|
|
My friend Kurt forwarded the Master / Slave article from Snopes Tuesday morning, and I wrote up a rant and was just about to post it when I realized that perhaps I was taking the wrong approach.
My initial reaction was one of scorn. As in... these people are too stupid to be allowed to run anything, much less a city. In many respects, that's wrong. These people are not stupid, they are simply approaching the problem in exactly the wrong way. We've been doing this just say no thing for so long everyone thinks this is the only way to do things.
Eliminating the terms master and slave from our vocabulary (as if that were possible) would not do one single useful thing but it would ensure that we could no longer effectively communicate the idea of one master and one (or more) slaves which are completely subservient to the master. No more history lessons for youngsters about master/slave relationships; we're tossing the concept... I guess US history will need to start around 1920 and we'll just skip world history altogether. All those mean and nasty people.
This is obviously a foolish approach, so why do we do this sort of thing to ourselves?
It will always be easier to eliminate by rule rather than educate by clearly expressed statements of intent.
If you don't like something it's not hard to find enough people to push for making it illegal (and given enough marketing push you can fool enough of the people for long enough to make a law). In general, it's because we (the United States) no longer attempt to define our beliefs in such a clear way that anyone can interpret them and we can all stand behind them. We pass laws written in legalese because so many want language that is left open to interpretation; and in order to satisfy a bunch of special interests, we usually have a raft of "yeah, but" exceptions to the general rules (which were vague enough to begin with).
We are so busy, at every level of our government writing new laws that there is no way for anyone to follow and understand all of it. The traffic volume is too high, too distributed. Poorly considered laws sail through all the time, no one notices. Laws worth thinking about never get past the local nomination method (and unless someone has a good PR machine, no one notices). The end result? Laws that explain exactly what we can not do, while never exactly clarifying what we are allowed to do and laws that remove our ability to do things we've always done without getting into details (e.g. laws that make strategic changes to upper tier laws without ever getting into specifics like the USA Patriot Act).
We expect to tune nearly everything in our lives over time, why is government left out of the equation? What we don't do often enough is to factor legal complexity and invent ourselves anew. Constitutional amendments should be alive and well, but we've dropped that concept on the floor because we found a legal maneuver around it. Constitutional changes not only override federal and state laws once adopted, they also override all existing court decisions.
We've got to find a way to fix this...
William Maple is (according to the Star) working with Dennis Gillette to protect Hilltop Feed by having it declared a historical landmark.
The Hilltop Feed site is among several that he wants to save... like the newer Timber Schoolhouse (aka Conejo Valley High School). In a city trying to grow, getting approval to save off one thing at a time is difficult. Trying to get many passed at once seems impossible (but hey, it's good PR). Further complicating things is the type of housing (as mentioned in this article discussing the vote last week):
He said an application to build town homes or condos on a portion of the site was pending and likely to come before the Planning Commission by spring.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the same kind of construction that's been going on for some time on Conejo School Road and around the corner on Los Feliz Drive. The city must be pretty comfortable with this kind of thing (and the developers involved) by now. I guess that's why so many former stop signs in that area were converted to traffic lights some years back. That put a big dent in the trip to Westlake (yes, it's still much better than Thousand Oaks Boulevard, but far from ideal) and it made it a lot easier to start putting in higher density housing.
Anyway, the Hilltop Feed site (2727 East Hillcrest Drive according to their last Yellow Pages entry) is less than half a mile east of Conejo School Road and that strip of Hillcrest (between Erbes Road and Westlake Boulevard) is just destined for development. I knew this was coming but stayed in denial for a long time.
It'll be interesting to watch it play out of course, but this old western town (as the really old timers fancy it) is going away. I'll have some more on this subject later... I've been gathering all kinds of little tidbits. I also need to make another trip to the Elks lodge to talk to some people who really know this stuff (we still have members who moved out here in the 50's, I love to hear them talk about the old days).
A very special happy birthday to my sister Lynn. I've always felt a bit sorry for her when it happens on Thanksgiving.
To the rest of you... Happy Thanksgiving.
I am so out of it...
Chuqi points out this very funny iPod spoof of the Balmer silliness.
In Too Quick to Copyright (pdf), Jason Mazzone of Brooklyn Law School writes about the responsibility corporations have when they make claims of ownership and the current overly confusing licensing issues.
