quarter23cd

When I still lived in the area, the big hole in the ground was a routine tour stop for visiting family/friends. As much as I hated going there, I don't begrudge them their curiosity. Let them look at the big hole. Go ahead and take a picture if you want. And try to imagine what was there before it, and the way that hole got there. Its pretty powerful stuff to sit and think about. The only thing that ever really irked me were the gift shops.

Do you have a link to the supposed list of books to be banned? I had searched and searched on this and was never able to find it. The librarian herself said she was never given a specific list, I only knew of the "what if" question that sounds like it was essentially posed as a loyalty-test. Frankly, that's distasteful enough on its own. If a list never existed, its a pretty ingenuous tactic to suggest that there's a fake one floating around there somewhere. (and by now I'm sure there is) But, yeah, the whole thing is pretty he said/she said and therefore pretty pointless to pursue. Its

Does it matter? Its a colorful and entertaining news item. For now, I'll say "yes" to your question. If that answer turns out to be untrue later and you call me on it, I'll just roll my eyes disapprovingly and wonder why you insist on living in the past. Agreed?

Drill, baby, drill? Note: It was really difficult to search for images with kewords "drill", "girl", "oil", etc. without coming up with stuff that I really shouldn't be looking at at work.

Heh. I had completely forgotten that a month after 9/11, my wife and I flew from NYC to Ohio for a friend's wedding--a feat that, evidently, awed a great many people in attendance. The pastor actually pasued, mid ceremony, and acknowledged us specifically for being so "brave" as to actually board a plane from NY to be there. We just awkwardly smiled and waved and people looked at us like we were Evel Knievel or something. I dunno. New Yorkers--I don't know if this is still true or not, as I live elsewhere now--but for a while there at least, you couldn't board a subway or an elevator or

My wife and I had just moved in with her sister, in Westchester, just north of NYC. That was a surreal time to be "settling into" a new area. The morning the planes hit I was on my way to my first day of some lousy temp-job telemarketer gig in Yonkers. I walked in the door and it was just total silence. I wandered around saying "hello? hello?", looking for the guy who was supposed to be my supervisor there--nobody looked up from their computer screens. Finally, somebody told me what had happened and told me to go home. I knew a plane had hit the trade center, but I was assuming it was a

I dunno, but I got a chuckle about south Florida getting the Syracuse/Penn St game--must be for the Snow Birds.

There is still a poster at the entry to my workplace that has the "terror scale" on it and a marker that supposedly shows the current level. No idea if it has been updated recently.

Team 'em up and that ticket is pretty intriguing. FWIW, I've always been curious about write-ins and wonder how many votes God and Santa Claus have gotten over the years.

Make your vote a historic vote. Lincoln's Ghost '08

To combine with the "Scary Things" thread, since it has long been rumored that Lincoln's ghost still haunts the White House, an argument could be made as to whether we really need anyone new in there at all. Think about the history we'd be making--the first non-corporeal president!!!

How many people do you need in order to be officially recognized as a movement?

Well I'll be gal-darned. I by no means have a PhD in economics, but those reckless lefties over at that clearly liberally-biased "news" rag know as Business Week seem to like Obama's tax plan.

My wife has zero patience for politics. She avoids the topic as much as she can (although I give her credit for having an astonishingly good BS-detector without having to spend hours on end obsessing about it, like we've all been doing around here lately). But I guess since I'm usually pretty level-headed, she hates election season because it never fails to push every last button I have.

I can understand that. We just moved from the NY/CT area of the northeast back to the midwest--living in Delaware County, OH, just outside of Columbus. The schools are great, but, yeah, its about as white as you get in the area where we are. Which, in itself, isn't a problem except that my oldest daughter came home after her second day of kindergarten and dropped a vaguely racist comment at the dinner table while we were asking her about her classmates. It was pretty clear she was repeating something she'd heard at school, and it just completely blew my mind. Two days of kindergarten...

Coffee with a shot of valium figures to be my beverage of choice for the next couple months.

That would be a really good band name.

This kind of stuff just seems ridiculous to me. Heismans are nice to win, but in an ideal world you shouldn't have to campaign for awards like you're running for president. Sheesh. Then again, I just listened to a friend of mine explain his theory that OSU deliberately laid an egg against OU in order to dramatize for the media the effect of not having Beanie Wells out on the field. For their sake I hope that explanation is true, cuz otherwise I have a feeling they're gonna get f'd up by USC this weekend.

Its true. I have at least a couple people in my immediate family who are thus far willing to overlook the fact they don't know much about her (and don't really agree with the parts that they do know about), but have stars in their eyes over the fact that a woman is on the ballot and delivered one ballbreaker of a speech.(regardless whether anything she said was actually true) She is still new in the public's eyes and there are several weeks left of nonstop media attention before the election. Surely, by then, her novelty factor will have diminished and we'll know better if people still lik

I hear the vice-presidential bunker is nice.

On the bright side, beyond the campaign fight she doesn't seem to have anything to say and doesn't know what a VP even does, so there's a possibility she'd be preoccupied spending the next few years using a top secret war-satellite in space to blast baby seals with a death ray and you wouldn't have to listen to her.

Is she still bragging about her opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere that she was in favor of until it became a national symbol of wasteful spending? The answer to your question about whether it matters is: probably not.

I like the bit about Palin refusing to talk to that gal-darn media she hates so much (doesn't she have a communications/journalism degree?) until she is treated with respect......and has time to memorize her script. Seriously, they're letting her get away with this crap? Obnoxious as it was, maybe its time to resurrect the "3:00 a.m. phone call" meme. Even Rudy would have to agree that on 9/11, he didn't have two weeks to prepare a response. On 9/11. Because he was there. On 9/11. Did I mention 9/11? 9/11. 9/11. (thank you, Rudy. you can sit down now.)

I dunno, those Greek columns at the convention suggest to me that he's a closeted Zeusist. And, really, that would be refreshing. The world hasn't heard much from Zeus recently. I, for one, kinda miss the big guy. In other news, a recent study finds that Americans are easily distracted by loud noises and shiny things.