its free online content, Washington Post, as far as I know, has made no plans to start charging for its website. And ironically, CNN, whose website features much lower quality and less interesting articles than both NYT and WaPo, announced that its dropping the $5 suscription required for viewing videos on its site. And thank God, Slate is still free.

best movie moment ever (I’m drunk):

Ooooooouuuuuooooh

Hello,

Hope I’m not disturbing you, but uh I saw you from across the party and
I don’t usually do this, but I felt compelled to tell you something.

You have an absolutely breathtaking heinie. I mean that thing’s good. I wanna be friends with it.

OK this is the last one of these for a while, so just humor me again…

For the past 3 years I’ve been on an almost mythic quest for the perfect cup of coffee. I started out slow, first buying a Bodum french press, a Black and Decker blade grinder, and switching to whole bean coffee. This sufficed for a while. My quest accelerated rapidly January ‘04 when I bought the first of my two West Bend Poppery I’s (popcorn poppers) and began to roast green coffee out on my fire escape. I was still using an auto-drip primarily, though. After a while, I felt like my roasting efforts weren’t paying off, and that the culprit was the suboptimal water temperatures produced by my auto-drip. So I unplugged it, and began to make my coffee by pouring just-off-the-boil water over the grounds in the filter basket (the design of my auto-drip permitted this - most don’t). The initial difference was remarkable - more body, more flavors, and just stronger overall. I also bought a Swiss-Gold One Cup Brewer, which (as Mohsen can tell you) lets more sediment/oil through but produces a cleaner cup than french press. Then, in the last six months, the pace quickened even further - I purchased a Chemex, a Moka Pot, a muslin cloth Coffee Sock for the Chemex, a Silex Narrow-neck Vacuum Pot, and a Cory Large Gasket Vacuum Pot. This is ridiculous, I know, and I can’t really explain it. However, with the final addition (the Cory) I felt like I had found the perfect cup of coffee. However, having fulfilled my quest, I was left with a dark chasmic void deep in my very being. Rather than fill it with pie, I filled it with convenience.

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So that’s what a displaced (edit: broken) eye socket looks like. I have not seen how Joe Johnson was injured, but reports point the finger at a hard fall after a flagarant foul from Jerry Stackhouse as Joe tried to dunk. In addition to the eye injury, he suffered a concussion, scarred his hand, cut his wrist, and bit all the way through his lip.

The doctor performing his surgery says that his recovery timetable is uncertain - somewhere between Game 5 with Dallas and next season.

.

There was a song in the mid to late 1990s that was at least somewhat popular (on the radio) and it made references to J.D. Salinger’s short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from Nine Stories. I vaguely remember the song, but can’t for the life of me remember the name or band. Do you guys have any idea?

I tried Google, but no dice.

Determining the sexual character of a robot can be a tricky thing. You might think that robots, as they exist today, are asexual in every way. As usual though, you’d be wrong. According to Houghton-Mifflin, Asexual is defined as follows:

a·sex·u·al (ā-sÄ•k’shÅ«-É™l) adj.
1. Having no evident sex or sex organs; sexless.
2. Relating to, produced by, or involving reproduction that occurs without the union of male and female gametes….
3. Lacking interest in or desire for sex.

Clearly since robots do not reproduce they are asexual in only 2 of the 3 ways listed above. At least that was true until now. Now thanks to scientists at Cornell you can look at these new robots and unabashedly say ‘those robots are asexual in every way!’

That’s right these little dudes can build copies of themselves out of any spare robot-cube-segments that might be lying around, proving that reproduction, particularly reproduction in highly contrived settings, is not limited to biological thingamabobs.

Now run for your life before those little roomba vacum cleaners learn to reproduce and start taking over the world.

This is what one of our fellow Hogs is up to here at the UM. Eric is doing a PhD in biopsychology, and lots of other stuff rice-related.

Try this link instead.

As I alluded to in an earlier comment, I have an announcement to make. In short, I will be in Michigan for another miserable winter. The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy has accepted me for a Masters in Public Policy. The Law School and Ford School have a joint degree program that allows one to get an MPP and JD in four years as opposed to the five it would take if done separately.

Why would you endure another year of academia, you ask. Well, I am almost 100% certain that I do not want to be a private attorney for all of my career. I don’t want to work in a large firm for very long, if at all, and have always had a bent toward public service. The Ford School won’t help me get a law job, but won’t hurt either. Also, I will be trained in policy analysis that will assist me in pursuing a position at the State Department or local government etc. Furthermore, I’m only 24 years old. Most of my classmates are at least 2 years older. It’s hard to pass up the opportunity to graduate at the age of 26 with two professional graduate degrees. AND I will get to study economics, statistics and calculus, which I’ve really found lacking in my repertoire. ::kidding::

Actually, I look forward to the Econ classes. The other thing is that I’ve always wanted to do a joint degree and it was one of the reasons I chose Michigan. All of their graduate programs are in the top ten (public policy analysis is #3). I’ve put it off because I thought I really wouldn’t use it. Now, I’m thinking seriously about a career in academia after I get some real-world experience and since I’m not on the law review/Supreme Court clerkship track, the extra degree will help in that pursuit as well.

So, the Midwest gets me for one more year.

Here’s some unexpected national attention. According to the May 16th issue of Sport Illustrated magazine, which will be available on newstands Wednesday evening, Fayetteville High School’s athletic program ranks 19th in the country. The magazine ranks the top 25 high school programs along with a list of the top schools in each state.

The rankings are:

1. Long Beach Poly (Long Beach, Calif.)
2. DeMatha (Hyattsville, Md.)
3. Saint Thomas Aquinas (Fort Lauderdale)
4. Punahou (Honolulu)
5. Cheery Creek (Greenwood Village, Colo.)
*
*
*
18. Saint Ignatius (Cleveland)
19. Fayetteville (Ark.)
20. West Monroe (La.)
*
*
*
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Via News Hounds:

I didn’t make this up (although I wish I had). The female FOX News anchors were named the “Republican Babes of the Week” by JerseyGOP.com. You can go here to see the other babes who have recieved this honor.

It looks like Lebron James is following the footsteps of so many NBA player, who’d rather be rappers. According to reports (here too), he’s going to fire his agent and sign with the hip-hop label Def Jam Records (”a company not known for representing athletes”). Def Jam will apparently be sharing management duties with Lebron’ former high school teammate and close friend Maverick Carter.

Of course, I didn’t need Pitchfork to tell me. I figured it out when I first tried to listen to their new album’s first single, “Beverly Hills.” [audio here, video here] But today, Pitchfork gave Weezer’s new album Make Believe (to be released tomorrow) a 0.4 which I think on their scale means that it sets new standards for aweful.

I think the reviewer is right when he says Weezer’s last two albums got cut a lot of slack given their 90’s works. But after hearing “Beverly Hills” and now reading the review, I’m not going to even bother listening to the rest of Make Believe.

There are two ways of looking at Weezer. Like Pitchfork, you can say their 90s albums are objectively good and that their last three have been average at best, pathetic at worst. Put differently, Weezer’s changed for the worse.

But maybe it’s we (the twenty-somethings referenced in the review) that have changed. Maybe Weezer’s always made music that targetted a juvenile, simplistic audience. And that’s why we liked The Blue Album and Pinkerton, because they hit us when we were in their target audience. Now that we’re older, we just can’t dig their new stuff; because its targetting today’s teenagers, not a bunch of too-cool, over-analytic twenty-somethings.