- Voters say that they want an honest candidate who stands for clear principles.  In reality, most voters hate nothing more than an honest candidate who stands for clear principles but doesn't agree with them.

- People say that they hate negative campaign ads, but the truth is that they work.  That's why politicians are so attracted to negative ( Read more... )

Heard on some news report (paraphrase ( Read more... )

For weeks now, my mom's counts for red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets have all been dropping.  The two doctors who saw her (primary care physician and a hematologist)  thought that this was due to the fact that she had been prescribed too high a dose of a medicine that she took to bring her platelet count down - her platelet count at ( Read more... )

I'm beginning to realize why I dropped livejournal a couple of years back.  It really has nothing to do with other people - it has to do with the fact that LJ is an enormous potential time waster for someone like myself who tends to latch on to other people's opinions and not stop thinking about them.  From a purely rational point of view, it's ( Read more... )

We've had eight straight cloudy and rainy days. It's not always been raining, but there's been at least a little rain each day. There's also been some flooding, though not around where I live. (Where I live is one of the highest points in eastern Massachusetts - if the house I live in gets flooded, that's very bad news for most of the eastern part ( Read more... )

A lot of people have some funny ideas about history - funny as in odd, not humorous. In the interest of trying to set the record straight, here are a couple of them off the top of my head ( Read more... )

My mom has a medical condition that is basically the opposite of hemophilia - she has a platelet count that is much too high. She took medication for this for over a year, but then they took her off of it a couple of months ago. It turns out now that it apparently did a good job of reducing her platelet count, but it also reduced her red blood ( Read more... )

What is more dull and irritating than cataloging?

Cataloging theory - or specifically, reading articles and writing a paper about one aspect of this topic ( Read more... )

... these are a couple of quotes from Mark Twain that definitely ring true to me ( Read more... )

If I debate (or just plain argue) with someone on a political issue, I can become very vehement, very angry, very self-righteous. I've said things in political debates in the past that were nasty enough to end a couple of budding friendships. After that point I discovered that if I was going to get involved in an argument over politics, it was ( Read more... )