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Wednesday, January 29, 2003

“The Insignificance of Larry David. The Little Things,” by Lee Siegel from

;There has been a lot of handwringing during the past thirty years over the way mainstream culture has appropriated the adversarial energies of the avant-garde. But comedy was a last bastion of lucid insanity: long after Rothko sold paintings to the Four Seasons, Lenny Bruce was still manically holding forth on stage. (Source Link)

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556,000 dollars is the salar

556,000 dollars is the salary of the chairman of the US government’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

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40,000 dollars is the signing bonus for engineers enlisting with the Canadian Forces.

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“On Bummery: A Lesson in Etiquette, Pt. 2,” by Joe Keohane from

;There is a case for not getting the homeless off the street—not necessarily allowing them to starve and freeze, mind you, but not getting rid of them either. This approach ties in to our city’s collective self-esteem. What feels better after a stressful day than dropping a nickel into some maundering stinkpot’s paper cup? It just warms you right up, at least until you get home to your comfortable, heated apartment to take a nice nap before taking your soup and wine, you filthy gourmand. Naturally this tack would require a bit of juggling, a bit of regulation. You’d want the hobos to be desperate enough to make you feel good about helping them, but you don’t want them to be in such bad shape that they keel over and die. (Source Link)

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Tuesday, January 28, 2003

“A state of ‘curiosities’,” by Vince Statent from the

;Marvin “Bad News” Barnes was the most free-spirited of the many free-spirited basketball players who passed through Louisville in the days of the Kentucky Colonels in the old American Basketball Association. Marvin ate McDonald’s hamburgers on the bench, paraded around the dressing room in a full-length mink coat, with his uniform underneath, and accused his teammates of selfishness because they wouldn’t pass him the ball when he had 48 points and needed one basket to score 50. In one season alone he missed more than 100 team practices. But his most famous miss was a plane flight. As Bob Costas, then the team announcer for Barnes” team, the St. Louis Spirits, tells it in the book Loose Balls: “Because of the change of time zones our return flight would leave Louisville at 8 a.m. and arrive in St. Louis at 7:57 a.m. Marvin looked at that and announced, ëI ain’t goin’ on no time machine. I ain’t takin’ no flight that takes me back in time.‘“ (Source Link)

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