Mikarrhea

Why our country is great #336

How could there be any lede (let alone ensuing grafs) more evocative of the essence of America? (Interesting that while lede and graf are utterly common spellings among journalists, I couldn't find these entries in any online dictionary. The variant spellings supposedly date from the time when journalists had to provide typesetting instructions within the text and wanted to avoid confusion between text and metatext.) Anyway, the lede would make a fabulous first line for a poem.


Bartman ball gets explosive send-off

February 26, 2004

BY ANNA JOHNSON ASSOCIATED PRESS

The baseball blamed by many Chicago Cubs fans for the team's playoff disaster last year was reduced to a pile of thread on live television Thursday evening by a Hollywood special effects expert.

Fans sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" before the ball was destroyed in a flash of light inside a bulletproof tank in a stunt designed by Oscar winner Michael Lantieri, who worked on "Jurassic Park" and "Back to the Future."

"We're using a combination of pressure, heat and explosives in this bulletproof tank to destroy that ball so it will not resemble a ball at all when we're finished," Lantieri said earlier Thursday on NBC's "Today" show, which was broadcasting live from Chicago.





Hundreds of people gathered downtown Thursday night around Harry Caray's Restaurant for the event where the ball was destroyed in a tent outside the restaurant. Some fans were decked out in Cubs gear, others wore replicas of the famous broadcaster's signature glasses and one man was covered in ivy.

Whether the ball was possessed by the curse that legend says afflicts the Cubs or not, fans were happy to see it go. To some, the destruction is a sign of the good things to come this season.

more . . . .


Bartman Ball


The obliterated remains of a baseball sits in pieces inside a clear case after being blown up Thursday. The baseball was deflected by a fan during the Chicago Cubs' loss in Game 6 of the 2003 National League championship series against the Florida Marlins and blown up to help Cubs fans forget about the incident. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Ideas of Order

In college, my Stevens obsession rode hard upon my Eliot. I haven't revisited Stevens much since then, so it was a nostalgic treat to have the chance to reread some of his poems recently with Leigh and talk about them. The time of Frost has passed with the snow and the time of Bishop will come near Easter; for now, her Frost, Stevens, and Bishop class dwells with the Bard of Hartford. We talked especially about "Ideas of Order at Key West," and of course, as is always the case when I revisit poems eons later, I see all these ideas jumping around that I don't remember having met before.

The pentameter opening stanza has lingered with me forever, for some reason:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

I like the sound of the phrase "the genius of the sea" and the rhythm created by the plump caesura's sitting amidst "Inhuman, of the veritable ocean." I guess almost all the lines from this poem that stick like little fishhooks in my brain-folds are awash with the sea. Others:

It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea . . .

. . . the sunken coral water-walled,

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

The ultimate stanza, like the first, persists in my mind's ear like an earwig:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Stevens's musicality leaps up, asking for attention. Isn't it wild how many words have "r"s in them? First the "ray" words-- rage, Ramon, fragrant--then the "er" "ar" "our" "or" words--order, maker, words, portals, starred, origins, demarcations, etc. Not to mention all the "s" sounds. I'm fascinated by his suddenly introducing the oxymoron-flavored notion "rage for order" at the end. Whatever human emotions have been on display in the poem heretofore, rage hasn't been one of them. Indeed, the singing woman, in her ordering capacity, her capacity as "maker" and "artificer," seems, if anything, to constrain rather (or at least contain) the violence of the sea in putting it into words. By introducing rage into this final stanza, I suppose Stevens is refiguring the storm-force of the sea into the aestheticizing, poeticizing urge.

Leigh makes a great point. She noticed that even though Stevens insists on the irresistible organizing power of the singer's song over the natural world around it (a Tennessee jar at the beach, litorally), insists that it is she he hears and not the sea, he offers no specific characterization whatsoever of the woman or her song. The poem is all about them, yet withholds describing them in favor of bravura evocations of visual and auditory experiences the seascape affords at sunset. The poet's oft-reiterated claim notwithstanding, the reader's experience of the poem is one of coming to know this singer and to understand the relation of her art to nature through nature first--that is, through Stevens's poetic transfiguration of nature.

