Sadly, the one who knows is the one still in Kindergarten and learning to read; the one who does not has a nice office in the West Wing of the White House and advises the President — daily — on international threats to the nation. One day, someone will be able to explain why I’m the one without a job.

Knows the difference between Tibet and Nepal:

Does not know the difference between Tibet and Nepal:

(Gabe got a globe for his third Christmas, and became fascinated with the “bumpy part” on the Indian borders — and he likes Yetis, thus explaining his freakish knowledge of Central/Southern Asian geography. Why Hadley’s pig-ignorant, I cannot say. )

(I pretty sure has memorized more lines from the movie The Princess Bride than Hadley has, but that’s not as crucial to running the country)

The architect Zaha Hadid was selected on Wednesday to design a proposed museum, above, in Vilnius, Lithuania. The competition is part of a feasibility study by the Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia. The directors of both institutions participated in the jury selection. In addition to Ms. Hadid of London, Daniel Libeskind of New York and Massimiliano Fuksas of Rome submitted designs. The Guggenheim said that it was by no means certain that the museum would be a Guggenheim.

Because Minor League baseball is real baseball — the majors exist only to give the great minor league players the rewards they richly deserve.

Go Hens!

Also, the estimate to replace my roof is $8,000 — in case you needed more evidence that that Universe is profoundly malevolent.

Though the mayor’s dog, famous in Toledo, did like me. but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a role in the city’s hiring process.

Edward Lifson will have the details later today on NPR.

More coverage:

New York Times

Blair Kamin’s blog post

Blair Kamin interviews Nouvel on his blog

If you have any trouble, let me know.

I will be updating the software running this site tomorrow morning. If it’s down for you, check back a few hours later.

I’m not very good at this stuff, so it’s possible I’ll hose the whole Newsblog contraption.

After the update, I’ll be moving to a tag/category organization system that (theoretically) will improve the site’s organization.

I’m not sure how some site features like the event calendar will fare in the update. I could do pre-update testing, but I’m seat-of-the-pants kind of guy (more accurately, I’m lazy), so we’ll just see how it goes.

Clark wrote, with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odessey, the masterpiece of modernism.

I had badly underestimated the administration’s capacity to mess things up.

A) Ya think?

B) If anyone knows screwing up, it would be Richard Perle.

The volume of existing-home sales is expected to hold steady through late spring, with a gradual recovery during the second half of the year as the mortgage situation improves in high-cost areas, according to the latest forecast by the National Association of Realtors®. Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said many buyers have been waiting for higher mortgage loan limits. ”The higher loan limits for both FHA and conventional loans will increase consumer choice and provide greater access to lower interest rate mortgages in high-cost regions,” he said. ”Therefore, a notable rise in home sales can be anticipated in the second half of the year.”

If you bellieve that, yer dum. really dum.

Seriously, if you believe that, make sure someone is nearby around the clock to remind you to breathe every 30 seconds or so.

If you don’t believe that, then pat yourself on the back: you are much smarter than Lawrence Yun, National Association of Realtors chief economist. Or maybe not, since he was smart enough to land a job that allows him to drink, smoke weed and then type random crap into press releases.

He even made his first policy pronouncement: he wants to mandate the study of Beowulf (you can’t win — ban toy guns from the playroom, and a boy will latch onto a 1,000 year-old poem about a Danish dude ripping the arm off of evil-made-flesh).