As if some little corrupt governor,
Upon Lake Michigan's hem,
Went wandering down the corridors,
Until he lucky came
To a vacancy of Senator,
To opportunity for gain,
To willing, eager crowds of suitors,
Such a prize to be won!
I say, as if this little governor
To Eden wandered in--
What then? Why, nothing, only
Your inference therefrom!

Happy Birfday (and apologies) to Emily Dickinson. And Happy Birfday, but no apologies, to Rod Blagojevich, the newly-incarcerated hilariously-corrupt soon-to-be-ex-governor of Illinois.

F/A-18 Crash Pics

We'll Be Taking Your Money Anyway

Say you're proofreading something someone else wrote and you find something right at the top of the page that doesn't make sense. So, you make a note about how to correct it and continue on. Then you find another problem, and you make a correction. Maybe you find another. By this point, you think the person who wrote it is sloppy or incompetent. You're feeling pretty smart and smug, and soon enough, you find something else that you think is a problem. But, while trying to come up with a correction, you discover that the problem was you: you were expecting to find problems and so you jumped on something that you simply didn't understand quickly enough and blamed that on the person who wrote it.

I see this all the time in my side business (software). A person finds a bug, sends me a worried report about it, I fix it. He finds another, sends me a "Oops, looks like I found another one!" report. I fix it. Now he thinks he's the best bug-finder ever, and/or that my program is rife with problems. So he quickly sends me a list of five or six new bugs that he thinks he's discovered. But the bugs in this last batch always turn out to be problems with his understanding.

Somewhere in the process, your brain switches from analyzer to attacker, and you start finding problems where there aren't any because you've convinced yourself that you're in a target-rich environment. You start mistaking your own lack of understanding for my lack of understanding.

Is there a name for this?

Reason #52 why I won't be spending New Year's in Times Square:

New York Post:

In the aftermath of the deadly Mumbai terror attacks, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has come out with guns blazing - with a plan to get all 1,000 rookie cops ready to use heavy artillery in time for New Year's Eve, The Post has learned.

The NYPD wants all 1,000 Police Academy recruits trained to use M4 automatic machine guns - which are now carried only by the 400 cops in its elite Emergency Service Unit - in time for the holiday celebration in Times Square.

The recruits currently at the academy will get three days of training to familiarize them with the weapon, police said.

Besides being sung by women, what do these five songs have in common:

Linda Ronstadt, "How Do I Make You"

Pat Benatar, "Fire And Ice"

Madonna, "Like A Virgin"

Cyndi Lauper, "True Colors"

The Divinyls, "I Touch Myself"

Thank You President George W. Bush