Singing Loudly

Maryland's, launched last month by the state government. It lets consumers find the retail prices each pharmacy in the state charges for 25 of the most common prescription drugs.

"No new bureaucracy, no new forms to fill out ... just a great new source of prescription cost information for consumers.

a 15 year old boy was prosecuted by the state for writing a poem in which he described himself as "dangerous" and referred to a recent high school shooting...Reading or writing dark poetry doesn't in my mind constitute in and of itself criminal intent.

Justice Joyce Kennard suggested there was no immediacy to the threat and therefore no crime was committed. "The poem doesn't say 'I will be the next kid to bring guns to school.' It says, 'I can."'

Justice Janice Rogers Brown said the First Amendment doesn't shield works of art with unlawful intentions. She asked whether a bank robber could be immune from charges for giving a bank teller this note:

"Roses are red. Violets are blue. Give me the money or I'll shoot you."

"Entertainment Unit with naughty pine finish."

• No we did not go to Hooters! I'm a little insulted you would suggest that we would go to a place like that when there is much better out there. The women at the barbecue place we went (Bone Daddies) wear shorter shorts that are a little bit see-through.


• In this picture with all the waitresses from the restaurant around me I was actually saying, "I'll show you the real Bone Daddy."


• Yeah....I did respect your wishes for a five drink limit...


• Look at this teddy bear I won for you at Dave and Busters! I had 3000 tickets which only cost $50 dollars.


• No I didn't just get a "cheap teddy bear" for you. I also got this cheap plastic kazoo


• Of course we didn't go to a "tittie" bar. We went to the one that has full nudity.


• By the way, that saying about how there is no touching allowed. Yeah, lie!


• Remember how drunk you were on Monday after your bachelorette party? Multiply that by three and you got me last night.

Spencer Short assumes that I believe "that Martha Graham or Nijinsky would be covered under 1st Amendment law." Given that I'm willing to dump the 'understandable meaning' test for expressive movements and displays, he's assumed wrongly

I believe that the performative aspect of art enables it to fit comfortably under the protection of the First Amendment, she doesn't.

A new study found plenty of germs lurking in the neckties worn by physicians at a New York City hospital.

Nurkin said he's heard many suggestions about how doctors could deal with the potential necktie threat, from wearing bow ties or tie pins to using tie disinfectants or developing a "necktie condom." [editorial comment: Huh?!?] Anther [sic] alternative would be to dump neckties altogether, said Nurkin, who added that there's room for more study of the possible danger of ties.

1. Yale
2. Harvard
3. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. NYU
6. U. Chicago
7. U. Michigan Ann Arbor
7. U. Penn
9. U. Virginia
10. Duke
10. Northwestern

1. Yale
2. Harvard
2. U. Chicago
4. Stanford
5. Columbia
5. NYU
7. U. Cal., Berkeley
8. U. Michigan, Ann Arbor
8. U. Texas, Austin
10. U. Virginia

1. Harvard (4,760)
2. Stanford (3,370)
3. NYU (3,320)
4. Duke (2,040)
5. Columbia (2,030)
6. U. Cal., Berkeley (1,520)
7. U. Michigan, Ann Arbor (1,460)
8. U. Chicago (1,310)
8. Yale (1,310)
10. U. Texas, Austin (1,250)
11. Northwestern (1,150)
12. U. Virginia (776)
13. U. Penn (686)

Enjoy Sports with friends
Miller Lite: It is, in my opinion, the best of the cheap beers. I like the flavor and I like that it isn't too heavy. I can easily have three or so without worrying much about feeling sick as a result.

At a bar talking with friends
Guinness: I realize that it tastes better in Ireland than here, but I love it regardless. Everything from the beautiful head, the refreshing taste, and the way it is so filling. I can sip on one for an hour without feeling like I'm taking to long -- in part because it tastes better lukewarm than cold -- so it isn't costly. I usually only need to buy three drinks to last me the evening.

Party drink
Red Stripe: It tastes good, looks pretty cool, and isn't as trendy as having a Heineken or Hoegaarden.

Dinner Party/Nice Movie at home
Chimay Grand Reserve (Blue Label): This beer is near perfection. It is a bit more expensive than I like to spend on a regular basis, but I enjoy the taste. It goes down very smooth, despite the fact that it's 9% beer. Besides, it is just fun to drink a beer that was made in the town monastery somewhere in Belgium.