The poem ends with the coming of night: the poet, contemplating the lanterns of the fishing boats mixing with the stars, organizes into patterns the play of lights against the backdrop of night--a very different experience from that of the rough and tumble of wind and waves in the first section of the poem. All senses come into play in the calm night, striving to resolve subtle distinctions in perception ("fragrant portals, dimly-starred" "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds") to make meaningful words "of ourselves and our origins." But the night's vagueness is sublime.

The Urinals of Dairy Queen

As soon as I saw it, I thought to myself, I've got to put this up on Mikarrhea!

Then, thankfully, I thought, How pathetic is that?

The Urinette She-inal shown below is number 5 on the list of the top ten urinals in the world, according to Urinal.net ("Don't see your favorite urinal on this list? Let us know!")--a list as remarkable for its contents as for the fascinating questions it raises about research criteria, methodology, and comprehensiveness, as well as about the motivations and scientific ardor of, general character of social conversations among, and average number of friends possessed by the researchers. What stories do they tell at the bar at the annual convention? "You shoulda seen this beaut I came upon by chance in Yemen. . . . "

These urinals are located in the Dairy Queen restaurant in Port Charlotte, FL.
The urinal below is a women's urinal, a Urinette "She-inal". These pictures were submitted by JM.

"The 'She-inal' was designed by a Pensacola, FL woman named Kathie Jones. In the early 1990's she set out to design a urinal intended specifically for women, but this fixture never caught on for various reasons."

"While it's as not as versatile as a regular toilet, it still takes up the same amount of floor space. The funnel-like device that is is shared by everyone using the urinal also proved not to be a popular feature. Because of those reasons, not more than 700 'She-inals' were sold before Urinette, the company that manufactured it, sold the manufacturing rights."

Dishonest Dubya

Click on the picture. It's totally fabulous.

Define alegory

It's gratifying to know my performance garners the evaluation that I'm "as literary minded as the Bard himself." Unfortunately, plentiful evidence (egregious problems with spelling, punctuation, diction, and even the concepts being tested) suggests that the person who wrote the quiz "How much of a literary geek are you?" (via Cup of Chicha) lacks the qualifications to judge.


You are a complete literary geek, from knowing the
classics (even the not-so-well-known classics
and tidbits about them) to knowing devices used
in writing, when someone has a question about
literature, they can bring it to you and rest
assured; you know the answers.


How much of a literary geek are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Now that Dean's out. . .



click image to go to Gay Penguin for America site!

How well do you aim when you're drunk (and you're handling a drunk penis in full spray)?

The benefit of sitting down to pee is that you never have to play this stupid game in real life. But judging from evidence I've seen, some men themselves completely throw in the towel, so to speak, after they achieve a certain blood-alcohol level anyway--just when a towel would seem to come in most handy. Not that they resort to sitting down to pee, mind you. Instead, it seems, as soon as they get through the door and manage to fish their penises out, they just give the room a general spraying in hopes that a respectable volume will land somewhere in the vicinity of the bowl, or whatever the target in that particular room is supposed to be.

Have you seen this woman?



Her name is Ida. She was last seen in this house exactly one year ago today, when this image was captured. So this is a sort of anniversary-of-her-disappearance post. Here are some other pictures from that night.

If you have quicktime and click here, you can see a one-minute clip from the drunken video shot by Dorian from which most of those pix come.

If you listen carefully, on the audio track you might hear Ida (if that indeed is her real name) saying enthusiastically, "We should all go out sometime!" You might also hear Leigh saying, "We're taking Ida everywhere we're going now! Wherever we're going, Ida's going!" (You might also hear a drunken person we'll call "Ian Randolph" babbling inanely.)

As I say, I haven't seen hide nor hair of Ida since that night. Undoubtedly something happened to her to prevent her from hanging out with us. If you know her whereabouts, I'd be grateful if you'd ask her to e-mail or call. One of the pictures is of her fingernails, since she is extremely good at painting them.

Time, time, time--see what's become of me . . .

. . . as I look around at my possibilities. I was so hard to please.

A disinterested voice cries out against a little-noted but fundamental unfairness written into the U. S. constitution.

