A Short Cut to Mushrooms

Okay, so the title from a chapter early in Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring doesn't really have a lot to do with my day. I wanted a way to introduce pictures that I took in my yard during a break from mowing today, and mushrooms and hobbits came to mind. Actually, I don't even know if these are called mushrooms. This could be a situation like that between toads and frogs or between the pine, the fir and the spruce. I don't know. I just thought it a striking little thing, so I took a picture. And then I mowed it down.

The day was busy in general. On and off throughout I read back and forth between Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I had two meetings--one over lunch--with publishers' reps hoping the department will buy their books for our freshman and sophomore classes. At home, I cleaned out the gutters, trimmed the yard with the weed-eater (or whatever they call it these days) and mowed. Then I showered and went back to campus to catch the last of an Honors potluck in the courtyard outside the Center for Physical Activity. I picked up a sandwich at Subway for Raleigh and picked up Raleigh at tae kwon do. More reading followed, which was in turn followed by the Daily Show and a bit of the Colbert Report.

Jon Stewart's team on the Daily Show, new "reporter" John Oliver (British) to be exact, offered a wonderfully funny and telling report on the president's attempt to understand and reinterpret the Geneva Convention's identification of "outrages against human dignity" in defining torture. Stewart also conducted a pretty decent interview with General Pervez Musharraf, President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Musharraf said that a lot of external pressure is put on Pakistan by groups--like the USA--that know nothing about the country, its people and how the world works there. Stewart's final question--the "Seat of Heat" question--went something like this: If George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden were running for some mid- or upper-level government office in Pakistan, which would win? Musharraf said, "They would both lose miserably." If video clips from the show are up on Comedy Central's site tomorrow, I'll try to provide links.


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