The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won all 11 categories that it was nominated for including best picture and best director. It was an epic movie and trilogy and I eagerly await the extended version on DVD.
The Fog of War, a movie about Robert McNamara, won best documentary. I haven't seen it yet but from what I hear, it's a must see. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, playing a pivotal role during the Vietnam War. McNamara appeared at Berkeley to a packed house, you can find the webcast here.
The UW Men's Basketball Team swept Arizona tonight for the first time since 1984. Admittedly, Arizona played without their best player, Salim Stoudamire, who was suspended by Coach Lute Olson. Nevertheless, it's a huge win for the Huskies who have a shot at finishing second in the Pac 10 and a NCAA Tournament bid. I never really understood college basketball until I went to Michigan and experience firsthand a big time college basektball program. It's a lot of fun and now that the Huskies are good and Lorenzo Romar seems to know what he's doing, I'm ready to get season tickets next year. Who's in?
Gluteal implants are growing in popularity. This is just another example of how lazy (and vain) we're becoming. Building muscle is much easier than losing weight, a simple focused weight training program could accomplish the same thing in a few months.
I'm thinking about giving up on The West Wing. It's gone downhill--the writing is terrible. All they do now is repurpose in existing headlines, tonight's show stole from the Boeing Tanker scandal.
Eugene found a great story on agriculture. You can find it here.
Ever wonder what those symbols on your clothes tags mean? Well, wonder no more.
I broke a binding on my telemark skis last week. After a lot of research and thinking, I decided to buy a new pair of telemark bindings. My old bindings were being discontinued and both had partially pulled out so that they had to be remounted. So I finally bought a pair of Hammerheads, the bindings that I had been wanting since they came out.
I picked up my skis from the shop and went up to Alpental for a little night skiing. The bindings were amazing, I felt like I had twice as much control over my skis compared to my old bindings. I'm starting to wonder how much more alpine skiing I'll be doing.
I attended my first Democratic Caucus yesterday morning along with about 300 other people from local precincts. It was standing room only in the school cafeteria where we met--obviously someone underestimated how many people would attend. By my poll for a show of hands, I would say that about 1/3 were attending their first caucus. I wonder how much of that was driven by people's desire to oust Bush and how much by Washington state canceling its presidential primary.
I won't bore you with the details of how the caucus was run and what happened but it was definitely an interesting process. If you truly support a candidate, a little homework could prepare you to change some people's minds. While it was nice to discuss some of the issues with my neighbors, I prefer primaries. Since my candidate did not garner the required 15% of votes in the first round of the caucus, I was faced with the choice of selecting another candidate or my vote not counting. Thus, there is no record that my first choice candidate had my support--something that would happen with a primary.
At the gym the other day, I read a great article on SUV's and their perceived safety in a New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell. One point that the article article makes is that the data show that SUV's are actually less safe than smaller cars. While their size is an advantage in accidents, their lack of maneuverability (and hence their ability to avoid accidents) is actually much worse than regular cars. In addition, the body on frame construction of trucks and SUV's is less save than the unibody construction of cars in an accident. For those of you that chose an SUV over a minivan to drive your kids around, you made the less safe chose.
Bush has finally acquiesced to an independent inquiry of the intelligence failures regarding Iraq and their weapons of mass destruction. This comes after the former chief US weapons inspector, David Kay, told a Senate committee that no WMD had been found in Iraq and he doubted that any would be found. Kay called for such an inquiry during his Senate testimony.
While the Bush administration may not have lied about Iraqi intelligence, there have been a lot of insiders that said that the administration cherry-picked intelligence that would support invading Iraq. I think all would agree now that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the US. So if we had waited for more international support: we wouldn't have over 500 dead US troops, we wouldn't have spent untold billions of dollars, and there would be a better transition plan.
There was a good opinion piece in today's Seattle Times highlighting the views of an independent voter.