We went to a Jerry Seinfeld show last night. About halfway through, some guy shouted "Hey Jerry, don't you know what day it is?" It was Sept, 11th, of course - our national day of wallowing.

Jerry said "Yeah... so? I'm a comedian, my job is to make people feel better."

The guy started whinging about how Jerry wasn't commemorating the day properly, and that 3000 had died, and that it was this and that, and Seinfeld should be ashamed of himself for not taking the time to bring everybody down, and that he was sick in the head, etc..

Seinfeld handled it very well - didn't let the guy get to him, visibly, and didn't get too nasty. But he kept control. And the majority of the crowd wasn't having any of the guy's nonsense, either.

Sadly, as my Facebook feed suggests, there are still a lot of of people who would take the heckler's side in this.

Seinfeld was very funny, nonetheless.

Click to find out!

Let's listen to Gene Ammons!

We played this album during the reception dinner at our wedding. 19 years ago, Monday.

This is real.

You can buy this at the Ted Cruz Store.

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

I sometimes think we've gotten ourselves into a pointless argument in this country, as we rather often do, by exaggerating the extremes.

We are not faced with a choice between imposing some Christian version of Sharia law on the one hand, or "driving religion out of the public square" altogether on the other.

Two hundred years of not terribly rigid separation of church and state has given us one precious gift. As a quote attributed to James Madison (never been able to find the correct citation on it) put it, "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries." Religious strife is still soaking the soil with blood, isn't it, in Kosovo and elsewhere.

To the extent that politics should be based on moral and ethical considerations, of course it has religious foundations. But dragging God into partisan politics is, in my view, a sin.

...

Again, this may be a matter of taste, but I have seen too many Psalm-singing, Bible quoting, Holy Joe hypocrites in politics to think these frauds improve the moral tone of our public life. Getting snookered by some canting humbug is even more depressing than getting snookered by a plain old crook.

Beware those who make a show or a parade of their piety: Keep watching for the ones who walk the walk.

Click to read the rest.

And not month by month, either. He just bought the whole damn magazine.

Oh well.

Nevermind. I should know better than to trust Boing Boing.

In the never-ending effort to make buying a lottery ticket new and fun, the N.C. Education Lottery has come up with this: Tickets that smell like barbecue when you scratch them.

Lottery officials will unveil their new BBQ Bucks scratch-off tickets Tuesday at Clyde Cooper’s Barbecue in downtown Raleigh and at Queen City Q in Charlotte. The $2 scratch-and-sniff tickets will bring a chance to win up to $25,000 and to enter a secondary drawing for one of 10 prizes of 100 pounds of pork and a Big Green Egg to grill it on.

Never been to Queen City Q, but Clyde Cooper's BBQ is great! It was the best part of working in downtown Raleigh. I don't buy scratch-offs.

One morning, while working on a project, I Googled “python lambda function list comprehension.” The familiar blue links appeared, and I started to look for the most relevant one.

But then something unusual happened.

The search results split and folded back to reveal a box that said “You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?”

What happened?

Three months after the mysterious invitation appeared, I started at Google.

Browsing the web on a mobile device is complete suck. I can't remember the last time I was able to use a mobile browser without having it crash or hang or spend an eternity loading ads.

Also, I find that scrolling up and down on a touch screen that's constantly being redrawn and re-flowed as new ads and images are inserted is nearly impossible to do without accidentally hitting an ad link. I assume that's 100% deliberate.

I'm to the point where I refuse to follow links out of the Facebook app. If it looks interesting maybe I'll remember to check it next time I'm at a desktop. Otherwise, no.