Conversation this morning with co-worker:

coworker: 13 people.

Edward: Is that how many have died from the snow?

coworker: I was talking about the possible number of Democrats in the presidential race.

Edward: Oh.

coworker: Of course, the snow thing is sad too.

Edward & co-worker: pause...recognition of inappropriate comment awakens...laughter on both sides.

Okay, back to work. There's a nice piece on Dean this morning. If he can just get some money behind him, he's already well ahead in the "we want him to win" contest. He just needs more people in the "he actually CAN win" category. Money would help him. So stop by and help out. America will thank you.

Can't write. In the middle of a blizzard. Perhaps later.

Yes, I know the site's pink. I'm planning to re-work the style sheet system shortly, to give users more control but in the meantime, I may be implementing a style dictatorship. Kind of like our current administration.

So I picked up this new phone a couple days ago. Wednesday afternoon, to be exact. The first thing it tells you to do is to charge the battery, then use it until it's dead, then repeat 2 more times. After this, the battery should be completely ready to accept a full charge. (It's a lithium-ion battery, so it doesn't have any memory effect...so this might be complete hooey, but I'm following the directions, okay?) The problem? Well, the phone is able to run for 14 days (excluding phone calls) in standby mode, even while on. It can keep going for 5 continuous hours of talk time. So in order to do this 3 step process, it could take two-three weeks, assuming I talk at my normal rate.

The evaluation period only lasts 15 days. So if I have a problem with the phone, I have to return it within two weeks. Grr. I won't have even finished step four of the five steps before using the phone by that point. The reception isn't the best (it's a new technology) but this could be due to the battery not being fully charged. Of course, by the time I find out, it'll be too late to return it.

A new Chipotle opened up a block away from me in the MCI Center today. So I visited, got my regular (soft tacos and chips and hot salsa) and am in the middle of a full blown metldown. But it's sooo tasty I can't stop. I'm feeling the burn.

Happy V-Day, all! Yes, it's yet another year of crazy swinging singleness on the special day. So for everyone else who claims never to have met the queen of hearts, live it up. One day you'll look back with longing. With blue skies, newly soled shoes, and the day in front of me, everything's looking rosy.

Okay, I passed my MCSE test, picked up a brand new GSM based cellphone and have only a few hours of work left in the day. And the omnibus passed today, so the office is super-busy. Back to work!

The story seemed straightforward: Ted Koppel reserved seats at a Washington movie theatre and was annoyed when another patron took them. Several people wrote in to say that Ted Koppel was an idiot who didn't deserve reserved seats, etc. And if the story had been true, they'd be correct.

But it turns out that Ted's son-in-law, Ken Pollack, showed up early at the theatre to reserve seats (knowing that his father-in-law would be a little late to get good seats). Ken managed to snag four seats near the front. The theatre manager, then proceeded to offer four better seats than the one Ken had. So, like any good American, Ken upgraded. His mistake, of course, was leaving the seats instead of staying there the entire time. But if I were saving a couple of seats for my friends at AMC Hoffman, and the manager came by to offer me better seats, with tape, I'd be impressed. And I'd probably go help carry the popcorn. And I'd be royally steamed if when I came in, the seats the manager had set aside for me had been snapped up. Yes, it's annoying when people come in the theatre and snap up seats early, but that's how it works. And we're talking four seats, not an entire row. The rules work like this: if you show up early, you should be able to get 4-5 seats. Ideally, you'd need 2 people to pull off the 5 seat deal, but 1 person should be able to save at least 4.

And if something's roped off, despite being egalitarian, it's simply rude to sit down there. Nothing gets me more annoyed than the people who sit in the handicapped seats (or, even more frustratingly, in the seats next to the handicapped seats, as if people in wheelchairs don't have friends!) and aren't disabled, or who show up early enough to get a choice seat in the center and yet take those same seats marked with the wheelchair symbol. I could go off on a movie watching rant, but I'll stop there. People need to learn proper movie watching etiquette.

From the "Shouldn't Someone Have Thought of This" department comes the news that the easiest way to poison our troops is to simply let them drink the water from our beloved Water Buffalos. Go figure. Next thing you know all soldiers will be forced to wear camelbacks under their protective garments...although at the rate people sweat under those damn things, they'll be lucky to make it a half hour before dying of heat exhaustion.

Survey says: we'll be fighting at night.

I find this highly ironic, given the (in my mind) idiotic suggestion that people go out and stockpile duct tape and plastic sheeting. Any household without duct tape is probably doomed anyway, and most households have anough trash bags to improvise. Of course, then there's the oxygen problem, but no matter. (How one could survive with food and water for 3 days but no oxygen is beyond me.) Not that I like to quote from Republicans, but in the words of Christopher Cox, (R-CA) "The mission of the Department of Homeland Security must be first and foremost to prevent another deadly attack on the territory of the United States. A dollar spent on preventing the next terrorist attack is vastly superior to spending that same dollar on cleaning up the mess when we fail to do job one, which is preventing terrorism." Perhaps the dollars we spend propping up the plastic sheeting industry would be better served by giving the money to the agencies designed to prevent terrorism. Of course, there's no mention of the dollars going to tax cuts, is there? They probably already have shelters constructed with food, water and air.

What's especially idiotic about preparing for a dirty bomb is that, unless the terrorists in question are prize idiots, it will probably be detonated during the middle of the day, to create as much panic as possible. Dirty bombs actually can't kill that many people, but the panic that ensues could. So the fact that most people are at work in sealed buildings means that plastic sheeting and duct tape won't do a bit of good. You'd probably have to either shut off the air handlers entirely for the building (and cover them with plastic) and then hope that the building had enough pressure to keep leaks from coming in. Plus, you'd have to hope that the oxygen levels remained high enough to keep breathing. Of course, with a dirty bomb at street level, the chances of airborne contamination 15 stories up might be lower. Or they could be higher. What we really need is a government plan to evacuate the city. Until then, duct tape is a quick fix for a problem that doesn't exist. More people, surely, would be injured attempting to flee the site of a dirty bomb detonation to get home than would be killed from the bomb itself.

Back to my dangerous existence.

Yes, a new review of the movie The Recruit is now up. A good film, with the most actual District of Columbia footage I've seen in a long time. They manage to get the Metro system right (something no one has done in years), have decent shots of Union Station and Georgetown and manage to avoid to many of the omnipresent DC cliches, like talking in front of the White House or the popular memorials. I'm still waiting to see a movie that will have people visit the TR Memorial...but that could be a long time off. Between the dvd releases of Minority Report & Collateral Damage, the district is starting to get a lot of celluloid time to back up the TV presence it's seeing in The West Wing and Mister Sterling.

Fairly soon our population may actually get the bounce Tony's been calling for!