Oh, the Horror

Hopkins horror: 90-year-old was slain

The woman was found dead in her apartment Monday, the city's first murder case in nine years. Neighbors and police want answers.

I read this article yesterday morning. It immediately pissed me off, but I thought I'd give myself some time before talking about it. It's still pissing me off.

Meanwhile, concerned neighbors at the normally safe and quiet Hopkins Plaza Apartments flocked Tuesday evening to City Hall in search of answers from police.

Those in the well-kept apartment complex, where wind chimes and flowerpots adorn patios, said the woman...

I'm so tired of the assumption that living in the suburbs, in a "nice" place, can (and should) keep you safe. I've lived in the hood for more than fifteen years now. The closest I've ever been to a murder was when I was a kid living in deep, prosperous exurbia. One of the neighbors whose yard abutted ours was shot by her husband.

No one can promise you safety in the 'burbs. That won't stop them from trying, but you've got no business listening. If you pay any attention at all to who dies violently, you'll know that if it happens to you, it'll be someone you know. If you live in the 'burbs, that just means it'll be someone from the 'burbs.

Random violence does happen sometimes, but it's not particularly more likely to be a stray shot in the city than it is to be freeway congestion road rage or a drunken hunter.

So Hopkins has had it's first murder in a while. Yes, that's news. That people in the area are shocked? That's just stupid. 'Cause you know, when it happens in the city, none of us less-than-nice people give a damn.

Classist jerks.

Da Widdle Snakey

Isn't it adorable? Just needs that pink little tongue sticking out to be irresistible.

Okay, I find them irresistible already. Every time we go to the pet store for cat stuff, I make my husband stop by the reptile cages so I can ooh and ah over the sweet little ball pythons. I can't have one while we still have cats (hopefully for a good, long while), but I can coo. (Yes, I can. You can't stop me.) They're at their cutest when curled into balls under their logs.


Last time we went to the pet store, however, they had sold their last ball python. We're about to go again, so I'm collecting the cute in an accessible place just in case.

If it's all getting to you and you think you might want a little ball of joy of your own (your own personal neck massager?), there are a few things to keep in mind, like the fact that this snake is an escape artist and benefits from quite a bit of handling. Here's some good background to help you decide whether you're going to be the next person to take a ball python from the store before I get a chance to talk baby talk at it.


The cute, in order: Ghost Ball Python and Spider Ball by Alex Butler, reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. gussy4 by quantumdell, reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

True Geek

Something seemed wrong.

We were at the Irish Well. The band was taking a break, but it was still loud. I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. "How many tons of steel in the station?"

He told me again.

"How long?"

I was skeptical.

"And how fast does it rotate?"

"One full rotation a day. Earth gravity. Earth day."

"That can't be right, can it?"

We looked at each other. I grabbed a napkin. He borrowed a pen from the waitress, explaining what we wanted it for. She said to let her know the answer.

I wrote down a formula. Looked at it funny. It didn't look right, and I didn't think it was just the Guinness. I closed my eyes and tried to see the page from my textbook. No luck.

The band was starting again when I tried to call my ex-boyfriend. If he was home, he'd look it up. He wasn't, but his new girlfriend wanted to know the answer too, once she could hear me over the music. She gave me the formula. I'd been close but not quite there. I promised we'd tell the ex what we found the next time we saw him.

I converted all the numbers to reasonable units and did the math. Really? I checked my work. Oops. One error here, one there. I was drinking Guinness, after all. But they cancelled each other out. The answer was still the same.

We looked at each other again and laughed. "You're not getting me on that space station."

"Half-millimeter steel hull? Huh-uh. Me neither."

Then we went back to the band and the Guinness.

And if that's not geeky enough for you, I can remember the results of the calculation, but I'm really not sure which fictional space station we were talking about.

Foreign Contamination 100%

Pixar can stop now. They've done everything they needed to do.

