TMN is featuring an interview with Kehinde Wiley and a gallery of his work. I'll never forget the first time I saw this painting of his at the Brooklyn Museum. The juxtaposition of the classical pose with urban style blew me away.

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The WSJ has an article about stray dogs in Moscow and this is my favorite part:

When a disturbed fashion model several years ago stabbed to death a gentle stray that lived at the Mendeleyevskaya metro station, horrified celebrities and ordinary city residents raised money and erected a bronze statue of the dog, Malchik.

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Dr. No asked me the other day what "teabagging" meant. Her response: "Boys are gross."

"Teabagging" is back in the zeitgeist thanks to the return of former Duke basketball player Reggie Love to the public eye -- namely, as Barack Obama's assistant. Before that, he was primarily known as the highest-profile teabagee in sports.

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SU won its tenth national championship in lacrosse yesterday, defeating Johns Hopkins 13-10 exactly 25 years after SU beat Johns Hopkins to win their first national title. The 1983 team was legendary for introducing the uptempo, attacking style of lacrosse that is perfectly captured by SU's first goal of the game: a behind the back strike by Stephen Keogh.

Hats off to Johns Hopkins, though, for beating the Duke Blue Devils, a team that people generally thought was unstoppable.

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Yep. The fad's over.

I just spent a week teaching the rudiments of business journalism to nine college students heading off to internships. I showed up Monday morning late, sick with the flu and making no sense at all. Along the way, I made several mistakes and occasionally imparted some bad bad info. I've also slept about 12 hours over the past three days. But I also, surprisingly, had a blast. And these kids -- can you believe there are legal adults who were born in the waning years of the Reagan administration? -- introduced me to Facebook.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to sleep for 14 hours.

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• About $40 in cash and checks for various NCAA basketball pools over the years. Anyone need an accountant?
• About ten thousand of these.
• When about a hundred old batteries sit for years wrapped in documents, interesting things happen.
• Really? A sock? Not two socks, which is weird enough, but one?
• The State of Working America, 2007/2008
• The State of Working America, 2006/2007
• The State of Working America, 2005/2006
• The State of Working America, 2004/2005
• Pirates!
• Taxes.
• Oh yeah, my checkbook.

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This Slate Video is shot at 20 W. 20th street near Dr. No's studio. The first time I went into the building, I noticed the sign for the gun club in the basement and thought, "huh...don't see that everyday." Little did I know that it was the only one in Manhattan. It's right across the street from a tasty little takeout joint and down the street from library for the blind.

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The Post-American World

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Mickey Kaus linked to an article by TSI!'s brother this weekend.

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I'm not sure how many of us actually received the newsletter, but apparently there is a proactive alumni chair reigning. I got a copy of this file in the mail today.

Anyway, thought everyone ought to have the opportunity to reply.

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Feeling badly about West Virginia giving Hillary Clinton a landslide victory? Well, don't! West Virginians are crazy! My favorite is the woman who had this interaction with a reporter:

Old Woman: He's Muslim, you know, and that has a lot to do with it. I'd just, you know, I'd just rather have Hillary.

Reporter: Just for the record, he constantly says that he's a Christian.

Old Woman: I know he does.

Reporter: You don't believe him?

Old Woman: (shaking head) No.

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Last night I was going through my unread back issues of the New Yorker, when I noticed a "Talk of the Town" piece about the New York Ranger's Sean Avery. Often referred to as an agitator, Sean Avery is best known for the Sean Avery rule that the NHL instituted after Avery's hilarious face guarding antics against Martin Brodeur in the first round of the playoffs.

Alas, alack, when I saw his name, that great moment wasn't the the first thing that popped into my mind.

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This article highlights the short life and the high cost of your average pair of of pointe ballet shoes. The American Ballet Theatre spends $7,500 a year for each ballerina's pointe shoes which are generally constructed with techniques that have barely changed since the shoe's development.

Given the advancements in footwear and material knowledge over the past fifty years, why are we still using these classic techniques instead of taking advantage of modern technology to make point shoes that are more comfortable and last longer? This is what happens to the feet of ballerinas wearing traditional shoes.

Whenever I meet somebody from the ABT, I harp on one point: if it's the American Ballet Theatre, why do they use the British spelling of theater instead of the American one? I strongly believe that we, as Americans, should proudly use our spelling for theater. To my mind, using the British spelling implies that our theater is inferior to their theatre and that the best we can seek to do is ape European theatre instead of proudly presenting our theater as the equal or better of anything in the old world.

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They must have sat on this story for a while...there's snow on the ground in the photos.