Meanwhile, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber posts the following:

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me the following passage in the late Jean Hampton’s Political Philosophy. Professor Hampton, who died in 1996, must have thought it inconceivable that a certain person would achieve high political office:

Now while it is undeniable that some people are smarter or more virtuous or stronger than other people, these differences by themselves do not seem relevant to establishing political domination. Think, for example, of all the ways in which people are different from one another, physically, mentally and temperamentally. If someone has greater muscle strength than another, does that mean that he gets to rule the other? No: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not considered, by virtue of his physical prowess, a political authority. (p. 19)

Inside the Times

3 leads 2
headlines a caption fragment
the supreme court agreed

to consider if president
bush had the authority
to detain indefinitely

an american citizen
seized on american soil

by declaring him an enemy
combatant a judge refused
to block san francisco

from issuing same
sex marriage
licenses saying it

caused no immediate harm a
dark energy is steadily pushing
the universe

apart suggesting the universe may end
with a slide into senescence
rather than a violent apocalypse new

data from the hubble telescope
suggests for musicians
solid walls

make good neighbors
marshes
a vengeful hussein

drained
stir again
a marsh arab

poles his canoe

Public transport in Mongolia

PF, having passed through Mikarrhea to Yuri's recent public transport experience, responds with his own vivid evocation of riding a crowded bus in Ulaan Baator, aboard which a fearsome woman maintains stringent behavioral norms with alacrity. If you visit PF, stay and look around. He has lots of adventures in far flung places that will make you jealous.

Sapiosexual

Aroused by intelligence (& those displaying it).

That's why it's hilariously stupid to try to regulate sex in the academy, whether between teachers and students or between members of the same department. For a lot of people, sex and the academy are practically the same thing.

I didn't say for everybody.

via Richard Evans Lee's Pansexual Sodomite

A Nut in Every Car

Yuri Hospodar, of the Yuriverse, who's lucky enough to share his name with the protagonist of a wonderful pornographic novel by Apollinaire, yesterday posted one of the most moving pieces I've read in quite a while. Like Katie's ever-wonderful posts, it captures one of those urban moments that hit you like a brick and cause a swelling in your brain that dies down only when you treat it with adequate verbal transfiguration. In this case, it's the story of Yuri's watching the schoolgirl beside him rise and courageously engage in a confrontation he'd only fantasized engaging in with an obnoxious psycho spewing loud homophobia to their tunnel-stalled subway car. Weirdly enough, Katie's most recent post is also about an encounter with a homeless man in a subway car, though not one as psychotically vocal as Yuri's. There's seems to be a genre here.

I guess they still, as Bill Cosby noted 40 years ago in a hilarious routine (click here for a windows media file snippet [which I had to load from within the stupid WMP]), make an effort to put a nut in every car.

They probably wax on about us, too. I got onto this subway car and can you believe it was filled with people not yelling, singing, declaiming, deriding, or smoking. Don't they know how to behave in public? Another fucking weird urban experience.

Back pain, naso-genital theories

My back was hurting a bit yesterday. I thought it might go away by today. Ha ha, it said. No such luck. I'm spending today flat on it, which for some reason appeases it, with my knees (really their sweaty . . . backs? insides? versos? ventrals?) supported by pillows. And my allergies are driving me crazy, so I keep coughing and sneezing, which causes my back muscles to clench exquisitely, sending pain shoots to all corners of the land.

It's amazing, you realize when you injure it, how many random mundane actions your back has a hand in, as it were. Brushing your teeth, for example.

For some reason, too, I've been horny all morning. But I'm not masturbating. Not as I write this, anyway. If sneezing from my nose sends my back into pyrotechnical spasms of pain, just imagine what sneezing from down there would do . . . .

I'm sure Freud's nosy friend and influential mentor Wilhelm Fliess had something to say about this somewhere. He's the guy who strove to invest with scientific respectability the notion (which Freud credited for some time) that the nose and genitals are so inextricably interlinked that, for instance, chronic rhinitis is a reliable indicator of excess masturbation. * If you've never read about what Freud and Fliess theorized about, and perpetrated upon, the nose of poor Emma Eckstein, Wikipedia has an excellent capsule summary of the story, along with a link to a diverting review of the play, "Emma's Nose," based on the incident, and to the letter Freud wrote Fliess finally informing him that in removing the turbinate bone of her nose to cure her depression, menstrual cramps, and chronic masturbation Fleiss had accidentally left behind within the wound a half a meter of surgical gauze, resulting days later in a serious, fetid infection and, during removal, a nearly fatal hemorrage (much later, also, the caving-in of one side of her face).

