19-0 (at home)!

Hey, punk-ass Boston Celtics, why don't you schedule some training in good sportsmanship into your practices?

...actually, why don't you just focus on playing basketball, since you've lost seven of your last nine games?

Fourth quarter, six minutes left in the game, Cavs player Ben Wallace is NOWHERE NEAR THE BALL, when the Celtics deliberately foul him.

Why?

Because the Cavs are kicking their ass, and Wallace has one of the worst free-throw percentages in the game. The Celtics want to foul him and hope he misses so they can catch up.

They go on to do this four more times.

Wallace makes five out of the 10 free throws. We'll take that. Cavs gets the rebound on one of the misses, and LeBron makes a basket. (Although, on one of the fouls, LeBron had just made a three pointer, so it didn't count.)

But, come. One time, okay. Doing it five times? Four of them for four Cavs' possessions in a row? That is bullshit.

Celtics, you have no class.

("The chant here in Cleveland is 'overrated.'" - announcer on ESPN)

Cavs, 98
Celtics, 83

These bowl games should be played on neutral turf.

It's bullshit that, when the BCS National Championship game involves the Florida Gators and Oklahoma Sooners, the game is played in Florida.

That's giving a home-field advantage to the Gators, when the home team usually wins.

And the last BCS National Championship game? In 2008, between the Buckeyes and Louisiana State University? Where was it played? In the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans, Louisiana!

I mean, come on.

This year, OSU played the Texas Longhorns in the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona, which is right next to, I don't know, Texas. And who won?

And the Rose Bowl? Penn State played USC in...California. Who won?

Don't be giving one team a huge advantage like that.

I'd like to see these SEC teams play a game in a cold-weather state. Let them come up to Ohio and Michigan and see how they do. Wimps.

Yea!

Masterpiece Classic on PBS is showing a new version of Wuthering Heights next Sunday!

After the great adaptations of Jane Eyre and the Jane Austen novels, I was hoping one would be done of my favorite novel!

Round up the usual suspects.

This weekend I watched the movie Valkyrie. Yes, that movie with Tom Cruise playing a German soldier (not a Nazi! They are two different things. Learn your damn history, people.).

Now, I am not thrilled by Tom Cruise as a person, but I enjoyed this movie. It was good. I would watch it again.

You may not know, but this movie reunites the writer and director of The Usual Suspects. You know what that means.

A twist at the end of the movie!

I hear you ask, "But iWoman, this movie is a historical thriller set in Nazi Germany during World War II, depicting the actual July 20, 1944 plot of German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler. We all know how history turns out. How can there be a twist?"

There can be a twist because most people probably never even knew that officers in the German army tried at least 14 times to assassinate Hitler. So you don't know all of history, do you, smarty pants?

Now, I will tell you the spoiler here, but only read it if you don't mind being surprised!

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

B
E
L
O
W

Hitler is Keyser Soze!

The cat is so lazy. I'm sitting in the den, listening to MICE in the walls. Yes, mice. Most cats would be interested in the noise and, I don't know, try to get to the mice. Not this lazy one. He just looks up like it's interrupting his beauty sleep and then goes right on ignoring it. Thanks a lot, cat.

My new favorite song.

"The Show" by Lenka.

The Terrible Trivium.

Soja, I found that passage from The Phantom Tollbooth I was referring to, that I said I loved.

Now, I don't know that any child could appreciate this passage more than someone reading it as an adult. I'm referring mainly to the last four paragraphs.

Who hasn't been beaten down by the the Terrible Trivium?

The Terrible Trivium
--From The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Humbug whistled gaily at his work, for he was never as happy as when he had a job which required no thinking at all. After what seemed like days, he had dug a hole scarcely large enough for his thumb. Tock shuffled steadily back and forth with the dropper in his teeth, but the full well was still almost as full as when he began, and Milo's new pile of sand was hardly a pile at all.

"How very strange," said Milo, without stopping for a moment. "I've been working steadily all this time, and I don't feel the slightest bit tired or hungry. I could go right on the same way forever."

"Perhaps you will," the man agreed with a yawn (at least it sounded like a yawn).

"Well, I wish I knew how long it was going to take," Milo whispered as the dog went by again.

"Why not use your magic staff and find out?" replied Tock as clearly as anyone could with an eye dropper in his mouth.