Corporations are responsible if Americans, now equipped with all the tools of self-publishing, do not abide by copyright laws. After decades of claiming they own virtually everything in print, commercial publishers have made abiding by copyright law seem optional. If corporations with their teams of lawyers cannot distinguish between what is protected and what is free for public use, we can hardly expect teen-agers with their laptops to play by the rules.
It's short and well worth the read. [via IP]
This has been a really busy couple of weeks but I've been having fun too. My aunts were in SoCal for their yearly trip on Thursday, so I made the (now annual) drive down to Orange County to join them for dinner. I hate the traffic going down there (and back) but it's well worth the hassle. I enjoy these dinners greatly, it's just a blast.
Sarah had pointed out the weblog during the fires so they've been reading, which is pretty neat. I also got some negative feedback... it seems that I am really bad about posting family pictures and little details. Jean and Carol get lots and lots of pictures from others; why of all people am I so bad at this? I once tried to enlist kids in the publishing process and that went nowhere, we'll have to work on it.
We ate a great meal and talked about all kinds of things including their ongoing interest in the kids. Local family is the one big thing that I miss from time to time; being independent has its costs. I didn't wind up leaving their hotel room until shortly past 1 on Friday morning (sorry ladies!) after showing them some slides from our trips to San Francisco.
We also discussed more Jersey'ese after talking about my post from last week. Carol had a new story about a southern couple they had met (I can't remember where) who just loved the way people from Jersey speak, their version:
Jeet? No, Jou?
My version (a bit more Philly oriented):
Squeet?
Squout n' eat...
Kay, meecha ov'r dare, when jouz gonago?
It was a wonderful visit and we'll have to see about setting something up for the spring.
Note : I don't know exactly why I've recently become so enamored of discussing the funny way people from New Jersey speak, but I have. We'll just have to see how long the affliction lasts.
Although the Packers are struggling a bit this year, we (SoCal, where some TV executives seem to think the Raiders are still located) get to see them again in what shapes up to be a game with a lot of scoring.
Even if one team or the other goes up by a couple touchdowns it won't be over. Neither defense has been good at holding a lead. I missed last weeks game against Tampa so this'll have to make up for it and if the Pack is to make the playoffs, they need to start winning at home. Here's hoping!
Tom asked a great question: When is a boycott considered intimidation?
Many people who have attended to some business near (or in) a supermarket (in SoCal) in the last month or so can answer that. I've seen (and heard) complaints about the protests from all kinds of people, including those you'd expect embrace this sort of protest. When the protesters start yelling at someone (you, or someone near you) with no provocation and the mood turns ugly, that's moving towards "intimidation and harassment".
I have some personal experience with this, specific to pro-life protesters. For more than a year (most of 1984, early 1985), we lived in a small apartment complex across the street from a strip mall in Norfolk, VA that contained a NCNB branch (I think that was the name, it would now be BofA), an insurance company, an abortion clinic and a couple other small businesses. Every weekend the local chapter of Right to Life would be out and five to fifteen people would be working the corner of Bison and Little Creek. They had a message and they were relentless in delivering it. They made some noise and were pretty visible, but no one had become a problem. Over time, these folks become more and more bold, to the point where they started heckling people who were doing nothing more than using the shopping center. It became harassment just to use the ATM at the bank on the wrong day. A group of people once followed us into the parking area of our apartment building on the other side of Bison (I guess we lived too close). This was the same clinic that John Salvi shot up ten years later.
So that's my little story, now the disclaimer. I'm pro-choice. Partly because I'm not a woman and it feels wrong for me to make choices for others that have no direct affect on me (pregnancy is not a gender neutral question). The other part is fiscal, I'm not interested in funding an unwanted child if I can avoid it. That may seem cold to some, but I've been comfortable with that view of things since I was sixteen (Jan '75 was the timeframe, Saturday Night Live was the talk of the hallways and I'd finally figured out a big part of a very confusing adolescent picture by observing others).
Getting back to the original question....
Was there intimidation in the case in Austin? That's hard to say. The calls to a subcontractor warning him not to participate sound a bit like it (more so if they come from other parts of the country). Having churches circulate a list of companies that do work on the clinic is an interesting (and intimidating perhaps) tactic. There wasn't anything physical, but when churches become political things get messy quickly (and yes, we also scold churches when they don't).
Austin is a pretty youthful city, so I'd guess these kinds of services are needed more frequently than in other parts of Texas. One thing that always seems to get left out of these articles is a discussion of other choices available in the area. These types of clinics are often a good choice for certain kinds of testing (pregnancy, STDs and AIDS as examples), especially for people without insurance (mostly young singles and families) and those who don't want their doctors to know (like young almost families who skipped the vows part, including a lot of people on the fringes of the military).
