The Disgruntled Housewife webpage is prettier and maybe funnier and more informative than my website. But I don’t resent her for it. No.

The excellent Dawn points our attention to a column by Rick Reilly* on the lack of attention to women’s achievements in sports and a call to vigilance for Title IX.

*Also the author of the excellent sports novel Slo Mo! My Untrue Story.

From Washington State Vital Statistics 2001, the top ten baby names in the state in 2001:

girls:

Emily

Madison

Hannah

Emma

Grace

Olivia

Elizabeth

Samantha

Sarah

Ashley

boys:

Jacob

Joshua

Ethan

Michael

Andrew

Alexander

Daniel

Nicholas

Tyler

Matthew

The list in the book, from the Department of Health, lists the top 100, with percentages and raw numbers. The odder names are further down the list, with some broken up by different spellings. Well, I say odd perhaps only because I don’t watch soap operas.

Today’s book of the day is “Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene” by Ingrid Bauer. Yes, it’s chock full of “wisdom” on how to hold your baby over a receptacle when your intuition alerts you to their need to eliminate. Lavishly illustrated with black and white photos of white people with dreadlocks, tattoos or organic cotton clothing bonding with their widdling babies, holding them over toilets, mixing bowls, or the great outdoors.

Seen today, on the back of a pickup truck, a sticker shaped like those tree air-fresheners, but with a stars and stripes pattern. I’m stumped. Is it supposed to indicate patriotism with a piney fresh scent? But it’s not actually scented, cause it’s a sticker.

Sometimes this blog is for you, my loyal readers, but much of the time it’s just for me. Here’s a list of library blogs I wish to peruse later this week. People who write blogs that have crazy fans instead of loyal readers sometimes get lavish gifts. If any of you is even slightly crazy, please send me a working scanner. I’ll post all sorts of crazy shit from my vast collection of thrifted cookbooks.

(OK, my scanner works, it just has a strange band of color distortion partway down every image. It was free with my computer.)

Oh wow, man. This blog should keep me happy for the rest of the night. Tardblog. Memepool totally rocks.

And may I add (later) that the tardfaq totally sums up my job, too. I love my job, but if I didn’t make fun of some of my patrons and co-workers in my off time, I would totally lose it. But I won’t be making a blog of it- my blog is how I escape… whee!

Why, it looks as though Hugh Laurie, brilliant comedian and author, may be modelling corsets in Seattle.

“‘We’re starting our decent now, buckle up. It’s gunna’ get bumpy,’ he yelled over the defining engines.”

It turns out that the youth of today don’t read enough to write well. They’re pretty much just writing phonetically at this point.

An interesting (and stomach-turning) article on Minnesota garbage houses posits that people who end up creating a garbage house are a symptom of people not coping well with information overload and the rush of modernity. Personally, I suspect that garbage housers, like cat collectors and pack rats (the article makes a distinction, I don’t know how much of one there is, besides the existence of paths in the chaos and the theme of the obsession) are the dysfunctional height of an inclination in a lot of people. Like severe depression or alcoholism, I think there are many (not all) people with the potential who don’t actually end up developing the disease. Who knows what pushes you over the edge, but many people live careful lives to avoid a genetic curse.

Hey, look! Someone else already did the related web searching I was going to do after posting this- I’m going to go read it now.