I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- Brett Favre is a national treasure.

And here's Favre himself on the QB mojo.

Just before Christmas, Joe Strummer died of a heart attack at age 50. Here is an obituary from the Guardian and a rememberance from Billy Bragg. Here is an article on Strummer from the Washington Post, and a rememberance written by someone who knew him before he formed the Clash.

Bigfoot has left the Building

The Seattle Times reports that Ray Wallace died on November 26th. According to Wallace's family members, he orchestrated the prank that created Bigfoot in 1958. He had asked a friend to carve 16-inch-long feet from alder-wood. Then he and his brother Wilbur slipped them on and created the first Bigfoot footprints as a prank. Wallace continued to milk the prank for years with films and photos he supposedly captured of the creature in the wild. Read the story here.

This Sunday's New York Times Book Review includes a review of 6 new graphic novels. The review is written by Nick Hornby, author of “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy.” You can read the review here.

Turkish filmmakers have acquired the habit of stealing American films and TV series and remaking them with additional characters and "their own unique set of production values." For example, in Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda, better known as the Turkish Star Trek, Kaptan Kirk, Mr. Spak, and Omer face the menace of Profosor Krater, his assistant Nancy, and a Tarzan robot. Here's a review of the Turkish Star Trek from The Wave.

For more Turkish cinema, here are reviews of the Turkish:

Wizard of Oz,

Star Wars, and

E.T.

What do the original cast of Saturday Night Live, German idealist philosophers, and the British group called the Lunar Men have in common? Malcolm Gladwell explains in this New Yorker article.

All five sources of TV news are now divisions of large conglomerates. In this New York Times column, Paul Krugman discusses the question: Will the economic interests of the media undermine objective news coverage?

About 120 million Americans don't vote. This Atlantic Monthly review of the book Where Have All The Voters Gone? discusses who these nonvoters are and why they don't vote.

The Wall Street Journal has discovered a new problem -- poor people don't pay enough taxes. The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne explains.

In this article from the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg compares and contrasts the Windsor dynasty of Great Britain and the Bush dynasty of the U.S.

Will the United States go to war with Iraq? Slate calculates the odds with its Saddameter. As of November 19, 2002, the odds for an invasion are 56%.

According to this column by Tom Friedman of the New York Times, the war in Afghanistan showed that "most NATO countries have fallen so far behind the U.S. in their defense spending and modernizations, they really can't fight alongside of us anymore". While NATO still exists, "The old NATO has been replaced as a military alliance — not by the expanded NATO but by a totally different NATO. The "new NATO" is made up of three like-minded English-speaking allies — America, Britain and Australia — with France as a partner for peace, depending on the war."

This article shows this new military alliance at work. It describes the blockade of Iraqi oil in the Persian Gulf by the Australian, British, and U.S. Navies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Marines are training in Djibouti, a small nation in the Horn of Africa that used to be a French colony. This New York Times article describes a recent U.S. Marine amphibious warfare exercise there.

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote at least 849 compositions. While several hundred of these works have been recorded on one medium or another, there still remain hundreds of other works which have never been recorded. That's where the Unheard Beethoven comes in. Go to their website to download never-before-heard Beethoven compositions in MIDI and MP3 formats.

It's official. Brett Favre is a national treasure.

Almost all of the journalists and pundits predicted that the Democrats would retain control of the Senate in last Tuesday's election. Now that the election is over, the journalists and pundits are trying to figure out where they and the Democrats went wrong.

Here are election postmortems from:

E. J. Dionne,

Jonathan Alter,

MyDD.com,

Talking Points Memo,

Paul Krugman, and

ABC News.com's The Note.

Meanwhile, The Scrum looks at how the 2002 election results will affect the 2004 Presidential elections.

Please vote today. If you don't vote you can't complain for the next two years.

Here's the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on the election.

For results and comentary on the election try the blogs MyDD.com and TalkingPointsMemo.

Today is Halloween, a holiday based on an ancient pagan ... uh, well, not really. Salon.com explains here.

Here's another scary article. Paul Krugman of the New York Times explains why "incompetence is exactly what the people in charge want."

Jonathan Alter discusses whether Paul Wellstone's death will influence this year's election in this Newsweek article.

Slate's William Saletan reports on the Arkansas Senate race in articles here and here.

The death of Senator Paul Wellstone is a tragedy for Minnesota and the nation. Here are Wellstone remembrances from E. J. Dionne, David Broder, Paul Krugman, and Joshua Micah Marshall, and a selection of editorials on Wellstone from Minnesota newspapers.

Eric Alterman's weblog Altercation has several Wellstone remembrances. Alterman also discusses the lie being spread by conservative pundits that Coleman was running a clean and respectful campaign against Wellstone. As anyone who watched Minnesota TV over the last few months knows, "Coleman’s campaign was based almost completely on destroying Wellstone."

Many conservatives rushed to praise Wellstone, even Jesse Helms. In this column, Slate's Timothy Noah discusses why conservatives will miss Wellstone.

Politics continues without Wellstone. It looks like Walter Mondale will replace him on the DFL ticket. For Republicans, its back to business as usual. They've chosen Newt Gingrich to throw out the first lie of the Mondale/Coleman campaign. Joshua Marshall explains the truth here.

The midterm elections are a few weeks away. Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, tracks all the Senate, House, and Gubernatorial races and makes predictions on a website called Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball Predictions.