Milo took the shiny pencil from his pocket and quickly calculated that, at the rate they were working, it would take each of them eight hundred and thirty-seven years to finish.

"Pardon me," he said, tugging at the man's sleeve and holding the sheet of figures up for him to see, "but it's going to take eight hundred and thirty-seven years to do these jobs."

"Is that so?" replied the man, without even turning around. "Well, you'd better get on with it then."

"But it hardly seems worth while," said Milo softly.

"WORTH WHILE!" the man roared indignantly.

"All I meant was that perhaps it isn't too important," Milo repeated, trying not to be impolite.

"Of course it's not important," he snarled angrily. "I wouldn't have asked you to do it if I thought it was important."

And now, as he turned to face them, he didn't seem quite so pleasant.

"Then why bother?" asked Tock, whose alarm suddenly began to ring.

"Because, my young friends," he muttered sourly, "what could be more important than doing unimportant things? If you stop to do enough of them, you'll never get to where you're going."

He punctuated his last remark with a villainous laugh.

"Then you must -----" gasped Milo.

"Quite correct!" he shrieked triumphantly. "I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit."

"We'll take a cup of kindness yet, For auld lang syne."

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

"Oh, yeah? That's what you think."

I've watched/listened to this video about a hundred times. Love, love, love Kristin Chenowith.

I'm watching the 20 greatest Christmas songs on NBC. This show is effing ridiculous.

Number 19 is "Jingle Bell Rock" by Julianne Hough, that chick from Dancing with the Stars who thinks she's a country singer. I'm sorry, but a song that came out THIS YEAR and sung by someone only five people know is not one of the greatest Christmas songs.

This show is basically an advertisement, and the singers prob. paid to have their songs on the list.

Completely RIDICULOUS. I love Christmas songs, so I'm pretty ticked.

...Josh Groban at 18? Shoot me. And people think they're cool when they sing the lesser known versus. They're not.

Now Taylor Swift is singing "Silent Night." Now, I actually like her, but she is so off key and sounds strained. It's awful. And it is not one of the greatest Christmas songs.

This video never gets old.

"I wanna roll around like a kid in the snow"

I think the Brat is in love with an opossum.

My evidence:

--Twice the opossum has been spotted sleeping and/or eating on the front porch.
--For the past week or so, the Brat has been acting weird at night. Usually, he stays in through the night and gets let out when someone gets up for work around 6 a.m. Now he is waking me up at three in the morning (lots of thanks) to be let out. When he gets on the porch, he starts meowing this awful sound, like he's calling someone. He's never done that before. And when I tapped the window at him one time, he looked at me guiltily - I swear! - and ran who knows where.
--He's all wore out, ragged, and sleepy when he comes inside in the morning and afternoon.

Okay. That's all I have. But I'm so right.

Cute.

If you like Christmas songs (and "Africa" by Toto), you'll agree that this version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" by Straight No Chaser is really silly and cute.

A good day.

I need to realize that if I just speak up about what's bothering me, it'll almost always be taken care of.

Sweep the stupid idea!

Pinkett Smith Happy to Help Karate Kid Son:

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith has a new role - acting as son Jaden's mentor as he stars in a remake of The Karate Kid.

Jaden, Pinkett Smith's eldest child with her movie star husband Will Smith, is forging his own Hollywood career after winning the part of Daniel Larusso in a remake of the hit 1984 film.

And Pinkett Smith will be behind the scenes playing a supporting role for Jaden, 10, who has previously acted alongside his father in 2006 movie The Pursuit of Happyness.

She says, "I'll probably be playing stage mummy, which is not a role I play very well. My son said, I need you here just as mummy."

The Karate Kid is an effing classic. It does not need to be remade. God. This seriously ticks me off. No originality anymore.

ETA: From here:

Smith also spoke about his son’s upcoming remake of The Karate Kid, and the news isn’t pretty. Apparently young Jaden, seasoned veteran of at least (but no more than) two movies, is taking a stand on the classic crane kick that not only won Daniel Larusso a trophy but the hearts of Elizabeth Shue, Tamlyn Tomita, and all of America. He doesn’t want the iconic crane move in his movie. Apparently, Jaden wants his Daniel to kick ass with moves taken from video games. The irony here is that papa Will is trying to convince his son not to mess with a classic film by changing something so important…

lsjdflsdf;kdlfkgdlgkvldfk

STUPID.

