Short Takes - Second Attempt
Spent the evening hanging out outside the Elliott Center in G'boro while JennySlash attended a grad school orientation thingie, after taking myself out for a nice Indian dinner on Tate Street. I'm told that there's a Cup-a-Joe on Tate Street that likely has wireless, but it's location wasn't obvious.If you spent any time on I-85 going back and forth between Greensboro and Durham in the last couple of decades, you'll have certainly noticed the billboards for Dockside Dolls, a strip joint - er, gentlemen's club - in the location off the interstate between Graham and Haw River that some of us are old enough to remember once housing Bakatsias' Restaurant. It struck me today as we drove past that the young women pictured in the billboards, which haven't changed in at least 20 years, all probably have daughters that are old enough to dance now at Dockside Dolls. They're closed for renovations now - maybe they'll renovate the billboards while they're at it.
I've been meaning for days to link to "Liberality for All", a new comic book depicting the exploits of cyber-enhanced Sean Hannity, Ollie North and G. Gordon Liddy (so what are Rush and Novak, chopped liver?) as they battle the forces of ultra-liberalism led by President Chelsea Clinton and her VP, Michael Moore. As a spoof of extremist right wing paranoia, it would be fantastic - I wish I'd written it myself. However, to all appearances it seems to be serious (as serious as anything positing a cyber-enhanced Sean Hannity could possibly be). Things can't possibly get much stranger.
Tell me again why the free enterprisers and privatizers think its a good idea to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to Big Oil (the world's most profitable companies) for, uh, performing their core business?
I've realized that I've slipped back into my habit of reading only fiction, after spending quite a bit of time the last couple of years reading quite a bit of non-fiction, including a bunch of stuff on US history between the 1880's and WWI (a period I was woefully ignorant of) and some really cool stuff like Charlie Wilson's War, which I would encourage all of you to read. But the last 6-8 months have been almost entirely devoted to fiction. So here's the thing - for the next few months, I plan to read at least one non-fiction book for every two new fiction titles. Note the "new" qualifier - I do intend to spend some time going back and rereading the Harry Potter series now that we're only one book away from the end and I'm not counting them towards the fiction total. But given that I'm about 2/3 of the way through Neal Stephenson's most excellent (but extremely long) Cryptonomicon and recently finished HP and the Half-Blood Prince, I've now picked up Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond after reading the discussion of it in the comments of Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog last week. I'll let you know what I think.
While I was out on bighappyfunhouse, I checked out a couple of Ron's Chicagoland links and found this. Punk chicks, roller skates, an injury photo gallery - if I were in Chicago I'd be there every single night.
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