Bank Gets Atlas Shrugged Onto Reading List With Bribe

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged'’ would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

For a lousy million bucks. Swell. I bet for ten million they'd make students read Flowers In the Attic.

The whole world can bite me. That goes for you especially.

Snow during the morning will give way to a mixture of rain and snow during the afternoon. High 38F. Winds S at 15 to 25 mph. Snowfall around one inch.

New hypothesis for central Ohio weather: we're brains in jars and the weather program is on the fritz, so they're rerunning the last known good configuration.

If you cannot spell scholarship, you will probably not be awarded a scholarship.

At least, I fucking well hope not.

Headline: Ohio colleges to improve education

Boy, they don't care whose feathers they ruffle over there, do they?

A loud knock on my apartment door disrupted my watching of Brandon, Dylan, and Brenda. I opened it to find my then-girlfriend British Liz who was supposed to be in a 4-hour evening class panting, trying to catch her breath.
“What are you doing here? What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Oh Jay…Simp…son…is…on campus…you have…to go…interview him.”
“Who?”
“OJ fucking Simpson!!!”
“But 90210 is on,” I said.

Read more, in "How I Met OJ Simpson and Survived Without Getting Stabbed Multiple Times!"

We went to his horrible bar called the Junction in Athens. It's one of the pickup bars for the Greeks at OU, but it's...well, it's pretty much the sleaziest one.

We never hung out there when we lived there. (Well, a couple of times on Quad Night, when you could get a drink with four alleged shots in it, but that was it.) We went because Matt's cousin was tending bar there and we wanted to say hi.

Of course, I pointed out that we weren't going to be able to sit and talk to a bartender in an Athens bar on a Saturday night, because of all the busy. In the event, I was right, so Matt got Howie and I each a pink, fizzy drink.

Howie sipped his. "It's kind of mediciney," he said. (Later, Matt told us why that was. I thought they had Red Bull and vodka and club soda in them, but he claims not. Hard to believe a bar would sell...well...never mind.)

So while we were, um, drunkenly writing on the walls in Magic Marker, these chicks stumbled out of the ladies' room. They made out for a while(in that "Is everyone watching?" kind of way), and I noticed their drinks matched ours. Then one of them started smiling at me and doing that flirty I'm-touching-my-neck thing, and I told my friends we had to go. I said that these women were so drunk they thought I was attractive. Our mystery drinks went unfinished.

Later I reflected that possibly this says poor things about my self-esteem. It's been a rough couple of months.

Part of the Family Guy Star Wars thing featured Rush Limbaugh playing himself.




( Read more... )

This weekend in Athens, we had dinner at the Union Street Diner. If you were at OU in the mid-90s, this is where Gold Star Chili used to be.

We got there well after the rest of our party, because we had to finish the beers we opened at the hotel before they boogied out. They were getting their food right as we sat down, and the waitress asked, "Will you need menus too?"

"Yes," we all said, and she sighed and headed back towards the front of the diner.

"Unless that would be some kind of totally huge hassle or something," I said to her departing back.

Chad said, "I think she did that because she forgot my side dish."

"Did you see her shirt?" I said. "It says, 'I get shitfaced drunk. How do you deal with stress?' That's what she decided to wear to work today, and her employer doesn't mind. That's kind of awesome."

Been reading about the Jena 6, finally. The central issue that's got everyone incensed -- at one side or the other -- has been discussed to death, but I find myself fascinated by one of the tangential issues that cropped up.

To wit: in what sounds like a street fight, or a bunch of guys swapping insults in lieu of an actual street fight, a white guy goes and gets a shotgun out of his truck. The black guys he's yelling at, or who are yelling at him, or both, take it away from him and won't give it back.

The black guys are charged with theft of a firearm and the guy who pulled out the shotgun isn't charged at all.

Everyone knows how to interpret that, right? That is small-town-law-enforcement-ese for fuck you.

"As a rich, self-satisfied prick, I've had trouble finding a classy broad to nail in the back of my LearJet."

In today's bold new world of information retrieval, you can be driving home with a friend and make an off-handed comment about some comedy sketch you remember seeing, years ago, and hours later be seeing that very sketch.



