1. snow! woo-hoo! okay, so its barely and inch here, which is pretty lame when you think about it. (why do weather reporters always exaggerate accumulation so much?) but it still puts me in a good mood.
2. last night i noticed my comments disappear after a while. i was digging around my archives looking for a link and started to notice that no one really commented on anything in the olden days (i.e. last august). then i went to my september archives and found posts where i definitely remembered having comments at one point (e.g. hats 1 and 2) but these days nothing’s there. i guess haloscan eats them when they get too old.
mmmm, comments.
3. if anyone cares, my arabic class does exist, for now. apparently the department requires there to be a minimum of 6 people to have a class. only five registered, but one of those five needs the class to continue with her program. the powers that be took pity on her and authorized the class with only five people. however, said person-who-needs-the-class did not show up on tuesday, so now we’re down to four and missing the person which allowed our class to continue below the minimum. i’m hoping she shows up tonight or that the department just gives up and lets us have our friggin class. once again, i just might squeek by and get another semester under my belt. insha’allah.
4. "squeak" really should be spelled "squeek." it just seems to capture the sense of a high pitched sound better when there is a double "e." (so the use of that word in the prior paragraph is not a misspelling, but rather a protest against unjust spelling rules. for that matter, so are all the other spelling "errors" in this post and others. trust me. i meant to do that)
5. is it just me or is our unelectable miserable failure acting like a kid in a candy store. just days after paul o’neill revealed that the administration thinks that "deficits don’t matter", the president doing all he can to confirm that allegation by proposing to spend money on a government program to encourage marriage among poor people (which, i might add, would not apply to the various rich divorcees that fill the ranks of the republican leadership) and to build a moonbase. meanwhile, there are rumors that he is planning to propose yet another tax cut in this election year.
now don’t get me wrong. i am definitely not anti-moonbase. in fact, i feel a bit ripped off that we don’t have several already. after all, i grew up with shows like the jetsons and space 1999 which made it perfectly clear to me that i would own a moon timeshare by now, or at least have a robot. even with all my nerd credentials which would predispose me to be in favor of anything space related, i must admit that, if presented with a choice between say, a moonbase and universal healthcare, the moonbase should probably fall by the wayside. but while the president is faced with the same options, he is, practically speaking, making the opposite choice. bush has made no proposal to cover the uninsured, but he is going to authorize money for this moonbase plan. so, if the president gets what he wants, a handful of people will be living on the moon, while thousands of people here on earth will die each year because they can’t afford to see a doctor at the first sign of an illness. just because he’s not presenting it to the american public as such a stark choice, that is the practical effect of his proposal.
i don’t know bush’s position on robots.
