As my regular readers know, my chosen profession is that of a college professor. My teaching and research concern the organizational consequences and strategic uses of information technology. In the last several years I have taught most of my classes in a discussion-based format using Harvard Business School cases. This means that I have gotten accustomed to asking questions and to using them as a way of organizing the thoughts and contributions of dozens of people and their varied perspectives.

One curious side effect of teaching in this manner is that I have largely changed the way I read and remember information. Now, instead of taking notes or highlighting when I read, I more often write down a list of questions to which the information I read would be answers. While I have found this to be a very economical and efficient organizing principle for academic and teaching material, I have never tried it before with a carnival or roundup. Thus, I have no idea how well it will pan out. So, buckle your seat belts!

1. Can you send me your address so I can make sure I don't move into your neighborhood?

Jim "Suldog" Sullivan of Suldog-O-Rama lives in Watertown, MA, just a few miles from Brighton where I lived when I started my academic career. Unfortunately for Jim, he got "splashed with radioactive waste" recently. He claims it has given him the power to talk to cats. Fortunately for me, Jim poses the key question himself, thereby sparing me the need to do so:

Oh, yeah, I’m a superhero. Another result of the radioactive waste thing. You may have heard of me. Wonderbreadanimalman? No? Ah, I’m not terribly surprised. I mean, look at the guys who get all the ink; Spiderman, Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern. They’re all well-built and good-looking and have powers that people respect. Me? Well, I can take a loaf of Wonder Bread, see? And carve little farm animals out of a slice and they come to life? And then they obey my every command!

2. Would you buy a tank from this man?

Speaking of speaking animals, Ferdy, aka The Conservative Cat, has a beef with all the spam that's latterly turning his inbox into a litterbox. Case in point- spam for selling deeply-discounted tank parts. We're not talking fish tanks or toilet bowl tanks, however. Rather, we're talking M60's.

With more than 20 years experience in this field, our factory is producing the parts: HD90101A and HD8821.They are used in the engine system of M35A2 and M60 tank. Their most competitive price (almost one tenth of the product which made in USA) and the same quality will meet your need fairly.

And as Jim before him, Ferdy has a question of his own: "Now why would somebody be trying to sell me tank parts when they know full well cats prefer unmanned aerial vehicles?"

3. Enjoying that morning coffee?

That's not my question, that's the title of a post over at Randomyak, a post which if read, I must warn you, may permanently alter your coffee consumption habits.

The rare and expensive Kopi Luwak coffee bean distinguishes itself by "a unique taste and aroma enhanced by the digestive system of palm civets, nocturnal tree-climbing creatures about the size of a large house cat." For those of us reading before the morning coffee kicks in: The coffee bean is essentially the "seed" of the coffee cherry. Somewhere in Indonesia, the civet eats the coffee cherry and some time later (not to put too fine a point on it) - deposits - the coffee bean, which remains intact "after passing through the animal."

Randomyak's question? "Just how far do you have to get from reality for drinking "civet beans" to look like a good idea?" Pretty far, it seems to me, pretty far.

4. Is NOTHING sacred to you?

Keeping with the theme of culinary peculiarities comes a post from Blog D'Ellison that rightly deserves to be asked the above question, one that actually came from one of his readers, Acidman, some time back. And what did Ellison do (this time) to warrant such opprobrium? He offered up a new recipe for preparing the most American of all foods, Thanksgiving Turkey, that includes both store-bought stuffing ("Pepperridge Farm is good") and uncooked Orville Redenbacher's Low Fat popcorn seeds. Ellison, how could you?

5. Stress, What Stress?

Once again the question comes from the title of a post, this time over at TMH's Bacon Bits. It's a very good blog but just so you know, the Bacon is of the Sir Francis variety. And according the TMH, stress is what accounts for his difficulty in choosing which 2006 calendar to put up in his office. His choices were "the RNC/Bush one or 'The Reagan Record', courtesy of the Reagan Ranch." I don't know what the RNC/Bush calendar looks like, but the image of Old Ron, looking might fit in boots, a cowboy hat, and blue jeans and swinging an axe is a hard one to beat. A comment left on the site by David of Third World County sums up the dilemma best: "What? You have a problem with using both? ;-) "

6. How many times are you supposed to bow?

That question is posed by none other than the always-entertaining Peakah of Peakah's Provocations. Peak, it seems, did a favor for a relative over the weekend: he played chauffeur to a group of Asian business executives who came to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Seems that Peakah has plenty of questions about the niceties of how his riders showed their appreciation.

...rented me an '05 Chrysler 300 that was FULLY loaded, the luxury model with no shortage of co-hones and proceeded to give all these people my cell phone number. My phone rang off of the hook as I drove with the skills of a professional race car driver around the rubbernecking tourists driving along the Vegas Strip. When I would drop them off and open the door for them they would get out muttering prayers of thankfulness for their survival and then this strange dance would begin...

They would bow, I would bow, they would bow again, I would bow again, again, a bow, again a bow reciprocated... on and on... How many times are you supposed to bow? Are there supposed to be an odd number of bows? Is the one who begins this bowing chicken dance supposed to be the one to end it?

7. Got your own thoughts on signs of the coming apocalypse?

That question is provided courtesy of Josh Cohen over at Multiple Mentality. At last count he's got no fewer than four of them and they range from NFL great Jerry Rice's appearance on the "faux-reality show" Dancing with the Stars to the fifth, yes fifth, season of American Idol. I'm sure he'd love to have more additions to the list. Only one reader has done so to date: Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth touring together. Oh, the Humanity!