Jonathan and I went to see the DeCesare-Francis Piano Duo perform Recital Under Construction at the Thousand Oaks Civic Center this evening.
The Duo is composed of local music professors Mona Wu DeCesare and Edward A. Francis. Piano Education has interviews with both: DeCesare and Francis.
The evening was well done, with classical before intermission and some sort of swing and classical variation afterward where they let their hair down and played around a bit. The highlight of the evening for me (and perhaps for Jon... he went to bed when we got home) was their rendition of 'Paramell V' by Stephen Montague (more here). Wow! I really want to hear this again and again. I'd heard everything else they played but was unprepared for this. A recital review from down under describes it this way for a duo called 2:10 ...
I liked, too, the duo's response to Stephen Montague's Paramell V, a little work that requires busy fingers, staying power and the ability to build up to massive climaxes.
He's not kidding. This thing really crashes on you. It's very modern, it has some odd tonal qualities including some harshness and I think I really, really like it.
DeCesare and Francis play it as a tribute to September 11 and ask that no one clap when the piece is finished. Jon's hands were hanging in the air when I pushed them back into his lap and whispered enough so he knew we weren't doing that (he was bit miffed because he really liked it, I explained things during intermission).
Unfortunately, the DeCesare-Francis CD, Piano Music for Four Hands doesn't include it.
Amazon has a Montague chamber music CD that I might take a gamble on, even though that's not usually my thing. The sample for 'Behold A Pale Horse' was interesting!
A great night of music and I have learned something new that I need to dive into.
I sure hope The Cat in the Hat (the movie) is good, without diverting too much from the original. Jonathan is really enjoying reading the book right now (in typical fashion, he reads it over and over) and I'm sure he's going to want to see the movie.
While looking around for information about Dr. Seuss I stumbled across What if Dr. Seuss Wrote Technical Manuals? which is a more complete version of the one that floated around in email several years back. What a clever little hack. You can find more of these over on the Dr. Seuss Parody Page.
I was a huge fan of the HP16C but it is now long dead and I've decided that I must have some sort of replacement. It might as well run on my desktop, like everything else. For some time after it died I used anything that was available, including MacsBug (yep... that's a bit weird but it mostly works). I eventually settled on Bitwise by Eric V. Curtis. If you've never seen it (and have a Mac with Classic installed) you should take a look... I always liked the nibble/byte marks and the classic gate operations. I ended up with version 1.4 while the last version made available was 1.8.1 (I wish I knew how that happened). I'm tired of Classic and I need something native (because I can't fall back to MacsBug?) so I need to find something new.
Here are a couple good jumping off points if you too are searching... RPN/RPL Calculator implementations, a list of and RPN/RPL Implementations. Both are FAQs which get updated from time to time.
The most popular item is an HP16C simulation in Visual Basic (did I read that right?) and another for the Palm. These won't work. That led to a swing based HP16C clone which is both interesting and frustrating (I want a local application!)
Moving on we find Emu48 for Mac OS X, a free emulator for modern HP calculators. I played around with a few of these and I'm lost. I assume that after the factory reset I'm stuck in some non calculator mode that I need to get out of. It's an interesting concept, but doesn't work for me (yet). One thing worth noting, they use MovableType for the parts of project pages.
From there I wandered over to MPCalc, a multi-precision RPN scientific calculator. It uses the C++ NTL Library, a library for big numbers (and a few other big number concepts). I also found RPN Calculator, another calculator which uses the NTL Library. I'm going to hang onto this one, even though it's not really what I want (I need bit twiddling).
Eventually via VersionTracker, I wandered over to PCalc (which I already had). For now, that also seems to be where I'm going to stay. The binary and hex support is good, even in RPN mode. We need 64 bit support... it sounds like I need to let James know.
This is what happens when one combines money and time with some software called WidevieW and Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The author of WidevieW also has a pretty impressive setup.
I was going back through some posts from last year (note to self... I need to move this stuff) looking for something about our trip to Santa Barbara (which I didn't write about) when I found this...
The evolution of a family. And they're at it again this year. I wish we'd done something like this way back when, it's a wonderful idea.
There were a couple important Panther related items from last week that I wanted to preserve before moving on...
