Casey gave me a copy of this last night before we headed out to the movies. I think this is post-Wilco, back in February.

Digital composite of images of a solar eclipse, all taken in Antarctica, November 2003.

(found via the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive)

Look at what I watched over lunch:

Carl and Beckett Wiswell at Beckett’s first birthday party, April 9, 2005.

Offered without comment:

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

…Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy “should be the poster boy for impeachment” for citing international norms in his opinions. “If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well.”

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary.

[more]

There they were, 11 college students, lined up like some alien species before a curious group of about 50 college and university librarians.

One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken.

And when was the last time he was in the U’s library?

“Last year,” he said.

The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What’s a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?

In one of the kickoff sessions of the national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the group spent seven hours Thursday at the Minneapolis Convention Center puzzling over the habits of the so-called millennial generation.

Confident, sophisticated, tolerant and practical, they are “Internet natives” who are more likely to use Google to research a paper than go to the library.

Accustomed to getting information at the click of a mouse button, they are impatient with the slower, word-based searches and single-use computers that many libraries use.

One librarian said that at her college, students filled the large reading room but never approached the librarian behind the reference desk. When someone finally asked why, a student said, “I thought you were there to watch us.”

###

More in the link, obviously. Definitely something I think about every now and then, at least in the general sense of technology in everyday life. Carl will always have Sesame Street at his beck and call because of the TiVo, for instance, instead of having to wait patiently until it’s on. When I was a kid, it was a big deal if you typed your paper for school on a computer; now, it’s expected. And we’ve always been the generation that was comfortable with new technology — what about the generation that doesn’t know anything but the New?

Here’s a link to a great piece I heard on NPR this morning about a fifth-grade teacher in Aberdeen, Maryland, who’s using graphic novels and comic books to help motivate and interest her students in reading. Notably, although the teacher mentions the fact that the idea seemed natural to her because of media interest in comic book movies like SPIDER-MAN, the books she’s using are from Jim Ottaviani’s G-T Labs, whose nonfiction graphic novels focus mainly on science and scientists (including FALLOUT, one of the most facsinating comics I’ve ever read, all about the Manhattan Project and the birth of the atomic bomb.)

In honor of the new season of Sesame Street which began this week (yay!), here’s an awesome essay (with photos!) about the 25 Greatest Moments in Sesame Street history:

And also:

When mild-mannered doorknob salesman Grover Kent hears the faint cry for help, he becomes Super Grover, a cute & furry hero who’s smarter than a speeding bullet. He may not actually save the day all the time, & by all the time I mean ever, but his mere presence has helped children all around the big city solve their own problems, all by themselves.

My favorite Super Grover moment is when he answers a cry for help from a girl who can’t get her computer working. His solution is the first of a Grover classic… jumping up & down & going WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA ctrl+v ctrl+v WUBBA ctrl+v WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA ctrl+v ctrl+v ctrl+v WUBBA

The girl eventually figures out that she needs to turn the computer on first if she wants to do anything. While any other tech support guy would reach their hand through the phone & strangle her until he can feel her last breath, Super Grover is happy to have saved the day… until he has trouble lifting off into flight. Is he stepping on his cape? No, that’s not it. Oh well, it’s worth another shot… WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA ctrl+v ctrl+v ctrl+v WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA ctrl+v ctrl+v WUBBA WUBBA ctrl+v WU

Read through the whole thing — I guarantee you’ll smile and laugh at more than one of his picks.