Month: December 2004

The cover story on this week’s free Sacramento News & Review is Sacto Blogo, and it turns out Asparagus Pee has gotten a pretty nice write up. (Read it all, but they used my story for the close, so please scroll out to the end.)

They called me “Smary-pants blogger Chris Benson,” then went on to say that Asparagus Pee is “…a reliably clever, good-natured look at science and politics.”

I’ll take that.

Special thanks to Mayagirl over at Postcards from Sacramento for making me aware of this article. Thanks Maya!

P.S. With this recent little bit of local notoriety, I’m coming to understand the meaning of journalistic phrases like “though he never responded to e-mail requests for an interview” – if I’d thought for one second that one of the 600-800 spams I deleted that day was SN&R wanting to talk to me about my blog, do you think I might have granted the interview? (Uh-huh.)

Paul from Paul’s Posted Notes has received his free Elliott Smith CD, From a Basement on the Hill, and he’s done the required listening assignment, and blogged about it over here. He’s also gone above and beyond, and started his own “mini-contest,” so do pay him a visit.

Finally, a poll whose results I can relate to:

In today’s e-mail, Daily Inbox sent me a link to The Contortion Home Page. It never ceases to amaze me what a hairless monkey with a too-big brain can do if he works hard enough at it – I mean, I can still put my foot behind my head, but this is PFR!

(PFR is a codeword that The Lady Janet and I use for “pretty f***ing ridiculous”, it’s along the same lines as “No BFD”… just thought I’d share this handy tool – hey, maybe it’s the next LOL!)

Curvy finally got her free Elliott Smith CD and blogged about it on her Blyg:

She says, among other things, elliott smith “*is what jewel would sound like if she were male, a better songwriter, and could play more instruments.” Insightful.

“Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs.” &#151 Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve grown tired of hearing “Never Forget” as a slogan to describe things like 9/11, but maybe I’m wrong. I’m flabbergasted to learn that in a recent poll by the BBC, “Among women and people younger than 35, 60 percent had never heard of Auschwitz.”

Didn’t know how to spell Auschwitz, sure, but never heard of it? Wow.

Our local paper recently ran as a guest column a fairly substantial article I put together about my take on the local school budget crisis, from the position of a failed school board candidate who’s working on the budget committee.

So today, I’ve got my first fan letter: Spin on school district finances misleading. (According to this guy, I’ve “joined the establishment.” What’s next, turning Republican?)

You may have heard of this group, whose Statement of Principles informs the Bush administration’s agenda. Scary stuff.

As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s entry about Jeff Hawkins’ book, On Intelligence, here’s a good article in Business Week: The PalmPilot’s Creator on Good Design.