ETA #2: From here:

Jaden Smith made his film debut alongside his father in The Pursuit of Happyness, and will also be seen in next month’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. Following in his father’s footsteps, Jaden has already pressured the studio to alter the ending to The Karate Kid reboot. **SPOILER** Reportedly, his character notices familiar traits in his mentor before realizing that the wise, old man is indeed himself from forty years in the future. Smith plans for the film to be the first in a karate/time travel trilogy.

There are no words. NO WORDS.

Bratty, spoiled kids who only get movie parts because of their parents should not be allowed to remake fun, entertaining films and change EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOOD ABOUT THEM. I did not realize 10-year-old kids now (re)write movie scripts.

For Christmas, we bought my dad an old-fashioned apple cider/grape juice press. He doesn't know anything about it. I just remembered some comment he made in passing last year, so I wanted to get him one.

But tonight during Ugly Betty some commercial had one in it, and he said, "That's what I need." Heh!

I love this show.

New camera!

"Bang bang, shoot 'em up, destiny"

So ABC has canceled two of my favorite television shows, Pushing Daisies and Eli Stone. And it's the last season for Boston Legal. ABC always cancels good shows, and yet crap like Private Practice is still on.

Life on Mars is still on. If that gets canceled, I'm never watching any new shows on ABC again. What is the point of getting hooked on something new when it won't last?

But, seriously. Life on Mars is awesome. That last episode, with Sam's dad? What a trippy mind fuck. And you gotta love the 1970's soundtrack.

Black triangle.

I'm not saying it's aliens or anything, but sometime in the late summer/early fall, I saw a "black triangle" flying in the sky. I personally know at least one other person who has also seen it around my area.

I found this video, and what I saw looked nearly exactly like this, the white lights at all three corners, forming a triangle, and a red light. Except I saw it from further away and didn't see the "form" of a ship, just the lights.



I don't know what it was, something to do with the government/military, I don't know, but it was weird.

Funny video game!

Super Obama World

Listen to this song! (The Submarines - "You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie")

Ew. It's snowing.

...okay, it's sort of calming to watch it, though.

What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Visit http://change.gov/!

I love my President-Elect Obama.

Today is beautiful.

Hell Yeah, America! - UsedWigs Mix Tape Vol. III

"Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'."
--Bob Dylan, "The Times They are a-Changin'"

It's going to be a long night.

Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri (with photo)

Beautiful.

Excerpt: Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill had harsh words for Palin when she introduced Obama on Saturday. Referring to comments Palin made earlier this week in North Carolina about “pro-America” states, McCaskill said “We have reached a new low in America politics when a candidate dares to say that one part of America is pro-America and another part is anti-America.”

...

...the "health of the mother"? Really, John McCain, really? You seriously put the "health of the mother" in AIR QUOTES?

But this video below is classic:



Obama is the definition of cool. McCain looked like his head was going to explode the entire night.

Okay, weird. Obama's Web site has a section about volunteering, and one of the volunteering options is to Make Calls.

It's actually pretty neat, as you can register, view/read a tutorial, and then it will give you a list of potential voters you can call and encourage to vote for Obama. It provides a script, in case you need some help.

So I signed up for it, just to see what it was like, and my parents are listed as two of the people to call! (They give you local people to call.) I recognize some other names, too. So weird.

If you have some time to kill, consider volunteering for the campaign in this way! You can also call people in Pennsylvania or talk to people in the streets.

Yea for early voting.

I've already voted. Have you?

(Actually, I almost got on television, too! Some news crew was covering the early voting in Ohio, and they stopped the couple in front of me, as I walked into the election office. I would have declined being on television if asked, but still).

Mosh. :(

Nevermind.

There's a young man who works for Obama's office in my county.

He's not from around here, he's away from his friends and family, just one of those campaign workers who go wherever they're needed.

I've seen him several times walking the streets and sidewalks, always in a different city or village in this county. I imagine he's going door to door, trying to let people know why they should vote for Obama.

I've seen him walking in the rain without an umbrella; I've seen him walking on a sidewalk-less road. I've seen him try to convince people to sign up as campaign volunteers.

I'm just really amazed at his dedication. Knocking on people's doors - that's hard work. Because you can bet that half the people do not appreciate that. But he's trying to reach at least one more voter.

I'd like to volunteer, but I can't because of my employment. I would never go door to door, but I wouldn't mind making phone calls.

