I just read this. A great take on the situation, along the lines of something I mentioned last night: how can we be fighting the evils of terrorism when it's so appalling easy to shut down our city? From the piece:

I hate to be giving advice to Saddam Hussein at this moment, but clearly, the most effective path for any enemy of America is to put on a helmet that makes him look like Franz Liebkind, the unreconstructed Nazi in Mel Brooks' "The Producers," get himself a John Deere tractor and drive it into a shallow decorative pond. That'll shut down any American city but good.

Well put. What if this guy was parked outside the White House? Or the Capitol? What if there were four guys, around multiple buildings? What would our response be? Shut down all the roads? What if there were five guys, with one below my building here at Metro Center? Would we shut down the entire transit system?

Someone should've thought of this. The startling news last week that Washington couldn't evacuate, regardless of the threat, was bad enough. We were told to just sit and wait. (Sound advice, notwithstanding: panic is far worse than simply staying put.) Now, though, we can't even go about our daily lives because of this nut. You really have the read the entire article...

Readers may notice that the main page symbol is now different: it's the Hebrew symbol "Alef". I'm still trying to figure out whether I spell it with an "f" or "ph". Why the change? Well, I've always liked the concept of infinity and this symbol reflects that. Plus, it looks cooler than the generic black star. The logo contest be damned!

Odd.

I just sneezed, and for a good thirty seconds afterward saw sparkles out of my right eye. I've always been intrigued by floaters, the tiny bits of gunk floating around the back of your eye that you can see when you stare at a uniform white surface, like a cloudy sky. These things were like floaters but very small, turning on and off at random, but with very bright colors. Although it was cool to see them, I'm glad they went away. My sense of sight is one of the few things I really couldn't stand to lose. There are just too many interesting things to see and appreciate. Sound and smell don't come close, although I'm glad I have all my senses.

For the past several days, I've noticed that traffic in DC around the time I walk to and from work is ridiculous. The new convention center has closed down parts of New York/Mass. Ave. near Mt. Vernon square, which contributes to it. But throw in a crazy tractor driver who managed to shut down several streets and today was absolute madness. Things were backed up up to Rhode Island and R St. which says a great deal.

In other news, I'll take down the shamrock shortly. It was fun while it lasted, though!

No, it's not a celebration of the earth: it's St. Patrick's Day! That glorious day where we're all Irish, almost everyone wears green and even more people fall off the wagon for good. Obviously, the site looks a mite different, as it should. Unlike on v-day, the site will hopefully revert quicker, this being a weekday. Last time I got lazy and left it up the entire weekend.

Some choice soul has been playing the bagpipes for hours outside my office, which raises the questino: aren't bagpipes Scottish? Perhaps I'm mistaken on this...

Forget all that boring other stuff: the big news this week is that at my beloved workplace I received my frickin' huge monitor and set it up. It's gigantic! Colossal! Incredible! Words don't fail me, but as soon as we get our new computers in, I'll be able to punch up the resolution to a cool 1920x1440 at 75Hz. Now I just need to sneak in a copy of good ole' quake III and start using the bfg in the dredwerkz, like days of yore.

This is really too funny to quote from. Read it yourself. If you've never seen the movie in question, shame on you.

It appears the new idea behind journalist "embedding" is quite utilitarian: the army has managed to kill all the canary chickens and needs replacements fast. Go figure.

As a yellow dog Dem, I'm not the biggest fan of the blue dogs, but they have their heads screwed on right, especially when it comes to fiscal affairs and this is the latest example. It's about time that a group of Dems got up, said "this is idiotic" and made a plea for fiscal sanity. With projections of $6 trillion surpluses, it's difficult to keep everyone's hands out of the cookie jar (even though I still think Bush's first round of tax cuts was idiotic, even if it was politically difficult to fight), but now that deficits are back, someone has to draw the line. So three cheers for the blue dogs! I just hope they keep fighting strong.

I don't know why the last two days have taken a decidedly fark-like turn in the state of Texas, but the latest thing I've heard of is this man who is now serving time in a doghouse. Read the article. Makes you wonder what the punishment for the guy in Denton would have been had they caught him before he died. Either way, doesn't this at least count as "unusual" punishment, as in "cruel and unusual punishment"? Regardless of the crime, this guy should have to go to jail or pay a fine. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to happen overseas, not in America.

I was somewhat surprised to find the list of consular services for the Mexican Consulate, quite so...broad. Included is the always helpful question: how do I send a corpse to Mexico? Finally, the question that's been on everyone's minds has been answered. And yes, there are strict regulations on embalming, caskets and papers.

As an aside, I attempted to find the instructions to send dead people to France and Italy, but neither featured said info prominently. And those Italians...well, let's just say they need to work on their website. The French are way ahead of them.

What do I make of this story of a pair of really really bad neighbors? Well, let's take the final two paragraphs:

Kyla Welch, whose house backs up to the side of the Mack house, told the Denton Record-Chronicle that her neighbor did not appear to work and was a bit eccentric. But she said both were friendly enough to wave or speak when she saw them in the yard in the past eight years they have been neighbors. Welch said she had noticed recently that when she looked into the yard, Mack was sitting in the van.

"We did kind of notice they were out there all the time with the engine running. I just thought he was smoking in the van because of his mother's health," she said. "You never saw any lights in the house, but I thought they stayed in the back. You never saw anyone visiting," Welch said. "They were kind of odd, but they never bothered anybody."

Um, the van was parked in their front yard. And the engine was running. That's a little bit stranger than "eccentric". One neighbor even brought the man gas for his van so that he could continue to run the engine, yet go nowhere. Yet no one heard from the starving dogs who were so hungry they ate part of the dead mother's arm off, yet couldn't get anyone to let them out of the van. It's a sick, sick world, sometimes.

I haven't commented on the whole Perle/Blitzer/Hersh incident. Everything's been hashed out fairly well. But I did see an amusing quote from JMM that I thought was worth repeating. Here goes:

Trust me, if lacking a theme in your articles made you close to a terrorist most of my friends and I would be down in Guantanamo with burlap sacks over our heads.

Couldn't have put it better myself.