Wednesday, July 1, 2009

WEB BOHEMIAN (Wednesday, July 1, 2009)
(1)- EXCEPTION RULE -- It's a spelling mantra that generations of schoolchildren have learned — "i before e, except after c."New government guidance tells teachers not to pass on the rule to students, because there are too many exceptions.

(2)- THAT DOG -- There's not much we can tell you about the just-released official White House portrait of First Puppy Bo Obama ... except that, yes, he's still adorable, and still treating his office with the dignity and respect it deserves.

(3)- COMING OR NOT -- One-in-five American Christians, 20%, believe the Second Coming will occur in their lifetime, a larger number than the 17% who do not believe in the Second Coming at all.

(4)- GET 'EM EARLY -- The administration proposes creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services.

(5)- LEGAL DISTILLERIES -- Moonshiners could face new competition from legal distilleries in as many as 44 Tennessee counties, including several in the Knoxville area, under legislation given final approval.

(6)- WE ATE THEM -- One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.

(7)- BIKER STUFF – A biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of “primary America.” Matthew B. Crawford is even more fanatical about motorcycle maintenance than Pirsig’s narrator.

(8)- RUSSIAN LIBERALS?? -- Russian liberals in the 1990s—through the policies they supported and the contempt they showed towards the mass of their fellow Russians—made liberals unelectable for a generation or more across most of Russia.

(9)- EXPLANATIONS -- A yearlong study just completed at the University of California at Riverside offers several fascinating competing theories about why same-gender sexual behavior has endured.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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