Twenty-two years ago, they released Luxo Jr. and set the standard for animating the inanimate. Luxo Jr. is the desk lamp in Pixar's logo. It's a great logo, but in the original animation, he's even more playful, squirmier and demonstrably young. Sure, he's beautifully rendered, but that's almost beside the point. It's all about his personality.

Wall-E is the culmination of what Pixar started with Luxo. The robots in this movie, almost entirely without speech and using just their own inflexible mechanical parts (no bumper mouths and headlight eyes), are so personable that even Greg might be enchanted by them. (Or terrified. I'm not making bets either way.) There are humans here, but they're almost reduced to a running joke.

It isn't just the animation that makes this a great film, either. The voicework is impressive, especially considering limitations of vocabulary. There's none of the all-too-typical basing characters on the stars who voice them. One of the voices is even provided by Macintalk, which I didn't realize until the credits.

There are a couple of Macintosh moments that made me giggle but could annoy others. The story is going to have some people screaming that it's too political, but it's well within the normal bounds of science fiction extrapolation. For a film about robots, it's very human positive. The script is far more mature than those for the Toy Story movies or for Finding Nemo. It gets harder to rely on pop culture and throwaway lines when you have so little dialog. As far as I'm concerned, that's a very good thing. I haven't a clue whether kids are going to like the film, but it's perfect for adults.

And for us old Pixar fans. I'll be getting this one on BluRay. While I'm at it, I think I'll pick up that disk of Pixar shorts I saw recently. Now I remember why I loved them so much.

A Big Boom, Then Silence

I know lots people who work at the U of M, not just the ones who work with my husband. Tuesday morning, one of them sends me an e-mail saying, "Wow, did you hear about the fire in WBOB?" This is the West Bank Office Building, the building in which my husband works. Everyone knows my husband works there, since his location next to the bridge means we give details to people who want a better picture of how the rebuilding is going.

I haven't heard any such thing, and I immediately hit the local news sites. Nothing. Front page at the U. Nothing. Google's local feed. Nothing. I shoot an email back asking for details. I haven't heard from anyone who works in the building, which is a good sign, right? Nobody expects me to have heard anything they need to reassure me about. Or so I'm hoping. Either way, if they have work to do, I don't want to interrupt.

I try to do a little work myself, but between sending and checking email and the news, not much is getting accomplished. Apparently the person who sent me the original email has abandoned their computer--or they want me to suffer, but I'm trying to be generous, knowing I'm a wee bit overwrought. Everyone else has evaporated. Still nothing.

Finally, I give in and call my husband. "So, what's this about a fire at WBOB?"

It turns out fireball is more accurate. A transformer outside the building took itself out most spectacularly. Everybody is fine, and he's working from a remote location to keep the most essential systems up. He's busy. Has to go.

Okay. That's not too bad. They have contingency plans for just this sort of thing. I go back to work. Then, finally, people start forwarding me the information I'd been asking for--emails sent to U students and staff.

From 11:30 a.m.: "At approximately 11:00 a.m. today (July 1), a power line was accidentally cut in the construction zone outside the West Bank Office Building (WBOB), causing a fire. By noon today, the Office of Information Technology will be shutting down the servers in the WBOB location to prevent damage...Access to e-mail is not affected."

From 12:30 p.m. "Due to a power outage at the West Bank Office Building several services have been shut down by OIT. Our connections to the internet, e-mail and calendar systems remains functional."

By 2:30 p.m. we find out that "Some E-Mail users" are affected. I'm guessing the users already knew that and that the message wasn't going to do them much good. The best part of this message, though, is "The new Enterprise Financial System was not affected by the power
outage and was not the cause."

Uh, duh. EFS is a PeopleSoft app. That may make it evil (just sayin', PeopleSoft), but it's not going to give it the power to take out a transformer. Hmm. Sounds like there's some pretty heavy pressure from above to make sure absolutely nothing goes the littlest bit wrong with the EFS implementation, doesn't it?

