September 12, 2010 · 2:56 am

Nine Worst Colleges in America | Educated Nation | Higher Education Blog

Interesting on many levels….

Yes, it’s another college ranking list, but this snarky / cheeky one really stands out. Radar Magazine Online recently put together a “semi-scientific guide to the most substandard schools in America.” Using a wide variety of sources, Radar took up the challenge of choosing which accredited 4-year colleges with physical campuses made the “dishonor roll.”

Worst Party School: (Tie) California State University-Chico; San Diego State University

Illustrious Alumni: Chico lays claim to good-time-guy novelist Raymond Carver (who graduated elsewhere) and bare-knuckled political consultant Ed Rollins, while SDSU graduated disgraced former CIA executive director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo and oft-disrobed former C-movie actress Raquel Welch.

Worst Trust-Fund-Baby College: Bennington College (VT)

Notable Course: “SHHH! The Social Construction of Silence,” a class focused on breaking down the classification of silence as an absence of sound and “establishing it as a presence.” Or, the class where you sleep off your hangover.

Worst Ivy League University: Cornell University (NY)

School Pride: “I haven’t overheard a single intellectual conversation in three years, unless it was between Indian or Asian students,” writes an architecture major on Students Review.

Worst Christian University: Liberty University (VA)

School Pride: “The mountains and all are beautiful. It’s right near the Wal-Mart too,” writes a student on Campus Dirt.

Worst of the Big Ten: Michigan State University (East Lansing)

It’s not surprising this hard-drinking football school hasn’t made it to the Rose Bowl since 1988: Much of its student body seems to be in jail. Over 1,000 students were arrested for drug and alcohol offenses last year, along with another 1,224 perps in the crime-ridden city.

Worst Military Academy: Virginia Military Institute

VMI excluded women from its ranks until the U.S. Supreme Court forced the academy to admit female cadets in 1996.

Worst Women’s College: Texas Woman’s University

Notable Course: Cultural Perspectives of Personal Appearance.

The Worst College in America: University of Bridgeport (CT)

Fun Fact: At orientation, all incoming students are given a “personal alarm locator” that will send swarms of campus policemen racing to their rescue whenever they press a panic button.

via Nine Worst Colleges in America | Educated Nation | Higher Education Blog.

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September 12, 2010 · 2:35 am

Liberace Museum to Shut Down in Las Vegas

What can I say?  This is really sad when you think of the pre-Stonewall world.  Liberace was the most visable Gay Man in America.  He just didn’t think so…

Middle class women in the South spent their lives denying that Liberace was gay…He was just “flamboyant.”

Love it or hate it.  It’s a fact:  Liberace is part of our Gay history.  And it’s going to be harder to find him in the future…

The Liberace Museum, long one of this city’s best-known and unusual attractions, is shutting down next month, the latest victim of a brutal recession that has hit Nevada particularly hard.

A singular landmark since its opening in 1979, the two-building spread topped by a skyward sculpture of a keyboard contains thousands of artifacts from the career of its namesake, who once reigned in the Strip’s showrooms by pounding sonatas out of rhinestone-encrusted pianos while donning outlandish sequined capes.

The museum is operated by the Liberace Foundation, whose board chairman announced plans for closure today and said his organization would narrow its focus to raising money for the music scholarships it has awarded for decades. More than 30 employees will lose their jobs.

via Liberace Museum to Shut Down in Las Vegas.

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September 11, 2010 · 1:40 pm

Chapter 21: A Southern Boy’s Reflections on New York on September 11th | My Southern Gothic Life

A newish post is up on my other blog:

I am blessed to be able to go to New York at least 3 or 4 times a year- for either business or pleasure.  I can say, with no shame, guilt or qualification that I love New York.  As I have said before, I’ve had my love affairs with London and Paris, but I always come home to New York as my favorite city.  It is the most alive place I have ever been.

I know people go to New York to escape where they are from or who they may have been before.  That’s part of the magic.  Nothing is as it really seems.  From Broadway to the Bronx, you create your own reality in New York.  But it is always alive and you can’t hide from life in New York.  At least not easily.

In other parts of the country, you can isolate yourself.  You can’t do that in New York.  You can only have so much delivered.  You have to go out.  And when you go out, life smacks you in the face.