Also, Fliess advocated the theory of bisexuality, a football Freud instantly picked up and ran with straight out the door of the stadium, and of biorhythms, which he left behind but others have picked up and absconded with since (for your own Web-o-rhythm, click here).

I've read some speculation about the current of homoeroticism Fliess and Freud's seventeen-year, love-hate, nasal-erotic, cocaine-fueled, academic relationship may have been structured to channel. This speculation seems right on the mark to me. On the other hand, I have not read much speculation about the likelihood that Fliess's family, embarrassed by Wilhelm's shenanigans, reversed the vowels in their surname upon emigrating to the United States, where many years later in Los Angeles a great-granddaughter, sharing some of her ancestor's interests, had considerable success in the service industry.

The connection between nose and sex organs was, of course, already a cliché in the 1760s when Laurence Sterne wrote the "Slawkenbergius's Tale" section of Tristram Shandy, which he cast entirely in Latin, not just to piss off the reader (as with the all-black page and the marbled one, not to mention his persistently inconclusory narratorial tortuousness) but in my opinion so that he could baldfacedly write the word "vagina" whenever Slawkenbergius sheathed his "sword" (which he did every other page or so).

I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that nose and genitals are more intimately connected than we know now.

There is heavy evidence that the vomeronasal organ (also called Jacobson’s organ) acts as the pheromone receptor. It is a little sense organ (part of the "sixth sense") just beside the cartilage of the nasal septum and just beside the olfactory nerve. It is only stimulated by pheromones and not by odours, while the olfactory nerve is only stimulated by odours and not by pheromones.

In fairness, I probably should note that this passage, though persuasively backed up there by references to scientific articles, comes from a web page advocating putting needles in your nose to achieve menstrual and genital improvement.

Clicking around to find links to illuminate parts of this post, I've come up a veritable trove of sites I have to talk about as soon as I have time. But right now I promised Leigh I would write up a piece about her dad to be put in a birthday-present memory book.
----------------------

* Because of chronic allergy-driven rhinitis I've been known among friends since high school as a devout kleenexian, generally maintaining at least one fecund kleenex box within reach in all my habitual spaces and a travel-size packet (for which Anneliese sewed a beautiful green fabric mantle, the best present she's given me since the coconut bra) in my purse. Thus I refute Fliess.

(back to entry)

Call your local representatives and urge them to censure Bush

Here's the full page ad urging censure MoveOn.org put in the Post on Tuesday:

.

Click here for the more elaborate argument.

This morning, Michaela Cooper, the unexpergefacted version

>>>WELCOME TO THE WORD OF THE DAY FROM http://www.askoxford.com<<<


expergefaction
===============
waking up, from a Latin word meaning 'make awake.' Alarm clocks could be called expergefactors.


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Blogspot hides archives

I switched my archives from weekly pages to monthly ones so that they would be easier for me to portage over to the ever-impending new blog. So now I'm clicking on these new monthly pages, and blogspot seems to think they don't exist. That's so sweet.

Ziss forgets me

Ray Davis of Bellona Times always has a wonderful way of putting things. Here's a bit from a recent post about Hitchcock & Notorious.

What might we infer was the filmmakers' intention?

1. To expose the workings of sexism.
2. To linger over the pain of a young woman.
3. To apply social insight to the narratological problem of isolating and endangering a protagonist while increasing tension on her sole lifeline—that is, to revivify the gothic form by finding contemporary equivalents for the moribund sexist institutions that originally powered it: wives and daughters as property; restricted civil rights and employment; acceptability of rape....

Check all that apply.

But please, don't then publish essays with titles like "Hitchcock the Feminist" and "Alfred Hitchcock: Misogynist or Feminist?" As a collective name for five decades of collaborative work, "Hitchock" is much too large and slippery for such personal labels to be meaningful. ("Random House: Vegan or Murderer?") All we're likely to establish is that the movies partake somewhat of experience, where misogyny and feminism find their common source.

As for Alfred Hitchcock the human being, more appropriate than a false dilemma like "Hitchcock: Misogynist or Feminist?" might be a conjunction like "Hitchcock: Artist and Laborer".

