I like having the actual paper on weekends to curl up with on the couch. During the week, the online edition works just fine.

Me too, except my reasoning is that the new format of the Sun sucks and the actual content dropped drastically. It's crap now.

Seriously. I am not sad at all about the Tribune company. I feel bad for the people who work there but they treated their papers like shit and now they are shitty papers.

...although I do enjoy the traffic column that's in there now.

The idea of Mark Twain representing elitism makes me laugh and laugh.

Well, exactly. But the fact of that matter is that most people now don't realize that Twain was considered a hack in his day. The most commercial and pedestrian of writers. It's a matter of context I suppose, which is why I don't tend to jump on the "oh, that columnist's being an elitist shithead" bandwagon.

It looks like the Chicago company whose workers are on a sitdown strike due to no notice of the company shutting down are getting a boost not only from Obama, who's supporting them, but also the state of Illinois, who has shut down any business with Bank of America until they give the company a line of credit to pay severance to the workers.

Damn. The times they are a changin'.

Jesse, sadly, your reminder to work came after I had already fallen asleep.

I don't actually feel great. I hope I'm not getting sick. The timing would be very bad.

OK, this is weird. Something I read today reminded me of a TV movie we watched in high school, The Wave, about a high school teacher who'd done an experiment on his class with creating a "movement" to show them how ordinary Germans could get caught up in Nazism. I vaguely remembered that it was based on a true story. I googled for more info.

I ended up on this page. [link] It starts out with debunking parts of the story -- a few details that don't add up, the number of students involved seems bigger than it should be, and so on. I keep reading. Some scans of the school newspaper from the time -- kind of interesting. And then I read some more, and realize that he's just skating the edge of Holocaust denial. (He acknowledges concentration camps, seems iffy on the gas chambers, and doesn't mention the Final Solution.) Pretty much implies that, since the teacher (who wrote the only in-depth account of what happened) is part Jewish, of course he's a liar.

Then he veers into a rant about the war on drugs for a paragraph or so. And then goes off on something about evolving into a state of "ultraintelligence," part of which will require "redesigning our cells."

It's an interesting read, as he slowly goes from stuff that makes sense, to stuff that sort of makes sense, to stuff that makes no sense, to utter nonsense.

The book The Wave is still being read in schools--we sold a bunch of copies over the summer since it was on a local school's summer reading list.

I remember seeing that Afterschool Special when it was first aired; it really freaked me out!

And reading further down the page, I see that he does deny the gas chambers. Also pretty much claims that Jews control wikipedia.

Jews control all of the internets, don't they?

I don't actually feel great. I hope I'm not getting sick.

If you're me, randomly falling asleep is a sure sign of getting sick. But it can also be a way to avoid it!