Jon Gruber takes on the Panther text rendering changes. My general impression over the last 17 years is that Helvetica looks pretty crummy everywhere but on paper but some people seem to be able to read it on screen. Whatever. If Panther continues the trend of addressing this, that's terrific. The screen shots are worth a look.
The other item was John Siracusa's recent Panther review over at Ars Technica. One of these days he's going to decide he's had enough and pass things along to someone else, but right now he's still doing MacOS X release reviews and they are always worth reading.
And if you missed it earlier, check Mark Pilgrim's What’s new in Panther.
Sarah and I are back from a small getaway weekend. We left after the football game on Friday for Santa Barbara and got back about an hour ago.
Our thanks to Adam and Stephen, who filled in admirably with all the last minute requests.
In The Clinton Formula, Michael Tomasky peppers former President Clinton with questions about the dems chances of winning back the White House in 2004. [via 0xDECAFBAD]
Mr. Clinton certainly sees many things that are wrong. I also think he may tend to oversimplify for convenience...
BC : And if you look at these tax cuts, they got a good return for their investment. I mean, people say, "Gosh, how did Bush raise $200 million, $300 million?" I say it's peanuts compared to the tax cuts he gave. It's not even a tithe, you know? Not even 1 percent!
It sounds nice. Certainly much of the Bush money does come from the very wealthy, but it also comes from all sorts of other places so this kind of statement is likely to end up causing a ruckus.
It was an interesting interview. I'd love to see one with George H. Bush, if someone would let him out of the dungeon.
He and Jimmy Carter were born within a few months of one another (both are 79 and seem quite healthy). We still see and hear from Carter quite often... he has an influence that the senior Bush doesn't because he's out in the public eye. Gerald Ford is 90, Ronald Reagan nearly 93. George the elder is all that's left if we want a "been there, done that, lived to tell about it" perspective from the conservative side (I believe we need it). The cloak and dagger sealing of Reagan's records just before they would have been opened to everyone makes it all but impossible for the senior Bush to take a public stand.
On the other hand, Clinton lived much of his administration (good and bad) in public view, because someone was always testifying somewhere. He doesn't have anything else to hide and he's going to be out there giving his spin on things for a long time to come (he and George W. are both 57).
Jeff was kind enough to be my guinea pig whilst we whacked away at CSS. It works. Mostly.
Years ago I learned that I pronounce water with a distinct splinter factor (wood-or). My aunts were once detected as residents (former by then) of New Jersey by a woman in Hawaii because of their pronunciation, at which point they discovered a really weird coincidence, she was my girlfriend from the eighth grade. This word has been a source of much delight for my children over the years.
It was only in the last couple years that I learned to hear how I mangle the days of the week. Mondee, Tuesdee, Wednesdee... you get the picture. Where's the ay? I guess New Jersey ate it... That's how I grew up saying the dees of the week. More dinner table fun!
Kiyo stopped by to comment on my current layout mess so I followed it back... He knows more about English than I ever will (in many respects) and he just had the perfect subject to talk about: Feb-You-Ary?, the month with no 'r'. I know that it would take a lot of looking to find the 'r' in my February.
Have I mentioned how much of a pain I think CSS is lately?
I found out today that the links column is broken in Safari 1.1 (and probably a lot of other browsers). Outside of that everything else looks pretty good, so it could be worse.
More to do...
On a bright, clear and sunny Saturday, twenty years ago today my girl said "I do" at Sacred Heart Cathedral in downtown Raleigh, NC.
Thank you Sarah for these past twenty years and all they mean to me.
A list of things that need doing...
Such a disappointment!
The Favre head shake after the prevent defense had stopped nothing was denial. Our collective denial. The fluttering airball with the game on the line? That was our guy, such as he is.
Football, especially when played under adverse conditions, is very much a lesson in humanity and humility.
Shoulda, coulda, woulda... we lost.
C-SPAN is a pain (the video can be found) but American Presidents: Life Portraits (by the C-SPAN folks) is awful.
I don't want to watch, view or review; no tour either. Unfortunately, I want to read (but right now I don't care to remember "Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?" and he probably doesn't care either). What I need is a simple list of presidents and basic bios. That's it. The data is there somewhere, but that basic view doesn't exist.
So I ended up over at Groliers.
When I'm having trouble finding the right way to search for something, I occasionally go out to the old encyclopedia in the family room and thumb around in the reference volume. The encyclopedia folks have been working this multiple indexing game for a long time — they may not have figured out an optimal new media organization, but they get accessibility for old media very well.