This is another reason why I don't see myself doing what I do as a career.

"I walk on concrete / I walk on sand / But I can't find / A safe place to stand"

Today I watched several videos, from the mainstream media and from "citizen journalists" of recent McCain/Palin rallies. Some of these rallies took place in my own Ohio. I would share them, but the thought makes me ill.

John McCain and Sarah Palin should be ashamed of themselves, for promoting this hate, this ignorance, this VIOLENCE against another presidential candidate. Against another human being.

People at the Republican rallies yell out that Obama is a terrorist, that he should be killed, that he's a Muslim (and so what if he were, but that's something else entirely), that we should "bomb Obama." McCain/Palin supporters have turned into an unruly, hateful mob, and I honestly fear that violence will break out. It is SICKENING, and I can't even put into words how low I feel about it. And McCain smirks. And Palin encourages it: Obama pals around with terrorists!

I have to remember that these people are in the minority. That, for now, Obama is up in the polls. That even people like my grandmother, who has not always been the most tolerant, defends him against her friends that say they won't for a black man. They won't vote for a black man.

Seriously.

What to know who I voted for?

"That one."

Want to know who's going to be the next president?

"That one."

If I were playing a drinking game, taking a shot every time McCain said "my friends," I'd have alcohol poisoning right about now.

"But you gotta make the best of life while you're young"

My new babies:

Watch this.

Sarah Palin says: "We've got a toxic mess on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street."

Nice to know that no candidate in this election supports "gay marriage." / sarcasm

Just watched The Dark Night. Frickin' bad ass.

"What kind of overconfident nemesis are you?"

I wish blogger had an option that allowed you to make posts "friends only."

Oy!

Debate night! So not watching it on CNN, where I'll have to listen to dumb-ass commentators. I guess if you have HDTV you'd be able to see their reactions real time! Joy.

I think I can catch it on CSPAN, where they just play it without people bothering you.

ETA: John McCain is so effing disrespectful. I hate his damn smirk - it's like George Bush all over.

I missed the first 20 minutes because I guess C-Span is stupid after all.

ETA 2: Where's McCain's flag pin? Doesn't that make him "un-American"?

I heart Josh Lyman.

So Bradley Whitford seriously needs to star in a new show on television. Because he is that awesome.

Too bad Studio 60 got all weird and moved away from the relationship it should have been focusing on, that of Whitford's and Matthew Perry's characters (or just Whitford, that's fine with me), and started up with some stupid romances.

"Danny began working at Studio 60 as a segment producer, working his way up to become a co-executive producer. He resigned in 2002 as a display of support for the firing of his friend Matt Albie and went on to direct a critically acclaimed film penned by Matt. The two proceed to watch each other's back, Matt's decision to go back to Studio 60 is a show of support to Danny, because Danny is a recovering drug addict, Danny relapsed in 2006 after eleven years of sobriety. He tested positive for cocaine use in an insurance physical, and as a result cannot get bonded as a director until he has been drug-free for eighteen months."

So much wasted potential on that show. Whitford playing a recovering drug addict? And that friendship between the two male lead characters? I mean, come on.

Whatever.

So McCain wants to "postpone" the debate. Whatever. I should hope that a president would be able to focus on more than one issue at a time, thanks.

They socialize the losses; privatize the profits.

We don't have money to fix Social Security or Medicare or provide health care and take care of our veterans, but here we are bailing out effing Wall Street and MILLIONAIRES.

It's bullshit.

I did try to look at how my Roth IRA account was affected but a) I don't care much because I won't need this money for decades, so it doesn't really matter for me and b) I couldn't make any sense of it anyway.

Luckily, when my dad switched jobs, he had to wait a while to do something with his 401K from his previous employer. So right now it's sitting in the safest place possible. Whew.

"Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters"

Okay, I am loving Bob Dylan at the moment. I always love him, but now I'm listening to him about 24/7, especially the albums Nashville Skyline, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and all the bootlegs with Johnny Cash (two of my favorite people ever, together!)

It's sad that so many of Dylan's lyrics are still relevant to many situations today.

So every sports team I follow basically got slaughtered this week. My old high school got killed; they didn't even make it on the scoreboard.

The Browns better win today, or this rivalry with the Steelers isn't even a rivalry. It's a dominance. To be a rivalry, there has to actually be COMPETITION.

