Sense and Nonsense

The Logic of Southern Fatties

 Great, eh?  You can get this on a tee-shirt here. 

How They Came To Be

Freaky Sound-alike

For my work colleagues only: here's something frightening. 

Go to this website of an NPR program, and click on the "Listen Now" link.  If you move the slider on the pop-up window to about 4:25 (or thereafter), you'll hear a voice that is virtually identical to that of someone who works with us.  This woman's voice is slightly more Elmer Fudd-ish, but the similarity is startling and sorta freaky!  Same timbre, inflections, pauses, etc.

More Idiocy from Boston College

Talk about bad neighbors.  Talk about a lack of civic virtue.

I noted recently in this space that Boston College -- an institution long known to its immediate neighbors for its drunken, boorish students and its loud, boozy alumni -- has incurred the wrath of the locals for the way it shirks its financial responsibility to its neighboring communities.

Let us continue to count the ways in which BC manages to offend.  I have it straight from an eyewitness that today, as people in the greater Boston area are coping with the burdens of a severe water crisis, Boston College is profligately watering its intramural playing fields on its Newton campus.  Thousands of gallons of water from reserve water supplies!  Never mind the water crisis.  What's more, the idiots were doing it at 1:00 PM on a 90-degree afternoon.  The water would evaporate before the sod could come close to absorbing it. 

Idiots.  Morons.  Halfwits.  Cretins.  BC Eagles.

Tempest at BU

There's a tempest brewing in the teapot that is Boston University.  Students there are up in arms about the university's choice of a commencement speaker, U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano, Democrat from the 8th District of Massachusetts.

The BU students' reaction is WTF?  Who is he?  The Boston Globe reports:

"We're all like, 'who's that? What's going on?' " said Megan Steffen, a visual rhetoric and Chinese studies major who was at the breakfast. "And then there was a collective groan when we realized it was our speaker."

The meat-and-potatoes congressman from Somerville lacks the star wattage befitting such a large university, many students said.
. . .

Katie Koch, a senior journalism and political science major studying in Washington, D.C., this semester, received word via text message from her friends in Boston. She began digging that night, trying to find out more about the congressman, and learned that he has worked to steer millions of federal dollars toward BU street-beautification projects and medical research and that he supports the controversial BU biolab in the South End, she said.

"He's a poor choice because the money ties he has to the university are through taxpayer dollars, and it makes the university look tacky" by inviting him to speak, said Koch, who created a Facebook group called "Your Money is Not as Important to BU as Mike Capuano's."

Gotta love it. I'd be pretty pissed, too, if my commencement speaker were a crappy U.S. congressman whose big achievement is to raid the public treasury for local street-beautification projects. 

Ripping Friedman a New One

As long as we're taking a look at smackdowns (see previous post), here's Matt Taibbi's delightful evisceration of Tom Friedman.   It makes for fun reading.  Enjoy yourself.