On September 4, the first nationally televised Democratic Presidential Debate will take place in Albuquerque. I volunteered to help out at the debate, and I learned today that my duty will be staffing/escorting one of the candidates during the debate. Due to the ever-present danger of getting in trouble for blogging something you shouldn't, I will just say that the candidate is male, a U.S. Senator, a former V.P. candidate, and is named Joe. I am definitely looking forward to it.

Strongbad hits the big time.

I know homestar runner has taken my group of friends by storm. I've concluded my summer can be summed up by: "family guy and strongbad."

From msnbc.com: 12-year-old begins medical school. I was going to comment further on this story, until I read the following:

The response from the public — and some of his undergraduate classmates — has not always been positive. Recently, Sho did an Internet search of his name and was surprised to find many people commenting about his life in blogs (or Web logs).

“One person said, ’Look at this miserable child with a pushy mother,”’ Sho says. “Another said, ’Look at this miracle of God with his supportive parents.”’

Sho smiles at the notion that his parents have pushed him. “Sometimes, I kind of pull them along,” he says.

You know, it's much harder to make unfair generalizations about someone you've never met when there's the distinct possibility that they'll do an ego search and find your blog....

This is a little weird... Those crazy Portland Beavers...

Alright, alright, I'm back, there's no need to post things that you say Nat would love to entice me to post. My computer at home has been down for three weeks and I have a hard rule of not blogging at work. (I have this annoying job where if some stupid reporter wants to write an article about me misusing the internet at work, they might consider it news.)

The news from my end of town is I found a house to move into next weekend. No pictures yet, but I'll take some with the digital camera when we move in.

Pluses: 2 fruit trees, clean, lots of space, close to work, $675/mo., nutty guy in the other half of the house, 1 block from the "river".
Minuses: 2 blocks from junior high school, faces north, in a "be careful" neighborhood, nutty guy in other half of the house.
More pluses and minuses will follow when I move in. There will be a housewarming party soon for all who would like to attend. There is also a spare bedroom for all who would like to visit. This seems like a very strange step, as I actually have never rented before. And it is weird to do it in the town where you grew up.

It's fall which means that tuesday morning quaterback is back (and also, as someone pointed out yesterday, "the leaves are falling back east..." All I don't like about berkeley is the lack of fall). Here's the highlight of today:

Dear France, You Can Keep Your Politicians, But Marianne Is Welcome Anytime: Marianne, traditional symbol of French womanhood -- best-known as a topless warrior in Delacroix's mural Liberty Leading the People -- is now being posed for by Laetitia Casta, a lingerie model. Only in France could a lingerie model be a national patriotic symbol!


Casta was chosen by a vote of France's 35,000 mayors; the French population is 61 million, which means France has one mayor for every 1,750 people. Prior to the vote, many mayors pored over photos of the candidates sans shirts. Only in France could looking at bare-chested babes be a patriotic duty! Le Monde writer Debra Ollivier has said that the essence of Marianne is her exposed breasts -- "flush, freewheeling, insolently raised in protest or subdued in a state of heraldic order." TMQ never dated a woman with flush, freewheeling, insolent breasts. Apparently I missed something.

Figured Nat would really appreciate the number of mayors statistic.

From the New York Times travel section: If a Bear Knocks, Don't Answer.

This is probably common knowledge to Fed groupies, but while looking for resources on the Federal Reserve, I came across this interesting piece from 1997 on Alan Greenspan's relationship with Ayn Rand. Apparently they were close enough (the article refers to Greenspan as Rand's "special pet") for Greenspan to read the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged straight from Rand's typewriter. The article also has some interesting material on Greenspan's reputation as a ladies' man, speculating that he was "a good kisser."

Over the course of the summer I'd somehow managed to completely forget just how ridiculously many undergraduates there are... They're like ants. You can hardly move without running over several of them.

Today is a sad day for musicians and music lovers everywhere: Wesley Willis is dead.

