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The style section covers the cult of TiVo. Quoted are people who own TiVos and love them, and people who don't own them and don't think they sound that great. I don't think I've heard of anyone who bought a TiVo and thought it was just okay, let alone disliked it--not counting people who got malfunctioning units. Have you guys?

rollerboogie beat me to the story on The Daily Show. I want to name an album "bombs that kill ideas". There's also an article on the nearly centenarian Bob Hope. The Daily Show article includes enough material to make you laugh (or at least me); the Bob Hope article tries to tell you why Hope was important, and even why he was funny, but there are precious few gags, which is a shame, because, well, he was funny. But perhaps it's not what he says, but how he says it.

I'm thinking of My Favorite Blonde, My Favorite Brunette, and most of the Road movies. And The Cat and the Canary, a dark-house mystery played for comedy. At one point another character asks Hope, "Don't these big empty houses scare you?" "Not me," says Hope, "I used to be in vaudeville." I don't think I've seen The Ghost Breakers, but IMDB offers this familiar-sounding quote:

Geoff Montgomery: A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.
Larry Lawrance: You mean like Democrats.

NBC has a two-hour special on Bob Hope tonight; let's hope they keep the exposition down and just show a lot of old clips.

Also: Al Pacino ("What actor has ever represented fatigue so tirelessly, so energetically -- almost as if it were a form of rage?"), Turner Classic Movies, and Rosanne Cash ("'This record is about living with the unresolved,' she said.").

I only skimmed the real-news sections, and sadly, the online edition does not include the photograph of a Baghdad poster vendor that might teach us all that kitten kitsch is the same the world over. Hitting my usual themes, though: What's next for the antiwar movement?

"I don't think it has much of a place to go unless U.S. foreign policy seems to continue in this same direction," said Richard Stoll, a professor of political science at Rice University.

Mike Hawash, software designer and U.S. citizen, is still imprisoned without charge.

"Jailing people who are simply under investigation is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime," said Kate Martin, who runs [the Center for National Security Studies].

And another chapter in the bizarre fiction that corporations are people, too: The Supreme Court will decide whether Nike's "benign descriptions of working conditions in its Asian factories," though "misleading," are protected as free speech by the First Amendment. Read phrases like "corporate speaker" and try to figure out just what it means for a legal fiction to "say" something. (This isn't the issue in the case, it's just a background assumption.)