I watched "Survivor: Amazon" yesterday. It's down to the final eight, and Christie (the deaf woman) is still hanging in there. More and more, she's the only one who I really like. A few weeks ago, around the camp fire at night, she told a kind of racy story about making love near the Washington Monument with fireworks going off overhead. How can you not love a woman like that?

I started watching "Band of Brothers" on video. It's a 10 part series that was on HBO a few years ago. It was produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. I think that it is much better than "Saving Private Ryan". It focuses on Easy company, one of 9 companies that made up the 101st Airborne during WWII; the Screaming Eagles - Death From Above. They parachute behind enemy lines and provide support for landing divisions. The death rate was calculated as 150% which is possible because of all the replacements to the ones who died before. There is one scene where they are parachuting into Normandy at night as the precursor to the D-Day invasion that is just incredible. The enemy is lighting up the sky from ground fire and you get a real sense of what it must have felt like to be there. It's too bad that we can't learn from series like these that war should be avoided, if at all possible. Nobody really wins; what's left are just those who manage to survive.

When he got loaded, the human cannonball knew there were not many men of his caliber.
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I once knew a girl who was so fast, that her parents installed a speed bump in her bedroom.
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Are vegetarians allowed to eat animal crackers?

I was taking the train to Bloomington last week for a class that I needed to attend. You meet a much different class of people in train stations than you do in airports. That's not to say that they are better or worse, just different. Many of them are college students or elderly people who don't have much money. There are more minorities than you meet on most airplanes. One thing that is nice about America is that there is a great deal of diversity. I think that is probably one of our biggest strengths. When a civilization stops changing, it begins to die. At least that seems to be what happened to every other empire in history.
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There was a middle-aged woman next to me traveling with her mother who needed a walker. The woman pointed to the clock and said to her mother, "Did you ever notice how most clocks have two hands for the hours and minutes, and then some clocks also have a third hand which is the second hand?". They must have talked about that for 3 or 4 minutes before the mother understood the joke. Listening to them was far funnier than the joke. I felt like I was next to Abbott and Costello.

I went to Old Orchard on Saturday. Actually, I visit there a lot. That has to be one of the biggest turn-arounds for a commercial development anywhere. I remember years ago when I first moved to Evanston, the place was nearly deserted. There was a Montogomery Wards and a few little stores, but it was mostly a modern day ghost town. In my mind, I can almost picture tumbleweeds blowing down the main section. Today Old Orchard has over 100 thriving stores. Nordstroms, Marshall Fields, Bloomingdales, Tiffany, and several other stores give it an upscale feel, but there are a lot of other smaller stores, restaurants, and movie theatres which bring out large crowds. They made a great decision to keep the mall outdoors and not build a domed enclosure. It's a beautiful place to spend a few hours.