Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
TSA thug: we are doing a random check of your laptop.
Me: Oh for f*ck’s sake.
Thug: Is there a problem?
Me: do whatever you do.
Me: this is why I joined the ACLU.
Thug: what’s that?
Me: an organization devoted to privacy rights.
Thug: You do have privacy rights [...]

All Dogs Go to Choate.

By Thoreau
Michael Lind argues that libertarianism is becoming the ascendant faction in the Republican Party.  I have three levels of response.  On the most basic level, I never really know what to make of a Lind column.  I am not nearly as conversant with American history as he is, so I can never refute any [...]

By Mona
“I’m sorry, it appears that I went fucking insane the other day and said something that was so mind numbingly idiotic that in a sane society it would mean that everywhere I went from that point on, people would point and laugh at me. And I’m now going to commit ritual disembowlment [sic] to [...]

By Thoreau
In keeping with Jim’s DST blogging, it is the first Monday after we set the clocks forward, and somebody other than me decided that the final exam should start at 9:10am.  This 9:10 mindset fails to take into account the way that things have changed.  In keeping with our new reality, next quarter we [...]

I just saw the most amazing thing.
Living Ruff, another reason downtown Silver Spring is criminally underrated as a DC-Metro neighborhood, sponsored an indoor playdate in a vacant storefront near their own shop this afternoon.
Very important: off-leash dog parks present risks as well as benefits. All kinds of negative events can happen quickly, and the danger [...]

By Thoreau
I love this.  Especially the award for best third author.  I’m proud to say that other than a few things very early on, I’ve always been first, second, or last author.  First and last really matter, and there’s at least a chance that the second author did something useful.  The rest are a bit [...]

By Thoreau
My biggest fear has always been that Al Qaeda will move away from trying big, flashy, mass-casualty attacks on high-profile targets, and start doing lots of small attacks.  Bringing down skyscrapers again would take a lot of planning and a group of trained, reliable men who have been recruited through networks.  All of this [...]

In which a blogger clears his browser tabs:
* Via Kung Fu Monkey, web series The Sanctum. It’s superheroes (and villains) in an addiction support group. And yes, there is a plot, that develops pretty trickily over the half-dozen episodes so far. New episodes seem to come out every month or two. They are reaching the [...]

In comments downblog, Tom Scudder reminds us of Jenna Katarin Moran’s “DST Nocturne.”

Each year they made Daylight Savings Time longer, until one day it lasted the whole year round. Then it was spring forward, always spring forward, and never fall back, until noon was where midnight used to be and midnight lost in noon.
In the [...]