The New Yorker story is fundamentally wrong. There was no DoD/CIA program to abuse and humiliate Iraqi prisoners. Despite what is alleged in the article, I am aware of no CIA official who would have--or possibly could have--confirmed the details of The New Yorker's inaccurate account.

It was the second deadly fire in Honduras's outdated and overcrowded prisons in less than 14 months. In April 2003, some prisoners were locked in their cells, doused with gasoline and set on fire during an uprising at El Porvenir prison. Nearly 70 people, including guards and visitors, died.

In rewriting Priscilla, Mr. Kushner has softened a character who was originally a relentlessly hostile overgrown adolescent. But it's Ms. Gyllenhaal who locates the awakening wonder in Priscilla, a dawning respect for the ambiguities of life so cherished by the Homebody. The highest compliment that can be paid to Ms. Gyllenhaal is that Priscilla is now unmistakably her mother's daughter.

Set in 1980, with a flashback to 15 years earlier, it weaves a tale of two men, a director and an actor, who knew each other when they were schoolboys, and one of them was victim of a pedophile priest.

Although the film presents priests as pedophiles and murderers, he says he does not view the film as "anti-clerical" because "it is not necessary to be anti-clerical, because the Church is destroying itself every time it speaks to the press. In Spain, at any rate, the Church's worst enemy is the Church."

Kerry's team says it's amazing that he's tied with a wartime president after a $60 million ad campaign against him. "They (the Bush campaign) thought they would unleash this and we would be standing before you dead. That is not the case," Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, said in an interview Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Austin, charges that Texas' ballot access law is unconstitutional because it sets stricter standards for independent candidates than it does for third-party challengers.

she is often persuasive, as on the tendency of lazy writers to reticulate their sentences with dashes: "The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and...it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can't use it wrongly -- which, for a punctuation marker is an uncommon virtue."

Evelyn Waugh cut commas to convey the clipped dispatch of upperclass speech: "You see I wasn't so much asking you to agree to anything as explaining what our side propose to do."

The 24-year-old Picasso painted "Boy With a Pipe" soon after settling in the Montmartre district of Paris. Depicting a Parisian boy holding a pipe in his left hand and wearing a garland of flowers, it was one of 34 works up for auction from the collection of publisher John Hay Whitney and Betsey Whitney, who bought the painting in 1950 for $30,000.

The previous auction record was set by Vincent van Gogh's 1890 "Portrait of Doctor Gachet," which was sold to a Japanese billionaire for $82.5 million in 1990 at Christie's. That price included the auction house's premium.

Besides, there is a specific kind of fun to be had by being icily polite and civil to your dearest enemy. Feel free to call them names and froth at the mouth in private, but be cool and cordial to them in public. If nothing else, it will confuse them, and isn't that worth something?

Apple is marking the first anniversary of its iTunes Music Store by thanking its customers with a free song of the day for the next eight days from artists who have helped make iTunes a runaway success, including Foo Fighters, Avril Lavigne, Courtney Love, Annie Lennox, Jane’s Addiction, Counting Crows, Renee Fleming and Nelly Furtado. Following the anniversary celebration, the iTunes Music Store will continue to offer a “Free Single of the Week” from up-and-coming bands, spotlighting emerging artists and offering iTunes customers a risk-free way to discover new music.

“The reciprocal nature of theater doesn’t exist in film.” To illustrate this dynamism that only live theater can provide, O’Hare shared two anecdotes, one stemming from the performance of Golda’s Balcony he attended. When Tovah Feldshuh (as Golda Meir) read the names of the Nazi concentration camps, someone in the audience—a Holocaust survivor or the relative of a victim, O’Hare surmised—groaned. “The air was charged,” O’Hare said. The theatergoer’s reaction made the horror of the camps “that much more real.”

[Denis O'Hare's] other story related to how theater audiences were affected by 9/11. At the time O’Hare was appearing in Roundabout Theatre’s Major Barbara, Shaw’s play about an arms dealer that, in O’Hare’s words, posits that “we cannot choose who has the moral authority to use weapons.” The comedy was getting laughs prior to September 11th, but afterward the audience reacted to it as “a deadly serious polemic,” he said. The experience convinced O’Hare that while theater seemed trivial compared to Ground Zero rescue work, “we were filling an incredibly vital need: to entertain, discuss and educate.”

The main issues this time include the studios' contribution to health care funds, DVD residuals and jurisdiction over areas like the booming "reality" TV genre.