– My office is exactly 33.5 miles from my home.
– Twinning’s “Vanilla Chai” tea tastes totally, completely gross.
– Cactus, on the other hand, isn’t bad. It reminds me of a green bean, only a little chewier and a bit more flavorful.
Pre-Friday Cat Blogging
This pic of Bear and Tommy is too good to wait until tomorrow. Plus I was out and about all day so I haven’t gotten anything else up.
Bear is closing in on six months old now. Oddly, the grey ruff around his neck seems to have faded. He’s pretty much a solid dark brown now except for his tail, which is still somewhat grey, and a few small patches of grey on his underbelly. Go figure.
On a related note, go say hi to NTodd’s new critter, a mixed-breed bundly of fur named Mexico.
Ugh
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a dominant figure for decades in shaping the Middle East, was fighting for his life on Thursday after suffering a massive brain hemorrhage.
As I write this, whether Sharon even survives or not is still up in the air. If he does survive, the odds that he will again be active in politics are slim indeed.
A friend of mine pointed out this afternoon that whether Sharon’s illness is bad news or not depends on whether you think that continuity of government in Israel is a good thing. I’m not so sure about that.
Regardless of what you think of Sharon or his government, political instability is not what Israel needs. A sudden transition of power with elections upcoming and with both Likud and Labor in transition thanks to Sharon’s recent forming of Kadima, make for a very, very confusing time Israel this spring.
New Year, New Gig
Today was the first day at my new internship, which is why nothing’s been posted here. I’m home and fed, and Bloglines tells me I have 132 unread posts waiting for me in my RSS feeder. I wonder if I’ll get through them all before I get too sleepy to finish?
I won’t be talking about the internship here much, if at all, but I will say in passing that anyone who says that switching from Windows to Mac is easy is kidding themselves. I have been given a G3 as my workstation and the lack of either a right-click or a scroll wheel on that horribly non-ergonomic joke of a Mac mouse is no fun at all.
Strike Two for SUVs
Not only are they massively fuel-inefficient, they are NOT safer for the kiddies:
Children are no safer riding in sport utility vehicles than in passenger cars, largely because the doubled risk of rollovers in SUVs cancels out the safety advantages of their greater size and weight, according to a study.
Researchers said the findings dispel the bigger-equals-safer myth that has helped fuel the growing popularity of SUVs among families. SUV registrations climbed 250 percent in the United States between 1995 and 2002.
“We’re not saying they’re worse or that they’re terrible vehicles. We’re challenging the conventional wisdom that everyone assumed they were better,” said Dr. Dennis Durbin, a pediatric emergency physician who took part in the study, published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics.
Good. Maybe people will finally stop clogging the roads with them and I will once again be able to actually see more than one car in front of me when stuck in traffic.
What He Said
Ezra:
Bush’s actions were illegal. And that’s all there is to that. You can argue that they were justified, or righteous, or that the legislative structure is outmoded and wrong, but none of that changes the fact that they were in flagrant violation of the law of the land, a law the White House could have attempted to amend or asked the Supreme Court to invalidate. Which means that not only were Bush’s actions illegal, but he offered no attempt to make them legal. It wasn’t simply that he thought the law outdated, it’s that he believed it didn’t, and shouldn’t, apply to him.
Digby also indulges in some lovely irony, quoting some nice Rep. Henry Hyde rhetoric from the Clinton impeachment:
That none of us is above the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. To erode that bedrock is to risk even further injustice. To erode that bedrock is to subscribe, to a “divine right of kings” theory of governance, in which those who govern are absolved from adhering to the basic moral standards to which the governed are accountable.
I suppose this is another case of IOKIYAR, though.