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With the advent of nice weather in New York, I've been spending a lot of time on my bicycle. A typical day might involve riding around Manhattan and ending with a loop or two around Central Park for, I don't know, something the neighborhood of 25 to 35 miles a day.

While NYC bicyclists, and messengers in particular, have a reputation for being slightly crazy, solitary riders generally travel slower and take fewer risks. It's when you get an urban peloton going, that things start getting really fun. It's not unusual for a couple of bicyclists to hook up with other bicyclists heading in the same direction to form an ad hoc peloton. You generally end up with people like you, but I've even ended up riding with people on road bikes if they don't use their brakes too much and know what they're doing.*

My riding partners last night were two women. We ended up burning through lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn into Cobble Hill and it was one of those times where you go for miles with at top speed without stopping once. It was a lot of fun.

* I get particularly annoyed by road bikers in parks. On Sunday in Prospect Park, on the flat section by the lake, I acquired a road biker who was just drafting behind me and didn't offer to pull once. I derived a great deal of satisfaction from losing him as soon as we began the climb to Grand Army plaza. Oh, and did I mention that this guys was decked out like Lance Armstrong while I was dressed normally and carrying a 10 pound gym bag?

There are guys in Central Park who have the skills to back up wearing bicycling jerseys, but 99% of road bikers just need to learn how to ride before they start getting all decked out and shaving their legs. Well, that's my rant for today.

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I need reference photographs of people engaged in every-day activities*. I would like to work from photographs of y'all; I prefer to draw and paint people I know rather than a random collection of souls drawn from the digital abyss by googlomancy.

If you're interested, just email me: [my pseudonym] AT [the big hippy-wanna-be Texas city outside of which I live] DOT rr DOT com

* By "every-day activities", I mean "as opposed to smiling insipidly into the lens of the camera". Beyond that, anything goes.

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Move over Tipsy McStagger, here comes PD O'Hurley's. Apparently, PD O'Hurley's has been a fixture on the upper west side for almost a decade, but it recently caught my eye due to a recently opened location on the Hudson river bikepath in the 50s.

The name doesn't look too bad on the original building as shown in the photo above, but the location on the bikepath has a chain restaurant style of architecture and an Applebee's like red neon sign spelling out the PD O'Hurley's. It looks like a corporate branding attempt gone horribly wrong, which is exactly why I can't ride past it without giggling.

I'm not the only one who finds it funny. Last night a dude got off his bicycle just to take a picture of it.

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Wondering where the Guapos (or the Nos, I guess) are? Might they be at home? Might they be traveling? There's only one solid way to find out for sure: Turn on your TV and see whether Predator 2 is playing.

Seriously underrated movie. It stars Bill Paxton, Gary Busey and Morton Downey Jr. Plus, Danny Glover as the renegade cop. It's a recipe for awesome. And it plays whenever I stay at a hotel.

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From two character plays set in academia to the UFC.

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Vladimir Putin is everything that George W. Bus would like to be. He's a strong leader who's extremely popular, waged a popular war and just happens to be a bad-ass who talks tough.

Instead, more more Americans disapprove of him than Richard Nixon at the time of his resignation.

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About a year ago, we cut the cable. Well, not literally, as I still use Everest, Time Warner’s worst nightmare in the Kansas City market, for internet access and telephone. The cable TV portion of our bill was about $50/month. For the number of channels we got, the price was actually quite reasonable, but the problem was that the few shows we watched every week were all on network TV. And when you consider my son’s sports schedule at the time—baseball practice on Monday, soccer practice on Tuesday, baseball practice on Thursday, games on the weekends—our available TV watching time was minimal. (btw, we’re never making the two-sports-at-once mistake again)

Netflix and the networks offering their programming online has nearly rid me of my need for a DVR, although I do miss being able to watch every play of a football game in 45minutes. Aside from missing KU games on ESPN, I’ve managed to get along without the “crack in a coax.”

My original plan was to see if I could survive without cable through the between-seasons wasteland that we sometimes call “Summer.” Well, we made it, and we’re still going strong. But it led to something quite interesting with my four-year-old daughter on a Saturday evening a couple weeks ago.

Since she no longer has access to Dora the Marketing Machine, she watches PBS. I’m not sure if she expected her usual programs to be on at that time, but she didn’t seem disappointed by the Lawrence Welk episode that was airing. In fact, she enjoyed it quite a bit.

I was curious about the show (when it started, when it ended, etc.), so I went to the Wikipedia article on good ol’ Lawrence. For some reason, I had Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line” in my head, so I pointed another browser window to YouTube. Here’s what I found:

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