October 2008
September 2008
The Crazy guy in accounting left a picture of a Trailer-Trash drag queen wearing a cowboy hat on my desk last night
(via axelrod)
Sorry, I’ll tell him to stop stealing pictures from my private collection and sending them to you.
Now I feel like a creeper.
Listen
Empire of the Sun - “We Are The People”
New single released for download ahead of the October 4th album release from Empire of the Sun. If this and “Walking on a Dream” are any indication of what’s to come, I can’t wait to hear the whole album.
Definitely a group to watch out for, I will be getting this album.
Play
Play
Chicago People
Anyone know of any good places to eat by WaterTower? I have class right around there and am tired of eating at SoupBox and Jimmy John’s.
I remember hearing Foodlife is not bad. I think there is also a California Pizza Kitchen around there. If you want to spend too much money for ok food in a tourist trap you can always eat at the Cheesecake Factory at the foot of the Hancock building, hehe.
Planned Parenthood Thanks Palin
From Salon’s Broadsheet:
You know that e-mail everyone’s been sending around, encouraging people to donate to Planned Parenthood in the name of Sarah Palin? So far, it has yielded $802,678 in donations from over 31,000 people, from all 50 states, two-thirds of whom are first-time donors. Thank-you notes to Palin, care of the McCain campaign headquarters, will begin going out next week.
Love it.
Play
Economy?
So the economy basically makes me want to bury myself in art and literature (and who am I kidding? Videogames) until it all just goes away. I’ve been so politically engaged for the past month that I don’t know how much more I can take, but the economy thing is coming out of the realm of the abstract and is starting to have a concrete impact on those all around me.
It’s starting to look like the current generation in power took the Great Depression as a challenge, and are fighting hard for the Greatest Depression. Let me fall into a life of booze, drugs and whoring if that is the case, because I really don’t want to deal with that thought sober and undersexed.
Maybe it won’t matter anyway if they can get the Large Hadron Collider back on track and end the world in time to make that Mayan Calendar accurate.
“Whenever you think that the Government has done things so extreme that it can’t top itself — torture, theories of presidential lawbreaking, a six-year war justified by blatantly false pretenses — it always tops itself. On top of the massive debt under which the country was already drowning, another $700 billion is now being added in order to save the nation’s richest individuals from the consequences of their own recklessness, allowing many of them not only to remain enriched, but become further enriched, all while basically ensuring that the Government is incapable of spending any money for years, if not longer, on programs designed to improve the lives of the vast, vast majority of its citizens — the same citizens who are forced to fund this bail-out. That seems hard to top, but the only thing certain is that they will find a way to do so.”
—Glenn Greewald
The Height Gap →
newyorker.com
If I haven’t read it, it’s new to me! I was tipped off to this article in the New York Times after John McCain pointed out in the debate this last Friday that North Koreans are on average threeinches shorter than South Koreans due to malnutrition brought on by their oppressive regimes. Interestingly, it seems the average American is up to two inches shorter than people in Northern Europe where wealth is more evenly distributed, there is universal health care, and a greater social safety. Most of the differences were attributable to poor nutrition during childhood and adolescence.
In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.
Of course one doesn’t need to look at height to know that people in northern Europe are healthier; it has been long known they have a greater average lifespan.