I literally dimly remembered seeing this at two in the morning in 1992. I wasn't even sure what station it was on.

While in Chicago we drank tons of Old Style. My friend Matt, with whom we stayed, can appreciate good beer, but he's also not an extravagant person, so he ends up buying whatever cheap stuff he can stomach. Sometimes that's Schlitz Malt Liquor, which his local groceria sells by the 15-pack. Usually it's Old Style, because every dive bar in Chicago has it on tap.

I'm kind of jealous. It makes me wish that Columbus had a sewage-grade beer of its very own.

Inevitable traffic jams in Indianapolis. Hicks in raised pickups willing to tailgate you at 85 mph to indicate their displeasure with your staid, conservative driving. Some of the ugliest scenery on the planet once you get north of about Valparaiso. Filthtastic gas stations and truck stops that actually don't stock bottled water.

When I got to Chicago, I drank a very tall Jack and Coke that Howie graciously provided me, and then I thought for a long time about whether trying to get back to Ohio without going through Indiana would delay things too much. Going through Canada shouldn't take more than an extra thirty-six hours or so, right?

Damn it, there is no conceivable reason for me to be in the kind of bad mood I am. Seriously. I'm off work for the next eight days, and I'm going out of town to see all my friends, and so on. I don't get it.

ENTERTAIN ME, INTERNET FRIENDS!

Chicago this weekend. Arrival tomorrow evening, staying through Sunday afternoonish.

There may be people who still read this thing who live there and would like to hang out -- drop me a line.

Other than that I'm having a good week. A problem I was having may be solved...

What'd I always say about Dr. Holbrook at OSU? Those who know me have heard me say that she was a bad cultural match. Well, check it out:

http://dispatch.com/live/content/multimedia/audio/2007/08/karenh.html

By now, I imagine everybody has seen Miss South Carolina pontificate on geographical ignorance; if you have not, I reproduce the video and transcript below for your convenience.

( Such as... )

My wife called me at work. "There's a fucking bat in the house!"

So I came home. When I got there, my neighbor/bass player taniwha was walking out of the house. "I think it's gone, I searched through your whole house."

He and I searched again. No bat. We came to the conclusion that it possibly came in through the mail slot, and flew out unnoticed when Jen fled the house to seek Ted's assistance.

We went to sleep. Jen woke me up at about midnight, and I heard a thumping. "What's the cat doing?" she mumbled. "The bat isn't in here, is he?"

"No." I looked up at the ceiling. "JESUS CHRIST!"

As I watched, it fluttered into a wall and thumped to the ground.

I got Jen up. "Run downstairs, we'll shut it up in the bedroom."

We slammed the door shut and went downstairs. I just started to catch my breath when I heard Jen scream. Yep...fluttering.

Okay, I know bats aren't that dangerous, all right? I've even gotten them out of houses before. But I was still half asleep and Jen was really upset(she didn't have her glasses on and couldn't really see the thing well), and I freaked.

I pushed our front door open, but that little doohickey that's supposed to hold the hydraulics on a screen door open didn't work. I sent Jen back upstairs, threw the cat in the bedroom with her, closed all the doors to the upstairs rooms, and went out on the second-story landing.

The thing fluttered halfway up the stairs towards me, then back downstairs. Good; now I knew at least three rooms where it was not. I went downstairs, opened the door again, wedged the screen door open with a broom, and stood outside waiting.

Nothing. For like ten minutes.

I went back inside and shut the door to the basement, thinking I'd either trap it down there or keep it from hiding down there. I shut off all the lights in the house, turned on the porch light, and sat on the living room couch in the dark, waiting to see if anything would happen. (I'm quite proud in retrospect that this is apparently exactly what you're supposed to do. I didn't know that at the time.)

After a long, boring hour, I gave up. No bat. I decided that either I'd missed its escape or it was trapped in the basement.

So, here I am in the basement. There are...a lot of nooks and crannies in my basement. I never realized. I can't find my Maglite and I really need to start Bat Patrol. It's irritating that I'm not a hundred percent sure it's down here; if I don't find it, I won't know if it's gone or if I just suck at looking for bats.

Bah. Ate a ton of beans and rice, and hungry anyway.