No, really. Galley Friend R.S. sends us this link:

Bob Knight will give one Texas Tech student the chance to play on his team in a reality show hosted by the Hall of Fame coach.

Sixteen students will attend “Knight School,” the name of the show set to air on ESPN in February, and Knight will whittle the class to one during six one-hour episodes. Filming will begin in late September.

What could possibly go wrong!

Galley Freidn B.W. sends along this link which is clearly too good to be true. But still:

So saturday, Matt, Erin, myself and a few others went to DC to crash a rally held by those loonies that think that 9/11 was caused by the US Gov’t in order to steal our freedom. Yeah.

So I covered my hat in tinfoil and drove off to matt’s place where he’d constructed two large signs. Mine said “The CIA killed Dumbledore!” and had a picture of a wizard, while his said “Dick Cheney is a Giant Communist Robot!” and had a picture of some sort of crazy queen of france arm’d robot.

Certainly, we thought, we’ll be yelled at – people will get angry at us very quickly. Not the case…

They took us seriously… They asked to have their pictures taken with our signs. They invited us to the day’s events. They gave us a large sign they’d made too! Oy… Here are a couple of exchanges we had while there. . . .

I’ll let you read the rest yourself because, like I said, I just can’t believe this is for real. Even the pictures can’t convince me.

The other night I noticed that Cruel Intentions starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Reese Witherspoon was on cable. Of course all sorts of movies appear on cable television, though I happen to notice the station logo in the bottom right corner said ABC Family. Of course, Cruel Intentions is a family movie. Gellar plays step-sister to Phillipe, whom she also teases with the promise of anal sex should he do as she tells him to. And there’s nothing un-family about Gellar’s saliva-string kiss with Selma Blair, who plays the dumb innocent in this teen remake of Dangeorous Liaisons. ABC Family Values … for the post-family era.

Now this email has been spreading like wildfire: It is a voicemail apparently left by a Burger King superviser somewhere in the South (he seems to be headed to Dallas). He happens to witness a fender bender involving another man and four elderly women. There’s also something heart-warmingly genuine about his laugh (and the way he says “umbrella”). Just listen for yourself and enjoy.

Galley Hoss Chris Levenick has an outstanding piece in the Wall Street Journal on how the Scopes trial reshaped the relationship between science and religion:

At the time of the trial, the nascent progressive movement drew much of its strength from the perfectionist impulses of evangelical Protestantism. That alliance began to dissolve at the trial, when two lions of the American left turned on one another.

Leading Scopes’s defense was Clarence Darrow, a champion of progressive causes and an outspoken agnostic. Among the prosecutors was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a stalwart defender of traditional Christianity. The two had long worked together for social reform, but in Dayton Darrow treated Bryan with contempt. In the trial’s climactic scene, Darrow called Bryan to the stand, where he sneered at the witness for “insult[ing] every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.”

And so the culture war came. For the first time, coastal elites descended on small-town America, calling its citizens stupid and their beliefs backward. And though fundamentalism may have looked worse at the time, the longer-term damage was to progressivism; it was at Dayton that the movement began to lose its popular appeal.

Bryan, after all, was to the left of most Democrats today, but his followers found that they could not keep company with those who so disdained their faith. Nowadays, when liberalism’s leading strategists wonder what’s the matter with Kansas, they could do worse than to look back to Tennessee–and to their own caustic dismissive of serious Christians.

Good stuff.

Now I’m convinced the housing market is insane. Have you seen the $640K “mobile home” in Arlington, VA?

Galley Brother B.J. sends along this link about Jack Barnhart’s treehouse:

An accomplished woodworker, Barnhart dreamed of building a treehouse – but not one of the scrapped-together versions the word conjures up in most people’s minds.

The cozy little cottage he was envisioning would put the Swiss Family Robinson to shame, with two staircases, built-in closets and cabinets, a wet bar, high-quality insulated windows, water and electricity, cable TV and a rooftop patio – not to mention table service for six.

And instead of climbing a ladder from the ground, his treehouse would be accessible by a soaring footbridge, connected to the deck of his home some 65 feet away across a ravine.

Scroll down to see a great picture of the finished product.

I don’t really dig on Anchorman, but Bill Simmons does, and he’s funnier than me. He has an excellent NBS offseason wrap-up, and has this to say about the ’76ers:

To Philly GM Billy King, who continues to hemorrhage money like a drunken stockbroker in the champagne room at Scores. Over the past four summers, King spent $68 million on an aging Dikembe Mutombo; $40 million on Kenny Thomas; $35.5 million on Aaron McKie; $29 million on Eric Snow; $20.7 million on Brian Skinner; $18 million on Greg Buckner; and an astonishing $15 million for Kevin Ollie (which was especially memorable because, at the time, I spent 15 minutes on the phone with my buddy House trying to get him to guess how much money Ollie had signed for, before House came up with the exact figure). And don’t forget, King traded for C-Webb’s bum knee and the $66 million remaining on C-Webb’s contract last February.

So if you’re Billy King, what do you do for an encore? You spend $45 million for the next six years on … (drumroll please) … Kyle Korver and Willie Green! Are you kidding me? It’s amazing that King didn’t get in on the Brian Scalabrine bidding. Anyway, I think King is clearly preparing for his next job — Hollywood movie executive. Couldn’t you see him spending $18 million to lock up Rob Schneider for “Deuce Bigalow 2?” He’d be perfect out here.