It seems I’m not the only one who thinks Tony Blair kicks ass. I’d vote for ‘im. 🙂

And who else thinks it’s ridiculous that a third of Americans can’t identify the leader of our nation’s biggest ally??

Whoa. A girl at my university was raped in 1998 by one of the school’s football players. She reported it to the Office of Residence Life and the guy was banned from campus. He eventually transferred to West Virginia where he again joined the football team. This weekend that very team is returning to campus for a game. She thinks the ban should still stand. The school’s PR people won’t comment, other than to say they’ve been in touch with West Virginia. In the years since the assault, the victim has spoken about sexual assault at Freshmen Orientation and made a video that will be shown to incoming students in the future. All her work, she fears, will be jeopardized if this guy is allowed on campus this weekend.

Personally, I think if ND had any class they’d not only uphold the ban, they’d tell West Virginia that they’d rather forfeit the game than condone the actions of this guy. If he’d been a worker or a professor, there’d be no issue here. It’s only because he’s a football player (and Notre Dame has a multi-million dollar contract with NBC to broadcast home football games) that they’re even debating the issue. If ND really wants to be known as the Catholic moral force it aspires to be, they should take a hardline stance. We don’t allow criminals to play for our team, and we don’t want them coming into our community either.

Steve calls out all the companies using the “Osama Excuse” to explain bad performance and profits. They actually trotted that one out to us last week during the whole redundancy crisis. After the meeting (where it was mentioned twice), I asked someone else who’d been there what effect the tragedy could possibly have had on our business. We couldn’t come up with anything.

I’ve been on a Roger Ebert craze lately. I just like the way the man writes. He’s also redeemed himself in my eyes a little bit with this article on the Internet.

“The Internet is in economic crisis, but its brilliance and audacity continue to amaze me. The stories of its decline are stories about money, not technology or communication. If millions of investors felt compelled to throw their cash insanely at Internet investments that made zero economic sense, is that an indictment of the Internet, or a demonstration that they were greedy herd animals?”

I’ll be so happy once the Net returns to the “everybody giving away something for free” model and all the capitalist pigs go home. (That’s a bit extreme, but I’m enjoying the fact that I can now make such statements without being a dotcom-working latte-sipping hypocrite.) 🙂