Men bare all for their local schools

JUNCTION CITY, Oregon (AP) — Cleve Dumdi — a 70-year-old respected sheep rancher, husband of a former county commissioner — was walking in this small Oregon town one day when a longtime acquaintance hailed him from across the street.

It’s the kind of ribbing Dumdi has had to bear ever since he disrobed and perched on his tractor for a 2004 nudie calendar featuring the men of Junction City’s Long Tom Grange.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/10/13/offbeat.calendar.boys.ap/index.html

So it looks like my hometown made national news. In other news I am going to see if I can legally change my hometown.

Are They Happy?

Y’all must watch this short film. Thank you, internet, for making my life so much better.

In other news, we don’t give nearly enough play to Eugene Volokh and his conspiracy.

“Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass”

Some reasons not to become a physicist.

See also: this.

How have I ended up browsing the computer science department at the University of Wisconsin when I’m actually looking for something completely different having to do with their math department? Ah, that would be the magic of the internet.

On The Role Of Chairs In Henry V

Amongst other things, anyway.

Mark Steyn, vehemently agree with him or vehemently disagree with him, is an excellent writer, and this piece from the New Criterion is absolutely golden. His book on musical theatre looks more and more like a must-read. Unfortunately, it came out long before the recent war; it would be nice to see how he’d weave pro-Iraq-invasion arguments into a history of musical theatre. (I’m convinced he could do it. Come to that, I’m convinced he could find room for a couple such arguments in his average weekly shopping list.)

The First Rule Of The Speech Code Is That You Don’t Call The Speech Code A Speech Code

Good stuff from Erin O’Connor‘s blog. Not sure how the Bucknell conservatives stack up against those zany funsters at the Princeton Tory, but, to quote O’Connor:

What’s great about the letter: the Bucknell Conservatives are taking on a cause that affects all students at the school, and are handling that cause in a non-partisan, even-handed way. Fighting for free speech on campus has become, unfortunately, identified with conservatism, and has thus become something too many people feel they can dismiss as self-serving conservative agenda-driving. It’s no surprise that this is the case, as the people who tend to find themselves on the wrong side of campus speech codes tend to be those whose outlook differs from the liberal orthodoxy that is entrenched at many schools (see the FIRE case archive for endless examples). Naturally, they will become the poster people for campus speech. But even if the issue has largely been taken up by conservatives, and even if taking up the issue gets you labelled a conservative (as has often been the case with Critical Mass), the issue is not itself a conservative one, but one that affects us all.

Right on.

Got a little captain in you?

So, let’s do a little role playing. You the exectutive of a liquor distillery. You lack morals, taste and a soul, so you come out with a wussified malt beverage, you disease ridden whore of humanity. Due to the fact that there is some justice in this world, the product falls flat on it’s pansy-ass. Now you have millions and millions of cases of booze that no self-respecting drunk would imbibe as long as there is a bottle of whiskey left on this planet. What do you do?

In June of this year, 145,000 cases of Captain Morgan Gold were found dumped on a farm in Pennsilvania. Although fedral officals refuse to comment on how the intoxicated farmland was discovered, rumors floating around say it was found when one fedral officer’s daughter came back home after visiting the farm intoxicated, passed out, was inexplicably violated by at least three frat boys and joined a sorority.

The mess was quickly cleaned up, thus ruining all of my wonderful plans of sewing barley and grapes in alcoholic soil.

Conservative academic? Even on the New York Times op-ed pages, that’s recognized as being an oxymoron…or at least viewed as one by universities’ liberal arts hiring committees. Read David Brooks’ September 27 column, “Lonely Campus Voices,” here. I also enjoyed his September 30 column, “The Presidency Wars,” which seems to accurately describe much of the anti-Bush vitriol commonly heard in Eugene. (Hey, I didn’t vote for the guy, but at least I don’t believe he’s the antichrist.)

Professional Sports “Matter Little In Big Picture Of Life,” Says Man Writing Column In College Newspaper

Let us consider Joe Bechard, Cultural Obstetrician. (Coming Wednesday nights to NBC this fall!) For a while now, he’s been my second-favorite Emerald columnist, and today he doesn’t disappoint: while most of the column is a fairly generic sports-are-for-idiots bromide which doesn’t really merit a response, there’s more fun to be had within. Mr Bechard, now more than usual, reads as though he has just been removed from a time capsule, having been interred scant minutes after the invention of the printing press or the cathode ray tube. Seriously, check it out.

Dozens of channels, with their glitzy production capabilities, would broadcast the events with all-star color commentators and sideline reporters.

We could even go one step further, and have a network that broadcasts actual debates from the floor of Congress!

Entire sections of newspapers would be dedicated solely to politics…

What a thing that would be. I also envision a world in which an entire section of the newspaper would be devoted to feedback from readers, perhaps in the form of letters, which could be printed together with a snappy bold headline summarizing the correspondent’s point of view. How about another section, which would cover arts and entertainment outside the world of sports? And perhaps community news, also. On the other hand, no. Nobody would care about that.

But my world will never exist…

It’s true, Joe, you were born too soon. But take solace in the thought that we’re all better off having clever people like you around to tell us what form our entertainment should take.