http://www.foxsports.com/content/view?contentId=2490610

I dunno, if I used it as a term of endearment I think I’d be missing teeth.

From: Barry Goldwater
Subject: [SPAM] The only officially authorized Ronald Reagan commemorative coin benefits the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
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I think this whole Middle Eastern / West Texas religion thing has gotten out of hand ever since Saddam al-Ladin flew his book depository into the Reichstag! Can’t we all just be unified by our traditional alien voodoo gods?!?

http://www.newwavephotos.com/

Wow!!

There used to be a midget rodeo video for sale; it appears to have vanished from this earth. However, a search on Amazon for “midget rodeo” returns So you want to move to Portland?

What has brianenigma been hiding from me? Is it really in the City of Roses and not in Pico Rivera?

Could this be the real reason bruisedhips wants to move there, and vegemitelover already has? And just what kind of “Law School” is meta_kate attending there, anyway?

The truth is out there.

I dreamed that you and I went for a walk on the beach on a cold night. You wanted to swim and I didn’t, so I waited on the sand for you.

You went out too far, beyond the buoy, and the sea took you. And I waited forever but you never came back. I felt a cold dead sadness in my chest when I knew you were gone forever.

But really, I knew that’s what you wanted. The sea, and not me.

N.Y. Students Pull Birth-Control Prank

SELDEN, N.Y. (AP) – Parents opened their mailboxes to find an official-looking letter offering birth control – and motel rooms – for the upcoming senior prom.

They were not amused – and neither, needless to say, were the stunned administrators of the Long Island high school.

“It’s inexcusable, offensive and quite frankly demeaning of all individuals,” Mitchell Ross, principal of the Newfield High School in Selden, said Friday in a telephone interview.

The letter, an apparent end-of-the-year prank, described a “Protection Package” of “very specific birth control items,” including condoms, Ross said.

It also stated that “a number of rooms will be made available” for interested students at the Inn at East Wind in Wading River, where the prom is to be held June 23.

The hotel, which was notified of the prank, does not rent out rooms to high school students, said Ross.

The letter’s official-looking letterhead actually was “cut and paste job,” Ross said.

He said the school, which has about 400 seniors, has narrowed the list of likely culprits to 10 but believed only one or two students were involved.

“In order to pull off a prank like this, we believe it had to be an individual that’s bright and who is familiar with the mailing system,” the principal said.

Disciplinary action will be taken against the individual or individuals involved, said Ross. The hoax also “would involve police action” since mail fraud was committed, he said.

Ross said the mailing list used in the prank, first reported by Newsday in its Friday editions, apparently had been stolen from one of two student offices. The list had been missing since April, but officials at the time did not know if it was stolen or simply misplaced.

Ross said the prank letter envelopes were mixed in with other legitimate school bulk mailings.

I was staggering around the Internet this evening and I kept tripping over fan subcultures. You know the ones I mean: Harry Potter maniacs, Pern obsessives, people whose entire existence revolves around one rock band, fanfic addicts. It made me wonder about modern popular culture, which is to say U.S. culture.

I’ve read thousands of books so far in my life, and more than a few of them are in my personal Pantheon of literary quality; I re-read them regularly. I’m a lot less of a movie fan but there are a few I enjoy enough to see once in a while and know whole bits from, etc. And I spent years as a pop music critic and have been obsessively in love with a few musical acts over the years too.

But I’ve never felt the impulse to reenact my favorite movie, dress as my favorite character, go to conventions about some artist or work of art, write fan fiction, or in any way be a “fan”. In fact, I can’t stand it. It freaks me out! I remember back in the mid 80s when friends of mine were following some band like R.E.M. or the Meat Puppets all over the country and I was thinking “Great band, yeah! I buy all their records! I am yelling WOOHOO in the front row when then play in town. But FOLLOW them?”

The other thing that’s interesting to me is that the fan cultures I see on the Internet are all about pop culture, recent pop culture at that. You don’t see people getting together at a hotel to share their love of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Small fan subcultures like the Lord of the Rings folks balloon to huge size when the feature film comes out. And some of these, like the furries, are entirely creations of pop culture. No one dressed up as a cartoon animal and went to conventions about it until cartoon animals had been around for quite a while.

I don’t want to get too McLuhan about it, but it seems that fan subcultures are linked very closely with television and movies, as though these groups of people imprinted on a visual image like baby ducks. Does fandom push our parent/child button or something?