Jonathan's blog

From an article of the same title by Daniel Gross on slate.com:

Star-endorsed basketball shoes have long been one of the great rip-offs in footwear. Nike wants $130 for a pair of Zoom Kobe I sneakers and $110 for Zoom LeBron IIIs. You'll pay at least $90 for Allen Iverson's signature shoes, the Answer. (The question: What costs too much?) But now cheap is suddenly cool. New York Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury has just put his name on a line of cheap athletic wear and shoes, dubbed Starbury. Marbury's signature Starbury One basketball shoes retail for a mere $15. Marbury isn't the first basketball player to put his name on cheaper shoes. In 2004, Shaquille O'Neal's Dunkman line of shoes retailed at Payless for $40 a pair. But what distinguishes Marbury's shoe is its extreme cheapness combined with his vow to actually use it in his professional life. "I'm going to wear the shoe on court. I'm going to wear the sneakers all season," he said in a piece that aired on National Public Radio this morning... And rather than affiliate with a sleek, design-conscious company like Nike or a mega-retailer like Target, Marbury has chosen to cast his lot with a scrappy upstart. The Starbury line is available only at the up-and-coming cheapo apparel retailer Steve & Barry's. Steve & Barry's started with a single store at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, expanded to other college campuses, and then to malls. Today, there are about 130 stores, with six opening in August and September alone. This piece in Business Week explains how Steven Shore and Barry Prevor have managed to undercut Wal-Mart and Target by scoring great deals from landlords at crappy malls, buying directly from overseas, and offering only house brands. The result: absurdly low prices. Walk through the aisles and you'll shake your head in disbelief: polo shirts, rugby shirts, hats, university T-shirts, bulky hooded sweatshirts, jeans and khakis, shorts, warm-up jackets, all for less than $10.

While in Grand Haven we stayed in the Garden House in the Serendipity Resort (several turn-of-the-century homes that share a pool in the back yard).

As a follow-up to recent reports regarding an embryonic stem cell research breakthrough touted to get around the ethical dilemma by leaving the embryo unharmed, from an article of the same title by Rick Weiss in The Washington Post:

A landmark scientific report that was supposed to bridge the gap between proponents and opponents of human embryonic stem cell research has become the focus of an escalating feud, with a prominent critic of the research alleging that scientists were deceptive in presenting their results. At issue is a series of experiments described in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, in which scientists at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass., described a method for making stem cells without harming a human embryo. The basic facts of the report remain unchallenged. But in an unusual move yesterday, Nature corrected wording in a lay-language news release it had distributed in advance and posted clarifying data it had asked the scientists to provide. At the core of the battle is a widely distributed e-mail from Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who raised three issues. First, he said the scientists did not make it clear that no embryos survived their experiments. In fact, data in the paper do make that clear, but Nature's initial release said otherwise. It is well established that a single cell can be removed from an eight-cell human embryo without causing any apparent harm to the embryo, and the new report aimed only to show that such single cells can become stem cells, lead researcher Robert Lanza said yesterday. In the experiments, the scientists took as many cells as they could from each embryo, destroying them in the process, to make the most of the embryos donated for their study.

Via Slashdot, set your Tivos or vcrs for the Firefly marathon on the sci-fi channel on September 18.

We spent last Saturday at Michigan's Adventure in Muskegon, MI. The weather was great, and we happened to run into the Gavin's while we were there. All of our photos from the trip to Grand Haven are (temporarily) on the web here.

Here are a couple of videos of the kids on the Frog Hopper. The aspect ratio is messed up on the first one because I had the camera turned sideways:

Kevin, Allison, and I rode the Ripcord together. We were winched to the top of the 183 ft tall launch tower and then dropped to the ground, swinging from a cable tether back and forth.

Here's video of Elliot on the Mad Mouse roller coaster. THe aspect ratio is messed up on this one too: