Thanks (I think) to B.F. of extrawack for pointing out what must be the most inane online charity auction ever

I would, however contemplate a bid on that Dixie Chicks stapler if I found out it had been used to staple Toby Keith's eyelids to his corneas.

Abstract for my paper:

Although pronouncements of the coming demographical and cultural “Hispanicization” or “Mexification” of the United States have existed for more than two decades, the debate has been framed in increasingly antagonistic, combative language in recent times. One example would be the anxious posing of a “Hispanic Challenge” to traditional American society (Huntington, 2004); related to that are the inflammatory fears of “La Reconquista” or “The Reconquest” of historically Mexican lands taken by the United States in the 19th century; this reconquest stands to be social, cultural and demographic, if not political, in nature. If we accept that sports are both “the most universal feature of popular culture” and “the principal front of globalization”(Miller, 2001), then the announced creation of the professional soccer team Club Deportivo Chivas USA in Los Angeles in August of 2004 may be a bellwether for this process accelerating in a tangible cultural form - although it could slip under the radar of the mainstream, given soccer’s current lower status in relation to other professional sports in the U.S. Like its Mexican namesake and parent team, C.D. Chivas USA has explicitly declared that it wants to be the team for Latinos, and especially Mexicans – a growing and supposedly problematic minority in American society; this represents a unique incursion into the otherwise ethnically indistinct world of American sports. Though the resoluteness of this stance has yet to be proven over time, the incursion itself – a complex combination of corporate brand extension and displaced ethnonationalism – is well worth studying, not only for its actual causes and effects but for the way it is framed by American media. I propose an exploration of how both Los Angeles-area and national English print media have confronted (or not confronted) the arrival of C.D. Chivas USA in relation to a broader ‘Hispanicization’ process in American society and culture.

3/5ths of the way done with the actual paper. The sooner I get finished, the sooner I can get ready to drive home for Thanksgiving. But I've been procrastinating like a champ for weeks on this and show no signs of stopping now.

Keith Olbermann on the bizarre lack of attention being paid to questions of election corruption, on the part of everyone from the mass media to John Kerry himself.

With Tony Sanneh, Oguchi Onyewu, Cory Gibbs, and Chris "White Chocolate" Albright (ok, I'm reaching there) manning the backline, and Eddie Johnson scoring the first and only US goal of the first half, the theme of tonight's US team is pretty clear. To think that Eddie Pope, DaMarcus Beasley and Edson Buddle - three guys who could have started as well - didn't even get in the game is saying something. Think back just a couple years, when people were talking about Pope and Beasley as (relatively) groundbreaking role models for the African-American soccer stars of the future. US Soccer isn't there yet - outside of the Latino base, it's still a sport primarily played and watched by suburban middle-class white boys like me - but it's coming along slowly. I'm glad. The more diverse, the better.

#1 Rob Stone Howler of the night:
On the yellow Nike ball: "It makes it look like we're at a Champions League Qualifier in Iceland!"

Er, Rob, Icelandic teams like KR Reykjavik tend to crash out at the first qualifying stage - that's usually around July. I can't imagine there's knee-high drifts of snow in places like Reykjavik even then.

By the way, those invisible numbers on the Jamaica kits suck.

We tied. Blah. No biggie.

So Hardee's, the fast food chain so aware of its low-rent public perception that its commercials basically crow "you knew we sucked, we knew we sucked, everyone knew we sucked-sucked, but now we're actually almost mediocre", has announced plans to sell a nearly 1,500 calorie, 2/3 pound "Monster Thickburger", complete with four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese and a buttered roll. Yummy, right? I can feel my arteries hardening just reading about it. Then again if you think it's about the food, you're wrong - it's not, it's about carving out a niche as the burger place for "young, hungry guys", presumably the ones who have gotten bored with the Atkins-inspired lettuce-wrapped Thickburger. The defiant tone Hardee's CEO Andrew Puzder takes against those nasty "tree-huggers" is touching; down with the limp-wristed, effete health advocates and communist dieticians who've been keeping the cause of "big, juicy, delicious, decadent burgers" down!

The good news is, the idiots who eat these things will be self-selecting themselves into an early grave, leaving more room for the rest of us. Unfortunately, I suppose that all our insurance premiums are going to go up, paying for their fat, grease-sweating, cheese-choking red-state asses.

(Can I also mention how precious the Hardee's website is? Rather than give them any more hits, I'll just note that the flash ad for this new Thickburger features a couple "thunderclap" sounds that sound more like car bombs going off beside the Green Zone, a couple weak stroboscopic flashes of burger, and that tired old overused metaslogan - "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid." I'm afraid it sucks mightily. Aren't their web designers even trying?)

What's funnier - Cute Japanese girls pointlessly (and painfully) bitchslapping each other, or photos of (presumably) knackered Japanese businessmen sleeping in public?

No, that title doesn't mean anything. Trust me - it don't. I just think it sounds cool.

I am actually so busy it hurts. I've left everything that needs to be done this quarter to the last 11 days. That's at least 2 term papers, a couple shorter analyses, and two final exams that I've got to study for. Now of course, 11 days is a more than sufficient amount of time to generate approximately 3.75 reams of top-flight academic material; that's why I'm losing about a day and half of it, going to Chicago for a pre-NCA seminar on urban communications, public space, sustainable development, communication technologies and what-have-you. Kiki's coming to see me the day the quarter ends, and I'm hoping there's enough of me left to come see...

Actually, the pressure of needing to get all this stuff done stat is the only thing that will inspire me to actually get it done. For better or worse, I've always been a last minute kind of guy.

So while I've got much to write - thoughts about the week we've just been through, thoughts about the future, for the moment I'll only make note of a few more sites I'm adding to my links column. I've got quite a few that I look at on a semi-regular basis, and I find more all the time, so I'll beef it up more in the near future; for the moment, do have a gander at...

www.agglutinations.com: "interviews and reviews about urbanism, politics, and society". It hasn't been updated since July, but there's enough deep, thought-provoking material to keep you busy for at least a little while.

Dailykos - True, you've probably already been there plenty of times, especially if you reside somewhere left of the dial, as I do. But in the aftermath of the election, rather than tuning out and making plans to exile myself to some faraway land with sane leaders and a rational citizenry (ok, I'm still thinking of that, but for now I'm stuck here), I find myself going there (and other like-minded sites) more. I'll probably start up a diary site there, as well, as soon as I've got the time and energy to spew my uninformed and laughable political opinions.

Spinachdip - I don't know Bigsoccer poster skipshady, outside of the fact that he's one of the (lamentably) few BSers whose posts, whether about soccer or NYC or music or whatever, are pretty consistently money. This is his blog and you should look at it; I would probably say that even without having just read this classic advice on How To Tell If You Live In A Blue State.

This is the first time my head has been clear enough to write anything today. I don't want to think about yesterday. I certainly don't want to think about the next four years. A lot of bad things are going to happen, and a lot of people are going to suffer; that's all I feel right now. And we - this stupid, infantile, ignorant nation of ours - we have what's coming to us, whatever that may be.

The empty, desolate streets, the washed-out color of the day, the speechless, expressionless faces of the people in the school I work in; the friends telling me that they're too depressed to leave the house, and scared; Kiki telling me she went for a jog this morning and ended up sitting on a bench, crying her eyes out in the rain; the dull, nagging pain in my head, throbbing with insomnia and anxiety, the numb anger and feeling of utter hopelessness, helplessness.

I have not felt anything like this, in myself or in the air around me, since 9/12/01.