From the Richmond Times-Dispatch Feb 2 Supplies for Iraq troops ease concerns of fathers
CNN.com - Falluja residents question election readiness - Jan 27, 2005
Fathers help Marines gear up
I’m reminded of the peacenik’s bumper sticker:
SuppliedtoSurvive
From the LA Times:
The Fallouja Plight Persists
Stephen Rodrick writes in Slate:
Unpardonable Interruptions - How television killed the newspaper sports column. By Stephen?Rodrick: “They’d write a cherished column for 30 years, and that was it. There was nothing else to do, no higher job to attain. Now, a sports column is nothing more than a springboard, a gig that starts you on your way to becoming a multimedia star.
As with many things in sports media today, television, and more specifically, ESPN, is to blame. “
In case you liked sportswriting the old way, try this annual series.
The Best American Sports Writing 2004 (Best American Sports Writing)
“I think I made a mistake when I picked the night sounds.” was Tia’s explanation for being out of bed after 9 pm last night.
We’ve recently tiled the house, so, the acoustics are different and now one can hear every sniffle from anywhere in the house. We’re trying to adjust to the echoes with electronic nature sound machines and hoping that rugs will dampen the sounds.
Tia had chosen “Forest”, the sound of a gentle breeze through the leaves of trees, to mask the various household and street noises that would otherwise keep her awake at night. But this digitized sleepy forest was not uninhabited. At some odd interval, an owl’s loud clear “hu-Hoo hoo” breaks the peace, freezing invisible digital forest rodents in their tracks and causing Tia to wake up just a little bit more. Add a couple of twig snaps and some malevolent murmurs and you’d get the Foley Track for the next Blair Witch Project.
One of her other choices was “Ocean”, like someone thought the “Scraaw-ARK”s of a half a dozen seagulls was, somehow, soporific.
What we need is sound to mask the dishwasher, the neighbors Harley, and that lowered ground effects Honda Prelude from up the street with more subwoofer than tires. We don’t need romantic notions about thunderstorms, treefrogs or crickets. We need sleep.
Some of these machines come with a setting called “heartbeat”. At what age does the effect of hearing a heartbeat in your bedroom stop having the “mother’s-womb-effect” and start having the “Edgar-Allen-Poe’s-tell-tale-heart-effect”? I don’t know either, but if an experiment is required, no, you may not use my children.
Here are my sound requests for the next time somebody makes a sound machine
Refrigerator compressor
Diesel at idle
Art History lecture
40 Gal freshwater Aquarium
El Train
Laundromat
