can you believe they *still* haven't changed the freedom back to french?

Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants, told a local newspaper the US went to war "with no justification".

Mr Jones, who in March 2003 circulated a letter demanding that the three cafeterias in the House of Representatives' office buildings ban the word french from menus, said it was meant as a "light-hearted gesture".

But the name change, still in force, made headlines around the world, both for what it said about US-French relations and its pettiness.

Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand and a constituent's request - he replied: "I wish it had never happened."

really? god's hand helped you decide on that clever name change? tell me more.

via julian sanchez, i see that the gamblin' types think that dumbledore will be the next character to bite it in the upcoming book harry potter and the half-blood prince. though the amount of bets on dumbledore supposedly stems from a leak in the town where the book's printing press is located, i still can't convince myself that it's true. isn't dumbledore too obvious of a choice to die?

in thinking about it since rowling confirmed a character would definitely be kicking the bucket, i've often thought that percy weasley, obnoxious older brother to ron and his clan, would be the goner. he's shown a tendency to get evil-er and evil-er as the books have gone on, and i can only imagine that he's going to pull an anakin at some point and will need to be killed off. or, or he's going to get a bit too drawn into the dark side, eventually have a crisis of conscience when ron or a member of his family is put at risk, and possibly sacrifice himself to save them.

either that or the owl. who the hell would miss it anyway?

As Catherine noted, Susan sent this book blog-game thingy our way. Sounds like fun -- I'm always glad to point out ways in which I'm a horrible hypocrite before anyone else has a chance to.

I'm a pretty bad reader. Not head-injury slow, but not fast, either, and very bad at making time for books. These things don't even take batteries -- how could they possibly entertain? Adding to the problem is my tendency to periodically become disgusted with my lack of book consumption and start on some ambitious nonfiction tome that takes me 4 months to get through. It's not pretty.

Plus there's the fact that while all you debauched liberal arts majors were reading Kundera and smoking hash with your TAs, I was toiling away in the computer science building and, uh, building a kegerator. Sure, I took more humanities courses than my nerd brothers-in-arms, but still -- by far the balance of my exposure to Great Literature happened in high school. Nowadays vacations are the only time I ever get meaningful amounts of reading done, and I rarely spend it improving my mind.

So there are lots of books I'm ashamed not to have read, and even more that I'm too dumb to know to be ashamed of not having read. But here are five that immediately come to mind:

Anything by Nietzsche

Okay, I might have read a an excerpted chapter of something in GOV101. But my main exposure to the man's work is from AP English discussions of Crime and Punishment and, yes, owning the Fight Club DVD. And yet I am still the kind of horrible ass who, after a beer or two, will unabashedly use the word "Nietzschean". Somebody stop me.

Any of Shakespeare's Histories

I took a course on the tragedies, and that was good. The comedies -- well, how much pretension can you really wring out of those? Plus I've seen a few of them staged. But when the histories occasionally come up in conversation (invariably conversation surrounding a trivia question), I'm lost. I mean, come on -- multiple Henrys? What the fuck?

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

It's a classic of cognitive science, it's supposed to be readable, and it's high on many people's "it blew my mind, maan" list. But I haven't read it.

Moby Dick

I actually have very little interest in reading this book. I'm a little curious about what the hell scrimshaw is, but that's about it. But most of my friends went to a different high school than me, at which they all suffered through Moby Dick. It's a conversational touchstone. I enjoy pointing out that my class fulfilled our seafaring literature requirement with The Old Man and the Sea, which, subjective opinions aside, is indisputably shorter. But still: I feel left out.

Catch-22 / On The Road / Lots of Vonnegut

There are probably others that fit in this category -- you know, accessible books with a whiff of our parents' counterculture hanging over them. Some people start reading them in eighth or ninth grade to prove how goddamn precocious they are; others get to them a couple years later and eagerly devour them. But aside from a few Vonnegut short stories, I just haven't gotten around to them.

Well, there it is: the tip of my iceberg of ignorance. Like every other one of my personal failings, I blame my parents. Sure, I could have dragged myself downstairs to their bookcase. But I had a bookcase of my own -- one distractingly larded by my dad.

See, one of his biggest customers is John Olsson of Olsson's Books and Records, and frequently he'd bring back remaindered books -- booksellers can get refunds for unsold paperbacks by tearing off their covers and sending them to the publisher. From what I understand, the books would get dumped in a box in the breakroom prior to getting thrown out. And since my dad was friends with the employees, he could help himself to the books, enjoying the same status as the doctors of philosophy and failed guitarists who made up the staff proper.

Anyway, the upshot is that a lot of terrible, terrible scifi would appear on my bookcase and I would dutifully read it. So if you want to talk about The Great Gatsby, I will only be able to smile and nod. If, however, you'd prefer to discuss the possibility of humans encountering a spacefaring race of hyperreligious spidercreatures, and how that might work out for us -- well, then I'm your man.

oh, man. we've been tagged. tommy's busy at work today, and i just want to get this out of the way, so i'll go first. this was a meme i was absolutely praying would not get passed on to me because it would reveal the multiple ways in which i am a sham. graduated with honors as an english major at the university of virginia? check. minored in italian literature and therefore should be expert on dante, boccaccio, calvino, etc? check. been reading for over 20 years now? check.

but the really terrible thing of it all is this: i don't really like reading classic stuff. i didn't always used to be like this - i used to read voraciously - but somehow being an english major killed my love of literature. also, i realized recently that i have developed the attention spam of a gnat. a 25 year-old giant blonde gnat. i can barely stand to read a single blog post before i am running off to do something else, and when i do read something, i am inevitably looking for a limpid pool of crap in which my mind can relax, which might explain why i've read nearly all the works that dan brown has put out, but have apparently repressed the plot lines of everything from paradise lost to moby dick. the horror. i should really change this meme to "books i shouldn't have read but did anyways." or "books i have in fact read but for the life of me can't remember what happened in them, like jane eyre, there was that crazy attic lady, and crime & punishment...err...might have had something to do with an axe?"

but anyway. enough rambling. here goes!

The following quote from Helen Keller is posted in the elevator of the office building where I'm currently working:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

mike and i went to catch snowden (of atlanta) and cartel (of d.c.) at the black cat backstage last night, and both were lovely. they both play the kind of pretty, guitar-driven rock music that i so enjoy. check out cartel's fleets here, and snowden's kill the power here.

in other music notes, i believe his ghostness may have said something to this effect a while back, but holy hell, spoon's "i turn my camera on" is one unbelievably sexy song. in fact, the whole new album is sexy. of course, i'm an idiot and didn't buy tickets before their 9:30 club show sold out, so if you want to help a girl out, shoot me an email.