Oregon Country Fair - Nudity + Vanity + Awkwardness - Country

While I typically hate stealing things directly from other sources, I feel the need to rip off The Hater here and point out the ridiculous 21 covers for the upcoming Bono-edited edition of Vanity Fair.

Basically they took 20 random celebrities, ranging from Bush, to Chris Rock, to Oprah...and each cover features one of them whispering some fact about Africa while the other person stares pensively at the viewer. The photography is a mixture of banality, insanity, hilarity, and...I don't know. But you have to look through them for yourself:

Muhammed Ali hanging out with Queen Rania!
Bono admiring the cut of Condoleezza Rice's suit!
Bush admitting to Desmond Tutu that evolution is correct!
Madonna giving Maya Angelou crabs!
The weird smore-threesome with Oprah inbetween Bill and Melinda Gates!

And while I'm finding things online and passing them off here in lieu of original content, there's a New York Times article that is worth a read about the long-term effects that entering public schooling sooner or later has upon kids. I'm always somewhat interested in education, although the statistic number-crunching that goes on in this education building that I work in has little to do with the improvement of a person, I suspect...but then maybe my greek definition of education (see my new blog headline!) would actually jive very well with the statistical software packages I spend my day installing, since the greeks loved numbers so. In any case, I was always younger than most everyone else in my class, and I was a total outsider...I know that if I were more on people's levels socially throughout elementary and middle school, I would not have focused my attention inwards and on books about science and whatnot. So it interests me, what types of things one ought to be learning at what age. Even more so, is whether or not comfort and stability really are the best path to self-improvement. If I was comfortable and stable in elementary school, would I have gone in a direction of wanting to be at the top? My desire for intellect was in many ways a desire for revenge. I would not have become a debater, and then backasswardly fallen into philosophy, that is for certain. In fact, I likely would be a musician right now if I weren't so interested in participating only in things that I can really be superior to all others at (a large part of why it is tough to get me to cook, for instance...I'll never get the thrill of a tiny little mental sneer as the result of my labours there).