WHEN YOU BACK TO SCHOOL: And they make you take the obligatory humanities course to get your degree? Watch out for the class where the teacher splits you up and makes you argue if Oedipus really deserved his punishment or not. And you argue for two straight hours in a room the air has a lot of difficulty circulating through. That class is a killah. The "no" said ending up winning on the technicality that while he thought he deserved it, and the play clearly means to say he deserved it, we could not say if he deserved it or not. I think he did, though I was on the "yes" side, but anyway Oedipus was a big drama king; he would've found a way to kill his father and sleep with his mother and poke his own eyeballs out prophecy or no prophecy.

Summer classes in general may be more effort than they're worth. True, you get the credits quick, but how much time to you have to absorb this stuff? I may regret taking physics under these conditions.

Kevin Drum: Reagan, Midwesterner at heart.

Bill Simmons goes to Italy, has a little bit about the NBA finals.

There's always a zillion subplots to every NBA finals--I mean, you can find a lot of little stories when this one event is all you have to write about. One I find interesting is the matchup pitting the Reggie Miller 3000 (Rip) vs. the Michael Jordan 3000 (Kobe). Which doesn't bode well for the Pistons, of course. But just the fact that there are these stylistically second-generation stars is remarkable.

Lakers 44, Pistons 36 at the half. Well, whatever.