I was introduced to Wesley by Todd Gustafson, who graduated from my high school in 1996 and went to Northwestern. Some time during his freshman year, he gave a member of our Quiz Bowl team a tape of Wesley's music, and we played it during a log car trip to somewhere in northern Minnesota. The only description we got was that it was music by "a 400-pound black schizophrenic from Chicago who writes songs and draws pictures." We heard such classics as "Rock and Roll McDonalds," "I Whupped Batman's Ass," "Northwest Airlines," and "Chicken Cow." We were hooked.

I saw Wesley in concert in San Francisco in January, 2002. He was amazing. He played for about two hours, headbutted dozens of admiring fans, and consumed about ten litres of Pepsi onstage. He played many of the old favourites as well as some timely pieces such as "Osama Bin Laden" and "Grand Buffet" (the name of one of the opening acts). It was well worth spending $20 and waiting through three pretty dreadful opening acts.

In case the Reuters brief doesn't convey the full meaning of Wesley, here are an article and a concert review that do him better justice.

Rock over London, Rock on Chicago.

Suzanne Vega learns to drive in New York City. All I have to say about driving in New York City (to pick up alec, haiwen, tamara for a trip to bessie's) is that within the first 10 minutes I was hit by a taxi driver (just a little love tap) while spending nearly 10 minutes in a traffic jam that was one block long!

Oh, that and realizing that I was driving through a scene from 25th hour, that was pretty nifty...

Last weekend at Middle Haddam, I was trying to remember one of the more memorable financial queries I've seen: a reader asks CNN Money how he should invest today to save $100,000 for his six-year-old daughter's wedding in two decades. Of course, if we put the girl to work now, she might be able to save most of it herself!

If this murder trial were a novel, I'd toss it out the window for sheer implausibility: New York real estate millionaire disappears, disguises himself as a woman, checks into a rooming house in a sleepy resort town, then allegedly shoots his drifter neighbor (nicknamed "Gilligan"), dismembers the corpse, and drops the pieces into the shipping channel. There's also something about the mysterious disappearance of his wife from twenty years ago, and a 45-day national manhunt that ended when the suspect shoplifted a Band-Aid and a sandwich, despite having almost $40,000 in the trunk of his car.

Anyway, I'm tempted to quote the whole story, which strikes me as the sort of thing that Nat would love. Sample quote: "At the Poop Deck, a second-floor tavern with a porch that catches a breeze off the Gulf that rarely makes it inside the bar, neither man was known to have been argumentative or to have dressed as a woman."

Amusing incident on the other side of the ocean.

I probably should have pointed this out earlier, but unfortunately, these replica letters of transit wouldn't have done you much good in Casablanca: the artist fell into a common misconception and had the letters signed by "General De Gaulle" ("copied from the real thing!"). However, as the Casablanca goofs page on imdb.com makes clear, the letters of transit were actually signed by General Weygand (that is, Maxime Weygand, the Vichy minister of national defense), although Peter Lorre's accent makes this difficult to hear. Most people, including me, seem to hear "De Gaulle" when they first hear the line, despite the fact that De Gaulle's signature wouldn't have been very useful on a Vichy document.

The day after my last post, an actual Grail Diary appeared on eBay, at what seems to be a bargain price. I'm tempted, I'm really tempted....

More Indiana Jones replica merchandise: This fellow sells every amazing artifact you've ever wanted, from Sankara Stones to Nazi collapsible coat hangers to the letters of transit from Casablanca. His Grail Diary replica is simply amazing.

You can also buy a discount Grail Diary (at 1:6 scale) from this guy.

Like everyone who saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I've always wanted my own copy of Henry Jones's Grail Diary, arguably the coolest movie prop ever. You can imagine my astonishment, then, upon discovering that there's an entire online community of artists who apparently spend much of their time preparing beautiful, hand-crafted, hand-aged replicas of the Grail Diary, which retail for something like $900 apiece. (A bit steep, perhaps, until you learn that the "original" diary sold at auction for about $18,000….) The site I found is really fascinating, with pages and pages devoted to the different sketches, inserts, entries, etc. that the diary contains. This may even be cooler than the Codex Seraphinianus...

Today Mike Develin told me, "You look very California." I took it as a compliment.