Sports
Three big football games highlight college football today - USC (1) vs UCLA (11) at 4:30 eastern and VA Tech (5) vs Florida State at 8 p.m. Should both be good games. Also Georgia (13) vs LSU (3) at 6 p.m.

Recommended Reading
The Adventure of English This is the remarkable story of the English language; from its beginnings as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language. The Adventure of English is not only an enthralling story of power, religion, and trade, but also the story of people, and how their lives continue to change the extraordinary language that is English. This looks to be a very interesting book - listen to the sample on the Audible site. If you like languages, then this should be fascinating. Gets a 5/5 from readers with high praise for the narrator. Just another instance of where an audio book works better than a written book.

River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. (5/5 at Audible - listen to the sample - Roosevelt is a fascinating fellow).

Digital Photography

Pbase Digital Photography Magazine Interested in Digital Photography but want to learn more? Check out these free informative magazines from Pbase.com, one of the biggest, most popular, yet unheralded digital photography sites on the web. When you're done reading the mag(s), you can check out my pics on Pbase .

Word of the Day
ineluctable - Not to be avoided or escaped; inevitable - Those war plans rested on a belief in the ineluctable superiority of the offense over the defense

Snowing on the mountain this evening - ugh. Winter can stay away a bit longer as far as I'm concerned. Not looking forward to climbing up and down the mountain every time I go to town.

Cleaned out my '92 Honda Accord today of a few year's worth of accumulated junk. Totalled the ol' girl out day before yesterday, sliding into the backend of a 2005 mini-van - barely scraped the minivan bumper but caved in the entire front end of the Accord. Not a pretty picture. Damn airbag didn't even go off, but I suspect that is because my bumper on the Accord was below the bumper of the minivan. (Probably lucky it didn't go off!) Didn't even touch my bumper - just creamed the hood,fenders and engine. 182,000 miles on it - probably not going to get a whole bundle of fresh greenbacks out of this one. Neck and upper back don't feel so hot - of course they weren't doing so well before I jammed the car up against that nice new van, either. It figures that when your neck is bothering you , you crash into another vehicle.

Watched Duke and IU last night on ESPN - good game, albeit it a bit ragged but that goes with the territory early in the year. Thought for a moment IU was going to beat them, but no such luck. Nonetheless, Killingsworth (Sr. transfer student from Auburn kicked some Duke butt, scoring 34 points and dominating the game). When IU gets DJ White back from his broken thumb in a few weeks, they are going to be very tough.

Firefox 1.5 is now out. I can't tell all that much difference, but figured I might as well install it anyway. Botched up my Roboform extension for a bit, till I went to Roboform site and got the very latest version - pays to follow instructions closely to get Roboform to work correctly. Couldn't live without that program though. Waiting for them to update TinyURL extension, another one I use constantly.

If you happen to be upgrading from Streets and Trips 2005 w/GPS locator and are wondering why your GPS unit doesn't seem to be working with 2006, it's because they forgot to tell you that you had to stick the setup disk back in after everything was said and done and then the program would find the GPS drivers and you would be good to go. Shame on Microsoft for leaving that important detail out. Haven't given it a run for the money yet, but should be nice with new added "voice commands" and a large section of the screen that tells you when and where to turn in large letters. Makes it more feasible to use the unit by yourself, rather than having to have a co-pilot.

Books

Happened to see the Quill Awards on NBC today. Always interesting to see what books are selected as good choices to read. Of course, the latest Harry Potter won Book of the Year. I still haven't gotten around to reading one of those or watching one of the movies. Not sure why - one of these days. Probably because I listen to so many audiobooks through Audible.com and they don't have a publisher agreement to carry the Harry Potter books (which is a shame, because the narrator is known for the remarkable job he does with all the different voices). I thought it was interesting that the Quill Awards were on during all the football games. Shows where our nation's priorities are - maybe why we are so far behind other countries?

The Johnstown Flood
In the meantime, finished reading The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough, one of my favorite authors (John Adams, 1776, etc). Amazing description of the flood that wiped out this Pennsylvania town in the late 1800's. They didn't pay attention to the problems of the dam on a lake high in the mountains and it turns out that poor engineering led to the devestation of this town. Sound familiar? Thought so. Except that help arrived for them a lot faster than it did in New Orleans. (Brownie would still be looking around deciding which pinpoint oxford shirt he should put on).

The Lincoln Lawyer Also finished reading the Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly. A good defense lawyer yarn - the first book I've read by him. Keeps you entertained - exellent narrator. I don't usually read these kinds of books, but when I do, I must admit they're pretty good. Gets a 4.75/5 at Audible which is very high for Audible. Will have to check out Janet Evanovich's book, "Eleven on Top" which was best Mystery/Suspense/Thriller at the Quill Awards - another good beach read, I suspect.

Complications Now, it's time to get back to finishing another excellent book that I started and then put down - Complications by Atul Gawande, an outstanding book on medicine. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur, why good surgeons go bad. He shows what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande also ponders the human factor that makes saving lives possible. Garners a 4.5/5 on Audible, which is high praise.