Reflections from the North Woods

Greetings from the North Woods of Minnesota, site of this year's summer vacation.

- Quote of the week: Houston Nutt, head football coach at the University of Mississippi, had this to say about dealing with players who post on Facebook and Twitter, "They said, 'Coach, it's the name of a song.' I said, 'I don't like the name of the song, then.'"

- Daniel Schorr, one of the best known and most combative journalists of his generation, died yesterday in Washington. Schorr reported the news from the 1950s through the 2000s and very famously made President Richard Nixon's enemies list, which was revealed during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. Schorr took on government misdeeds but also could put his employers in the crosshairs of his investigations. Wrote Schorr in his 2001 memoir, Staying Tuned, "It must mean something that, unable to accept the dictates of my bosses, I ended up in confrontations with (chairman) Bill Paley after a quarter-century at CBS and with Ted Turner after six years with CNN. It may be that I am just hard to get along with, but to me it always seemed that some principle was involved."

- I saw Inception last night and think it's a terrific movie. The subject matter was so compelling that I actually woke up, after dreaming, last night and thought of the movie, which is all about dream invasion. This isn't a summer popcorn movie--it's a twisting, turning mind-bender.