I’m heading to St. Louis in an hour or so for the labor day weekend. I’m hoping to catch a Cardinals/Reds game, and one of my boys is looking into scoring some Illinois-Mizzou football tickets for tomorrow. My sister and her husband will be in town too, so it should be a damn good time. If that’s not enough, my German exchange student will be spending next week in St. Louis with a friend of his who just moved there. I haven’t really seen the guy since I was a Junior in high school, so 8 years ago I guess. It should be exciting. Fingers crossed that my automobile makes the trip. I’ll resume regular posting on Monday evening.

Up for a potty joke? Here’s one more reason to use the shower instead of the tub: Click click.

Found it at Hoplites

How’s this for a pretty picture? Mars came at his closest point in orbit with Earth this morning. It’s been very clearly visible here on these clear nights we’ve been having. I can’t remember the last time we had any rain, although we’re supposed to get some tomorrow. My bluegrass is dying!

A friend of mine turned me on to an outstanding band called The Magnetic Fields, and their ’99 album 69 Love Songs. The man behind the band has a blog-like website here. Given the chance, I highly recommend you check out that three-disc record.

Today is the first day of the Fall 2003 semester, a Wednesday to be treated as a Monday. I went out and painted the town red last night to celebrate the last day of Summer, and was treated to a horrible, horrible baseball game. It wasn’t all that bad, except for the fact that Garrett Stephenson gave up 6 runs in the third, hopefully dropping him down to the minors where he will become one of those “players to be decided” in the trades for DeJean and Hitchcock, who pitched like a major leaguer last night, an unusual sight out of the Cards’ bullpen. Throw Pedro Borbon in too! To recap, aside from that one inning, it was a swell night. Recapping further, today is the first day of class. I’ve got everything settled, my schedule: Ling 482, Self-Organizing Phonology; Ling 451, Pragmatics; and ARAB 210, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. My work assignment has been finalized, I’m at 66% for the year, meaning that I work a third of a forty-hour week, or 25 hours. I’m no longer responsible for keeping this ‘puter lab working well, and will devote all my time on audio/video work. I started working full time again on Monday, and I’ve already gotten three major projects. Finished up some work for the French department Monday, got started digitizing and cleaning up some nasty microcassettes yesterday (one of them sounds like it was recorded in a moving car), and today the audio for three Russian classes were dropped in my lap. Good times. I’ll resume real blogging later on, the only news I’ve seen today is that the Alabama courthouse had it’s monument removed, on which I comment thusly: “Who gives a flying fuck?” The pensive, serious voice in my head answers: “The ACLU does, that’s who.” I don’t see that having some stone tablets inscribed with one of the most ancient codes of public conduct standing outside of a courthouse can be considered a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition of state religions or state infringement on free exercise of religion. And I don’t even believe in Jeebus.

Here’s an interesting and spooky article: U.S suspects Iraqi WMD in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley Found the story at Donald Sensing’s website. Linked to the blog that wrote it up, since I imagine the source will disappear once the big revelation happens tomorrow.

If I live to be one thousand years old, I hope I never hear of anything as idiotic as this: Egyptians may sue Jews over the Exodus. Found that at the Patriette’s place.

Added two new links to the permanent list on the left that I maintain more or less for my own browsing convenience. If you hadn’t already read Chief Wiggles by now, you should have. He’s in Iraq processing POWs, recently transferred from a desert camp to some fancy digs in downtown Baghdad. Also down there is Dave, a friend of mine going back to High School who writes with atrocious grammar and is posting a new picture every day. And here’s two tempalinks to inspiring stories out there today: first is Shanti’s mockery of al Qaeda’s claim to have orchestrated the East Coast blackout, and second is a letter from a Lt. Col. in Iraq critically describing the nitwits who are attacking our soldiers and the others who report on it.

Let’s recap: I’m on vacation right now and have been doing little aside from working on/registering my car and cleaning up the crib. My cousin is attending Ball State University this fall to finish his Chemistry degree. Ball State is in Indiana and not so far away from where I live, so he came up on Saturday to see his old cousin, drop off some of Aunt Kathy’s fantastic chili, and have a good time. Success! Monday we helped my roommate move out, I went to work for exactly one hour to administer a test, and then the cousin and I drove to St. Louis where we had dinner and threw darts at my friend’s bar. My cousin hit two Bulls and it was his first time playing. Tuesday we went to the zoo and then toured another friend’s live production shop/warehouse and ate at the restaurant across the street where his brother and sister works, and is co-owned by a friend of my brother’s. Small world. If I lived in St. Louis and had a fine lady to take out on Saturday night, I’d go there for their “Evening on Vandeventer”. Sounds like some good chow. After lunch, the cuz and I drove back to Urbana and he continued on to Muncie. My dad and his girlfriend visited me today, we went to my favorite watering hole for some lunch and then the lightning tour of campus. Got my license plates today, then spent the rest of the evening reading Bill Whittle’s newest essay, Responsibility, which you should do too. I think I’ll spend the night in tonight, recharge a day or two before taking advantage of the new liquor law that was passed in Champaign today. It looks like the Cardinals took the night off too, although I read the good news that Pedro Borbon, described last night by my former roommate as the worst pitcher in baseball, was sent down to the farm. I also got a positive confirmation in the past few days that my other two roommates signed a lease and will be moving out September 1. That means that I can get the renovations back online. That makes me happy.

