Saturday, December 8, 2001
Does this remind anyone else of Footloose?
12:08 PM EDT
Santa's got a corporate sponsor. I guess this shouldn't surprise me, what with every stadium and football game in creation being sponsored by some corporate behemoth.
I'm still waiting for the Tampax Tampons Cotton Bowl, myself, but the Poulan Weedeater Bowl is a close second.
12:04 PM EDT
But was it Clark Griswold?
12:00 PM EDT
I slept really well last night, and am feeling oodles better today. We're going to the Devils-Caps game at 1, which I'm really happy about. The last game I attended was way back on November 18, and I'm suffering a little bit of withdrawal.
Dave's in the living room watching a show on HGTV on installing audio and video components, and I'm in my office in my jammies, surfing around and doing some holiday shopping. Rumor has it there might actually be SNOW tonight, which is just insane, considering that on Thursday the temperatures here reached 75 degrees and I was driving around in short sleeves with the sunroof wide open.
10:39 AM EDT
Friday, December 7, 2001
What a polite thief.
08:38 PM EDT
Well, we're back. Actually, we got back around 5, and then promptly crashed for a couple of hours. It was a lovely service, but completely draining. It was really difficult to see my parents and their friends and Barbara's family in so much pain, but her brother gave a really sweet and funny eulogy, and everyone tried very hard to remember the joy that Barbara had brought to them.
*sigh* I was also wrong about how old she was. She was 56.
I'm in my jammies, and am planning to write out some holiday cards. I don't think I'd be very good for much else tonight.
07:49 PM EDT
Thursday, December 6, 2001
I am 45% ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET.
I could go either way. Deep into the madness of nights filled with coding CGI-Scripts and online role playing games, or I could become a normal user. Good luck!
Take the INTERNET-ADDICT Test at Fuali.com!
11:42 PM EDT
One of my kooky former professors has shown that DNA evidence taken from one of the victims of the Boston Strangler does *not* match Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to eleven murders and was killed in prison. It is widely believed that DeSalvo was innocent, but confessed in order to make money from media deals.
08:49 PM EDT
This article just reinforces my feeling that John Ashcroft is a big honking idiot.
08:43 PM EDT
Um, I must have missed the memo where gauchos came back into style. I loved gauchos when I was, like, seven.
04:05 PM EDT
I guess it wasn't Sully after all.
03:54 PM EDT
This is on tonight, which is about the only thing that can redeem this giant suck of a day. Apparently there's some sort of "making of" special on right afterward, too.
I also saw that this is on Saturday night at 8. My dad *loves* this movie. I'm not so fond, since I found out that Flick is a porn star.
03:51 PM EDT
One of my favorite Sports Night quotes of all time really fits today:
Dana says, "It's not at the cleaners, you idiot! There's no such thing as an overnight ring cleaners. Gordon and I broke up, which is just the most recent in a series of recent humiliations, and I'm okay with it. I can take it, but this -- is really the living end. I have seen enough to know that I have seen enough. And now I want something good to happen. I want something good to happen before the day is over, and I'll be judge of what's good. One good thing before the day is over, I swear that's all I want!"
Our email system is down. My sinuses HURT more than they have ever hurt in my life. And I have to drag Dave out of bed at 6:15 tomorrow morning so that we can make it to Philadelphia for Barbara's funeral service tomorrow. Did I mention that his company Christmas party is tonight? Yeah. Great timing. I feel like crap for ruining his Friday off with this unexpected trip.
10:34 AM EDT
Wednesday, December 5, 2001
"It'd be like letting a toddler loose in a room full of peanut butter stuffed electrical outlets." Dear Lord, SuburbanJoe is funny. Be sure to page back through the home improvement entries.
09:41 PM EDT
When the night shows
the signals grow on radios
All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
even choose a side.
I took the old track
the hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
they were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
and as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
was warm and soaked the crowd.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
use up what we used to be.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
-- Peter Gabriel
06:33 PM EDT
I've not been posting much here about the 9/11 stuff, but this story about people who showed up on the dead and missing lists but who are very much OK is pretty interesting stuff.
04:42 PM EDT
I'm wondering if we could put one of these in the Dave Cave.
