The Washington Post had a great article about Pierre L'Enfant's original plan for Washington, DC, and how it survives today.

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Nashville, East Nashville, Male, 26-30!

See the BlogChalking page for more on this idea.

I just realized that the Starr Report (detailing Bill Clinton's alleged dillydallying with interns and cigars) was released to the public on September 11, 1998, exactly three years before the terrorist attacks. It kind of makes you long for a time when the most pressing issues facing our nation revolved around the president's sex life.

Worst Response To A Crisis, 1985:

From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

As quoted by Wanda the GNOME Fish

Too much Disney is bad for you. Need proof?

TOWNSEND, Tenn. (AP) -- Bears sometimes attack deer -- it's what bears do.

But a Florida tourist apparently could not accept that, rangers say, and he took nature into his own hands by kicking and slamming a young black bear that had pounced on a fawn in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

“He probably thought he was saving Bambi,” park spokeswoman Nancy Gray said yesterday.

Michael Shaw, 38, of Grand Ridge, Fla., was charged with disturbing wildlife and disorderly conduct — federal offenses carrying up to $5,000 in fines and six months in jail.

“He seemed to be quite put out that we were charging him,” ranger Kent Looney said. “He thought he was doing the right thing.”

According to a ranger's report, Shaw and other visitors became distraught when they saw a 45-pound yearling bear jump on the young deer in Cades Cove on June 28.

Shaw ran toward the animals and began kicking the bear. When it refused to let go of the deer, Shaw picked up the bear and threw it down, the report said.

The bear released its grip and ran back into the woods, “probably pretty confused,” Gray said. The injured deer was euthanized.

But park officials said Shaw interrupted nature.

“The bear was doing what it was supposed to be doing,” Looney said. “Many of the people who gave me statements about the incident were incensed. ... If they had gotten hold of him, we might have had to save him.”

Ok, since you asked, here's how I spent my fourth of July in DC:

•  Family tradition: Attended Takoma Park Independence Day Parade with entire family, including a brother home from college and another brother visiting from out of state.

•  Took metro to Union Station to meet visiting friend. He had been bumped from his flight the night before, but got a sweet settlement from the airline.

•  Walked from station to look for other friends. Stood in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue yelling into cell phone trying to figure out where they were.

•  Got searched (several times, actually) by dutiful police officers manning security checkpoints around the Mall.

•  Availed ourselves of free free food from the rather large Hare Krishna encampment on the Mall. Listened to repetitive chanting for about 20 minutes. Worried mildly about possible sedatives in the lemonade.

•  Visited the Silk Road-themed Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Were soon deterred by near 100 degree heat, so escaped to the (air conditioned!) Natural History Museum to look at Mammoths, Mastadons, and bugs.

•  Went and got less holistic food at the Old Post Office Pavillion. I remembered this place from school field trips, but apparently no one else did, since it was nearly deserted. We had to go through a metal detector and have our bags x-rayed to get in.

•  Hopped on Metro and, after some confusion over the bizarre holiday routing changes, took it to Arlington Cemetary. Then hiked a ways looking for the Iwo Jima memorial. (Turns out it's closer to the Roslyn stop.) Eventually found another friend, and decided to stay there to watch the fireworks. This picture is almost exactly the view we had. It's a pretty great place to watch from, although you don't get as much booming as you do right on the Mall.

•  Followed throngs of people to Metro, and went our seperate ways to retrieve cars and luggage. Then met back up on the Maryland side of town and headed to the Route 1 IHOP. Returned home sometime after midnight.

That's it for now -- more later...

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth -- just got back from spending Independence Day weekend in Washington, DC. More later...

As you may know, government in the great state of Tennessee has come to a grinding halt due to an impasse over the state budget. Around 9:00 this evening, I drove home from work past the Tennessee state capitol. There were a fair number of people protesting and waving signs on both sides of the issue, but it wasn't exactly an out-of-control riot scene. I continued home, and about an hour later turned on the 10:00 news. They're doing live shots from in front of the capitol, and there are people coming out of the woodwork, cars stopped blocking the street, and plenty of other assorted mayhem.

Sort of makes you wonder if a lot of people are showing up just in time to protest their way onto the evening news. (I'm not the only one with this idea -- Danielle over at Missives Anonymous hatched a plot to head over there with signs promoting the band she works for! )

Oh, and as she very accurately points out, it's hot here!

Wow, I've been Instapundited!

Lest we forget...

I stumbled across a link somewhere and clicked it. My browser responded by calling up a large image of a woman falling through space, one of the towers of the World Trade Center, blurred, in the background. iTunes was churning out music in a major key. I was in mid sip of a diet Coke. It was like running across a pleasant meadow, then falling into a deep, hidden well. The Coke in my mouth drained down my lips back into the glass. I didn't want to see this image, yet there it was. The light was so warm, falling on her falling body. I could see her black shoes and her beige skirt, the warmth of a sunlit arm. I felt seized with one wish: that I could reach out, reach through the screen, through the browser window, through the pixels and the 9 months and 18 days, through all the screens and space and days that separated us. I wanted to reach out with huge arms and catch her and bring her to my chest and tell her that she was all right, that everything was all right and she was safe.

(From The Publick Journal of Evan Izer.)

Had to share my favorite message so far today from our tech support voice mail line:

We just discovered this amazing property on our intranet, where if you click a button on how to contact the fire departent, it actually links you to a site on how to find pornography! We just thought you might want to come see it...