A year ago short a day, my sister had gone to Richmond, Virginia to volunteer as a child advocate at a homeless shelter. My car would dump smoke into the cabin whenever I’d turn the vents on, and I didn’t know how bad that was. My sister wouldn’t need her car in Richmond, and was going to leave it in our mom’s driveway for the year. Instead, I pulled my ’89 Nissan Pulsar forward all the way in the driveway and let it sit fallow for the year, and I took over caretaking of her ’00 Hyundai Accent. Needless to say, I didn’t know as much about cars then as I do now, since I didn’t put fuel stabilizers into the tank and I now know the problem is a bad heater core, and not a big deal at all so long as you leave the vents off. Now the year has past, and my sister and mom stopped in my neck of the woods on their way back from touring the East Coast branch of the family to pick up her vehicle. Wish her a big congratulations, she put up with a lot of guff and doled out more sympathy and patience in the last year than I expect in my lifetime. She’s back in the Lou for the week and is looking for an apartment in Kansas City. The past two days, I’ve spent working on the two cars, mostly just cleaning up hers so she wouldn’t know how many cigarettes I smoked in there. My car has a new battery and fresh high quality oil designed for cars with high mileage. On the advice of the guy from the car parts store, I also tried out Sea Foam, putting some in the gas tank and some in with the new oil. I also put a little into my lawn mower, which also suffered over the winter from my ignorance of fuel stabilizers. The stuff is great, I highly recommend it. Both engines are running very nicely. Today I picked up some shiny new rotors and high-end brake pads, so that will be my project for tomorrow. My insurance agent says that I can stop in tomorrow to pick up the new insurance card, so I’m just about set. Also have to finally get an Illinois driver’s license and plates after having lived in this state for three years, but that can wait for a few more days.

Here it is: The Moment of Truth….

I watched every Cards game on TV this week except for Thursday’s, and saw some pretty amazing stuff. On Wednesday, I saw what looked like an E5 turn into a 5-3-4 double play. Yesterday, Miguel Cairo was the runner at third with Rick King intentionally walking Pujols when he sailed a wild pitch to the screen, scoring Miguel. Tonight, I saw Rafael Furcal turn an unassisted triple play. Then back-to-back HRs by Perez and Pujols in the eighth, Perez against the starter to tie it, and Pujols against the unhittable John Smoltz to score the winning run and extend his hit streak to 24 games. Super good. I don’t think I can watch any more games on TV for a while. Think I’ll save it up for the series against Pittsburgh the week after this one, when I intend to head to the Lou and see a game in person.
Update: Donald Sensing has the video of Furcal’s 6- triple play.

I’ve got a swirl of major projects going on at work, at any arbitrary point in the day I’ve got at least two computers working full bore. Audio bouncing on one and video capturing on the other. It being the summertime, campus is pretty dead. Most of the people around here are high school kids and their parents touring the campus. Everytime I go outside for a breather (ahem, smoke break), a tour walks past with the perky tour guide walking backwards and bullshitting the same spiel. The building I work in is shaped like a nose-down pyramid, this way there is a huge atrium inside, four floors high, and all the office space is arranged in rings stepping up the building. The tour guides say that this inverted pyramid shape is because the basement of the building used to house the “World’s Supercomputer called Plato,” and the building was made during the Cold War and designed like that so that in the event of a Soviet attack, the building wouldn’t fall on the supercomputer. Then they finish it off with a joke like, “but luckily nobody ever invaded Illinois.” I’ve always wondered whether some of the parents who lived through the threat of MAD silently ground their teeth at that joke. The story itself is pure BS. Plato wasn’t a supercomputer in the first place, although it was pretty damn cool in it’s own right. It was a mainframe/terminal system with something very much like instant messaging, and had a sound system and even graphics. The graphics weren’t digital, but instead something like microfilm. The microfilm was moved around by being blown by compressed CO2. The hoses are still up in the ceilings and the old CO2 tank is sitting in the corner of my lab, which used to be the PLATO server room. The old server racks are still in here too, although they’ve been put to other uses. There’s a Plato terminal set up on a desk in the computer lab next door, although it is non-functional since there’s nothing for it to connect to. These guys pretty much know everything there is to know about PLATO, in case you’re interested. Besides PLATO not being a target of strategic interest, I think in the event of thermonuclear war, a four-story building coming down on a computer would be among the smaller problems to be dealt with.

Dial-up is ridiculously slow. Especially the free Juno dial-up. I’m downloading a 1.8 meg driver installer for my mom’s printer, and it’s going to take 20 minutes. It would be faster to drive to a friend’s house who has a sensible broadband connection, download it to a floppy and drive back. This is stone age. But at least it’s something.

I’ll be gone this weekend, adventuring in another place. I’ll leave you with this post on NRO’s blog The Corner, by way of Instapundit. It describes a Stones concert in Prague, where Vaclav Havel presented Keith Richards with an outstanding T-Shirt. I’m with Glenn, I want one too! And bad! Havel is one of the greatest world leaders of the past one hundred years. I first read about him when I was in High School. A list of some of his speeches is available here. See you Monday.

Tell me if this story isn’t among the worst you’ve heard in a long time. To sum up, a local man was released from prison in June, and recently went on a rampage, killing his parents in their home with a baseball bat or some other heavy bludgeoning tool. The next day, he was driving on the highway on the North side of town when he decided to ram a car through the median and into oncoming traffic, killing the driver, and injuring at least three other people. He then slashed his throat. Rot in hell.