CMT has a list of the top drinking songs of all time. Despite normally being very country music phobic, my fraternity played a pretty astonishing number of those (of those that were out at the time) when I was in college. I don’t think there was a party where we didn’t hear “Family Tradition” or “Friends in Low Places,” even if it was mixed in with 2 Live Crew.
In addition to being incredibly well-designed from a challenge standpoint, the new World of Warcraft dungeon, Zul’Gurub, marks the first time that the WoW level designers have taken away the walls as a visual element in a dungeon. They’re still there, effectively — huge cliffs with narrow slopes between areas keep content in discrete areas as usual — but it makes a huge difference visually. Not only is this place a ton of fun, it looks great, too.
Hats off, guys.
(If you look carefully at the picture, you can see a dead night elf rogue, which is always nice, too.)
Not included in the latest patch notes is mention of the holiday going on. Check outside Orgrimmar or Ironforge for a new quest. Given the feast nature of the holiday and its absence from the patch notes, I suspect we accidentally got the Thanksgiving event early, but we’ll see. Still, neat stuff:
OK, I’m told the Harvest Festival, with its references to “fallen heroes” is about remembering 9/11. That makes sense and is a class move.
State Senator George C. Runner, Jr., stopped by the Daily Press in Victorville yesterday morning to meet with reporters and editors. Reporter Miguel Gonzalez has a story on what Runner talked in today’s paper.
I interviewed Runner Monday afternoon and an article following up on his letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will appear in the next edition of the Star.
This is just annoying:
Four out of five Americans say they think too many reality shows are on the air, according to an AP–TV Guide poll. Only 4 percent of respondents said there were not enough.
Half of Americans believe there are too many crime shows on television. The longtime staple of TV dramas has proliferated with the success of franchises such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “Law & Order.”
Guys, change the freaking channels. There’s 72 different Law & Order shows because people keep watching them. Ditto reality shows — if you weren’t giggling over Donald Trump firing people all the last two years, we wouldn’t have Martha Stewart doing the same thing this year.
Of all the new shows introduced last year, “CSI: New York” has the most people looking forward to its return. “Desperate Housewives,” twice as popular with women as it is with men, came in second.
OK, now people are just making stuff up. As much as I wanted to like it, the NYC CSI is almost unwatchable.
As my mother used to always ask me, when I was watching a show I didn’t like, are your arms broken, people?
I have to stop letting my brother wake me up early in the morning.
Joel did it the morning of the Challenger explosion (it was a teacher workday for us), and on September 11, 2001, he called me before my alarm went off to let me know that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. Jenn and I got up and watched on television, confused as to what was going on, until an airliner crashed into the second tower.
Like everyone else in America, we didn’t know what happened next. So, I got in the car and drove into work.
Normally, my commute took me along some of the busiest highways in America — the 10 miles from our North Hollywood apartment to downtown LA, where the LA Times building is, for instance, can often take up to an hour driving the 101 during rush hour. Not on September 11. My car was one of a handful on the road; it was emptier than on Christmas morning. I scanned the radio as I drove, but no one knew anything more than they had known before I’d left for home.
It wasn’t until I was driving past the Orange County airport that I felt scared for the first time. Previously, I’d felt dizzy, disoriented, but now, driving along, I couldn’t help but wonder if one of the planes would be falling out of the sky, or diverting course on final approach to take out a densely populated Southern California city. I needn’t have worried: Like the roadways, the always-busy airways of the area were empty and eerily silent, but I had the strongest sensation of feeling a massive airliner suspended over my car by a giant hand, ready to drop when I was least expecting it. I even peeked up through the sunroof a few times.
When I got to Blizzard, the office was open — that is, it was unlocked and the alarm was off — but almost no one was there, other than a few people who lived outside Orange County and had a long enough commute that they had started driving before anyone would have been in the office to say whether or not the company was open today. Those of us there looked at each other a bit until upper management types (I honestly don’t remember who) essentially threw us out and told us to go home to be with our families.
Other than the five month period between me returning from Egypt and starting work at the Potomac News, I have never lived in New York for any great length of time, although we visited one of my father’s old fraternity roommates there regularly when I was growing up. But I find myself thinking about what happened on 9/11 all the time, especially the people aboard Flight 93 and the firefighters and police officers who died in New York City. I had been scared of imaginary airplanes falling on my head, but the FDNY casualties ran into a collapsing building, knowing they were going to die, on the off-chance of saving a stranger’s life. Those aboard Flight 93 knew they were dead, but chose to save the lives of people they would never know by facing it head on.
I wish I had some great revelation about what it all means in the long run, or that it had somehow transformed me into a better, more noble, more selfless person. But I think that mostly happens in movies.
But it’s still September 11 for me, nearly every day. I’m not scared now — indeed, rural America is a singularly unattractive target for terrorists — but I find myself mourning all the lives lost that day and the days after all the time.
Not forgetting is the very least we can do.
