Reading the transcript and some commentary about osama bin laden’s recent video clip, I can’t help but note (as many others do): how come his talking points are so close to those of many leftie folks in the USA? I assume even the lefties think of him at least as an enemy – does it not make them take pause and consider … “Can I really be right, if my enemy agrees with me?”.
On several occasions, friends have related unsolicited stories about their private lives. Three of them stood out in that the storytellers were proud of what they did, even though they seemed wrong.
One gentleman had a child-rearing story. His young boy wanted to go to sleep early one evening. The boy made the mistake of asking his dad to please turn down the television’s volume. The gentleman haughtily refused – it’s his house and he’ll listen as darned loudly as he wants to. Apparently the kid went upstairs to mope. There was no background given as to whether this was a frequent occurrence, or whether other little power struggles were occurring.
Another gentleman was a finance person in a company. He was aware of some major upcoming downsizing, and his coworkers were not. Apparently, one of them – a friend – was just about to buy a house, based on a false presumption of continued employment, but the first gentleman resolved to give no hint of the bad news. Thus his friend must have gotten into some trouble, and the gentleman’s corporate responsibility conscience remained clear.
Finally, another gentleman mentioned his way of dealing with sickness that travels home from his kids’ schools. He gets the first sick kid to deliberately infect the other kid by getting them to play closely together. The thought was that this would help the other kid build his/her immune system. Apparently, it was therefore frequent that the two kids were both sick as dogs. I no longer recall whether these bugs tended to spread to the adults too or not.
Question: am I mistaken in thinking that the actions being bragged about were kind of unfortunate? That perhaps they were trying to express shame by sharing?
Perhaps some member of my huge readership can help me: I’m looking for an X11 window manager, which makes its window decorations somewhat “sticky”. Specifically, I’d like the mouse pointer to be attracted / snap to control areas like resize borders, window management buttons. I use big screens and windows with small decorations (to minimize wasted real estate), and I don’t want to spend so much effort in precisely hunting for them controls. Any suggestions?
It will not be long now before our older brat Eric can start taking in Virginia Lee Burton’s book Life Story. It is an amazing piece of work. Predating Edward Tufte by decades, this lady managed to squish the Earth’s biological history into a beautifully written and illustrated book supposedly for kids. It displays a technical rigour more appropriately found in a textbook, while managing the tricky business of smoothly changing the time/space scales as the story moves to its personal, tear-jerking conclusion. Maybe the book is too good to share and I’ll buy another copy just for me.
New cultural simile:
Stuart waved and said “bye-bye” to me tonight, a bit over nine months after he arrived.