My brother and our friend watched The Ohio State Buckeyes play in a bar last night. Oy vey. That was just embarrassing, too. Our best player was injured and didn't play, though, and it's always best to lose early in the season.

Yeah. An employee at the bar last night was incredibly rude, unprofessional, and lacked decent customer service. I think he was the night manager, which makes it worse. I don't want to get into the specifics, but let's say he lied to our face about what we could use a discount on, and refused to grant it at the end of the night; charged us for drinks the guys didn't order; and our bill was messed up in other ways, too. I say he had poor customer service because none of the things were corrected. So I wrote in a letter of complainant to the corporate office, and someone better respond, because it's the principle of the thing.

Ha.

OMG.

The women on The View slaughtered John McCain today. They're better journalists than the actual media - except for Elisabeth. She's just ignorant.

I'm impressed. They shot down all of his, okay, a lot of it, bull like whoah.

Barbara pointed out that Palin sold her plane at a loss and that McCain also used the lipstick on the pig line, they pressed him to name one of her reforms and he couldn't, and they pointed out that Palin has accepted earmarks. And they called his ads lies.

They talked about separation of church and state, Roe vs. Wade. He gave some bullshit answer, and Barbara said that's an answer from someone who wants to overturn it. People in the audience were pissed when he then admitted Roe vs. Wade shouldn't have happened.

More on the interview.

I'm just impressed that they stood up to him and weren't afraid to ask him anything they felt like.

Look at the Date, redux.

I was looking through some old posts on here, and remembering what date today is, I thought it'd be appropriate to repost this snippet from an entry on Monday, Sept. 11, 2006:

Look at the Date.

I haven't watched any of the memorials or human interest stories or "how the U.S. has changed" or etc. (the polite term for it) segments on the television this week. I just...don't want to. Too many emotions would come from them, bad or good. I don't think I'll ever be able to watch any of those movies dealing with September 11th.

It just feels surreal still. I can't believe what happened. I can't believe what terrorists and OUR OWN government have done to us. I can't even read lj entries about it because I never know if they will make me want to cry or throw something--either at the media or the government or the poster. Wow. I think I just realized George W. Bush makes me angrier than terrorists. Maybe because they are abstract and so far away and Bush is supposed to be HELPING us, not making everything so much, much worse.

But I did watch Ellen today, and she had a segment about a woman, Ann Nelson, who died in one of the World Trade Center Towers. A while after she died, her parents found her Life List on her computer. (Ellen has been all about life lists this season: those lists where you write down everything you want to do/be in life.) Ann's story has been in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, etc., and she has inspired people to keep their own life list (one such woman was also on Ellen, with Ann's parents). Her list was all about bettering herself and the people around her, not superficial things like "own a car" (which might actually be a big thing for some people).

I don't know what is was about her and her story. It was her picture, her parents, her love of life, the woman she inspired and what she told Ann's parents, the shots of her actual list...But my mom and I looked at each other, and my mom was crying, and I said, "I know! I feel like crying!" and then I started crying and...even if I had spent all day watching stories about 9/11, no other story would have touched me as much.

I tried to find something online about her with no luck.

I should make a Life List...but I'm almost afraid to. Like I'm afraid I'll never accomplish anything on it. I don't even know what I'd put on it.

ETA: I found The New York Times's article! Read it below.

***

May 17, 2006
About New York
Hope, Saved on a Laptop
By DAN BARRY

For a long time, Ann Nelson’s laptop computer remained dark.

It had been returned to her family in North Dakota, along with the other belongings she left behind in that great city 1,750 miles to the east. She was 30, lively, working near the very top of the World Trade Center, and — you already know.

In the small town of Stanley, halfway between Minot and Williston, a fog thick enough to blur time’s passing enveloped the Nelson home. Amid the many tributes to Ann, amid the grieving and the absence, it became hard to remember just when and how the laptop wound up in the basement of the one-story bank that the family owned.

There the laptop sat, for years, tucked away from sight in a black case. It was a Dell Inspiron 8000, bought shortly before Ann called home that day in early 2001 to say she had gotten a job as a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald — in New York! Soon she was living near the corner of Thompson and Spring, and working in an office 104 stories in the air.

Ann’s parents, Jenette and Gary Nelson, say the laptop remained unopened because they are not computer savvy. But it was more than that, Mrs. Nelson admits. “To tell you the truth, it was just too painful.”

