James Wolcott:

It never seems to occur to our national simplifiers that many of the homicides in this country are not committed by career Bad People but by seemingly Good People who psychotically snap or lose their tempers in an altercation; and that there are plenty of Bad People in this country who, while expressing their destructive impulses in a myriad of ways, manage not to pick up a weapon and leave a multiple death toll. The notion that the answer to gun violence is to allow Good People to arm themselves and to keep guns out of the itchy paws of Bad People is a fatuous fantasy, particularly since the gun lobby and gun merchants work so strenuously to keep laws and regulations lax and loosy-goosy, regardless of the human consequences.

Sometimes I just can't get anything done.

Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn't happen.

These bouts of unproductiveness usually last for a day or two. But there have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I'm not in flow. I'm not in the zone. I'm not anywhere.

From an old Joel on Software article.

There's a pile of work orders assigned to me, each one as apparently-insurmountable as the next. Fuck 'em. I just ain't got the jam to do that shit today.

Sitting at lunch with a bunch of my fellow programmers, all of them younger than 30. One of them mentioned that her brother was spending the night at her apartment because he had a road race the next morning. She was in charge of setting the alarm clock and making sure he got to the race on time. I made what I thought was the obvious Seinfeld joke. Nobody got it.

I've discovered a generation gap.

Pelican Eats Pigeon

Of Waterstone's "100 best books of the past 25 years", I've read the following:

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
• High Fidelity
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• All The Pretty Horses
• Possession
• A Brief History of Time

And, I agree: they were all good.

The rest of the list, though... half of it looks like a list of popular movies of the past 25 years. "Da Vinci Code", "Chocolat", "Memoirs of a Geisha", "Cold Mountain", "Bridget Jones's Diary", "The Beach", Angela's Ashes", "Snow Falling On Cedars", "Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil", "Captain Corelli's Mandolin", "Trainspotting", "Shipping News", "English Patient", "American Psycho", "LA Confidential", "Silence Of The Lambs", "The Bonfire Of The Vanities", etc.. Makes me wonder if the people who voted for these are voting for the book or the movie...

Supporting The Troops

feature, not bug

That notoriously liberal rag, the American Conservative, makes a decent argument that the Bush Administration is not simply addicted to lying for political reasons, but instead is made up of visitors from a parallel branch of time.

I encourage them to explore this. I think it holds real promise.