8. Why is this the worst post of the week?

Ubu Roi over at Houblog ("Random rants from a municipal civil servant in Houston, TX"), has a long and, I think, thoughtful post about recent successes in the organizing drive of the Service Employees International Union or SEIU, one of the nation's largest. Even if you are not interested in union organizing in Houston or elsewhere, you may find interesting a point that Ubu raises in the last paragraph of the post:

Now what could really throw a spanner in the works is something I’ll get around to covering in a future article — the unspoken elephant-in-the-room is that the city’s generosity this last summer has just added roughly 75,000 Democratic voters to the city’s mix. Voters, who judging by the government they elected back home, are not interested in what they can do for their city, but in what their city can do for them.

9. Is there a downside to Move-by-Wire?

Well apparently Russ Mitchell of Boxing Alcibiades thinks so.

The nifty thing about Move-by-Wire and other spiffy technologies that will come about during the "rapture for nerds" discussed over at Dean's World isn't necessarily that everybody will be able to get wired up or neurally trained-up to move like a ballerina... but that once this is achieved, some bright boy will figure out how to insert an algorithm that will make you walk like an epileptic variation on Grouch Marx, while simultaneously doing the Macarena every time you sneeze.

Question for Russ: Have you seen Josh Cohen's post about signs of the coming apocalypse?

10. Has Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas Zúniga taken a shine to Founding Father, Patrick Henry.?

Apparently he has and Kerfuffles is spitting mad about it:

Yesterday found Kos writing glowingly of our Virginia hero, Patrick Henry:

“When our nation was founded, we had men of real character and courage fighting for their nascent America, one in which liberty and freedom trumped the authorative (sic) tendencies of the monarchy. Patrick Henry gave words to those efforts: ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’“

Kos probably thinks that because Patrick Henry did not take up arms during the American Revolution, that he must have been the Democrats’ kind of patriot. Well think again, Kos and the rest of you lily-liver, lame liberals. Patrick Henry literally risked his very neck with the words he ranted against our enemy. He was as much a warrior as anyone with a musket, and he would have been strung up by the British far quicker than any uniformed enlistee.

Hear Patrick Henry’s famous words reenacted; listen to the rallying cries of that great God-fearing Virginian and decide for yourself if anyone at “Daily Kos” would ever agree with such fiery rhetoric, preached at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia. Before Henry ever arrived at the phrase about liberty and death, he shouted “WE MUST FIGHT!” and he repeated, “WE MUST FIGHT“, calling upon the GOD of HOSTS!

11. How many days has February?

12. Toyota makes skateboards?

Well, actually they dont. But if your Lexus is in the shop and the loaner the dealer gives you is a 2006 Toyota Corolla, you might be inclined to think so.

13. Kennedy’s laments?

Here's yet another post title in the form of a question. This time from Liberty Cadre. The Kennedy in question is a well-known Liberal Democratic political leader with a well-known drinking problem. But it's not who you might think.

14. Did the Renaissance Masters believe in UFOs?

Mensa Barbie gets the award for the most provocative question this week (Sorry Peakah!). Look over these paintings: Glorification of the Eucharist by Ventura Salimbeni, The Madonna with Saint Giovannino by Domenico Ghirlandaio, and The Annunciation with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli, and decide for yourself.

15. Blogging makes reading more enjoyable?

Well Sophistpundit seems to think so.

Working at a bookstore can't be good for me. I keep wanting to read the things that I'm shelving--like this, because it looks cool. But I'm already reading Reflections on the Great Depression and The Tipping Point from my christmas booty--not to mention The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I had to take a break from during finals and haven't gotten back to yet.

I also got Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, and I'm looking to get this book on basic economics because I saw it at work and know it's exactly what I need. Blogging has made reading far more enjoyable to me, somehow. At the same time, it makes it more managable--I read a book bit by bit, then come here and write about all the thoughts it gave me. It makes the whole process something that I more actively participate in, I guess, and that gets me reading and writing on a regular basis. So how bad can it be?

16. Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President, crazy like a fox or just plain crazy?

See what makes the Mind of Mog think that it's more likely the latter than the former.

17. Can you imagine what they could get for a cloned dog?

I read this post and thought a question of my own: how far behind the news is Fortune Magazine?

"A lot of U.S. researchers are muttering "doggone it" today: South Korean scientists have won the international race to clone a dog. A team led by Seoul National University’s Woo Suk Hwang, renowned for world-leading stem-cell research, reported in the journal Nature today that it has produced two genetic duplicates of a male Afghan hound."

Would that be the same Korean Hwang Woo-Suk who has had all of his research declared bogus and who has brought shame upon South Korea and caused the stock prices of South Korean biotech firms to plummet? If so, then a cloned dog from that lab would be worth less than a hot dog.

18. OK, how many of you went to bed with five minutes left and Texas down by 12?

I didn't. And neither did Jack Cluth at the People's Republic of Seabrook.

19. Is there anyone who doesn't think newborns are cute?

Yes, there are and one of them over at Right Thoughts at least has the brutal honesty to admit it.

20. And why do I care about this?

That was my first reaction when I saw this very short post at The American Mind. It contains little more than a link to another website that enables someone to call any phone number in the US/Canada and read the "TextToSay" to that phone number using an automated voice called "Diane." But before I dismissed it out of hand, I remembered that I said exactly these same words, "And why do I care about this?", when my younger brother tried telling me about email and the internet in the early 1990's.

21. What would I do if I were King for a day?

Although it would be far down on what would be a very long list, I would impose a moratorium on posts about BattleStar Galatica , no matter how exquisitely wrought. Sorry Digger!

22. Why is a blog about business hosting a carnival that has nothing to do with business?

For the visibility and the traffic. Here's a link to my archives.

23. Are apologies to the memory of The Beverly Hillbillies in order?

Well now its time to say good by to Wiz and all his kin.
And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in.
You're all invited back next week to this locality
To have a heapin helpin of Bonfire Vanities

Y'all come back now, ya hear!