First same-sex marriage in Connecticut, and now Palin abused her authority trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired.

Internet's been down at home all afternoon and evening, so it was a treat to see all this good news at once when I stopped in the library and checked on the news just now.

New York Times: Mary Garber, Sportswriter, Dies at 92

LA Times: 'Miss Mary' Garber, longtime sportswriter who paved way for women in the field, dies at 92

Winston-Salem Journal: Mary Garber stood very tall in a man's world

As a project for one of his education school classes, my brother down in Charlottesville just assembled this nice little paean to George Allen and his legislative obsession with kitchen appliances (Windows Media file):

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ffk6v/allen%20commercial.wmv

Dewey Decimal System Helpless To Categorize New Jim Belushi Book

( Jump )

14 Arrested in Las Vegas Street Fight

Couldn't resist agitating the locals, could you?

notgruntled and brooklynite both wrote recently (here and here, respectively) about Wikipedia and its issues with errors and bias. Today, CNN.com points to an online report published this week by Nature that finds the accuracy of Wikipedia's science articles to be comparable to that of science articles in Encyclopaedia BritannicaIn the fine print it's made clear that ( Read more... )

The top three items on the radio newsbrief I woke up to this morning:

1. The House just passed a budget cut bill that will affect students, farmers and poor people (yeah, I know, that last category is superfluous).

2. Up to 10 states (this year, potentially more after that) may be allowed to change how they assess student performance, allowing ( Read more... )

Last week there was a Reuters article in which Mike McDaniel, secretary of Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality, responded to people calling the New Orleans floodwater "toxic soup" by saying that was an overstatement: "I'm saying it's a little bit exaggerated... To say it's toxic, it sounds like instant death walking in it. Let's get ( Read more... )

From the human resources newsletter that appeared on my desk yesterday afternoon, on the page insert describing this fall's various wellness programs:

REIKI CLINIC ( Read more... )

One of the first on-the-spot soundbites I heard (read, actually) after the hurricane began to subside was, "This is our tsunami," spoken I think by the mayor of Biloxi and repeated in dozens of news stories over the next day or so. At the time it made me mad, disgusted even. Casualties were still listed at only around 100, and all I could think was ( Read more... )