Yes, once again, Alan is in posession of a mohawk… life is good – life is good. A mohawk is a wonderful thing for several reasons. Some of them are:
I have hair on the top of my head still, might as well enjoy it. It improves my ultimate frisbee game (seriously). It reminds me and anyone else that I’m not really all the way old, yet. It helps instantly filter people, like John’s pants, for any who know.
We have had our bed now for over an week and it is fantastic. I actually found myself sleeping propped up on my elbows one morning – and it was comfortable. We got a Sealy : Reflexion : Venice Beach – a big latext foam bed. We bought it at us-matress.com, but we only had to buy the mattres (no box spring) so it ended up being a less than what you see as the cost.
I’m seeing a lot of articles (and people at work are linking me to even more) warning people about the new Google Desktop Search; like: Google Copies Your Hard Drive – Government Smiles in Anticipation
Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers.
If anyone is interested, go to https://political.moveon.org/donate/breakingthelaw.html to view the commercial spot (and the facts behind it) MoveOn is trying to get on the air. I’ve long said Bush is as bad or worse than Nixon – indeed, it looks like others are saying the same thing, better.
And of course, if you wanted to play a similar game try waronterrortheboardgame.com.
<MoveOn.org> petition: The President Broke the Law
President Bush admitted to personally authorizing thousands of allegedly illegal wiretaps, and he doesn’t plan to stop. Circumventing the Constitution is serious business.
This is a big moment. People from across the political spectrum are standing together to protect the rule of law and the principles that are core to our identity as Americans.
Can you sign this petition to show Congress that Americans want a thorough investigation of the president’s secret wiretapping program?
Here is a great interview with Noam Chomsky entitled There Is No War On Terror. Some of my favorite quotes from it, follow:
This is even sometimes discussed. You can find it in the strategic analysis literature. Take, say, the invasion of Iraq again. We’re told that they didn’t find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that’s not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s.
I am excited to hear about the possible investigation for the impeachment of Bush (I’ve been calling for it for a while). Too bad it’s not something that I am hearing much about – you all? No? You’d think the investigation for presidential impeachment might be discussed on the evening news, eh? Kind of big news… it sure was when it was discussed as a possibility for Clinton. But not for Bush (yet).
Phil sent me a link to the article [Appalachian town mining for land] which is talking about the removal of mountains by a coal mining company as a positive thing… to some it may well be – but as coal mining companies are notorious for their environmental horrors, and as we are already starting to “run low” on mountains that have been created (tectonically) for thousands of years — perhaps people ought to think about keeping their mountains around as long as they can (which is basically until a mining company finds something they want in said mountain).
I spent many full and well populated days in Houston. Anita and I spent nights at various family houses, ate some of the best food we had eaten all year, and most importantly – got to spend good time with our family together.
Here are some of the highlights:
Great quality time with family (can’t mention it enough – strange that just spending time is so important, so simple, and so rare) Got to meet Scott’s girlfriend, Ilah (ee-lah) Good but sad visits with my grandmother [Penny][1] (aka Grandma’ Penny) Games played : rummykub, canasta, hearts, pictionary, balderdash, ping pong (I won at ping-pong and sometime I won at canasta, but lost everything else) Food, food, and food (including some [mango salsa][2] I made, which everyone appeared to appreciate) Ikea blitz – a 1 hour run through ikea resulting in a total bill of less than $150 for Anita and myself (incredible for us consumer sheep) One of the important parts which gets a bit of a review is my visit with my grandmother “Penny”, who has [Alzheimer’s][3].
So, when flying to Houston, early on Monday the 19th of December I ran into a slight problem.
I went through security without issue, and my laptop bag had to go through… and I overheard security people being called over, waited, and heard a couple of other security people being called over. About this time I get nervous and soon overhear something I would rather not have heard.
Apparently, I had forgotten that I had put some gifts in my laptop bag, that I got for people at work in Japan… They were very unimpressive, unassuming, decoration-only, ummm, throwing stars.