But I'm all set now, I can kick back and relax and wait for details from my husband. Who doesn't call. Poor thing, I think, I hope he doesn't have to work so late he can't make it to class. Of course, what I don't know is that he got off work early and fell asleep under a tree on campus while listening to his Science Friday podcast. I love him dearly, but....

I found all that out the next morning, when I finally saw him, along with a bunch of details that don't belong in a public blog post. I promise: it's boring technical stuff about how the U's systems work together. I can't share, but unless you're a complete geek, you're not missing much. Instead, I'll leave you a bit from another email I got later on Wednesday, this time from someone who does work in WBOB.

"See that thing in the photo? That's the transformer outside my building. It fucking exploded yesterday, caught fire. This was some truly biblical shit - in my office, the ground done _quaketh_. "


"The fire looks small, doesn't it? That's because the top piece of the transformer got bent upwards by about 45 degrees in the explosion, sort of hiding some of the flames. When I made it down to ground level, and walked by the transformer, the flames were about 12 to 18 inches high. The transformer is oil-cooled, so it had some fuel to burn."

It does look tiny, doesn't it? Awfully small for such a big boom.

Rockets' Red Glare

As unlikely as it sounds, I'm one of those people who cries at the "Star Spangled Banner." I can't tell you whether I do it for the same reasons as anyone else, because I don't know anyone else who does it. I can tell you that the reasons have changed somewhat over the last few years.

I've always, as long as I've understood the words, empathized with the soldiers who dreaded the rockets but looked to them to know the flag they fought for still survived. How desperate does their need to know have to be to make it worth looking up instead of covering their heads? How much of a relief must dawn be, and how great their fear of bad news that they have to ask instead of looking for themselves?

I can't answer those questions, but even asking them makes me cry.

In recent years, though, my attention has been a bit distracted by the rockets--the trials and dangers that briefly illuminate our long night. I've been watching them fly overhead, hearing them explode all too nearby. I've been peering through the darkness to see what they can tell me about the state of our flag. I haven't seen much that I can be sure of, but I've made myself look.

But now, with a light on the horizon, I find myself understanding the soldiers better than ever. There should be a flag there, battered though it may be. Not everyone has put their heads down. Many kept fighting despite the rockets. When the sun finally rises, we should see the flag.

Will we? And how many of us will even be able to look?

Why Am I Here?

Yesterday at work, despite my best efforts to check off the 1,001 tiny things on my to do list and to clean out my inbox so I can figure out whether there's anything that never made it onto the list, I spent much of my time on two Projects That Will Not Die. Just when I think about catching up, just when I dream of breathing space, up pops one or the other of these. Yesterday, both.

These were supposed to be finished months ago. In fact, they've been finished several times, so when I see one again, it's like looking at a zombie. Now, I didn't sign up to work with zombies. Nobody said there'd be zombies. And I can't even take a shotgun to these zombies. No, I have to treat them just like any regular project.

So it's time for a deep breath and to remind myself why I'm in this job in the first place.

1. Variety. I can't see it when I'm staring at a zombie, but very few people have jobs with as much variety as mine. I have my own research project, my own administrative project. I crunch numbers, write client materials, edit client materials. I'm an IT backup, on a data security team, and a "guru" for most of the applications we use locally. That can be a lot of interruptions, but it doesn't get stale.
2. Impact. I make a difference at work. My administration work is a chance to smooth the path for people going through tough times. My research project puts me in communication with decision-makers in the company and was recently disseminated outside as well. I can make someone's day a little easier by helping make their computers do what they've been trying to do. What I do matters.
3. Challenge. Most of the projects I get come as goals. "The client wants to do this." or "The client wants to know this." Sure, we repeat some work, and I'm not on my own to figure out how to get it done, but I get to do it because the client couldn't do it themselves.
4. People. Since this is the kind of work we do, and since we do it successfully, you know I have to work with a pretty sharp bunch. What you don't know is that they're also hired for their people skills. Friendly, funny, smart, minimal gossip, no backstabbing--what more could I ask for?
5. Authority. I don't have a boss. I don't have anyone reporting to me. I have things that have to get done, people who work with me on them, and a coach who is also a coworker. I have effectively sidestepped the chain of power, and the arrangement couldn't suit me better if it had been made for me.
6. Compensation. This isn't why I do anything, since I'm mostly internally motivated. However, it's hard to feel under-appreciated when someone apologizes to you over a pay increase that is above most companies' top of the merit range.

