I cannot help but laugh at the end of an election cycle. There are people who are all sorts of mopey about the results, as if the unicorn factories will shut down, and the rainbow powered love machines will only be able to print out half as many strawberry-scented welfare checks as before Tuesday night. And for those whose group won, well they just ( Read more... )

Just when I thought The Seattle Times was coming around, they had to go and ruin things. They were taking some really good editorial positions on the various initiatives, and increased their stock by endorsing Justice Richard Sanders to be returned to the bench. They threw all that goodwill of mine away by revoking it ( Read more... )

Back in third grade, the class portable had a rip roarin' Apple ][ and one of the games included was Market Place. It was a rudimentary economics simulator. You could sell apples, flowers or lemonade, and you'd set the price from a penny to a quarter, and success followed a predictable curve of higher price equals lower sales. For third grade, that ( Read more... )

On Monday afternoon, a four-year-old boy shot his mother with a shotgun. He loaded a cart into the 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun and his mother suffered birdshot injuries on her left side.

That's a really terrible scene, but I think other details are...predictive of the situation. From the story:

"The woman's boyfriend was not home at the time of ( Read more... )

Believe it or not, I actually listen to NPR weekly. I don’t enjoy Wait Wait enough to subsidize them, even with the promise of the tote bag or smug self-satisfaction of supporting public radio. The preceding was a really lazy lead-in to the Juan Williams firing issue, and how it pertains to what happened on the set of The View earlier this week.

( Read more... )

In Washington state, we execute someone roughly every ten years. Whether this is to keep the injection team well-practiced, or because we find the crimes of someone so repugnant that to let the dirtbag draw another breath would be a crime itself, we do it. Since the Supreme Court allowed states to execute or not (1970s) at their discretion, the ( Read more... )

I come into contact with rather a lot of jerks in my daily life. Sometimes I like to compare which is the worst jerk of them all. Many times there isn't much thinking involved: one jerk completely carries the day. But there are days like today, when I find out about two jerks, and the only thing to do is have a jerk...tournament...to decide which ( Read more... )

I have lived in the Kent-Renton-Auburn area for the last twenty-three years, but for a small period in 1987 and 1988. After the parental divorce, Sis and I went to live in Spokane, with Mumsy, her parents  (and what a model of wedded bliss that was--oy!) and a surly uncle. I thought this was terribly bogus: after all, I was making friends in ( Read more... )

On Tuesday I was able to check the box on one of my Life List Goals: I appeared on a game show. Not in person, and I didn't win anything. A question that I wrote appeared in the first round of this week's Only Connect, a brutal quiz show on BBC in England.

My life list is fairly short and profoundly without things that are big risks: Get on a game ( Read more... )

Back in school, I was able to confuse a whole bunch of people into thinking that I was completely brilliant beyond measure. I was able to do this by reading something one or two times and then being able to quickly recall it on command. It was incredibly useful for tests where you had to match Clue A to Question Beta or for being able to loop the ( Read more... )