My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.

“Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?” she asks.

“Well…is there a payoff?”

“Fuck you.”

It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? “Ninety percent of the time I love my wife,” I told him. “And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?”

Blanton’s response: “Because you’re a manipulative, lying son of a bitch.”

(via Jeff Atwood)

[This post had been sitting in draft for damn-near 4 months now. God knows why it took me so long to get around to publishing it; I figure it's time now.]

[...] The tree I was sitting beneath began to sway. The tree became sentient and uprooted itself, and then fell over, grew four legs, and invited me onto its back. I don’t remember it walking the eight miles to town, but suddenly there we were, in the middle of the street, me straddling a tree. We were in a parade, like the one that happens on the island every Fourth of July, with vets in their jeeps and farmers on their tractors. I waved at all the people on the sidewalk, hoping they didn’t realize I was high on gasoline.

Los Angeles Times has an awesome news item about the “Tijuana Rambo”, Tijuana’s new police chief Alberto Capella Ibarra, it begins:

TIJUANA — The bullet holes pockmarking the walls of his home were just three days old when Alberto Capella Ibarra took over the police force of this violence-plagued city.

Twenty gunmen dressed in black had swarmed his yard in the middle of the night, and he’d fought them off, firing an automatic rifle.

The New York Times also has an article on the Mexican federal police vs. drug cartel skirmishes, this time in Río Bravo.

Finally, Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment. Also: Sydney Morning Herald, Los Angeles Times. Got to say, I was quite shocked when I first saw it.

And remember, Philsophers do it Ponderously.

That is all.

Paperclips are much more user-friendly.