Late Night Odds & Ends

We're nearly halfway done staging Vote!

Yesterday, Aly (my choreographer) and I were staging "Ambition," one of Mark's big numbers. Mark is one of the candidates running for senior class president in the show and is a mix of Alex P. Keaton & Karl Rove. David Coleman, who is playing Mark in the Bloomington production, is a freshman at IU and is doing quite a nice job in the part.

During one moment we had Mark try a crane kick. David knew exactly what to do and it was really funny. But, he didn't know what the reference was from! It made me feel pretty old. I thought everyone grew up on Karate Kid.

-- David Axelrod says Obama plans to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research sometime soon.

-- Kissing really matters. - "Saliva is like a chemical cocktail, and hooking up may have evolved to help us quickly tell if someone is a good mate or not." And, there is probably more to it than that:

"There may be more to this chemical assessment than just kissing," Fisher said. "I think kissing is the tip of the ice berg. I think we'll find that all kinds of other chemical systems are in play that we don't know about."

Goodbye freewill.

-- We've got a Stimulus Package! More on that tomorrow, but watch SNL go after the GOP this week.

-- NY Times: Five NYC economists on the state of the city's economy. Money quote:

“New York City isn’t like Elkhart, Ind.,” Ms. O’Cleireacain said, referring to a city that President Obama visited last week, one that largely depends on a single industry, recreational-vehicle manufacturing, and where unemployment has soared to 15 percent. New York, she said, “is a magnet for talent: for smart, enterprising, ambitious, innovative people, not only from this country but from around the world. Everyone wants to be here, and I think that sets us apart from virtually any other city.”

-- 71% of Americans believe there should be an investigation by either criminal prosecutors or an independent panel into the actions of the Bush administration.

-- Just what will White Spaces give us?

New cellular phones are being planned that would operate independently of existing networks, and would instead access the Internet through white-space technologies and send and receive calls over the Web. High-definition TV broadcasts and movies can be streamed through white spaces directly to a person's laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone.

"It takes images and sound and sends them great distances with no distortion," said Jake Ward, a spokesman for the Wireless Innovation Alliance.

-- Time's Joe Klein on the Israeli Election.

-- Thank you for the link NY Daily News!