It's Cyber-Monday

I learned two important things this morning on my drive to work.

One: the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for Rotorooter. Does this tell you something about how much food Americans, as a group, waste? Granted, some of the visits are to pull silverware out of the Dispose-All. But many of the visits are just occasioned by the vast amount of food that we throw away, that then gets clogged in the plumbing, as we try to grind it up and make it go away. Yuck.

Second: Expect the internet to be slower than usual today and, if you are a supervisor of people, your workers to be more unavailable. Apparently those who can no longer face standing in line outside Target at 4 A.M. waiting to get $150 off on a flat screen TV now jump online as soon as they get to work to get their holiday shopping done on the faster connections available at the office. Particularly men, which is a surprise, isn't it? Apparently the average male internet shopper spends between 15 minutes to an hour taking care of his holiday gift list. Go men!

And fortunately the Radical has made everything easier for your holiday decision-making too, so that you can all be like men in this respect. Click on the item to the left and buy a "Tenured Radical: The 2.0 Edition" tee shirt. That's right. And you can get it in many different styles and colors, not just the geeky one on the geeky guy that is being displayed on the Zazzle entry page. Gay men and butch lesbians will be interested in this model (for similar and different reasons):

This is called the "fashion tee." We'll see whether it's fashionable, won't we? But I wouldn't try to buy the fashion tee today, unless you really like the white: they seem to be all out of black tees in most sizes and styles right now. Wait until tomorrow. Then buy them for everyone you know, and your holiday shopping will be done, done, done. What a radical idea. And when you think about it, there hasn't been a great History Gift Item since the MARHO collective (publishers of the Radical History Review,which is so radical that your subscription often lasts for years because they publish it when they feel like it) stopped making those matchbooks that said "Become a Historian, Make Big Money."

In other news, did anyone but me notice this New York Times story, in which we are told that LSU has addressed its lesbian problem in the aftermath of the Pokey Chatman scandal by hiring a staff of married men to coach the women's basketball team? Because, of course, male coaches never have affairs with female athletes, so now the Lady Tigers can just play basketball and not worry about who they will have sex with and whether it will affect the starting line-up. Unfortunately, this peace of mind did not help sixth-ranked LSU yesterday, when they were shut down in the final minute by number seven, Rutgers, 45-43 on a hellacious steal by Matee Ajavon. Moral of the story: heterosexuality, or facades thereof, does not help you win basketball games.

Glad we got that settled. Now shop, shop, shop.