Or "Hitchcock: Fat Ugly Sissy and Heterosexual Man".

Or, more generally, "Hitchcock: Observer and Manipulator".

As someone who's read more than her share of Tanya Modleski, Teresa DeLauretis, Kaja Silverman, and Laura Mulvey, I appreciate those titles.

Hitchock is my absolute favorite lingerie fetishist (a group with which I feel a great affinity). How often does his camera linger on women's underwear, whether or not it comprises an actual woman? Some lingerie scenes in Hitchcock that spring to mind in thirty seconds:

• Barbara Bel Geddes, designing a strapless bra in Vertigo.
  
• Madeline's panties hanging on the shower-curtain rail after her "suicide attempt" (ditto).
  
• The scene in the lingerie department in Family Plot
  
• Miss Torso in Rear Window
  
• Marion Crane in opening of Psycho and undressing for famous shower
  
• Mrs. Danvers taking Rebecca's panties from the drawer and fondling them: "They were made specially for her by the nuns in
  the Convent of St. Claire" (warped-Catholic Hitch must have loved that line)
  

There must be more.

I always thought that one of my favorite Ingrid Bergman quotes came from Notorious: "Ziss forgets me." I took it to be a cute clumsy Germanic inversion of "I forget that." I've used it to mean that billions of times. But now I just did a search for it. Couldn't find it. There is a moment in the script when, apparently, she says "This fog gets me.". I'm such a total idiot.

Censure Bush

Please take a moment to click here and add your voice to the call to censure President Bush for lying the nation into war. That Clinton faced impeachment for lying about his sex life while Bush doesn't even get a raised eyebrow for leading a whole campaign of lies about the Iraqi threat makes my blood boil. It takes 15 seconds to fill out the e-petition.

The rise and fall of my pants

We were supposed to go to our friend Sherman's for a small get-together last night. Leigh, as you might imagine, wasn't up for it.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned Sherman, but he's probably my closest male friend. His name's not really Sherman, but that's what I said I'd call him if I wrote about him in this blog. As chair of the English department at a nearby college, he has face to lose, I suppose--or certainly would, if I started telling my favorite Sherman stories. The fact of his being a department chair never ceases to amaze me, an unemployed loser. But then again, my ex's significant other's the philosophy chair at a nearby university. A couple more chairs, as Woody Allen once observed, and we could have a nice dining room set.

Leigh said it was all right if I went, so I did, and had a fabulous time, abstemiousness to the winds. It was the usual handful of S's colleagues & friends. Maria brought pot, so of course I got stoned as well as drunk. I get all touchy and huggy with everyone. It seems the thing at the time, though in retrospect I'm not sure it's universally appreciated. At one point I pulled down my jeans to my knees and showed Maria and Sherman my panties--cut to look exactly like boys' tighty-whities (seams, trompe l'oeil fly) except in cheapo shear pink nylon edged with baby blue. It was sort of a reference to the first time we partied (in speech, that verb flows completely naturally; in writing, it makes me cringe; what's up with that?) with Maria chez Sherm, years ago. Somehow or other we all (except S., of course, who by hook or crook always manages to keep at least pants on) ended up losing our pants to display our underwear and just sitting around pantsless for the rest of that night, like at a girls' pajama party. A professorial, collegial, pinot-noir-and-cheese girls' pajama party. Why does it seem a party's no fun without at least some clothes coming off? Mine, usually. Anyway, I showed off my tighty-pinkies with the fake fly. It seemed the thing at the time.


To celebrate Leigh's upcoming birthday we're gonna have an academy awards party.

Back to normal

Yesterday, I came home late in the afternoon. She was already there, collapsed limply on the couch, lights out, watching TV, looking ill.

I sit down, wary, worried, wondering. Almost immediately, she jumps up and runs to the bathroom. I follow and while she retches hold her head and stroke her back and shoulders. When she catches her breath, she asks why I love her. 'Cuz of her her, I say ("your you," i.e.). We're not having a fight anymore, it seems. She drank too much, she volunteers, a little supererogatorily. And she and Matt "fooled around." Quel surprise. Did they have sex? (Most of what she calls "fooling around" in her stories I call "having sex" in mine [e.g., I'd say what we were doing with the tranny when her girlfriend freaked out the other weekend was "having sex"], but we're speaking Leigh's dialect here, in which with men "having sex" is reserved solely for penile penetration.) Doesn't remember. Doesn't think so. "Oh, let's just get married right away," she says, plaintive, tragic. I smile at her, the silly, and reply, "Totally," for the gazillionth time.

