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Today I was concerned the paper had shrunk to nothing. At least that’s how it appeared from the front door with nary a paper in sight. I looked around from different angles and eventually spotted it. Can you?
Newspaper deliverers are going to have to start folding your newsprint into paper airplanes to get it on the porch.
It’s the first Monday at the Spokesman since the layoffs took effect. I can’t imagine it’s a whole lot of fun there with all the empty desks and heavier workloads.
This NYT story about Sarah Palin was pretty interesting anyway, but then I got caught on these few paragraphs:
About eight months later? I wouldn’t care if the Palins did have the old oops-let’s-get-married wedding (family tradition?), but it seems like an odd way to phrase things. It either sounds purposefully vague or purposefully suggestive, like a written wink.
Former coworker Tom and his girlfriend Sally walk through an apple orchard at Green Bluff north of Spokane. Nick and I went with them to look around and it was fun. It was also a week ago, but I’m not real interested in time these days.
I wanted to walk all the way down the row of apple trees, like right up to the fence at the end. I figured there might be something interesting there and I was right.
Already today I couldn’t remember whether whales were mammals and Nick thought “L” was in the second half of the alphabet. Help! I hope this isn’t a foreshadowing of what unemployment does to your brain.
Also, hands down the best people-watching ever is when you have an estate sale next door in Spokane. If it wasn’t weren’t* so cold on the porch I could sit and watch that all day.
*Thanks a lot, Nick, you grammar jerk. I knew that one and just forgot. Like the whales.
Today I edited the Wikipedia page for The Daily Evergreen. Being a preeminent expert on the topic and, you know, unemployed, I decided to take up the task Rikki put out there a few weeks ago.
It started when I was crocheting and wondering whether the Cowles family of Minneapolis media ownership fame and the Cowles family of Spokane media ownership fame are related. (They are, distantly). Which made me realize a bunch of the Spokesman information on Wikipedia is way out of date, and I thought about correcting it but figured someone else can do that. What no one else can do is recite Evergreen history facts like I can, and since I still never recorded most of that in a useful format, I wrote it up for Wikipedia.
I also thought the Evergreen entry could use some better context about its relationship to the university and how it’s run, but all you still working there should give it a critical eye since that’s mostly from memory instead of extensive notes.
First, the perspectives, which I just hadn’t considered before. As one of my high school teachers would have said, they “rearranged my paradigms.”
1. From Colin Powell: The job of the vice president is to be ready to be president. After all the tiresome “heartbeat away from the presidency” rhetoric of recent weeks, what he said really made some old-fashioned textbook sense for a change. See everything he said on “Meet the Press.”
2. From the NYT: If you see abortion as killing a child, it doesn’t make sense to support exceptions for rape or incest. You either believe the survival of the fetus is more important than the mother’s circumstances, or you don’t. Those who hold the “extreme” anti-abortion view, like Gov. Sarah Palin, at least have logical consistency on their side.
Now for two questions.
1. Why does anyone care what Henry Kissinger thinks anymore?
2. On airplanes, why do they say you can use or not use your “portable electronic devices”? What other kind of electronic devices would you use on a plane? “Oh, whew, I’m glad they didn’t say all electronic devices or I wouldn’t be able to reheat lunch in this microwave I’m storing in the overhead compartment.”
I was reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” today and thought this quote from colonial Virginia governor William Berkeley summed up a good portion of all history:
“How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed.”
It’s part of my informal Books I Should Have Been Assigned For Class list, the same reason I read “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “A Separate Peace” after I graduated high school. I was reading it last summer before I got sidetracked by Harry Potter (it was my beat, after all) but I just started over for the heck of it and happened to read the first chapter on Columbus Day Eve. Timely.
I headed up north this weekend with my parents for the Whistle Stop Marathon in Ashland, Wis., up along Lake Superior. Except for the distance, it was totally unlike last weekend’s marathon in the Twin Cities. Instead of a downpour, it was beautiful and sunny. Instead of a twisting route in an urban setting, runners traced an old railroad bed amid colorful trees. Instead of focused elites leading thousands of competitors, it was a pretty casual affair.
Not that casual makes it easier. My mom and I started recognizing runners as we sped from one cheering point to the next, and they were all much friendlier and happy at mile 12 than mile 23. My dad (darker blue shirt in the photo) finished in less than 3 hours, 30 minutes, which was his goal. That’s not exactly Kenyan-like, but it’s pretty fast for normal people.
Minnesota apparently has some of the lowest gas prices in the country. This was last Thursday when they first starting dropping below $3, and not just $2.99 (and nine-tenths). Today the average gas price in Minnesota is $2.947, putting us as one of seven states with average prices below $3.
The average price nationally today is $3.206. Yesterday only two states were still above $4. Today it’s down to one. Guess which state, answers below.
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