Well, I rescued some more furniture today. This stack o' chairs came from the Abilene Printing & Stationary Co. Behind them you may notice some past rescues - a small desk rescued from the Abilene Salvation Army, and some lockers rescued from the side of the road in Pensacola.

I have to give a shout out to the oh so ladies for finding such great books. In the last 2 days, the mailman has delivered Bernd and Hilla Becher's Watertowers book (the images above are from the Guggenheim collection), and a nice little exhibition catalogue/book (shown above) from a show at the Textile Museum of Canada. Many thanks to you both!

We picked up some new music this week, and among the selections was this disc, Funeral, by Arcade Fire. I won't claim to be able to name all the influences of this band, but i get a little talking heads vibe, with some david bowie and even john lennon undercurrents. I have probably made some gross errors with that assessment, but oh well. The CD is very good, and NPR's All Songs Considered has been nice enough to include the first track, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)." Also, Amazon has a free download of track #4 - "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)."

The Sunday Times has a piece about artist Chris Jordan, who gave up a career as a lawyer to pursue photography fulltime. The Times has a few images of his work, including Container Yard #1 (shown here), and Jordan's website is loaded with some pretty great work. He has a show upcoming at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

It is time once again to give a plug to NPR. I am not sure what I will do when the right-wing extremists running our nation finally decide to wage an assault on public broadcasting. Back to the plug - earlier this week Morning Edition showcased some tunes that I think the oh, so ladies will dig in a piece called "Searching for the Perfect Summer Anthem." I couldn't help but think that you both will be especially enamored with Sahara Hotnights.

The Wallace and Gromit movie comes out this fall! Check out the website for the movie, the characters (and animated shorts), and for Aardman Animation.

Here is my favorite from the trip to the Nasher.

Below is an exerpt from the Op-Ed piece, So Who are the Activists, from today's NYTimes, which highlights an interesting analysis of judicial activism.

Here is the question we asked: How often has each justice voted to strike down a law passed by Congress?

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more "liberal" - Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens - vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled "conservative" vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

Picked up the June issue of Icon, a British arch/design magazine and could not help but be amazed by this, the coolest of all chain-link fences. It is the work of a Dutch design studio called DEMAKERSVAN. My search for this image took me to Icon's webpage and to a design blog, Reluct. Enjoy.

Baseball is back in our nation's capital, and the team is actually in first place. I updated my reading/listening links this week, and I have included a book by George Soros, who "heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies." I was rooting around on the webpage for New Yorker magazine today (Lisa wanted me to see an article about Guantanamo, but it is not on the web), and came across an article about Soros wanting to buy the Washington Nationals, which has apparently been met by opposition from several ranking republicans. Below is a small exerpt of an article that is quite telling of the level of partisan attitudes currently paralyzing the institutions of this nation - from Congress to Major League Baseball and beyond. Paul Krugman summed it up best in his column, "Karl Rove's America" when he asks, "How did our political system get to this point?"

Major League Baseball, which has owned the team since 2002, is currently considering bids for it from eight syndicates. One of them includes George Soros, and this has brought certain politicians charging out of the dugout, bats swinging. “I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes,” Tom Davis, the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, which oversees the District of Columbia, among other entities, told Roll Call, a Capitol Hill weekly. Baseball teams, he added darkly, “enjoy all sorts of exemptions,” notably from antitrust laws. “We finally got a winning team,” he elaborated in a chat with the Times. “Now they’re going to hand it over to a convicted felon who wants to legalize drugs and who lives in New York and spent five million dollars trying to defeat the President?”

OK, so if anyone needs an idea of what to send for my birthday, please feel free to check out the Studio 18 Art Gallery and purchase one of the prints by Terry Frost (jk...hehe). But, we have made 2 trips to The Grace Museum here in Abilene in the last week, and I was absolutely enamored with the 2 Terry Frost pieces in their collection (I am still looking for pics of those to publish also).

I know these guys have been around forever, but today after a trip to the public library I am finally giving Los Lobos a listen. Their newest studio album, The Ride, is pretty good, and it features many guests, including Cafe Tacuba, Ruben Blades and Elvis Costello. The library also yielded some Jimi from the music section and, from the DVD department, Hitchcock's NxNW, The Yes Men (who have even garnered an entry in wikipedia, which - surprisingly - reveals the true identities of the title characters), and Wim's The Buena Vista Social Club.

I was listening to NPR's Day to Day during lunch today and heard a bit about an airfare blog that publishes low fares and how to find them on a daily basis.

mmmm....not sure if you saw the Sunday Times this week, so here is a link to an interesting piece about the sad state of Tiger Stadium.