URLs du Jour

2007-09-09

  • Other than—heh—being married to an Adjunct Associate Professor of Pediatrics there, I've no direct interest in how Dartmouth College runs itself.

    But if I did, I'd be even more pissed off than Joe Malchow is. A charming picture of the overweening arrogance involved in the modern governance of higher education.

    There are also multiple link-filled posts at Power Line: here, here, and here.

  • Also in the "unsurprising but depressing" department: environmentalist porn marketing a recent book The World Without Us. James Lileks memorably described the mentality last year: "bitter little pills who hate people and wish them gone so Gaia can breathe free."

    However, I think just about any homeowner will classify the flash movie Your House Without You to be excessively optimistic. What they show in "Year 10" I see happening to my house closer to "Year 1".

  • But speaking of Lileks, he reports today on the local traffic problems:
    A reminder if you're trying to get around today: 35W is closed between two exit ramps — specifically, the 8th street ramp in Duluth and the last exit before the Iowa border. I-94 is on fire in the Midway area; winged monkeys are hurling cement blocks on 169, and 280 has been closed — and I'm quoting from the press release here — "to block off all possibility of escape and allow the dark army of soul-harvesting machines to fulfuill their horrible duty." Whatever that means. Persons who wish to travel from the west side of the 35W gulch to the east side are advised to string a rip line between phone poles and make an adventure out of it; the Crosstown, meanwhile, has been reduced to one lane, which must accommodate traffic moving in both directions. Expect delays, detours, and the sudden terrifying sight of your airbag exploding in your face like your steering column threw up a pillow or suddenly gave birth to the Pillsbury Doughboy.
    I'm grateful for the bizarre chain of circumstance that allows me to read things like this.

  • Also along those lines: readers of A Certain Age will enjoy Joel Achenbach's observations on "The Rise of the Alpha Geezer."
    Boomers always get a lot of ink, as do teens and twixters and Gen-Xers and all the other cohorts that are viewed by advertisers as demographically desirable. We're youth-obsessed to the point where the elderly have nearly disappeared from popular culture. Go to the racks at the checkout stand: You see 40-year-old women buying magazines whose editors want to reach 30-year-old women by running photos of women who appear to be about 22 but are actually 17.
    One fact Joel mentions that I'm trying not to be depressed by: the editor of AARP: The Magazine is younger than I am.

  • And for people who come to Pun Salad looking, usually fruitlessly, for puns: you might want to hie on over to Beltway Blogroll for about 341 of them based on apprehended Democrat fundraiser Norman Hsu. My fave: Hsu's on first?