Yesterday steroids, today…
Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday. Yet one woman in a “persistent vegetative state” is accorded the attention of the US Congress. Where are their priorities?
Archive of entries posted on March 2005
Rudimentary genealogy
Now this is fascinating. Go here, type in your last name, select the census year you’re looking for, and you’ll get a map of the geographic distribution of your last name for that period. It looks to be relatively accurate; I know our family name first appeared in Virginia, and when I check for 1850 …
Musician joke
Q. “What’s an oboe?” A. “An ill woodwind that nobody blows good.” Your turn.
Tropic of Cancer it ain’t, but…
You might have been a little surprised to hear that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has said Catholics shouldn’t read The DaVinci Code. The Church has a long history of banning books, which didn’t officially end until 1966. Authors on the prohibited list included: Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Zola and Milton. I suspect that this ban …
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Paul Wolfowitz to run the World Bank? The same guy who said this? “The oil revenues of Iraq could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years?We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” ? Paul Wolfowitz, [Congressional Testimony, 3/27/03] …
Price versus wage indexing
In the great Social Security debate there’s been some discussion of converting from wage-indexing to price-indexing. This is the best explanation I’ve seen so far: Using the term “indexing” to describe what is being proposed creates confusion and makes a simple proposal seem complex, so let me try to clarify it. Right now, Social Security …
Beware the Ides of April
I bought a copy of Turbo Tax and I’ve been playing around with it today. Seemed to me rather than paying a tax guy $150 to plug my numbers into some software I could plug them in myself. When I compare it to last year’s form prepared by a professional, I have no obvious holes …
HD ready or not
Our four or five-year-old analog 27″-screen Toshiba television is dying, so we’re thinking of buying a new HD-ready tv. One of the ones we’re looking hard at is this one. The dimensions are about right (it sits in a corner with a hanging fish tank above it, so height as well as depth and width …
Radio
Alright. It’s a weekend, fit for laundry-doing and non-angrifying news reading, so here’s some musical info. Last week Mark Morford went off on a rant about — well, let him tell you: This is the problem with rock radio. It has become the last option, the thing you listen to only when all other options …
Good thing it’s been raining
“The automated sprinkler system isn’t working.” “Why do you say that?” “The water bill this month was $5.77.”