Hmmm. We just assumed "redhotfirefighters.com" was the fire department's web page! (Actually, it appears that www.nashtnfiredept.org got hijacked by a porn baron. Don't go there, though, since it tries to install all sorts of spyware on your computer.)

Check out InPassing.org, a compendium of things overheard on the street in Berkeley, CA. A sample:

"...A really nice guy, and he just loves AC Transit. He's got a picture of every bus -- he even drove down to Freemont to take pictures of the busses there. If you're ever trying to convince him to go somewhere, all you have to say is, 'But think, you could look at the busses while you're there...'

"He better not be taking pictures of my bus."

--A passenger and the driver on an AC Transit bus

All very amusing. (Link via Laura at My Side of Things.)

Sorry for the reduced number of posts lately. My project management class has kicked into high gear, so I'm spending most of my available time doing readin', writin' and 'rithmatic. Only a few more weeks of this torture, though!

How 'bout this. Seems violence against computers is now a misdemeanor! (Link via Macintouch.)

Here at Newton's Kumquat, we work tirelessly to bring you the latest and greatest advances in journalism. That's why we're proud to tell you about the Ticked Off column in the Orlando Sentinel. Finally, a place in print for all those anonymous curmudgeons and complainers. (Alas, we couldn't find a web version.) Basically, readers are invited to leave a voicemails or e-mails, and then the complaints are transcribed and printed in the newspaper. Sample content:

I'm ticked off at a tow-truck driver who showed up to tow the car -- then said he didn't want to get his feet wet so he couldn't tow the car out of the puddle. This is after I waited for him for three hours. If he can't tow the car, he should get out of the business.

To the person who said that trailer park people actually have money: Why do you live in trailers and not in a house like the rest of us? It seems to me you're lying.

Since nobody else wants to say it, I guess it's got to be me. You know what really ticks me off? All these guys walking around with their pants almost to their kneecaps. Heck, I've even seen a few girls doing it. You know what? You look like clowns! And I thought bell-bottoms looked stupid in the '70s. Boy, was I wrong.

You get the idea. What makes these people think that a bunch of strangers are going to want to read their ranting and complaining on a daily basis? Hmm. Come to think of it, I guess it's sort of like blogging...

Don't know if you've been following the National Public Radio deep linking flap, but take that NPR! (And you can learn something about the tragic loss of the Wye Oak while you're stickin' it to The Man.)

Check out a great rant about television as a babysitter on The Last Page. I met a guy with kids recently who keeps his family's TV unplugged in the closet except for official family movie nights. In my current state of singleness, I don't have to worry about warping the minds of the kiddies, but I think this is a really great idea. I don't know if I could be quite this committed, but I certainly buy in to the idea that too much TV isn't a good idea.

When I was very little, we had a very small black and white TV, and I was only allowed to watch a very limited menu of shows, mostly on PBS and mosly involving a bunch of muppets who lived on a street named after a seed. (In fact, I remember that my parents went out and bought their first color TV so Mom could watch Princess Di's wedding.)

At the time I believed my limited TV access was a form of child abuse, but in retrospect, I think it forced me to find more constructive ways to use my time, and I'm probably a better person for it.

Traveling again, and chanced to pick up Southwest Airlines' Spirit magazine. That's where I found this tidbit:

79: Percentage of Americans age 18 and older who can identify Nike's "Just Do It" slogan.

47:Percentage who can identify the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as set forth in the U.S. Constitution.

Personally, I'm hoping the other 53% realized that there is no constitutional right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," since the phrase actually came from the Declaration of Independence. Sheesh -- if you're going to make fun of ignorant people, you should at least make sure you know what you're talking about!

Just spent 26 of the last 30 hours working, and none of the last 30 hours sleeping. Not good.

In response to my post below, Susanna wrote the following:

In this instance, about the blanket skewering of media - if you notice, I try to consistently point out that a lot of journalists are doing a good job, and that the possibility of a fair and honest media is within reach while they're still around. But in this instance BOTH WaPo and the Washgtn Times were on the bandwagon; apparently it was bad enough in the market area for Mundy to think it needed addressing. It's also evident in the Catholic priests case, and I've seen it elsewhere. So, I do think in this instance it's more pervasive than not.

But you tell me - are the majority of journalists strongly religious, and inclined to view the religious as just basic everyday people with a value system that is subject to the law just as everyone else's is? Or for most of them, is a go-to-church-three-times-a-week-or-more and really-believe-in-God-like-follow-the-Bible kind of religion some odd cultural quirk that is protected by the Constitution and sometimes causes people to do freaky things not understandable except in the context of their religion?

Well, I can't really generalize about most journalists -- that's sort of my point.

That said, though, I know some journalists who are intensely religious, and others who are borderline atheist. I suspect, however, that journalists as a group tend to be strong defenders of the bill of rights -- they'd be out of business without it. So perhaps they do tend to give some preferential treatment to defenses based on religion. (Remember, I said that for the most part I do agree with the original post.)

The "Media" thing was really a bit of a tangent -- but it is a of a pet peeve of mine. I think the term "Media" is an easily misused label, just like the terms "liberal," "conservative," and "Christian." (Leonard Pitts Jr. has an interesting take on the last one.) Attempts to pigeon-hole people into categories are often flawed, and I think the term "Media" is commonly used this way.