Three summers ago, during an art class Mrs. Nelson was teaching in that basement, a couple of students showed her how to use the computer. After the class, she says, “I just left it there.”

Who knows why never becomes someday, and someday becomes today. One day last fall — “when I got to feeling stronger,” she says — Mrs. Nelson finally opened her daughter’s computer. She pushed its power button and started by looking at the photographs stored in its memory.

Soon Mrs. Nelson was learning how to play the computer’s games, including solitaire and hearts. These distractions both relaxed her and reminded her of the games she used to play with Ann. Somehow, this little black machine made Ann seem present, there beside her.

Getting lost in the computer became part of Mrs. Nelson’s after-work ritual, though she never bothered to open a file that said “Top 100″; probably some music, she figured. Then, two months ago and who knows why, click.

What she found was a catalog of goals, humanly incomplete: a list that reflected a young woman’s commitment to the serious, to the frivolous, to all of life. That night, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson sat down with the list, and were with their daughter again.

1. Be healthy/ healthful. 2. Be a good friend. 3. Keep secrets. 4. Keep in touch with people I love and that love me. 5. Make a quilt.

Mrs. Nelson used to sew all the time, until it simply became too hard to guide a needle properly with a joyous little girl frolicking in her lap. Then, when Ann grew older, mother and daughter decided to sew a tablecloth.

“I don’t think we ever finished,” Mrs. Nelson says, laughing. “She had to be doing 100 things at a time, and consequently some of them didn’t get finished.”

As for this goal of making a quilt, she adds, “I’m sure that I would probably have been deeply involved in this process.”

6. Nepal. 7. Buy a home in North Dakota. 8. Get a graduate degree. 9. Learn a foreign language. 10. Kilimanjaro. 11. Never be ashamed of who I am.

“Ann was in many environments where being a girl from North Dakota may not have been the most sophisticated label to wear,” Mrs. Nelson says, recalling that her daughter had traveled to China and to Peru, and had worked in the high-powered environments of Chicago and New York.

Even so, Ann always conveyed pride in who she was, who her parents were and where they came from — though never in a boastful way. “It’s an important point about her personality,” her mother says.

12. Be a person to be proud of. 13. Always keep improving. 14. Read every day. 15. Be informed. 16. Knit a sweater. 17. Scuba-dive in the Barrier Reef. 18. Volunteer for a charity. 19. Learn to cook.

By her late 20’s, Ann had actually become a fairly decent cook. Still, her mother laughs in recalling late-night calls, like the one that began: “Mom, what’s drawn butter?”

20. Learn about art. 21. Get my C.F.A. 22. Grand Canyon. 23. Helicopter-ski with my dad.

Then Ann Nelson’s list repeats a number.

23. Spend more time with my family. 24. Remember birthdays!!!!

Birthdays loomed large in Ann’s life. She would celebrate her birthday not for a day, but for a week — in part because her father’s birthday came the very next day, in part because she was proud to have been born on Norwegian Independence Day — which is May 17, today.

“Ann would have been 35,” says Mr. Nelson, who turns 65 tomorrow.

25. Appreciate money, but don’t worship it. 26. Learn how to use a computer. 27. Visit the New York Public Library. 28. Maine. 29. Learn to write. 30. Walk — exercise but also see the world firsthand. 31. Learn about other cultures. 32. Be a good listener. 33. Take time for friends. 34. Kayak. 35. Drink water. 36. Learn about wine.

Ann was supposed to attend a wine class the evening of Sept. 11, in keeping with Nos. 13, 19, 31, 36 — the whole list, really.

After 36, there is a 37, but it is blank.

Mr. Nelson reads the list as an inventory of his daughter’s values. “You don’t see any Corvettes in the garage or any of those material things you might expect from someone that age,” he says. “She recognized that you appreciate a few things and kind of live your life wisely.”

Mrs. Nelson interprets the list as another way in which Ann seems to communicate with her when she is most in need. So, just about every day in a small North Dakota town, halfway between Minot and Williston, the screen of a laptop computer goes from darkness to light.

E-mail: dabarry@nytimes.com

Wacko.

From ABC News: Sarah Palin Defends Experience, Takes Hard Line Approach on National Security:

On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Gov. Sarah Palin took a hard-line approach on national security and said that war with Russia may be necessary if that nation invades another country.

Well, of course. She is an expert on Russia, what with Alaska being located next to it and all.