See, one of the reasons New York is both so Democratic and democratic is that you can’t help but interact with people who are different from you.  You are all in it–life in New York– together wether you like it or not.  You run into a multitude of diversity on the subway.  Walking down the block to the bodega on the corner.  Sure, each neighborhood is a unique little space, but you still aren’t isolated from the bigger space.  This makes you think and understand the people are both different, but the same, and that you need to work together to make life better for all of us.

One of the reasons the South other parts of the country can be so inbred and ignorant of diversity is that it’s so easy in those places to only socialize with “people like you”.   That type of isolation can only happen in New York if you are very, very rich.  And even then, with the influx of so much New Money, it’s still more diverse than it once was…

That’s why September 11th will always haunt that city.  It was a flash point that is still real and raw.  New York always goes on and goes forward.   Nothing stops New York.  But this last trip to New York, I was more aware of how September 11th still haunts the city than I had been in some time.

MORE:  Click link below for the complete post.

Chapter 21: A Southern Boy’s Reflections on New York on September 11th | My Southern Gothic Life.

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September 11, 2010 · 1:16 pm

Cary Grant Goes Camping

With Audrey Hepburn….

This reflects my sentiments exactly….

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September 11, 2010 · 12:08 pm

Paying the Price – NYTimes.com

An excerpt from another great column from Bob Herbert in the New York Times.  Link to full column is at the bottom…

People feel that the country is going to hell, that the system itself has broken down, and President Obama and the Democrats have been unable to assuage that awful feeling. The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders can point to a long string of legislative accomplishments — passage of a health insurance overhaul, financial reform, a stimulus package that may have been misshapen and too small but nevertheless helped stave off a worse economic disaster, and so on.

But voters do not feel that the administration and Congress have delivered the fundamental change they were seeking when they swept President Obama and huge Democratic majorities into office nearly two years ago. Forget about the crazies in the Tea Party for the moment. Forget about the ugly Republican obstructionism that is based on the idea that the failure not just of President Obama but of American society itself is the G.O.P.’s quickest ticket back to power.

Forget about that for a moment. The Democrats are in deep, deep trouble because they have not effectively addressed the overwhelming concern of working men and women: an economy that is too weak to provide the jobs they need to support themselves and their families. And that failure is rooted in the Democrats’ continued fascination with the self-serving conservative belief that the way to help ordinary people is to shower money on the rich and wait for the blessings to trickle down to the great unwashed below.

It was a bogus concept when George H.W. Bush denounced it as “voodoo economics” in 1980, and it remains bogus today, no matter how hard the Democrats try to dress it up in a donkey costume.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Paying the Price – NYTimes.com.

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September 11, 2010 · 10:11 am

Study: Lost Male Drivers Waste $3,000 In Gas

Uh, no comment….

(Sept. 3) — Men waste more than $3,000 in fuel costs because they refuse to ask for directions when lost, according to a British study released as motorists across the U.S. prepare to load up their cars for the long Labor Day weekend.

The research, commissioned by British insurance company Sheila’s Wheels, revealed that male drivers travel 276 unnecessary miles each year because they stubbornly reject help when lost.

In what might not be shocking news for female passengers, the survey found that more than a quarter of men polled said they would wait at least half an hour before asking for directions when lost.

via Study: Lost Male Drivers Waste $3,000 In Gas.

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September 9, 2010 · 7:30 pm

Forget Mehlman — What About Lincoln?

Interesting….This point of view seems to be growing in acceptance.

While the gay media has been awash in unwarranted hosannas over the recent coming-out declaration by former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman — who has not apologized for running the most homophobic presidential campaign in US history — the LGBT press has been ignoring an infinitely more significant development under way with vastly more important implications for the Republican Party: the increasing acceptance by historians that the loving heart of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first GOP president, found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex.

This shifting consensus about Lincoln’s sexual orientation is certainly the most stunning and effective rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes, which came to fever pitch during the 2004 race that Mehlman spearheaded for George W. Bush.

“We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization, told Gay City News, adding, “ We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”

Stauffer is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War era, and in his latest — and best-selling — book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he put it, “Lincoln’s soulmate and the love of his life.”

And in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Reviews of American History, Stauffer hammers home this point, writing, “In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

via Gay City News > Forget Mehlman — What About Lincoln?.

