Burning Down the House

 

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

We’ve got a number of uncontrolled fires burning in Southern California. It’s raining ash out of a darkened sky in Orange County, where I live, although we’re nowhere near the actual fires.

Read more

A Brilliant Waste of Time

 

A colleague is internationalizing error messages for a login form. He can tell you that your password is wrong in 12 different languages, even though the users of the application all speak English.

“This is a brilliant waste of time,” he chortles.

“It sure is . . . if by ‘brilliant waste of time,’ you mean ‘waste of time.'”

A Perfect Murder

 
Man hanging on branch

DURHAM, N.C. — A jury convicted novelist Michael Peterson Friday of bludgeoning his wife of five years in the stairwell of their Durham mansion.

Peterson says his wife fell down the stairs. Coincidentally, another female friend of Peterson’s was found dead at the bottom of a staicase in 1985 . . .

Read more

That is You

 

The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.

— Edgar Lee Masters, “Fiddler Jones”

There’s a balance to be struck between providing a kid with some direction in his life, and thinking that he should like certain things because I like them, or dislike certain things because I don’t like them, or that he should do things a certain way because that’s the way I would do them, the danger being that even though my way is, of course, the best way, the way he does it is what makes him him . . .

Recall

 

We have a new governor in California:

Does the punishment of a humiliating recall fit Davis’ crimes? Maybe not. But the issue isn’t fairness to Davis. It’s the future of the state. If the voters brutally and unfairly punish a state-of-the-art pol who overspends in boom times and puts off tough decisions until after he’s reelected, that doesn’t seem to me a terrible precedent to set. It seems a useful precedent.

Lesbian Rescue Fantasies

 
Girl feeding chickens

From a company newsletter:

[Insert woman’s name here] is quite a rescuer. She started with animals and now has six dogs, 13 cats and a rabbit. Last fall, she decided to extend her caretaking talents to children by becoming a foster parent. She and her partner, [Insert another woman’s name here], are foster parents to 7- and 9-year-old children and expect to take in several more soon. In fact, the two recently added on to their house to accomodate the growing family.

Read more

Prison Sex: A Win-Win Scenario

 

Convicted child sex abuser and defrocked Roman Catholic priest John Geoghan died Saturday after he was apparently strangled by a fellow inmate at a Massachusetts prison, according to local officials.

Read more

Who Moved My Cheese?

 

There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They go on and on.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slapstick

My wife helps me maintain my mental acuity by, whenever I set something down, picking it up and moving it somewhere else.

This is supposedly for the sake of neatness, even though her stuff is all over the damn place, but the result is that my life feels like a non-stop Where’s Waldo? puzzle.