Back in Week 3 of the NFL season, as the bookbag-shuffling and laptop-closing cacophony began to drown out the last few minutes of a late Friday afternoon class and the students near the front (successfully) conspired to shut me up with ordinary water-cooler talk, they asked me about the Buffalo Bills/New England Patriots game that weekend. I told them: "This game scares me. Really scares me."

Uproar! With two minutes to go, all of a sudden a flat, distracted, party-anticipating crowd of freshmen were paying attention. WHAT?!?! How can you say that? The Pats are favored by 9 points. Tom Brady. Bill Belichick. It's the Buffalo Bills. "Trust me," I replied, "The Patriots can easily lose this game." When they demanded to know how I could possibly think such a ridiculous thing, I pointed to the clock. "It's 3:15. Do you want me to keep you after or would you rather I explain it next class after the game?" They agreed with smug assurance,  then came the riotous blur as they bolted for the door.

I got hit a lot harder than I thought I would considering all the hype about how this was all hype. Very little rain but very high winds. The light pole was snapped in half. Wouldn't you know it--I lost power but this neighborhood streetlight didn't.

Help me out here people.

As best I can figure, one of the channels among bin Laden's favorites was either a Spanish language electronic music station, or, possibly, an audio-visual-editing channel.

But I could be wrong. Any other possibilities?

Well, 2010 is at an end, so it's once again time for the First Annual list of Stupidest.Lists, including the Award for Stupidest Annual Award. Along with pornography, stupid political opinions, pornography, stupid products, pornography, stupid social media, pornography, stupid videos and pornography, of course, one of the main consequences of the the explosive growth of the internet is stupid lists. So, this year, for the first time, we at the Inaugural Annual List and Award for Stupidest Annual List and Award were forced to limit the number of lists and awards under consideration. There's just too much stupidity out there for our Award Council to even try to catalog, let alone assess in the careful and expert manner such a prize demands.

Just about two years ago I was sitting in Argentina, surfing the web for US political news. I stumbled across an article, and decided to leave a comment. I had discovered Newsvine. Like most new members, initially I didn't really know what I was doing, or how to navigate the site, but I learned (mostly by trial and error). The more I used the Vine, the more I saw the dichotomy. There seemed to be two types of people; the Newsvine "pros", and the "trolls".

I keep reading articles in the mainstream media to the effect that the White House and Republicans in Congress are negotiating a tax bill with a settlement certain. Then I read conservative partisans chortling over the certain victory for Bush tax cuts extension. Then I read liberal partisans lamenting certain victory for Bush tax cuts cuts extension.

Those articles are all wrong, which means pretty much everyone writing on this subject is wrong. Except me.

Jon Stewart joked that his Rally for Sanity was just like Woodstock but without the nudity and drugs. He was right, mostly (I guess there were drugs around, but I didn't see any, and I certainly didn't see any nudity although there was probably some of that around, too.) The point of similarity, though, is that the point isn't the event as such. It's the event as cultural signifier. If you ask actual people who went to actual Woodstock and if they tell you the truth, they'll tell you it was terrible. It was raining fer gawd's sake.

UPDATE: Everyone, and I mean everyone seems to want Starbucks. Lines are hilariously long.

To the right is my sign, based on Chapter 6 of Huckleberry Finn, excerpted below. Of the folks who have seen the sign so far, two out of three don't get it.

Quick first impressions. It's a family adventure for the Blue part of Red Families, Blue Families. Tons of kids. I don't mean college kids, though there's a bunch of those. Ten-, twelve-, fourteen-year-olds. Solidly bourgeois. There was a long line at the merchandise tent a half-hour before it opened.

It's great weather for a rally. People seem cheery and talkative. It's OBVIOUSLY going to a lot bigger than earlier estimates.

UPDATE: I accidentally took a great picture. I set the camera to "panorama," stood on my tippy-toes and reached as high into the sky as I could and took the shot blind:

Don't make me pull this car over, I'm warning you. If you kids don't stop this half-assed, knee-jerk, loudmouth petty bickering about Juan Williams you're grounded for a week, you hear me?

But Mom.

Don't you "But Mom" me. You think I haven't been listening? One of you says he told the truth. The other says he's bigoted. You're both right. Now if I hear one more word out of either you, no Boardwalk Empire until it comes out in DVD.

Pundits, polemicists and various and sundry other social critics have puzzled lately over the problem of how to nickname the current decade, now rapidly closing. We need a nickname and we need it now. The obvious choice would be the "Bubble" Decade. After all, it seems so long ago now, but the tech bubble actually burst in this decade--March 10, 2000 was NASDAQ's all-time high. And of course, the decade ended with the housing bubble. But that's too obvious. I propose we call it "The Balloon" decade.

There's a supposedly big tah-doo about this really important thing that has President Obama all lectury and sermonizery and has NBC News all in a tizzy and has a bunch of ostensibly serious people attending this summit in New York to let a whole bunch of folks get all lectury and sermonizery together and all in a tizzy, too. Nobody's really said much of anything that hasn't been said before and we're probably not going to do much of anything that all those lecturing, sermonizing, tizzying folks say we need to do, and pretty much everyone knows that, but we all get to feel better, anyway, and that's something, isn't it?

Okay. Here's the last one:

our set of threads is:

http://kpr37.newsvine.com/_news/2010/08/03/4805785-john-esposito-islamophobia-and-the-ground-zero-mosque

http://jjthefisherman.newsvine.com/_news/2010/08/15/4893775-the-ground-zero-mosque-obama-makes-a-big-deal-out-of-a-zoning-issue-i-have-the-solution-that-will-make-everyone-happy

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2010/08/14/4890175-obama-supports-the-right-for-ground-zero-mosque

and

http://thedoctori.newsvine.com/_news/2010/08/06/4834024-why-the-ground-zero-mosque-is-counterproductive-to-the-islamist-cause

http://smd12364.newsvine.com/_news/2010/08/16/4901589-how-the-ground-zero-mosque-fear-mongering-began

http://lisaed.newsvine.com/_news/2010/08/11/4868132-ground-zero-mosque-developer-rejects-paterson-compromise

WARNING. High-bandwidth usage and possible browser crash involved with clicking below. I'm posting this with "all of Newiinve" unchecked and w/o category or tags so that anyplace you see this will probably be this excerpt before you have to click again.

Now I happen to agree with Obama that BP is doing what they can to plug the leak because I think it's costing them money every minute they don't, and they're a bunch of greedy capitalist pigs. But I was ROYALLY PISSED OFF that they were allowed to maintain information control. We had a right to those feeds because it's our country that's being damaged. The information in this case belonged to us, not some profit-maxmizing pig thug bastards from London, England.

The funniest part is having a bug, an advertising logo, in some of the feeds. The one my sister Linda and I noticed earlier today, pictured here, is for Veolia, a French multi-national corporation specializing in water and wastewater management, treatment and purification.

So a British company drilling under American license in the Gulf of Mexico is cozied up to a French utility.

Sounds like a plan. BP is really good at planning, I bet they have their water treatment contracts with favorable terms all lined up and ready to go. Of course, to whom those terms are favorable is the question. Not the American taxpayer, I bet, except the ones that bought BP on the dip.

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As I was gleefully, obsessively overstimulating myself this week reading, watching and listening to innumerable reports of the Democrats' historic victory enacting the principle of universal health care coverage into Federal law after a sixty-year struggle, one of the items that crossed my field of view was this: Why Obama Used 22 Pens to Sign the Health Care Bill. However, I had noted just a short time earlier that the White House had released a list of those given pens used in the signing: Who Got The 20 HCR Signing Pens?

Where, oh my, where are the two missing pens?