Quarrel

It seems Leigh & I are in the middle of a fight. Last night, she wanted to go out with her cousin Matt & his friend Dorian, but I was tired and wanted to stay home. Plus, we've been trying not to drink lately--we'd actually set a goal of no alcohol until Leigh's birthday, February 24--and what we mainly do with Matt & Dorian is use lots of alcohol, at the very least. So being tired and not wanting to have to try not to drink but fail miserably, I stayed behind. Leigh took our car, saying she wouldn't drink much and she'd be home early, 'cause she wanted to be able to spend the day today at home reading David Copperfield. So I get a call at like 2:00 AM. She's drunk and wants to spend the night at Matt's. Fine. Icy roads. So this morning my ex, who generally has the kids on Saturdays, calls at 9. The kids have mutually conflicting schedules today. So can I pick up Anneliese at the bar mitzvah at 1 PM and take her to her sewing class? No problem, I figure. After I hang up, I remember Leigh has the car. Knowing at least she will still be fast asleep, I wait until 10:30 to call. No answer on her cell or Matt's. I call repeatedly for an hour. Finally, Leigh answers. I tell her I need the car at about 12:30 to drive Anneliese. She freaks. I beg and plead. She hangs up on me twice. Finally, she agrees to bring the car back. Soon she arrives with Matt, who followed in his car. She announces that she needs to rethink our relationship, because she's not sure she wants to be in it anymore, and that she and Matt are going back to his house to have a fabulous brunch that Matt bought and watch Lost in Translation on DVD. A minute after the door closes behind them, she's back poking around the living room for her Dickens. Finally, she finds it and walks out, repeating that she thinks our relationship is in serious trouble and has been for some time.

Old mole

Every once in a while I'm faced with the login page at blogger.com. Beneath the boxes for entering name and password, there's a check box next to which are the words "Remember me." For some reason, I simply can't see those words without simultaneously hearing them spoken in a baleful voice by the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. I don't even know what production they're coming from. It's just some basso portentous "REMEMBER ME."

OK, so fine, I'm psychotic. Whoop de doo.

Maybe, he wants me to kill someone.

Of course, I don't "really" hear the voice. But as Antonio Dimasio is only too happy to relate, brain scans show that the very same areas of the brain are activated when you remember hearing something as when you "really" heard it. It's like the brain's reproducing the electical fizzing.

What if he moves to North Carolina?

Maine couple gives baby son a Super Bowl name

2/4/2004

BIDDEFORD, Maine -- A Biddeford couple let the world know their football team allegiance when they included "Patriot" in the name of their son who was born on Super Bowl game day.

Nathan Morris, 25, and Kelly Belanger, 20, named their son Logan Al-Patriot Morris after the Patriots defeated the Carolina Panthers, 32-29, in the Super Bowl on Sunday. The "Al" in the name is in honor of Morris' sister, Alicia.

Logan was born at Southern Maine Medical Center at 7:32 a.m. and was in the hospital room that night when his parents and friends watched the game on TV.

"I showed him the game and what football food is supposed to be," Morris said.

Belanger said she had to be persuaded to agree to the name, but in the end thought it would give Logan an interesting story to tell when he's older.

Morris said they waited until the game was done before officially naming Logan to make sure the Patriots won the game.

"It wouldn't have been good if they had lost," Morris said.

How pathetic--forcing your insane regional boosterism on a poor baby! Making your kid go through life bearing the name of the local airport! "Hey, Logan, you're mom's calling!"

Proud to be an American #284

The Kansas Supreme Court, pointedly refusing to accede to the U.S. Supreme Court's request to take the Lawrence v. Texas decision into account, upholds sentencing one teenage boy to seventeen years in prison for having consensual sex with another one.

Land of the free; home of the brave.

Meanwhile, yesterday 1.5 million New Englanders put otherwise productive lives on the shelf for the afternoon to stand in the cold within a mile or so of the Patriots' (sic) celebration of their Super Bowl win.