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September 7, 2010 · 9:26 pm

“True Prep” Author Lisa Birnbach on the “Today Show” This Morning

I’m not sure if this video will stay up at YouTube, but here it is for now….

Great interview with Lisa Birnbach about how “Prep” has evolved over the last thirty years, what it really means and who the “True Preps” are.  Hint:  Two live in the White House.

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September 7, 2010 · 9:14 pm

2010 List of America’s Most Stressed Cities Released; Detroit Is No. 1

From AOL News:

The Motor City is feeling a bit stressed out these days.

Detroit, and its 9.026 stress index, earned the unfavorable honor of topping the Portfolio.com/bizjournals analysis of stress levels in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. Los Angeles scored the next highest stress index, with a score of 5.899.

The study looked at 10 factors, including unemployment, income growth, poverty, sunshine, murders and commuting, to determine which cities leave their residents all wound up and which ones offer the good life. Drawing upon 2009 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the organizers analyzed the 50 largest American metro areas and then compared where they scored on those indicators to the national averages. (More information on how the study was conducted can be found here.)

Considering the ongoing dire state of the American job market and the struggling auto industry, the stress that the Motor City is experiencing certainly seems justified.

At No. 3 in the rankings is Cleveland, which has a 5.146 stress index. Possibly that result reflects some vestigial pain from LeBron James’ “decision” to move down to South Beach, Fla., although topping the “Robberies” index with 827.5 robberies per 100,000 residents may be the better explanation.

Here are the top five most stressed cities studied, along with corresponding stress indexes and unemployment rates.

1. Detroit: 9.023; 14.3 percent unemployment

2. Los Angeles: 5.899; 11.6 percent unemployment

3. Cleveland: 5.146; 9.3 percent unemployment

4. Riverside, Calif.: 5.105; 14.4 percent unemployment

5. St. Louis: 4.737; 9.9 percent unemployment

And the five least stressed cities studied:

46. Austin, Texas: -5.183; 7.4 percent unemployment

47. Raleigh, N.C.: -5.249; 8.4 percent unemployment

48. Minneapolis-St. Paul: -6.875; 6.7 percent unemployment

49. Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va.: -7.859; 7.6 percent unemployment

50. Salt Lake City: -7.949; 7.1 percent unemployment

New York City, the largest metro area studied, with 19.7 million residents, boasts the longest average commute to work, with an average of 34.55 minutes. It came in at No. 6 with a 4.734 stress index.

via 2010 List of America’s Most Stressed Cities Released; Detroit Is No. 1.

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September 7, 2010 · 9:07 pm

Dylan Loewe: Democrats Still Winning the Long Game

I-and a lot of people I know- am concerned about the possibilities of Republican gains this November.  Not just concerned, but mad and scared!

This column from the Huffington Posts helps look at things in a longer term perspective.  And gives those of us who support a Progressive agenda bright hope for the future.

It’s a longer article than I am comfortable posting in full here, so I encourage you to click the link, after this short excerpt,  and read the whole thing.  It’s not too long…and well worth reading.

I know what you’re thinking. It feels like things can’t get much worse for the Democrats — and that if it can, it will. We had so much momentum after 2008, so much hope and excitement, and now, as we march reluctantly toward the midterms, it feels like all of our efforts are unraveling. Republicans are poised to ride a wave election, conceivably as large as in 1994, and Exhibit A of their success may well be pronounced “Speaker John Boehner.” How’s that for a shiver down your spine?

But there is actually plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party — and the progressive ideals it represents. You just have to be able to look past November to see it.

I know that’s a tall order. In a 24-hour news cycle, in a minute-to-minute blogosphere, looking beyond the next election isn’t so easy to do. It’s not even that easy to look beyond the next news cycle. Go to any website, read any newspaper, and the sense you get is that nothing exists after November. Decisions made today, actions taken by both parties, are seen through a narrow lens. We ask, what will their impact be this fall, without any regard for what their impact will be in the years that follow.

But if you step back, look beyond the current moment, and consider the broader context, you’ll see that Democrats are actually in tremendously strong shape for the long term. What happens this November isn’t inconsequential. But it’s also likely to be a temporary bump on a road toward Democratic dominance.

via Dylan Loewe: Democrats Still Winning the Long Game.

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