I hope everyone had a great New Year!  As we get back to life and back to reality, here are some links for the day:

1) The Cute Factor – Scientists are trying to figure out what makes humans believe certain things, ranging from baby pandas and penguins to movie creatures such as E.T. and Yoda, are “cute.”  The article points out how we take more of a paternalistic view toward those we consider cute, which is distinctly different from how we place those we consider “beautiful” on a pedestal.  Anyway, cuteness does have a huge impact on our behavior – everyone wants to save the whales, but no one has held a protest on the plight of the tuna fish.

2) Scandal on the Bass Fishing Circuit – Another link courtesy of Matt.  I can just see Senator John McCain grilling Babe Winkelman on whether he has ever snagged a bass.  As Matt aptly noted, “All of my heroes are dead.”

3) Marion Barry Robbed at Gunpoint – Barry, the only man in history who has served 4 terms as D.C. Mayor as well as a 6-month sentence in jail for smoking crack on camera, stated that the perpetrator ran suspiciously like former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett.

4) Paris Hilton Christmas Display – I apologize for not finding this until after the holidays, but there’s just way too much potential for inflatable Christmas lawn ornament jokes here.

More on the week in sports in just a bit…

A slow day in the office for me means a busy day of reading for all of you.  Here are the links to prep you for this Christmas weekend:

1) School District Housing for California Teachers – If you’ve followed the real estate prices at all over the past few years, you know that there’s no more expensive housing market in the country than tech-haven Silicon Valley.  I know a whole lot of teachers, which means that I also know that their salaries wouldn’t go very far in a region where the median housing price is above $700,000.  So, the Santa Clara School District has started buying apartment buildings and offering units to their teachers at below-market rates.  This isn’t the product of left coast naivete – the economic justification is that the costs saved from reducing the massive turnover of the district’s teacher workforce caused by the high fixed costs of housing make the below-market apartment offers a sound investment.

2) Lost Star Melts Down After Drunk Driving Arrest – I appreciate the irony of the actress who plays a former LAPD officer on Lost getting belligerent with the Hawaii Five-O.

3) Passion of the Spaghetti Monster – Following up on Wednesday’s link, Matt sent in a great Wired interview with the creator of the Spaghetti Monster.

4) City News Bureau Closing Down (audio story from NPR) – Marshall Field’s isn’t the only Chicago institution going away after this holiday season.  The Chicago Tribune announced earlier this month that it was closing down the legendary City News Bureau, where young and hungry reporters have been trained to hunt for stories on the street since 1890.  Any institution that introduced writers like Mike Royko, Kurt Vonnegut, and Seymour Hersh to the world had to be doing something right.

Happy Braggin’ Rights Day!  I’ll have comments on the Illini-Mizzou game and Quin Snyder’s celebrity look-a-like after tonight.  Until then, here is the first installment of recommended reading on the web in Land-o-Links (I was going to call this recurring section the more clever “Land of Linkin'”, but then I realized that people might mistake me for some advocate of the band Linkin Park – which I certainly don’t want to happen, and Eric Zorn from the Chicago Tribune uses this title for his links):

1) Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – The water cooler talk around the nation today is centering around the case ruling that rejects Intelligent Design (I thought we resolved the debate on Evolution in public schools 80 years ago, but I digress).  Any random talking head blowhard can critique Intelligent Design, but the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has taken this issue to a spectacular level.

2) Oracle of Baseball – This is the baseball version of the Kevin Bacon game.  Plug in any two baseball players in history and the program will show you how they’re linked by teammates and teammates’ teammates over time.  For a baseball junkie such as myself, this is like crack with an angel dust chaser (if you’re a movie buff, the classic Oracle of Bacon is here).

3) Stricken Genius (click on “Read the stories”) – On a different note, if you haven’t seen this powerful front-page series on pianist Alexei Sultanov in the Chicago Tribune over the past few days, I urge you to take a few moments out of your day to do so.  Sultanov was a musical prodigy that won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as a 19-year-old.  At the age of 30, he suddenly suffered 5 successive strokes that left him completely paralyzed and unable to walk or talk.  While Sultanov wasn’t able to move any other part of his body, he eventually was able to get his fingers to move enough to play the piano once again.  The greater point is that he was born with musical gifts that few had ever seen, yet the pressure of living up to his own high expectations of himself made him curse those gifts when he was healthy.  It took the loss of Sultanov’s gifts to get him focus back on why he had loved music in the first place.  With all of the stress and anxiety that we have in our personal and professional lives, taking the time to appreciate what we have is an old adage that never gets old.