Below The Beltway

For the last three years, Salon Magazine has handed out the “Buffy” award — named after cult-television favorite Buffy, The Vampire Slayer — to what it considers the most underappreciated show on television. This year, the award goes to one of my favorite shows, Battlestar Galactica

Apparently, Hezbollah is branching out into the world of boy bands:
YAMOUN, West Bank (AP) — They were struggling in a boy band, working the West Bank wedding circuit and dreaming of stardom.
Now the five singers who make up the Northern Band have come a little closer to their goal, with help from an unwitting […]

Brad Warbiany writes about the virtues of NCAA football vs. the NFL and points to an article by Ivan Maisel at ESPN listing the reasons why college football is better than the professional version. Maisel lists twenty reasons, but these are the ones that stand out to me after having become a college football convert […]

Two Virginia legislators have announced plans to introduce a law that will prevent a situation similar to that of Abraham Cherrix, the 16 year-old cancer patient nearly forced by the state to undergo chemotherapy against his will, from happening again:
RICHMOND, Va. — Inspired by a teenage cancer patient’s legal fight to obtain alternative treatment, two […]

I grew up in New Jersey, and one of the lessons I soon learned by the time I was old enough to drive a car was just how screwed-up the automobile insurance business in that state actually was. For the longest time, New Jersey ranked as one of the states that exercised the most control […]

It’s official, Pluto is no longer a planet:
Forget what you learned in third grade. Pluto is no longer one of the nine planets of the solar system.
The International Astronomical Union in Prague ruled today that the much-maligned Pluto no longer qualifies as a planet under historic new guidelines, thereby stripping Pluto of the planetary status […]

Matt Barr will be hosting next week’s Carnival of Liberty at Socratic Rhythm Method. Go there to get his submission instructions.
Thanks for volunteering to host this one Matt !

Back in the early 1990s, I was a frequent customer at Tower Records. Then, I discovered online sources for CDs, and, then, Amazon got into the music game. I can honesty say that I haven’t purchased a CD in a traditional “record” store (geez, isn’t that word an anachronism ?) in more than ten years. […]

The 59th edition of the Carnival Of Liberty is up at Peter Porcupine. Head on over there and check it out.

On the same day that Paramount announced it was severing ties with Tom Cruise:
Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures unit is ending its 14-year relationship with Tom Cruise’s film production company because of the actor’s offscreen behavior, the company’s chairman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Sumner Redstone, Viacom chairman, said the behavior of the […]