Here we go

First big thunderstorms of the year. Number two of the evening is above us now with reports of giant hail to the west, and there are two nastier cells west between us and the Mississippi River heading east toward Small Town, Illinois.

UPDATE: Good news - the whole system is slowly moving south; bad news: a tornado was spotted a few miles west of Findlay, IL where Mom lives. On the phone just now she said she's getting ready to head to the Christian Church, the town's official tornado shelter.

Hugh Laurie on PG Wodehouse

An entertaining read from Hugh Laurie with a bit of the old Wodehouse panache at the World of PG Wodehouse.

General American

Here in east central Illinois we're on the eastern edge of the General American accent region, which makes it easy to slide the accent south and east as needed. Unless you've spent time with northerners, it's more difficult to slide the accent north & get a good honking Chicago sound. My freshman year at the University of Illinois was spend around guys from the Chicago suburbs and I came out of it with an outrageous Chicago accent.

A sentence (at least) a day.

Crappy journalism

My guess is that journalists who can't write go into teevee journalism. Take a look at this report from the CBS affiliate WCAX in Burlington, Vermont: we have a number used in place of a word...

The community is 1 of the most conservative in the Amish Christian sect.

...and no notion of how crapping in a bucket is a central tenet of Amish religious belief:

And the practice has been to collect the waste in a bucket and dump it onto a field. But the county says they have to install a holding tank and hire a certified sewage hauler.

Swartzentruber is refusing to pay the fine of more than $500. During a break while tilling a field, he told The Associated Press he'd rather go to jail than violate his religious principles.

I suppose it has something to do with their religious notion of simplicity in all things, but the reporter shouldn't make me rely on suppositions.

Roger Ebert on living life

Roger Ebert continues to blog like the wind - here he discusses the art of living life as taught by Studs Terkel and others. I think Ebert on books is even better than Ebert on movies - as I commented, "The best blog posts are the ones that introduce readers to books they've never read."

books.live.com to disappear next week

Naturally, just after I harvested a bunch of book urls pointing to books.live.com. Here's the news from Microsoft - any idea what the marketing gobbledegook means? Here's slashdot and infoworld, and a commentary at salon.

Fortunately, most of the books are available at archive.org.

Bewegen bis!

A performance of "The Jeffersons" theme song by Nazzie R&B legend Adolf Hitler. Swallow all drinks before playing.

That's me boy

11-year-old Christopher has discovered my Wolfe Tones collection! He's currently stuck on their versions of The Foggy Dew and Erin Go Bragh.

God bless these good men

They're doing the Lord's work.

Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation - holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic. Graduates of Dartmouth College, they are old friends with a schoolmarm's irritation at conspicuous errors, and despite their mild and somewhat nerdy exteriors, they have serious nerve. Deck lives outside Boston; Herson lives outside Washington. And together, they are TEAL - the Typo Eradication Advancement League - and they are between jobs.

Hat tip: Mrs vH.

WHAT THE HELL?

Now I'm no fundamentalist rad trad Latin-Mass dweeb, but really, I swear, this one video has everything:

• some teevee show marketed to effete women
• a talentless performer
• an audience of cheering children watching her prepare to fellate a guitarist, et cetera
• said guitarist, who is a dead ringer for the late Max Lynch of all people

Just drink it all in, then start googling here.

Circus train

The kids were excited to see one of the Ringling Brothers circus trains rolling through our small town this afternoon, heading west.

The Findlay Bag Ladies need blankets

The Findlay Bag Ladies are looking for blankets:

The Findlay Bag Ladies, who are known for helping others in need, are in need of your help. The group meets every Tuesday at the Methodist Church in Findlay to turn donated blankets into sleeping bags for the homeless. Their blanket supply is nearly depleted and they are in desperate need of more donations as the demand for the homemade sleeping bags is on the rise. The ladies are more than willing to pick up the blankets, or they can be dropped off at the Methodist Church in Findlay and the Shelby County News office in Shelbyville. If you have blankets to donate, please call Carol at 217-756-3401 or Joan at 217-756-8582.

Please call if you have blankets to donate or if you know of some corporate or government donor looking to get rid of large numbers of blankets.

100 essential jazz albums

I need to comb through this list from The New Yorker.

Bookmarking

As seen at Summa Mamas: What's your favorite thing to use for a bookmark? Or are you a page corner turner?

I'll dogear a page if nothing else is handy; otherwise it's the envelopes of old bills, business reply envelopes, the torn-off corners of paper towels. Pieces of ripped-up loan shark letters make good bookmarks if they're not too thick with reckless promises of cash. Basically, anything flat, flexible and disposable will do.

Back in my Rich Young Bachelor days when I visited bookstores and bought books in them, I'd save a book's receipt for a bookmark. And thus I can recall the very day in 1994 that I bought Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" and started reading it at a now-defunct restaurant on the corner of Church and Randolph in Champaign.

"I have literally bent over backwards..."

That's my favorite abuse of "literally" - it's from Jimmy Swaggart, as quoted by Karl Keating in his book Catholicism and Fundamentalism. Now someone has literally created a blog for the subject. It goes very well with The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and Apostrophe Abuse.

Hellpuppets, explained

Episcopalian black-ops - that's the best explanation I've seen for Call To Action's giant hellpuppet liturgy that was making the rounds last week.

Backstage with Rush

So this guy gets a decent ticket to the recent Rush concert in LA and winds up sitting next to Rupert Hine, who produced a couple of Rush albums in the early 90s. Bingo - backstage as a friend of Rupert Hine!

Apostrophe's!

Ahh - a blog celebrating apostrophe abuse. It goes well with the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

It's a Poncerlanche!

Buckeye Catlicker TSO linked to a post of mine yesterday, which accounts for the increased traffic lately.

And I bet no sentence ever written til now has started with the phrase "Buckeye Catlicker TSO".

The 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment

Photos of WW2 paratroopers, many killed in action, all very young. Lileks and readers of this blog may know the young feller in the 3rd row, 3rd column as Commodore Matt Decker.

"Kirk riding the Constellation into the sparkly maw of Hell’s cornucopia, waiting for the beamout." Ah, Lileks.

Another necessary "blog"

O dear Lord I needed this: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks goes well with the lowercase L blog.

Sedaris on smoking

Really, David Sedaris is one of the best essayists in English. The incipit:

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.

Via TSO.

Unpossessed

In an otherwise artful and insightful essay by Gerard Van der Leun:

After all, there's nothing evil in speech that argues for ideas that have proven, without exception, to be evil. It is, after all, only speech and the strength of the American system is to protect all forms of speech, especially the idle blather of a coffee house revolutionary. There's nothing, really nothing, in this overheard conversation that threatens the existence of the United States. The mere fact that it can be had, five years into the First Terrorist War, underscores just how strong this nation adherence to its founding principles remains. Here on Capitol Hill dissent of even the most egregious sort, is not only tolerated but celebrated.

Perhaps the spirit of Nihil Obstat has possess'd me.

It's the words...

The last few days, misspelled words have jumped out at me in about half the blog entries and websites I read. They're bugging me.

Michael Arrington, who saw the blog first, writes "The blog is lacking a RSS feed and has only rudimentary comments, but it is a true blog nonetheless." Why didn't they just through up a WordPress install? Nobody knows. While the bloggyness of it all seems debatable, we've got your RSS feeds right here. —cite

That'd be less painful than throwing up a half-digested WordPress sandwich.