Brushin' up on my smarts

In New York this summer, I was told by one of the most successful and lovely people I know to read the New York Times every day. While I admit that it took me a while to appreciate this advice, I grow more and more enthralled by this fine publication every day. While I am unabashedly driven by the desire to write "fluff" for some entertainment magazine like Us Weekly or People, nothing beats "real news" when you're educating yourself on the many sides of America and the world in general.

So, today and every day I have tried to visit the NY Times site and, if nothing else, peruse the 25 Most E-mailed Articles, which is a nice sampling of Op-Ed, Politics, Health and whatever ends-and-odds you might be interested. (It's been especially important to keep my finger on the pulse of America, it seems, while I am abroad.) I have also taken up the habit of bookmarking articles of interest, leaving them to be read for an indiscriminate amount of time. Well today, as Eminem would say, "I'm cleaning out my closet." I have read many (though by no means all) of those articles waiting to be read and have in the process learned a few things.

1.) The American Society for Self-Esteem is headquartered in Normal, Illinois. Save us all!

2.) Food products like Oreo market counting books wherein learning is based on eating up to 10 Oreos at a time. Yay for the excesses that America so ironically teaches its children... She may be morbidly obese, but DAMN can she count!

3.) The ACLU does take kindly to the fact that Bush has been trying to increase Executive Branch power by conducting secret, guilty-until-proven-innocent trials recently. And dad says that Democrats are the gestapo!

4.) Al Gore, shockingly, doesn't agree with Bush's foreign policy. He may be a robot, but he knows his shit: "In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, more than a year ago, we had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world," Mr. Gore said. "That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do."

5.) We may not be able to mess with Texas, but they certainly can mess with anything and everything concerning what is and forever will be known as America.
a.) On the one hand, Texas is the 2nd biggest purchaser of text books in America -- 2nd only to California. This apparently grants them the right to dictate what history we will pass down to coming generations and how we will tell it. They want to downplay Kennedy's positive actions for Civil Rights and play up the right to bear arms in the Constitution. Good stuff.
b.) Of secondary note, we have our pseudo-cowboy president, who embraces American foreign policy with the ridiculously machismo gusto of a Middlebury football player.
Remind me not to sleep next door to Texas.

And so, these are a few of my thoughts. I'm sure there are several I have forgotten, but at least I've got the rusty gears of my brain working for a moment. Now I'm off to a movie! How's that for retrograding positive progress. (Does it help that it's British, and I have to wrap my brain around the Midlands accent?)