The difference between art and journalism.
Thornton Wilder, contemplating the collapse of a bridge that killed five people: Who were they? How did they live? Why did they die? Was it the divine hand of God or merely random fate? What does it all mean?
News accounts of bridge collapse in Minneapolis: It's not terrorism! Really!
The disclaimer in this story,
Good-hearted Americans fed up with the direction of the country under the direction of the despicable Bush administration are fleeing to Canada in droves! What a wonderful testament to conscience and a terrible indictment of imperialist warmongers! But, wait. What were those numbers, exactly?
In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies.
Sigh. Guess I'll just go back to bed and pull the covers over my head:
The annual Harris Poll measuring public perceptions of 23 professions and occupations came out Wednesday -- and you can find journalists in the Bottom Ten.
[. . .]
First we had the story of the county police officer asking that his wife's DUI case "be handled differently," and now we have this story of a supportive spouse:
The fight for the position of Bargersville clerk-treasurer turned dirty in the past week when a candidate's husband was arrested on a charge of stealing campaign signs belonging to his wife's opponent.
I'm as much of a warmonger as the next guy, but I'm not sure of the point of this:
Governor Mitch Daniels made his second visit to northeast Indiana in two days, this time to announce the new name for State Road 1.
SR 1, which runs from more than 100 miles through eastern Indiana, is now named the Purple Heart Memorial Highway.
[ . . .]
I have been hoping I would get Restless Leg Syndrome, the new disorder that requires a drug that has the best potential side effects in the world:
“Some patients taking ropinirole have shown urges to behave in a way unusual for them. Examples of this are an unusual urge to gamble or increased sexual urges and/or behaviors.”
I've been remiss lately in passing along brilliant studies. But here's a dandy:
After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations.
It's more about lust in the body than a love connection in the heart.
Yes, lust leads to sex. You read it here first.
Remember how they tried to blast Gen. Noriega out of his compound by blaring loud rock music at him around the clock? This story is even better:
Transit workers are installing speakers this week to pump classical music from Seattle's KING-FM into the Tacoma Mall Transit Center. The tactic is designed to disperse young criminals who make drug deals at the bus stop or use public transportation to circulate between the mall and other trouble-prone places.
Whenever people point out that some war critics in Congress actually seem to want the U.S. to fail, they are accused of exaggeration. But James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal's Web site points to an example of a couple of legislators, and it's hard to interpret their remarks any other way. First, there is Kansas Rep. Nancy Boyda, who stepped out of a hearing room so she wouldn't have to hear testimony about progress in Iraq:
Wow. An illegal immigrant actually gets punished for breaking the law:
A Mexican national living in Indiana who has repeatedly returned to the United States after being deported will serve 62 months in prison for illegally re-entering the United States.
A touching love story that's set in Indiana and Kentucky. What's not to like?
OWENSBORO, Ky. -- An Indiana woman charged with helping her boyfriend escape after a triple murder is asking a judge to dismiss charges against her by validating a marriage license.
The editorial pages of The News-Sentinel and The Journal Gazette have had many disagreements, but never over anything this serious (from The New York Sun):
Quite a one-two punch. First, Kevin Leininger's column:
The state collected $395,686 in food and beverage taxes from Allen County bars and restaurants in June, down a whopping 27.8 percent from the same time last year.
This year's winner in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which annually honors the worst opening sentence for a nonexistent novel, to honor the Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clfford" famously begins, "It was a dark and stormy Night":
tHiS SeeMs lIKe tHe RiGhT dEcIsiOn:
Larry Cochran will never get the chance to face LARRY COCHRAN in court.
In a bizarre twisting of the notion of "capital" crimes, federal drug defendant Larry Cochran has apparently begun to annoy the judge presiding over his case.
We baby boomers have been commanding way too much of your attention. Now, we're coming for you money:
The aging of America is not just a population change or, as a budget problem, an accounting exercise. It involves a profound transformation of the nature of government: commitments to the older population are slowly overwhelming other public goals; the national government is becoming mainly an income-transfer mechanism from younger workers to older retirees.
Who could have guessed that this wouldn't work out?
They tell us he was steaming, but San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom shouldn't have been too surprised when The Chronicle reported that Golden Gate Park was littered with used drug syringes.
After all, his own Public Health Department spent $800,000 last year to help hand out some 2 million syringes to drug users under the city's needle exchange program -- sometimes 20 at a time.
This just in:
Can adding a cup or two of coffee to the exercise routine increase protection from skin cancer? New research indicates that just might be the case.
The combination of exercise and caffeine increased destruction of precancerous cells that had been damaged by the sun's ultraviolet-B radiation, according to a team of researchers at Rutgers University.
What if I double the coffee and just skip the exercise?
I keep hoping a dead relative will speak to me from beyond the grave and tell me, oh, I don't know, where a large pot of money is hidden or what secret there is to life or what it's really like on the other side. If I ever do get contacted, it will probably be something like this, though:
WHITING - A businessman who said a dead relative told him in a dream to cook the world's largest pierogi believes he and a friend did just that Saturday at Pierogi Fest.
I want me one of these:
Brigham and Women's Hospital has given a surgical team permission to perform partial face transplants on certain disfigured patients, making it the second US hospital that has gone public with plans to do this rare and hotly debated procedure.
Then I can be smart AND pretty, which is much better than cute and dumb.
