The power of naming. This is me. Or this is what I'm striving for, anyway.

George Ryan, our most recently ex-governor, was convicted of all 3,217 charges against him and could possibly spend the rest of his life in prison.

If you are really interested in the case itself, there's plenty of information online but I want to point you to the direction of the band that named itself after Ryan's statewide infrastructure initiative--Illinois First. If you named your band "Shock and Awe" or "No Child Left Behind" that would at least have some uuuummmph to it.

I should point out that the band has an accordian. They're cool.

The band has a song called "George Ryan". Here's a sample of the lyrics:

Now I'm a dyed in the wool Democrat
But there's a man from Kankakee who really knows where it's at
He's with the Grand Old Party, but that doesn't make him a fascist
He's got progressive politics that put him at the top of my hip list

Illinois First also does an impressive number about Rock Island (you know, one of the four communities that make up the Quad Cities along with Moline, Davenport and Bettendorf--Rock Island, dude!) with the lyrics:

They stored ammunition in Rock Island During World War I
During World War II, they also made a lot of guns
Visit the Rock Island Arsenal Museum if you wanna have some fun

I'm gonna take you down to Rock Island, it's a rock and roll paradise
Rock Island, and you know I'm gonna treat you nice

Insert your joke here. From MSNBC via Wonkette:

Bush called for a criminal investigation to ‘get to the bottom’ of the CIA leak scandal. It turns out he may be the bottom. By Eleanor Clift

I didn't get in on all the Bush-Assists-With-Leak tittering so now I'm back in the game.

I'm getting a weird batch of spam lately that is all in the same, oddly poetic, english-as-a-second-language style. My favorite phrases:

-Priority penis rouse!
-Grandiose teen doing charming blowjob!

This quote was on the same page as the Chabon essay I've blogged below:

“Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.” S.J. Perelman

It seems lazy to take two things from one source but on this day of Tom DeLay's resignation, I couldn't resist.

I came across this essay by Michael Chabon. He's writing about MFA programs but it seems that there are larger applications, no?

We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that “our most precious resource is our children.” But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are, but who find value in this knowledge, and even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.