thank you mask man

Apparently, my source on the hazing story did one too many keg-stands. Mortimer J. Leggett, a Kappa Alpha Sigma pledge, died at Cornell in 1873 because of a hazing ritual gone awry. It didn't involve mattresses (I'm trying to find out where that story could have come from), but it might have involved a blindfold. Also, Leggett was most likely the third hazing death in the US, not the first or second.

According to Major William Mitchell, the suicide bomber who targeted Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan probably didn't know that Vice President Dick Cheney was there. More importantly, and despite what MSNBC led me to believe earlier today, a sudden dip in China's stock market, and not the Bagram AFB bombing, is what led to stock market corrections around the globe, including a 3.3% drop in the Dow. Alison Stewart, why did you lead me astray?

For those of you who haven't finished the reading assignment for Tuesday, please do so by Thursday. I'll try to bring in one of Lenny Bruce's recordings so you can hear what his bits sounded like. In the meantime, take a look at "Thank You Mask Man," an animated short film from 1971 that John Magnuson, a San Francisco filmmaker who worked with Bruce during his lifetime, put together after Bruce's death. All the voices for "Thank You Mask Man" are done by Bruce himself. (You might want to watch it more than once so you can pick out what the different characters are saying.)