Well, here it is, the long awaited day of my housewarming party. I’ve got most of the big work done, but there are still plenty of small details to be attended to before the evening, most notably I have to get the fridge in the basement onto a level spot and plugged in, so it can start chilling the five-gallon keg of mead I hope to have tapped during the party. I also realize that I probably should have picked up a spare tank of CO2 so I’d be sure of being able to actually dispense it. Oh well, I’ll figure something out if that becomes a problem.
- Bruce Schneier writes about how we’re Slouching toward Big Brother. Well, some of us keep pointing out the problems with the latest government intrusions, but it doesn’t seem to stem the tide. [jr]
- Veto Threatened on Bill to Restrict Powers Under Terrorism Law, as John Ashcroft says that President Bush will veto the bill, which hasn’t even gotten out of committee yet. If a guy were a suspicious sort, he might wonder what about the bill has the administration so worried. It’s also interesting that Bush hasn’t vetoed any spending bills to try and keep government spending in control.
- Drug law’s costs swell by a third less than two months after making the new health-care thingie into law. But hey, President Bush is controlling spending, y’know. [press-patch]
- At least government’s busy solving the really important problems: FTC proposes label for porn e-mail because
17 percent of pornographic offers contained images of nudity that appeared whether a recipient wanted to see them or not.
Excuse me? I see zero images in my email because I don’t want to see them. Reconfigure your email program or spam-filter if you don’t want to see naked people in your email. Sheesh. [jr] - Uncle Patrick’s Advice to Children contains such gems as
The rash won’t go away on its own.
Head wounds do tend to bleed a lot. Don’t panic.
andYou better ask before you try and stick your finger up there.
But the most depressing is the one that saysDungeons and Dragons never goes away. Girls will still sense that shit 20 years later.
I fear that’s true, and I’m starting to think it’s more than twenty. [accordionguy] - As I approach my 40th birthday, I look at things like this list of 50 things to do before you’re 30 and wonder to myself. I got twenty-four of the fifty, and I’m pretty sure over twenty of those were before I was thirty. Sigh. [holy schmoly]
Thanks to Kim du Toit I went to create my own state map of the states I’ve been to. Note that I’ve gotten to all of them except Ohio at least once via ground-transport, which explains the lack of gaps. And as I continue to ponder taking a vacation, the map seems to suggest that driving down to Florida might not be the worst plan in the world. With some not-too-creative routing, I could knock off another dozen states.