Mullet denial

Also on the lighter side, from the Seattle Times article "Mullets: Party in the back not over yet":

Port Orchard beautician Julea Penland is still waiting for someone to accept her offer of a free mullet removal. "People with mullets either love them and want to keep them, or they don't know they have them," she says. "They're in mullet denial."

I was instantly reminded of a photo I took in Salamanca, Spain in 2006. Oh! A mullet in progress!

Veepstakes

One of the best things delivered to my e-mail inbox is Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day. Take for example this little gem:

Veepstakes

The process a candidate for president goes through to choose a running mate. It's a portmanteau word combining the colloquial pronunciation of VP as "veep" and sweepstakes.

The winner of the veepstakes is awarded the honor of being trashed in the media for the next 5 months.

A: Who should Obama pick for VP?
B: I sure hope Brian Schweitzer wins the veepstakes!

Fake news you can count on?

From the New York Times' article Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?

"When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Willams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN."

Roundtable discussion on newspapers

From Democracy Now!:

Newspapers Suffer Spate of Layoffs, Decline in Circulation, Ad Revenue, Stock Price: A Roundtable Discussion on the State of the Industry

Festival at Mount Si

Aleili and her Veils of the Nile crew always make for a pretty picture.

The Soldiers Project

One of the greatest joys of being a small-town journalist is meeting people who truly care about helping their community. I interviewed an anti-war psychologist who donates her time to counsel veterans, soldiers and their families through an all-volunteer organization called The Soldiers Project.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs Web site, as many as one in 10 Afghanistan war veterans and one in five Iraq war veterans return with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Goodspaceguy Nelson

I was cozied up to my laptop, mail-in ballot in hand, ready to make myself an informed voter, when U.S. Representative candidate Goodspaceguy Nelson jumped off the page. Big distraction. Here are some highlights from his most recent blog entry :

Goodspaceguy likes to refer to our Earth as Spaceship Earth, a spaceship built by the science and by the technology of Mother Nature. (God?)

Goodspaceguy worries about nuclear war and the coming of the next killer asteroid and therefore wants us to spread life from Earth out into our solar system as quickly as possible. Instead of bringing most of the material up from Earth for the colonization, Goodspaceguy wants us to use a lot of material from the near Earth asteroids and comets to help build the coming orbital space colonies. Let's follow the low-cost path to the Fantastic Future.

To glorify the Seattle area, we should try to make it easier to grow the movie-making industry in the Seattle area by cooperating with moviemakers.

Goodspaceguy Nelson is a non-smoker, non-drinker, non-drug user, but as a believer in individual freedom and free will and upward evolution, Goodspaceguy believes that each individual should decide whether or not to engage in habits which are thought to be harmful to oneself. Taxpayers, through their governments, should not incur the wasteful cost of interfering. Goodspaceguy is pro-choice on almost everything.

This fellow has been running for various offices for a while, but this is all new to me.

More news news

Another ray of sunshine for the journalism industry, this time reported by Richard Pérez-Peña of the NY Times: Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying

"Experts say the lack of interest reflects a sharp shift in the last year toward a more pessimistic long-term view of the industry. The loss of ads has accelerated, and few expect a rebound even when the economy recovers."