Doug Kenline, there's no link to The Week, it is a magazine I get in print form, and I cited it. The article originally appeared in the New Yorker. I will commit the "cardinal sin" of blogging from time to time, just so people don't start to rely on the internet as the sole information medium. There are still magazines, printed on paper, and at least for now, I feel they are worthwhile. But I should have given the dates these stories appeared in the publications.

When you say you didn't believe, was it the number of survivors you were doubting, or that most survivors instantly regretted jumping, or maybe my reliability in conveying the article, or The New Yorker's accuracy? Or all of them?

If an internet link is what it requires for you to believe something reported:
here

Anyway, thanks for maintaining such an active blog, for keeping an eye out for what other blogs are doing, for keeping things interesting, and for creating this here blog.

Quoted in a Washington Post article about the bill to ban partial-birth abortion:

The president, said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. "will become the first United States president to criminalize a safe medical procedure."

I'm not sure what kind of rhetorical semantics allows one to call delivering a baby except for the head and then killing it a safe medical procedure. Had that been your or my birth, we might have taken exception.

Seems like it would be pretty chilling to be married to a person who could actually perform that "safe medical procedure."

"Sitting in a box for 44 days is a bit of a farce, especially because there are really people starving, but it's doing me all right selling binoculars."
--Rick Brim, 26; article on completion of Magician David Blaine's plastic box stunt

"After you say you hate the way Bush walks and talks, you can never again ask readers to trust your judgment on anything involving Bush."
--David Brooks, quoted by Howard Kurtz in A Dislike Unlike Any Other?
Washington Post

Chilling news piece from the New Yorker, as reported in The Week:

At least 1,200 people have jumped to their death off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Only 26 people have survived the plunge. Most of the survivors said later that they regretted having jumped the moment they let go of the railing. "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought unfixable was totally fixable--except for having just jumped," says one survivor, Ken Baldwin.

Okay, The Passion has my attention.

Interesting site. How do you classify this medium?

I will not be writing in my blog starting today, and extending through Sunday.

Take notes. Dave Barry reports that the people who are always bothering us with unwanted calls are bothered by unwanted calls:
So what's their hangup?


Fair is fair:
Why wasn't Davis investigated too?

This site has the complete works of Van Gogh. I sure wish other artists were represented even half as well on the internet. Aside from this Van Gogh site, it's hard to find more than a dozen works of any artist.

…and eventually he reached the point where all he did was sit in a dimly lit corner, a laptop plugged into a nearby socket, writing and writing his web journal. His place was sparsely furnitured. He never was heard to use the word “blog;” He didn’t care for the sound of it. He had a relatively small audience, but the work was terribly important to him. Just the routine became a kind of reassuring security against a dark, isolated world. It didn’t matter what happened to him at work, on the bus, or in the grocery—he could always come back and type his little words into his little speck in a sea of electronic data.

My counter is all the way up to 42 now. I sit around and watch it, and whenever the tens column increases, I cheer. Sometimes in a moment of sheer spontaneity created by the thrill of seeing the numbers go up, I hug my coworker.

I don't really know how worthwhile the cheering is though. I mean, 42 is a pretty big number, but since 41 of those clicks were my own, I'm thinking there's a guy out in South Dakota who did a search on the word "half-wit" and stumbled across my picture briefly.

In keeping with the current Luddite theme, I once had this optimistic and hopeful thought, after a seminar on a paricularly complex piece of software:

At some point on the road of technological progress, no one is going to have any idea what we’re really doing. We might as well tape little scraps of data to our bodies and roll around on the floor.

Driving home last night, I found myself wondering, "Did I say yellow-cake plutonium?"

"Yellow-cake uranium" is an unsettling phrase for me. The incongruity of pairing something festive and delicious to eat with a pretty nasty radioactive chemical always sounds strange.