Sorry there's been such a lag. First I was traveling, and then Blogger was down. We should be back on a regular Filing schedule now.
posted by B T at 11:51 AM| ++

I used to think that hotel rooms were sexy – the privacy, the big bed in the middle of the room...but even a small amount of business travel cures you of that: I now think that Hotel rooms invite solely recumbency and the viewing of television. I almost naturally turn it on when I come into the room; it was an effort just before typing this to switch it off. I think these places are owned by the networks as research and indoctrination facilities. Only in a hotel room do I ever watch even five minutes of Good Morning America..

From a piece in the Nation on the inadequacy of public defender systems in many parts of the country, comes this paragraph, which I think unfortunately serves to do further damage to the person mentioned...:

'One of the few people in Greene County who told me they were innocent was Julian Daniels, 21, a smallish man who works on a quail plantation hanging birds by their legs on a conveyor belt so they can be shocked and have their heads sawed off. He said he had physical proof that the drugs found in the back of his friend's car weren't his, but after calling [scandalously overbooked defense attorney] Surrency three times and receiving no calls back, he resigned himself to paying a $925 fine during the two years he's on probation. "I don't got no choice," he said.'

I'm mesmerized by that job description: that has to be in the top ten of worst vocations ever.
posted by B T at 5:42 PM| ++

Business Owner Finds Jabez's Paw--Makes Wish
Jabez and Mammon Sign Historic Peace Treaty
Jabez Shows Way Through Needle's Eye
Jabez Gets 1 Million Hits Per Day
Republicans Relieve Guilt Through Bible Reading
posted by Art Stukas at 7:29 PM| ++

My post of yesterday, (see "Self-Applied Sucker Punch" below) had a broken link; click here if you're at all interested in the Dirt Cheap Airline to which I was referring.
posted by B T at 11:43 AM| ++

Thought-experiment for today: read this article from today's Times, meditate for two minutes, then quickly write down five Onion-style headlines for the same story.

By the way, I think you need the free online subscription to the Times to read the piece online.
posted by B T at 10:08 AM| ++

The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition)

Amazing color photographs, made using a three-color process, before WWI. Kind of a double-take to look at these.

Thanks be to MeFi for the reference.
posted by B T at 2:15 PM| ++

Does "self-applied sucker-punch" mean you're back in my fair city?

I should add one qualification to the Ditka story: I really dragged my heels about going into the resto/bar. Silly me. Had I gotten my way, we would never have seen the head and the man. BT would have returned to Gotham story-less. I still regret not having allowed the head mockery to ride, nay, joined in. That would have been a real story: Mike Ditka kicked all of our asses for mocking his wooden head.
posted by Mike Green at 1:26 PM| ++

Self-applied sucker-punch

Who is the bright boy who scheduled me on a 6 AM flight to Chicago this morning? Who's the guy who didn't think very hard about the fact that this does not entail getting up at six, but rather in the godforsaken hour before five o'clock, the time when the human body is at its metabolic low point, the time when waking up to an alarm means accessing one's Emergency Reserves, vague panic and dread naturally following: what the hell is going on? Fire? Earthquake? Wolf attack? Oh, right – that plane I have to catch...

The rest of the story – cancelled flight, interminable line at the Dirt Cheap Airline ticket counter, the haste to the gate for the flight I've been transferred to – well, I should have predicted that too. In any event, now that I'm looking down over the wild uplands of New York State, looking forward in a ridiculously eager way to whatever version of "breakfast" is about to land on my tray table, my poor serotonin system is beginning to recover from the shock; my neurotransmitters, which have been sparking as if some kind of national emergency were underway, have now concluded that there is Nothing Important Going On...I am feeling remarkably like I did that morning in college when I woke up in the back seat of a 1970 Dodge Swinger, parked off of an extremely bleak stretch of Virginia Beach, and waiting for my roommate to wake up too, so that we can go look for a tire shop and get the car fixed, so that we can turn around and head back to school. Then, as now, I wonder how it was that I failed, the night before, to predict what the morning would be like.

posted by B T at 12:30 PM| ++