100 Words That All High School Graduates - And Their Parents - Should Know: "The quality of a person's vocabulary has a direct effect on his or her success in college and in the workplace. In response to parents' misgivings over the quality of their children's education, the editors of The American Heritage College Dictionary have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend each high school graduate should know."

Nevada counties, cities dispute state population estimates: "Fearing the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in state aid, Clark County and several cities including Las Vegas [and Winnemucca] are challenging state figures that show the southern Nevada population boom slowed last year."

Officials ready for war on Mormon crickets: "Concerned that northern Nevada faces another, probably worse invasion of Mormon crickets this summer, state officials are preparing for chemical warfare. If millions of the insects hatch this spring and begin their creepy crawl across the landscape once again, the Nevada Department of Agriculture wants to attack them with chemicals from the air."

Now Corporations Claim The Right To Lie: "While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation. Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same 'free speech' right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, 'The check is in the mail,' or, 'That looks great on you,' then, Nike's reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns."

I have archived the KWNA Radio review of 2002 in Winnemucca here. Enjoy.

Raging Against Self Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines The Anti-Gun Mentality. Interesting read.

The Courtyard House: "It should be noted that the courtyard house emerged as both an urban and rural prototype. Its key characteristic, however, is not its context but rather that it represents a fundamentally different conception of space from the Northern European house form. In the courtyard house, outdoor space is captured and included in the residential volume and ultimately becomes the heart of its morphology. This is an arid region concept that serves its climate well. In contrast to this, the Northern European prototype uses the house form to distinguish between indoor space and outdoor space and is fundamentally conceived as excluding and protecting the inhabitants from the often cruel and unforgiving climate. Thus a house or a building becomes an object in a field of outdoor space or a figure on a background. Probably the best example of this approach is a North American suburban home: a 40 x 40 ft object sitting in the midst of a 60 x 100 ft lot. The house self protectively turns in on itself. It represents a compact enclosure of what is indoors; everything else is outdoors. The courtyard house has a fundamentally different view of the relationship of indoor space to outdoor space. In the patio or court yard home, the house itself is an interlocking combination of indoor and outdoor spaces that together make up the house. More importantly, the character and scale of the outdoor space is not significantly different than that of the indoor space. In a sense, the house is made up of a variety of rooms, some with roofs and others without. The patios or courtyards are simply rooms without roofs."

How Rowhouses Shaped Our Neighborhoods: "In North America, rowhouses go back to the days of the earliest European colonies. By the 1630s, English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, and probably elsewhere, were putting up small groups of attached houses closely modeled on familiar English forms that had been built since medieval times. "

Mom vs. Dad: "Living in a Mixed-Veg Household" This article prompted a heated discussion between Angie and I about Emerson's future eating style. The conversation made me hungry. I'm going to Carl's Jr.

Happy New Year, and all that.