The penny has got to get got.

Quoted: “Producing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents."

Haven't finished watching this yet, but it's very good so far.

Quoted: Detroit Wildlife is a taster video to find a production in France. I shot it this summer 2008.

This is a must-read for NBA fans and a great article in general. My favorite part is when Elgin goes Clay Davis on chartered flights and the pampered NBA lifestyle and then asks casually, "You ever hear about the time we crashed in a cornfield?"

Also, Mike Dunleavy is a cheater. Tell your friends.

Quoted: But Elgin's 38-19-5 makes no sense whatsoever. I don't see how this happened. It's inconceivable. A U.S. Army Reservist at the time, Elgin lived in a barracks in the state of Washington, leaving only whenever they gave him a weekend pass ... and even with that pass, he could only fly coach on flights with multiple connections to meet the Lakers wherever they happened to be playing. Once he arrived, he would throw on a uniform and battle the best NBA players alive on back-to-back nights.

Quoted: "If you tear down all of the historic buildings downtown and build new, what are we?" asks Mark Nickita, president of downtown-based architecture firm Archive DS. "We're Troy with higher taxes and a worse school district."

Liz and I are totally hooked on HBO's John Adams miniseries. This is a great site for satisfying curiosity about his and other presidencies.

Quoted: The American Presidency Project contains the most comprehensive collection of resources pertaining to the study of the President of the United States. Compiled by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California.

For those interested in wildly popular early-20th-c. barnstorming religious baseball teams, here's a dot for you.

I was trying to work them into my faves league fantasy baseball team name, but Derek wisely limited names to 20 characters.

Quoted: By 1920, the team was "barnstorming" around the country, earning money for the colony, and using the team as a way to preach to potential members.

This is a very fun read.

Quoted: What made Franklin great was how nobly he strived for perfection; what makes him almost impossibly interesting is how far short he fell of it.

Quoted: ...[On] religion: Serving God is Doing good to Man, but Praying is thought an easier Service, and therefore more generally chosen. Or delusion: He that lives upon Hope, dies farting. (Scholars have suggested that the last one was a printer’s error, and should have read “fasting,” but, I ask you, who was the printer?) Or he might have chosen to collect the dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs advising against the accumulation of wealth: The Poor have little, Beggars none; the Rich too much, enough not one.

Great idea for public schools curriculum. At the very least, an overview of city planning should be a liberal arts requirement.

Quoted: Today’s public school systems have no such manual. In fact, most students, let alone teachers, would have a difficult time explaining anything about their own city’s plan and why it is relevant to their collective future. Nonetheless, I can see the tremendous effect such a book (with accompanying lesson plans) could have on the students of today and of tomorrow.

Quoted: History Arts & Libraries - The following list of 50 essential works of Michigan history was selected by a team of noted historians assembled by the Department of History, Arts and Libraries and Randy Riley, Special Collections Manager for the Library of Michigan.