04:38 PM EDT
I AM 42% GEEK.
I probably work in computers, or a history
deptartment at a college. I never really
fit in with the "normal" crowd. But I have
friends, and this is a good thing.
Take the GEEK Test at Fuali.com!
04:31 PM EDT
"No noteable attributes were observed that would aid in identification of the subject," Miller wrote in a department news release.
03:48 PM EDT
Well, this story is certainly bizarre. Hint: It was a movie. There's no real money there.
03:47 PM EDT
Some of you may remember an entry that I posted just about this time last year, about the death of an old friend of my parents. I called him John then, but his name was actually Joe. Joe died suddenly the Saturday before Christmas, and I wrote a lot about how Dave and I had just seen him at Thanksgiving, and how awful and sad and unfair losing him at such a relatively young age was.
I had a seminar in Newark this morning, and arrived at my office to find a rather distraught-sounding message from my mom, asking me to call her at work ASAP. First, I wondered why she hadn't called my cell phone. Second, I knew that the news couldn't be about my dad, because if it were, she wouldn't be at work.
What she had to tell me was that Joe's wife, Barbara, with whom we just had Thanksgiving dinner, and who made us all laugh at my parents' 60th birthday party in November, had a heart attack last night.
She died shortly thereafter.
I just. Cannot. Believe. This.
11:27 AM EDT
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
For all of you who read the V.C. Andrews novels, here's a fascinating story about the ghostwriter who kept them going after the author's death.
12:51 PM EDT
Modern Humorist presents what 2001: A Space Odyssey could have been, if it had been written by David Mamet.
12:48 PM EDT
According to media sources, President George W. Bush appears ready to nominate J. Robert Brame III to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), despite Brame's long-standing leadership of religious-political extremist groups on the farthest fringes of the Religious Right.
Brame has served as a top official of American Vision, an Atlanta-based group that seeks to replace America's secular democracy with a "Christian" regime based on "biblical law," including enforcement of the harsh legal code of the Old Testament.
My favorite quote in the article is this one: "The Plymouth Rock Foundation, which Brame has worked with through service on its advisory council, opposed Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination to the Supreme Court because, in their view, it is wrong for a woman to sit in judgment over men." Oh, and of course the part about the "lesbian congressthing."
So what do you think? Should this guy be laughed out of town? Should he be prevented from serving on the NLRB because of his extremist views? Discuss.
12:26 PM EDT
Well, that's one way to try and win "Pizza Seller of the Year".
11:18 AM EDT
It appears that a man's letter taunting a Virginia Commonwealth's attorney about the lawyer's failure to make a death-penalty case stick may allow the writer to be retried for capital murder after all.
Wouldn't want to be his public defender.
10:45 AM EDT
Monday, December 3, 2001
KPMG needs to get a grip. I guess I'll be drafting agreements for all of those people in the left column, there.
08:04 PM EDT
So the teachers in Middletown Township, NJ are on strike, because their contract expired in June, and they and the school board can't agree on health benefits. Sounds normal, right? Well, there's a new wrinkle. A judge issued a "back-to-work" order, and is planning to call all teachers into his courtroom tomorrow, one at a time, and if they say that they do NOT plan to go back to work, he will immediately throw them in jail.
Yeah, a few days in the pokey is *definitely* the way to inspire teachers (who had been working for three months without a contract, remember) to get back into the classroom.
06:53 PM EDT
If you've got Comcast @Home, like we do, there's a wee bit of good news for you.
04:37 PM EDT
See, now these are the kinds of stories that keep me up at night.
03:22 PM EDT
How psyched am I that my departmental holiday lunch is going to be at Ruth's Chris Steak House?
11:36 AM EDT
 | If I was a work of art, I would be M. C. Escher's Lizards. I am a bizarre juxtaposition of the real and the unreal. Based in the realm of mathematics, my two-dimensional appearance belies a complex and free-willed behaviour which both delights and confuses people. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test |
10:57 AM EDT
I'm just waiting for my favorite holiday commercial to appear this season.
09:43 AM EDT
Sunday, December 2, 2001
So what really is the "Armpit of America"?
11:28 AM EDT
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