Now that's she's gotten her feet wet, though, Slaybaugh has begun to appreciate the art of the ordinary, which sites like Buzznet celebrate.

"I saw a guy who was documenting his climbing shoes, and it fascinated me, " she says. "When I started looking at other people's photoblogs it became almost addictive. It's like being inside somebody else's head. What catches their eye? Some people have baby pics, some have the contents of their pockets. It's a place for anything and everything."

"The blackout was fun. We lit some candles and played Zelda on my GBA"

"In a high-tech cover-up, the Washington Post this morning reports the White House is actively scrubbing government websites clean of any of its own previous statements that have now proven to be untrue. Specifically, on April 23, 2003, the president sent his top international aid official on national television to reassure the public that the cost of war and reconstruction in Iraq would be modest. USAID Director Andrew Natsios, echoing other Administration officials, told Nightline that, 'In terms of the American taxpayers contribution, [$1.7 billion] is it for the US. The American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.'

The president has requested more than $166 billion in funding for the war and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. But instead of admitting that he misled the nation about the cost of war, the president has allowed the State Department 'to purge the comments by Natsios from the State Department's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished.' (The link where the transcript existed until it caused embarrassment was http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/nightline_042403_t.html)."

The other funny thing was that I learned how Japanese people talk about their meat. I had learned previously that breakfast, lunch, and dinner (in the typically literal Japanese fashion) are, directly translated, morning-rice, noon-rice, and night-rice. In this past class, I learned that meat is simply the animals name ending with the word for meat, so beef is cow-meat, pork is pig-meat, etc. Thus, the American Beef Association’s tagline “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner!” would be, literally translated into Japanese and then back into English: “Cow-meat: it’s what’s for night-rice!” That one had me falling out of my chair, but of course, it required a lengthy explanation to my two Japanese teachers and my German rocket-scientist classmate.

"Playing Wild Divine also made me more aware of the mental states that I brought to the game. Near the beginning of the journey, you’re asked to light a fire by breathing in sync with bellows that blow air on a pile of logs and kindling. The test is designed to teach the heart breath used by many Yogis to reach a state of balanced calm. Using a more Western language, Smith describes the state as one in which the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of the body are working in sync with one another, without either one dominating. I found that lighting the fire was impossible in my overcaffeinated morning state. During my sleepier postlunch hours, I could generate a blaze in seconds." - Steven Johnson in Discover

In his trip to Baghdad, President Bush said he would have immediately turned around had his cover been blown. In trying to play up the secrecy and dangerous nature of the trip, Bush's aides said that a British Airways pilot spotted the president's plane...

But now it appears the story was a complete fabrication, designed only to hype the story. According to Reuters, "British Airways said yesterday that none of its pilots made contact with President Bush's plane during its secret flight to Baghdad on Thanksgiving... (via Daily Mis-Lead)

"So I'm on a plane this afternoon, flying back from an extended holiday break with my wife's family in Florida, and I sit through -- for probably the ten-thousandth time -- the extended lecture on how to inflate the emergency life preserver in the event of a water landing. Like most of you, I'm sure, I've always thought that this speech -- not to mention the accompanying demonstration -- was a bizarre waste of time. How many successful commercial aircraft emergency water landings have occurred over the past twenty years? One? Two? Certainly no more than a handful, if memory serves. So the odds of you having to use that life vest are what -- a billion to one? Plane crashes are incredibly rare, but plane crashes where the plane goes down and then everybody suits up in their yellow vests and zooms down the inflatable slides, those are beyond rare."