Category: Uncategorized

(Warning: link shamefully stolen from Charles.) This list is great, but #1 is just brilliant.

There are few things more depressing than going to your weekly meeting with your Little Brother and finding out you can’t see him because he’s been suspended from school. Particularly when he’s teetering near the failure point in several of his classes and a day’s missed work can really hurt him.
The reason: he’d accumulated seven tardies this year, and that generates an automatic one-day suspension. What genius came up with the idea of suspension from school as a punishment? It’s a day off — what sort of incentive for good behavior is that? “Gee, I better shape up — if I screw up one more time, I get a day off from school.”
I can understand if a kid’s bringing a knife to school or something that you might want him out of the school environment for a while. But his punishment for not showing up to school on time — is not showing up to school at all? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

This, my friends, is classic journalism. Girl finds two-headed toad, and newspaper decides to write about it. “The two amphibians are conjoined, un-identical twins,” the paper claims.
Then, three days later, it runs a correction: Oh, sorry, those toads were just having sex, that’s all.

Really, could there be a better time for my CD burner to crap out than a time when I have a couple dozen mixes to burn? I sent out a big batch today, but there may be a momentary delay in shipping out more. (Ordered a new burner last night, but it won’t be in for a few days. I’ll keep trying to get my current one to keep working — it seems to function, but keeps pumping out screwed-up discs — but if I keep failing, it could be a couple of days before I can start on the next batch. My apologies.)

Interesting profile of Kwame Brown, the 20-year-old who just finished his first year in the NBA. It’s been a rough adjustment.
A plate of strangely shaped fried seafood arrives at the table.
“Is that like fried shrimp?” he asks.
“That’s calamari,” Nasser says. “It’s squid.”
“You shouldn’t have told him that,” Ferrell says.
Brown looks stricken.
“Squid,” he repeats.
“You should have just let him eat it,” Ferrell says with a laugh.

May I make a musical recommendation? The new Imperial Teen album On is such great fun. Sure, it sounds just like their two previous albums, but is that such a bad thing?
Also enjoying the new Gomez (as would be expected), the new N.E.R.D. (perhaps more than I should be), and the new Mooney Suzuki (although less than I was hoping to).

My story in today’s paper: New state exam to get a test run.
It’s not online, but the story ran with a little math quiz showing sample questions from each of the four standardized tests Texas has had over the last two decades (the tongue-twister TABS, TEAMS, TAAS, and TAKS). The tests have gotten harder over time, and the increasing difficulty of the questions illustrates the point. The downside, unfortunately, is that all morning I’ve been taking calls from people who claim we got #4 wrong. (Trust me: we didn’t.) The question:
The student council sponsor is planning to make a circle graph showing the number of votes for each of the candidates for student council president. The table below indicates the name and vote count for each candidate.
Bridget – 240
Hakeem – 420
Maria – 180
Viera – 300
Tony – 60
What central angle should the sponsor use for the section representing the votes for the student who finished in third place?
A. 54 degrees
B. 72 degrees
C. 90 degrees
D. 126 degrees
Your answer? (No cheating by looking in today’s paper.)

“When you try to channel some of that southern friendliness up here, somehow it comes off as slutty.” – Canadian Katherine (though she’s evidently just quoting Joots)

Matt Update: He’s out of surgery, minus one gall bladder, and in the recovery room. No word yet on whether he’s asked doctors to save the gall bladder for use as a cell phone holder.

Everybody send good vibes in the direction of North Dallas, where Matt is scheduled to be suddenly short a gall bladder in a few hours. As he puts it, he’s just helping evolution along by having surgeons remove such an unnecessary organ.