Remember when magicians used to make cats disappear, or the Statue of Liberty vanish, or escape from burning boxes inside exploding buildings that were being shot into space on a river of fire? Oh, and with hot girls nearby, can’t forget them. Whatever happened to that?

Magician David Blaine has been entombed in a block of ice and buried in a coffin for an extended period of time. Now he’s in London, England, preparing for his next stunt.

Starting September 5, he will live for more than six weeks in a clear plastic box suspended from a crane over the Thames River.

I mean, I guess that will be cool, but there are survival guys in the military that do this for their jobs, and prisoners of war did this stuff for like 5 years. Not by choice of course, but it just doesn’t seem all that “magical”. Oh well.

And there’s not even enough for hot girls in said clear box. Bummer.

“People today want equal results, not equal opportunities.” - Kirk Olsen

“Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, “It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.”
– Jack Handey

The NY Times has a very interesting in-depth profile of Harvard president Larry Summers, the man hired to “fix” things at Harvard such as its law school’s #3 ranking in the latest U.S. News list.

Among other topics, the article details Summers’ shaky introduction to the school’s Afro-American studies department and his run-in with Cornel West.

“Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and think they grow immortal as they quote.”
–Edward Young

It looks like Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie is chugging ahead at full steam. And that’s something I’m looking forward to, as Nolan is of my favorite directors. And now the word on the street is that Batman has been cast. Allegedly, he’ll be played by Hugh Dancy, who played Kurt in Black Hawk Down, and will be playing Galahad in the upcoming King Arthur movie. To be honest, I haven’t the slightest idea how good he’ll be. My pick for Batman has been Colin Ferrell ever since I saw Minority Report. Of course, having achieved stardom so fast, his presence would probably overshadow the movie. We’ll see how Dancy does.

It looks like the Communist hardliners are winning some battles in Beijing.

After several months of permitting China’s intellectuals the freedom to call for political reform, ponder far-reaching revisions to the constitution and consider changes in the official history of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Communist Party has ordered a halt to such debate, and security personnel have begun harassing leading academics, economists and legal scholars, sources here say.

In the past weeks, party organizations, research institutes and universities have been instructed to stop all conferences and suppress all essays about those three topics, according to sources within the Communist Party. The new instructions spell out these “three unmentionables,” while the Propaganda Ministry has informed China’s news media that there are additional subjects that can no longer be broached, the sources said.

Over the past few years, a lot of the Communist hardliners who are opposed to Jiang Zemin’s continuation of a policy of reform have grown in influence and power. Not that Jiang Zemin is an angel by any means, but his willingness to allow the possibility of reform–however slight–spelled good things for China. But since Hu Jintao’s rise to power, Zemin’s influense has waned.

What does this mean for the United States? I’d expect an increasingly hostile attitude, as well as less cooperation on regional issues. This appears to be what’s happening, and I don’t see any reason for that trend to reverse itself in the near future.

…it looks like some people’s dream candidate for President is a teensy bit on the paranoid side.

The White House pressured CNN to fire former military analyst Gen. Wesley Clark, the retired Army chief told a Phoenix radio station on Monday.

“The White House actually back in February apparently tried to get me knocked off CNN and they wanted to do this because they were afraid that I would raise issues with their conduct of the war,” Clark told Newsradio 620 KTAR. “Apparently they called CNN. I don’t have all the proof on this because they didn’t call me. I’ve only heard rumors about it.”

I’ve got no proof, but a friend of a friend of my sister’s swears that it’s true! Really!

Astrologers have claimed to have discovered the real culprit in the terrorist bombings that struck Bombay a couple of days ago–the planet Mars.

While Indian authorities blamed Islamic militants for car bombings in Bombay that killed 52 people, astrologers are convinced the culprit was Mars, which is dangerously close to Earth.

Astrologers believe the current positions of the moon, Mars, Saturn and Rahu — an imaginary malefic planet in the horoscope — bode ill for the near future, with the Indian government due to make wrong decisions and the public responding violently.

Oh, that Rahu. It’s always getting Mars and Saturn drunk and making them do crazy stuff like that…

“I want to remember. I never want to lose that memory of the smoky sky above Manhattan that I viewed from my office window. I want to remember Pete Ganci’s wake and the sharpshooters atop my neighbor’s house during the memorial service for Claude Richards, I want to remember the haunted look in my firefighter cousin’s eyes and the look of despair on my father’s face. I want to remember the chilling feeling of looking at a sky free of jumbo jets for days on end and the quiet, the unnerving quiet, that made those days after so surreal and chilling. I need to remember these things because to forget would be to spit in the face of every single person who died that day.”
– Michele Catalano