The Sports Blog is rather interesting, they've taken a sort of mob blog type approach to sports. As it grows, it might wind up being quite something. Their NFL page is still somewhat sparse, but one of the most prolific posters appears to be a Packer fan (so I had to point it out).
I'm putting this here mostly so that I loop back at some point and see how things are progressing.
TransparentSmoke has an obsession with Coke (the company and the drink) and digital photo retouching. This article points to a very revealing collection of work by Greg Apodaca... Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio.
The AltaVista spider "Scooter" is fascinating to watch as it wanders around in real time (which is akin to super slow motion). I've been watching several others too, but mostly they have a more predictable behavior.
The Web Robots Pages has a listing for Scooter, but it's been a long while since it was last updated. Is there a current list (or weblog) where someone gathers useful information about spiders?
I need to build something to deal with tracking them in a different way (it'll be useful for other things as well) and I'm not sure where the conversation went. Mostly, I was looking for more up to date, identification heuristics (everything else is code). I'd never really wanted that particular piece of information before now.
We received an interesting piece of mail yesterday about the Ski Dazzle show (aka The Los Angeles Ski Show & Snowboard Expo) held at the LA Convention Center each fall.
They've got a picture of Jonathan from last year at their ski school (two thumbs up!) that they used in the mail catalog and in two places on the web site promoting the event. He doesn't really remember doing the two thumbs up routine, but I've seen him do it so many times for other things that it didn't surprise me (I laughed when I saw it).
Sarah did sign some sort of release form (I wasn't there), but I was somewhat surprised that they didn't contact people for final approval before using the photos. I guess I'm naive about how that process normally works.
We'll need to use another route to learn whether another picture used in the catalog (but not online for some reason) is a youngster we know through American Coaster Enthusiasts. Jon was hounding me this morning to "Find the picture Dad!" (referring to the one he thinks is of his friend). After looking through all of them twice, I concluded that it wasn't there and he was disappointed.
Now, funny enough, we just need to actually let him learn how to ski sometime. Since neither Sarah or I do it (I used to ski, but I've had enough broken bones for this lifetime) that might take a while. It's only been a couple years since his much older siblings finally got to go.
L.A. Observed points to a New Yorker article about the Iranian community in and around La La Land by Tara Bahrampour. I knew in a vague fashion that there are a lot of Iranian immigrants out here, but I had no idea that LA was the place to be.
It is not surprising that a nondescript street could be so quickly transformed into a thriving immigrant hub; what is unusual is this one's location, sandwiched between Beverly Hills and Brentwood, in one of the world's most exclusive swaths of real estate. Here and in surrounding neighborhoods, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf cafes overflow with dark-haired men and women sipping Darjeeling and speaking the Farsi-English hybrid Finglish.
There is an interesting first versus second generation conflict going on here, the whole romantic view of a place that their parents fled in fear. I wonder if there are echos of this in the large eastern Europe and Russian immigrant populations here in SoCal?
The short story: Belkin has set up one of their wireless router products to redirect arbitrary HTTP requests to an advertisement for a complimentary parental control service.
Justin Mason has a bunch of links.
The funniest reaction I've read was this one on Slashdot:
One day, Belkin's router project manager Eric Deming was sitting around thinking, "How can we get $5,000,000 worth of bad publicity for free, and sink the company in an afternoon?"
Then he had an idea: "That's it! We'll abuse the trust of our customers, and get a story on Slashdot!
Having had a less than wonderful experience with a Belkin KVM this past summer, it's very unlikely that I'm going to be interested in anything Belkin has to sell for a long time to come.
Steven Frank wrote up a humorous recent encounter with an old computer (and its old data) called Bit Rot.
It's a real problem for people who don't have his resourcefulness and skill.
One of these days I am going to have to do something with the roughly forty (or so) 44M SyQuest carts sitting in the closet. And I need to finish converting some of the 20 M of data I've been carting around from my days using an Apple IIgs (I occasionally fire up Bernie ][ the Rescue to poke around).
I noticed on L.A. Observed that KNX has dropped the drama hour. There is also followup article.
That's too bad. I haven't listened to the drama hour lately, but it was always cyclic. KNX explains the decision and offers some sort of subscription service.
What is this license plate trying to say (seen on highway 118 near San Fernando):
First thing to pop into my mind? Spammer! Maybe... but who knows?
