Uh, wasn't that a new station?

Oldies?

Wow. With Q101 "on shuffle" and playing some great stuff but also Alanis Morrissette and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the third-largest city in America is without a true modern rock station. How sad.

Eat your heart out, CSI.

Oakland, California. 1973. A priceless rare book has been stolen, and Agent Bay and his crack squad of library police have only three days to get it back. That's the premise of Jason Shiga's Bookhunter, which mixes bad@$$ '70s cop show action with a nearly insane level of detail about archaic library technology. Give it a shot.

no, roger. tell us how you REALLY feel.

mr. ebert is once again pulling no punches in a review of "dirty love." (NOTE: don't read the review if you tend to be squemish about certain bodily functions!)

thanks to gapers' block for pointing this out to me.

Requiem for a Department Store

State Street will never be the same. Marshall Field's is getting rebranded as Macy's.

Am I wrong to feel at least a little bit sad about the loss of a great Chicago institution?

Sunday Fun Day Math

+




=




Football's a dangerous sport, yo.

on: being poor

i saw this on the tribune's site a couple of days ago, and i can't quite let it go yet. maybe it's b/c i know all too well what some of that feels like. or maybe it's b/c i don't want to forget what it feels like.

Thinking caps...

Does anyone have any ideas, educated guesses, fully supported theories or otherwise as to why Avis charges nearly $600 (like almost all car rental places) to rent a car for two weeks, getting the car in Seattle and returning it in San Diego, but when you try to do the reverse for the same period of time, it's almost half the price?

I can't figure it out. Anyone?

hop aboard while there's still room!

i am, of course, referring to the "tyrell sutton for heisman" bandwagon. good seats are still available. we're 2-0! woo!

just sayin'.

Fit nerds!

BYU the fittest college campus
PROVO, Utah (AP) — On those annual lists of the nation’s college campuses, Brigham Young University is best known for its regular ranking near the bottom when it comes to party schools.

But now the university owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has earned a new distinction: fittest college campus.

The ranking comes courtesy of Men’s Fitness magazine, which earlier this year went in search of the fittest and fattest schools.

Working with the Princeton Review, Men’s Fitness surveyed more than 10,000 university students from 660 campuses and released its rankings in its October issue, which hit newsstands this week.

Along with BYU at the top of the list are the University of California, Santa Barbara; Boston University; University of Vermont and Northwestern University.

Gilligan ...

... is dead !

Cosmetic changes...

Question for authors of this fine spot:

-Would you like to change the layout of this site? If so, to what?
In terms of the template, look here and here for some sort of inspiration.
I kinda wanted a masthead, but as that never happened for UrbanTherapy, I'll tread lightly. I blame dooce.

Any particular color y'all want? Layout? Two/three column? Archives listed?

a court supreme

o'connor has announced her retirement. rehnquist lost his battle with thyroid cancer. the confirmation hearings for john roberts are scheduled to begin on tuesday.

so...now what? early speculation has bush either promoting scalia or thomas to chief justice or going "outside" and appointing someone like attorney general gonzales. the article says the latter choice is more likely, but i wouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves referring to scalia as chief justice.

there's no doubt that the impact of these decisions could be ginormously huge. the question, though, is what can/should we do to make sure the impact is positive? obviously everyone's definition of "positive" will differ, but still. i'm not quite sure what to make of it, but i find it intriguing nonetheless.

and in other news, guess which company has been chosen to do some of the katrina cleanup work in mississippi and louisiana?

and did i mention that the war on terror is a fight for oil? just thought you might like to know.

National Geographic article

ghettoalums

Maybe everyone else read this article a long time ago, but I was in the hospital at the time that it originally came out ...

I'm sorry, but...

From a CNN story:
"The Pentagon said that by next week 24,000 troops would be on the ground to assist in recovery efforts, including 8,600 National Guard members by Friday who could be put to work in law enforcement."

BY NEXT WEEK???? Two things: #1. We can formulate and engage an invasion of Iraq in days, if not hours, but we can't move troops on our own soil faster than "by next week?" What the hell? #2. Would it take this long if we didn't have thousands and thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?

It's just ridiculous to me...and maybe my reaction is ignorant or uninformed, but I'll tell you, those two reactions are the first ones I had when I read that. Seems ludicrous to me. Not as ludicrous, of course, as sniping troops trying to evacuate sick people from a badly damaged hospital, but sickening nonetheless.

come back down, do it all over again

It's a hell of an understatement to say this has been a more horrific week than usual for our increasingly unfortunate planet. When you're well and truly shaken about the state of the world, is there any sort of music that soothes you?

I just discovered Spiritualized's Let It Come Down, a gospel/rock/electronica symphony by way of Brian Wilson, and I have yet to pick my jaw up off the floor. (Yes, as usual, I'm just now discovering the best music 2001 had to offer.) It's catchy, thrilling, and really moving in its grand arrangements and sympathetic lyrics.

What about the rest of y'all?