In this article from The Atlantic Monthly, Paul Davies considers whether religions could survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe.

This New York Times article takes you along on a night out with Tommy Stinson.

The World Beard and Moustache Championships will be held on November 1st in Carson City, Nevada. It's the first time this event has been held in the United States. Over 100 contestants from several countries will compete including Willi Chevalier the current world champion from Singmaringen, Germany and the Swabian Beard Club.

The Wayback Machine lets you access archived versions of over 30 billion stored web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. For example, here's what Yahoo looked like in 1997 and here's Amazon.com from 1996.

Timothy Noah noticed that conservative Republicans seem to want Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2004. He examines this phenomena in two Slate articles. In the first article Noah demonstrates that the "Draft Hillary" movement consists almost entirely of conservative Republicans. In his second article Noah explains why all these conservatives want Hillary Clinton to run for president.

In this article from The Atlantic Monthly, Jack Beatty explains that the only way George W. Bush can be re-elected is if voters ignore his long list of failures.

Bacteriophages are naturally occurring organisms that kill bacteria. With more and more bacteria becoming immune to antibiotics, scientists are looking at bacteriophages as an alternative way of treating infections. According to this Wired article, "this approach to fighting infection lets nature do the lab work usually carried out at tremendous expense, and with high failure rates, by the pharmaceutical industry. In contrast to engineered drugs, phages are as numerous and varied as the bacteria they attack. What's more, they evolve along with their prey, matching bacterial adaptation step by step."

This webpage documents the "freaky one-to-one correspondence between pirate slang and gangstah rap slang."

Retired General Wesley Clark is expected to announce that he's running for president today. I don't know how interested voters are in Clark, but he seems to be doing pretty well with journalists and pundits. Salon's Eric Boehlert examines Clark's candidacy in this article, while Joe Conason discusses how Clark will change the race in this column. The Washington Post provides this profile of General Clark. Joshua Marshall looks at Clark's chances in this post from his weblog Talking Points Memo. Finally Slate's David Greenberg looks at the history of how generals are elected president in this article.

Since 1998 Rob Cockerham has used this website to record the results from his experiments to determine "How Much is Inside?" Some of his experiments have included finding out how much is inside a keg, a Chevy Trailblazer, a tube of toothpaste, and a Sharpie.

Is America in decline? The authors of several recent books think that it is. Laura Secor examines whether America is in decline in this Boston Globe article.

Here are two Slate articles on the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks. First, this article by David Plotz discusses six misconceptions about September 11. Second, Fred Kaplan discusses President Bush's foreign policy miscalculations since September 11.

According to this MTV.com article, the Pixies are reuniting for a world tour.

Mysterious ceramic tiles have been found embedded in the streets of several American cities. The tiles all say:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KubricK's `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER.

This Kansas City Star article discusses the strange tiles and wonders what they mean. The website What Is It? is devoted to the Toynbee tiles and includes a list of tile locations.

On September 21st, the Galileo Orbiter will crash into the planet Jupiter. Galileo made several scientific discoveries on its mission, some of which suggest there may be life on Jupiter's moon Europa. NASA is ending the mission to avoid the possibility of contaminating Jupiter's moons. This New Yorker article by Michael Benson discusses Galileo's discoveries and explains the engineering problems NASA overcame to make the Galileo mission successful.

Blogenheimer now includes a list of links to my favorite weblogs. The Blog Links are on the right side of the page, just above the archives. Talking Points Memo is the blog of political writer Joshua Marshall. Altercation, written by Eric Alterman, covers politics and popular culture. Boing Boing is a collective weblog on popular culture and technology. Comic book writer Warren Ellis writes the weblog Die Puny Humans.

The City Pages compiled this oral history of the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue.

Although he died in 1982, Lester Bangs is still considered America's best rock music critic. The release of the collection "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste," provides an opportunity to take another look at Bangs' work. Andrew Leonard argues in this Salon article that Bangs was a great critic because he cared about music. According to Leonard, "Lester on Black Sabbath is a revelation, Lester on punk is magisterial, Lester on Jamaica is a tour de force of brutal honesty. " In this Slate article, Sasha Frere-Jones says Bangs was a great critic because he was both passionate and skeptical about music.

Was he really that good? Decide for yourself. You can read Lester Bangs' article about Black Sabbath here.

Joshua Marshall discusses Presidential lying in this Washington Monthly article. According to Marshall, "Every president deceives. But each has his own style of deceit." George W. Bush and his administration "specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion."

I saw and enjoyed the movie American Splendor this weekend. The film is based on the autobiographical comic book writen by Harvey Pekar. Here are reviews of American Splendor from The Onion, the Village Voice, and the New York Times.