Safari 1.0 has the same stupid problem as IE for Mac. Popups that you massage often become your new default window size (it doesn't allow me to set a size somewhere and forget about it like OmniWeb). After having to adjust the size of a new window for the last time, I adapted an old script for IE that fixes things as I want them. Using LaunchBar, I don't have to dedicate a hotkey (I use DragThing for that) and the sequence is straight forward, but geeky (cmd-space, f [highlights Fix Safari], return, escape).
Anyway, someone saw this on my system today, and wanted it. So I pass it along...
set windowWidth to 960
set windowHeight to 700
tell application "Safari"
-- returned as a list of numbers { left, top, right, bottom }
set winRect to get bounds of window 1
set theLeft to item 1 of winRect
set theTop to item 2 of winRect
set bounds of window 1 to { theLeft,
theTop,
theLeft + windowWidth,
theTop + windowHeight }
end tell
Adjust windowWidth and windowHeight to fit.
There are some interesting developments regarding Warren Buffett's comments during Arnold's campaign. I was actually a bit surprised to see Dan Gillmor interested in the idea.
What I believed Mr. Buffett was alluding to (and still believe after reading the new documents) is that property taxes based on frozen asset values cause other serious issues for the state. In any slump of housing sales and/or prices, state revenues begin to fall behind and we have three choices. Cut back on spending, raise personal income taxes or raise taxes on someone else. We usually end up picking on someone else, so we add some more levies on businesses.
If we had a more adaptive and flexible system to tax citizens for their property based on what they own and what it's worth, we might have a shot at using our resources a bit more wisely. If we shared our tax burden more equitably, we might also be less likely to spend it so recklessly.
As one rather angry comment mentioned, one reason Prop 13 exists is because the elderly were being taxed out of their homes (and the younger people were afraid of that happening to them). That's a reasonable fear. But at some point we need to consider the fact that our crazy system has made it very difficult for our next generation to own homes. Blue collar ownership of single, unattached homes is a thing of the past.
Do we care? Should we?
If you have plans to move to the south, Mike has created this convenient list of things northerners should know.
The first Southern expression to creep into a transplanted Northerners vocabulary is the adjective Big ol, as in Big ol truck or big ol boy. Eighty-five percent begin their new Southern influenced dialect with this expression. One hundred percent are in denial about it
First Chuq pointed to a story about some young men who decided to drive around a geyser in Yellowstone National Park.
Then, down in the comments we find a pointer to story about a Japanese tourist that decided to carve his name into a statue on Easter Island.
Finally, Ross Karcher picks up a thread that's wandering around in Fox Sues Self which ultimately winds up on ICV2.com.
Mark is looking for a new camera (and camcorder) and got a lot of feedback. I'm ready for a new camera too. Every time I turn around, someone is borrowing the A20 we bought a couple years ago.
Lots of good comments about the A70, which I've been thinking about...
Final score, Moorpark 49, TOHS 28. The game was played closer than the final score, but the Lancers made a few critical mistakes and the Musketeers took advantage... such is football.
One thing seems certain. Jack Boger should have a fine senior year (he's having a nice year now). If Jack gets a chance to kick it up into high gear as he hits space... look out, he's gone. Hopefully the Lancers can find some time to get more experience for the underclassmen on the offensive line.
Jessie Border is leading an undersized defensive group that is making some terrific plays around the line of scrimmage. But once a play gets loose more than 5 yards down field, all bets are off. The defensive backs haven't learned that they have the right to move to the ball once it crosses the line... using any means available. Block, stop and go, spins, jukes; all the tools are available to them and the offense has to contain itself.
Oh well, the Lancers are a young team and next year could be a very good one.
In Frequent fires disrupt Southern California's ecosystem John Krist (of the Star) answers a number of the questions I had the other day about chaparral.
The Sacramento Bee has an interesting story about John Lucas who fought to save the home built by his father-in-law (Charles Wysocki) in Cedar Glen. [via California Insider]
Tom has posted a nice review of Willy Wonka that I'd like to chime in on. Willy Wonka is a terrific movie for youngsters. I loved it as a child and our youngest has watched it dozens of times since we bought it last year. I'm old enough that I actually watched the movie in a theater when it came out.
We also bought Davey and Goliath - Vol 1 at the same time. Jonathan likes it, but it doesn't get watched nearly as often. At this point, it mostly only happens when I suggest it (I still like watching it too).
I didn't see Finding Nemo when it was in the theaters, but Jon and Sarah did and the reviews make it sound like another children's classic.
If you can think of something else, please feel free to chime in!