Have any of my currently unknown artistic brethren and sistren out there noticed what nifty little curiosities we seem, to our  acquaintances? I mean, if we won big fat awards or sold something for hard cash, we would be seriously interesting — legitimate, even. But until then, we are breathing diversions; we are, at best, refreshing company, because if we are, indeed, forced to cut the grass to make ends meet, we still refuse to stray far from playing in the backyard sandbox.  And, oh, the little castles we can make! Such delights! Such fun! [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, education by Chris Matarazzo
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There is a dog room and a cat room. The dog room contains stalls and cages built into the walls along with large, wheeled fourplexes for the young and the small. Also in the dog room is an endless peal of barking, howling and scratching. The cat room is more like the section in the old Woolworth’s where they sold the goldfish and parakeets. Basically there are aquaria but with grillwork instead of glass and within the grillwork are tiny mewling bits of fluff, at this time all nameless. Little cards describe them briefly with a guess at their breed and a good estimate of their age which is given in weeks or months. In a dog cage in the cat room there was one enormous middle-aged creature who had already enjoyed a breadth of life far beyond what his cave-cat ancestors could have expected. His name was Arthur. [Read more →]

Tags: animals, getting older by Ken Watson
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It’s safe for work (I guess).

Tags: ends & odd by Michael Cade
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We’re getting some funny reactions to the eclipse of Solyndra. One tactical dismissal is the old threatened filibuster; you want to talk about the money wasted on Solyndra? What about all the money wasted on coal, gas and oil? Hmmm? And it is a good question. The presumption is that while there may be ups and downs in the New Frontier of alt energy, we KNOW “fossil fuels” are obsolete or at least bad, so…. And all talk is smothered under a threat of a days long energy policy seminar for which you feel yourself ill-equipped. Underlying this threat is the certainty that nobody…. that would be NO body is going to simply say, okay, stop it all. Of course they are correct. If ethanol, which starves the world but enriches Iowa while costing the nation billions can yet hold together a coalition of granolas and agri-business, the Solyndroids have solid grounds for their conviction. Log-rolling is a most popular sport in political fields even if it is not yet in the Olympics. So the total Solyndra loss is not much at half a bil and is only 3.4% of the outstanding solar loan portfolio. Alright, we can wait on that point until losses are at 30% as it won’t be long. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Honesty and sports do not necessarily go together. The stakes involved in the major sports certainly lend themselves to participants trying to get an edge any way they can. That is not to say that everyone cheats, of course, but there is no doubt that finding an advantage is often the key to winning. Sometimes, this does involve various kinds of subterfuge and even cheating. One of the reasons I have never been a big fan of soccer is the way that players fake injuries in attempts to get penalties called on their opponents. I have long assumed that this happens in other sports as well, but it seems particularly obvious in soccer. This week, this phenomenon became a hot topic of conversation in the NFL, as the New York Giants seemed to take a page out of the sport’s namesake, with not one but two players faking injury at the exact same time. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. Fart History

9. Print Journalism

8. Forensic Reflexology

7. Fax Machine Repair

6. Congressional Ethics

5. Ufology

4. Competitive Dwarf Tossing

3. Farrah Fawcett-Majors

2. American Economics

1. Grifting
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, education by Bob Sullivan
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Former Green Bay Packers kicker Chester Marcol’s new autobiography looks to be a real humdinger.

[Read more →]

Tags: drugs & alcohol, sports by Michael Cade
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Some pertinent facts seem to have been subsumed behind the New York Times pay wall, one wall I shall never breach, but my memory has not yet been degraded by the internets as badly as our ability to catch birds in flight has been dulled by the poultry industry. SkyNet Jr (Google) will not disgorge a story from 2004 about a team of mathematicians, two I recall, either at MIT or BU who eagerly participated in the race to develop statistical models that could predict elections. This is vital work as the one innovation that could solve all our problems; taking the citizen OUT of the electoral process, hangs on its perfection. These fellows had some pretty serious success as their program, held in utter secret, could reliably predict the two-party vote within two percent. At the time the question was, Will the fine, enlightened war hero, John Kerry, replace the drooling hand-puppet from Enroniburton? [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Is Erica Kane dead? It seems her show is, at least on network television. Yesterday was the last episode of All My Children on ABC, and it ended with a gunshot headed in Erica’s direction, followed by a fade to black. Much like its soap opera protagonists, All My Children will be resurrected from the dead, but online. Now two questions remain: who will be in the new version, and who will watch it? [Read more →]

Tags: television by Robert O'Hara
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So, Troy Davis is dead.

Strapped to a gurney in Georgia’s death chamber, Troy Davis lifted his head and declared one last time that he did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail. Just a few feet away behind a glass window, MacPhail’s son and brother watched in silence.

And, despite his claim that he is innocent of a crime for which there is said to be no physical evidence, it seems the witnesses were enough to make it stick. The victim’s mother says:

[Davis has] been telling himself [he's innocent] for 22 years. You know how it is, he can talk himself into anything (same source as above).

As anyone who reads my stuff with any regularity knows, I’m not a current events guy, except when current events raise larger philosophical questions about life. I can’t stay away from this one. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, religion & philosophy by Chris Matarazzo
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