I’ve found a wonderful 100 year old farmhouse for rent outside Athens (reference my ecopoet entry of Jan 24, below). It’s not a sure-thing yet, but I’m going to try to make it so. More details to follow.

I watched a fantastic hockey game last night: The Phoenix Coyotes at home versus the Detroit Red Wings. Except for fighting, this game had everything. Excitement throughout, excellent goaltending, fast and furious scoring, and a loss by the Red Wings. That last is pretty important, as the Saint Louis Blues are neck and neck with Detroit for tops in their division and the conference but are now missing two of their most important players to injuries.

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James Lileks has done it again. The master of mixing witty commentary and captions with old photos now gives us The Dorcus Line of Menswear. What he did with technicolor dining in The Gallery of Regrettable Food and with opulent motels in The Gobbler: The Grooviest Motel in Wisconsin, he’s now done with menswear. The Dorcus Line: another great exhibit at The Institute of Official Cheer.

Watched the Super Bowl yesterday. It may be the first one I’ve ever watched in its entirety. I’ve never really cared much for pro football, and when I left the St. Louis area for college, the area was still anti-football after running the Cardinals out of town on a rail. Still, I did have some sense of rooting for “the hometown team”, and both teams put on a great show. Of course, the real reason I watched was for the commercials. There was so much hype over the “dot com” ads, but what struck me was how alienating most of the ads were. Football is traditionally a blue collar sport. Both teams were from small working class towns. It may be safe to say that the majority of the television audience was middle class and lower. So why were so many ads about trading stocks and big business transactions? Even with online stock trading, what percentage of the US population actually actively plays the stock market? I don’t mean giving money to a 401(k), but really trading on an individual level. Of course, when the commercials weren’t for eTrade or the like, they were for Budweiser so maybe that evened things out.

Small world. Two sites I linked to some time ago, Linux got me kicked out of Wal*Mart and the Game Boy Camera project, are just two pieces of a much larger set of pages maintained by fellow NMT physics student Paul Houle. Paul and I weren’t all that close in school, despite being in nearly every physics class together. I do like what I’ve seen of his sites, though.

Udderly Smooth Udder Cream is a “water-based moisturizer that is greaseless, stainless, with a light, fresh fragrance.” Originally formulated for dairy farmers to help relieve dry, cracked udders, it’s now available to the general public for use on dry skin in general. Their website has plenty of pictures of cows, an animation of three cows singing the Udder Cream jingle, testimonials with other uses (the non-grease formula is a big hit with cross-stichers), and of course details on how you can get some. One tub of Udder Cream took a vacation to China and posed on the Great Wall.

More chicken strangeness. The BBC is reporting on the death of a chicken that was insured for £1M after receiving death threats from neighbors. Apparantly, the chicken was accused of defacing a local war memorial, but the owner says the chicken was framed by a group of unruly ducks. It’s unclear if the owner will be able to collect the money, as the insurance reportedly covers the chicken only if it was killed and then eaten by a parish councillor. The local police are not investigating. I can’t make this stuff up, folks.

Thanks to APBNews, you can view the rap sheets for NFL players in the Super Bowl. Crime in the NFL is APB’s current focus.

I just received an email from MP3.com. They are being sued by virtually every mainstream record label over their neat-o My.MP3.com service that lets you register the CDs you own on their servers and then listen to the music from any computer. Anyway, the subject line of the email read “MP3.Communicator: Defend Your CDs, Women…” I briefly thought that maybe the lawsuit had far more reaching effects than just music, but no. There’s also an article in there about “The Women of MP3.com”, and the subject line just got truncated.