DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY ONE

Eskisehir is my new love. With a beautiful canal running through downtown, it's known as a liberal city with lots of cute cafes, college students and polite people. Also, lots of fans of Eskisehir spor.  Road trip win!  It's also made me want to go to about a zillion other places in Turkey (!), which is something I'll happily do this summer with full report backs.

Some more stuff about the nun inquisition that's going on. Grr!

Huh. Homophobia may actually stem (partially) from self-hate...

A tale of escape by a blind human rights lawyer under house arrest!

Google's evil takeover of the world has begun!

As odd as it is, bison are one of the things that I think are really, really, really interesting. It probably stems from a lecture of one of the professors in residence at the Humanities Center at Wayne State, "Buffalo Soldier." Except that one was about Bob Marley and the American museum, focusing on the representations of buffalos. It was ridiculous. And now I have that song stuck in my head... But, to me, the bison themselves and their history were the fascinating part.  They're bison gone wild!

I love that Joey Harrington is listed as one of the worst failures in NFL draft history.  My most vivid memory of him was during a pre-season game, watching him successfully lose 10 yards after fumbling the ball not once, but twice in a row, accidentally dropping it behind him when he went to throw it. The article's actually quite interesting and about picking those most likely to succeed - or how to predict who will be successful, focusing particularly on education and teachers.  I remember getting into an argument with some grad students once about a particularly horrible professor that I had, who stared intently at the ceiling while delivering his 2 hour lectures to a 20 person class in a college where many, if not all, of the classes involved a lot of active student participation. The grad students were in awe of him because he liked to go fishing and read Heidegger, or some crap like that -- which had nothing to do with his being an effective teacher.  GVSU, on the other hand, as a non-research institution focused so much on teaching that I could not even describe the difference and excellence of the classes I took there in terms of ease of learning and understanding.

Read about this Iranian photographer's photo and history as the only anon. winner of a Pulitzer. And another tale of modern Iran, a country that I have wanted to visit for years and should do this summer.