Via Jeremy’s Blog and other places…

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the “shuffle” command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty.
5. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
6. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

Oh… why not.

• We’re Getting Down – 4 Hero Aka TEK 9
• De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da – The Police
• Dawn – Ornette Coleman
• Every Picture Tells A Story – Rod Stewart
• Songs From the Wood – Jethro Tull
• We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37) – Peter Gabriel
• Summertime – Patchworks
• Nia, Nia – Alessandra Belloni (from a Jakob CD)
• One Thing Left to Do – Del Amitri
• Up the Junction – Squeeze

You know… I’m not horribly embarrassed by any of those, although that’s a bit more classic rock than I would have expected.

December 1st is World AIDS Day. AIDS, for many Americans, is becoming the invisible epidemic. People in America are living longer with AIDS, so it doesn’t feel like the immediate death sentence it was twenty years ago. (My God, has it really been more than twenty years since we first started hearing about AIDS?) But there are now 38 million people in the world with AIDS with thousands of new cases being diagnosed every day.

It is quickly becoming an epidemic in Africa, and in America, the number of blacks and hispanics who have died from AIDS eclipsed the number of white people with AIDS years ago. We know now — or at least we better know now — that this is more than a "gay disease," but this is a disease that can strike anyone who is not careful.

There are only four ways you can contract HIV, and yet the number of people with AIDS continues to increase.

AIDS is preventable with education. AIDS is preventable when people are smart about practicing safe sex.

As a teacher, I worry about all of my kids. I worry that they do things because they are teenagers and think they are immortal. I worry about the day a student of mine tells me they are HIV positive.

I long for the day that those words are not a death sentence.

Dubya: The Movie.

(And I would swear that Conor Stratton made this.)