So Australia is 7 years behind on the news?

Must be all those time zones.

Does this mean the LotR movies came out down there 7 years before we got to see them?

In early REM shows, Stipe would routinely perform on stage in drag. Yes, I know that tranvestite ≠ gay, but I don't think Stipe was ever trying to hide anything.

I heard all that about him back in college in the 80s because someone I hung out with was from Athens, GA, and she said it was basically an open non-secret. The guys in Husker Du were a much bigger surprise to me for some reason, although Greg Norton's mustache should have been a giveaway.

A simple guide to the mortgage crisis: [link]

In a 2001 Time interview, Stipe described himself as a "queer artist" and revealed that he had been in a relationship with "an amazing man" for three years at that point.

So maybe a little big gay-ish, then?

I also recall him saying (in the late '80s) that he found all labels regarding sexual orientation to be too limiting. And then like in '89 I heard he was friends with Dorothy Morrissey. A friend of mine back then was really bitter that Michael wasn't out.

although Greg Norton's mustache should have been a giveaway.

Wasn't he the only straight one? I seem to recall that the one with the most gay mustache - wasn't.

a person at work is being randomly passive-aggressive... while everyone is on break, no less. he's in escalating cc: mode because of an issue that is completely stupid. To wit: He has a form on a website that someone (not a bot) is using to spoof input by people in our community (their names are correct, but sometimes spelled wrong, the addresses are wrong, etc. - "This is the second time in two weeks that this has happened!")... what chafes is that it is his job to review inputs from this form, and accept or deny them, and has been for two years. Why, person? Why now of all times? Besides which... quit being stupid - of course people will type crap into web forms to see what happens. and no. I will not "Try to trace the input so that we can determine who is doing this."

This is not the same person who needed an explanation about why placing something in a PDF didn't automatically make it "hacker proof". That was a different person.

Wasn't he the only straight one? I seem to recall that the one with the most gay mustache - wasn't.

Oh, really? Could be, but he always looked like leather guy from the Village People decided he was going to be flannel guy instead.

Can I tell you how sick I am of some of my smartest students failing my tests? Very sick. Very sick indeed.

doom doom doom doom doom....

Can I post about how doomed we are? Us in America, anyway....

Ruben says: "This is a summary of a documentary that aired recently on Dutch national television. The documentary was based on a "script" made by an economist who was assigned the task to make a "What if" scenario about how the dollar could crash within 24 hours."

Americans are living beyond their means and Asia is currently financing that. But eventually the Asians/Europeans will stop financing the USA and then the bubble will burst.

What-if documentary about catastrophic US dollar collapse

Executive summary: Things can't keep going on like this. (Basically, to keep things going the way they have been since '99, foreign investors keep having to put higher and higher percentages of their investment in the dollar - i.e. financing us Americans so we can consume beyond our means.) But no one knows when it's going to stop and reverse itself....

eta: The link is to an excerpt from the mentioned documentary. So it focuses only on why things can't keep going on the way they are, and not on the hypothetical crash of the Dollar....

Happy Birthday Mal!

Check out today's ginormous and exotic daily puppy!