There are more reasons to stay and love my job, but those are the highlights. Besides, it's time to go see whether I can finally lay those zombies to rest.

Hah.

That's My Girl

My only niece is in New Zealand right now as part of an educational exchange program, and my mother just forwarded her first email. All the little things about it scream that she's family. There are the 3-1/2 memory cards she's already filled with pictures ("and one of those is a 2 gig"). There's the mention--without explanation--that her favorite part of her stop in Fiji appears to have been falling in the mud.

But it's the email itself that just about has me tearing up. Sure, the only capital letters are the ones in her name and the two words in all caps. Sure, the whole thing is punctuated with exclamation points, and there's not an apostrophe to be seen. But the girl is articulate! This fifteen-year-old who usually communicates in shrugs gives us the highlights of her trip to date, lists the cultural differences she's noticed so far, and tells us how homesickness is competing with having the time of her life, all in fewer words than I'm using in this post.

I always knew she was a great kid (even when she was kind of bratty). I just never knew she could write. [sniff] I'm so proud. :)

Steven Moffat

...is a god among writers.

"Nine and a Half Minutes" is the single most brilliant script ever. It's from Coupling. No, the good one, the British one (same scripts, better acting and directing). It is the exact same sequence of events involving six people seen from three different viewpoints. It's the only time I've seen the same joke mean two different things, with both being hysterically funny. And while it adds a bit to know the characters, it's still brilliant without that knowledge.

Go watch it. Go watch the whole series. You can finish reading this when you're done.

Moffat also wrote the best Doctor Who episodes ever. All six of them. "The Empty Child," "The Doctor Dances, " "The Girl in the Fireplace," "Blink, " "Silence in the Library," and "Forest of the Dead." They will creep you out. They will break your heart. They will end in a place you didn't expect but that is exactly where they must end. And you will never forget the characters they introduce.

Next season, Moffat takes over the whole show. I already knew that, of course. Cheers went up at WisCon when it was announced that it was now official. But having just seen the last two episodes he wrote makes it more immediate, so now I'm twitching for it to happen now, now, NOW. It won't, though. Not for another two years.

I'm so going to wear out my DVDs before that gets here.

Janie's Blogoversary

My friend JanieBelle is celebrating the completion of her second year of kick-butt blogging by posting the fourth and final chapter of "The Lilith Obsession." As you can probably tell from the title, this is not a tale for the kiddies. It's not even for all the adults. But if you want a good read, start here, and wish her a happy blogoversary if you're not completely speechless when you get to the end.

Doin It Rite

The New York Times has an article today about a government-sponsored conference that is exploring whether there could be a link between mitochondrial disorder, vaccines and autism. It was prompted by the Hannah Poling case. The conference is indeed news, but it's the kind of article that generally makes me wince even as I know I have to read it.

It's hard to find an article on vaccines today that doesn't think it has to "teach the controversy" on the subject of autism. Generally, local health officials and pediatricians are quoted on the importance and timing of vaccinations. Who is quoted depends on where the article is written. Then their statements are offset with scare tactics by one of the same half dozen doctors, attorneys, leaders of parents' groups, and former Playboy bunnies who are quoted in all of these articles.

Except this article.

Parents and a small group of doctors have offered a variety of scientific explanations in recent years to try to explain why they think vaccines may cause or contribute to autism. Among the first was that the measles vaccine caused a low-level measles infection that affected children’s brains. The science underlying that theory has since been discredited.

The next theory was that a mercury-containing vaccine preservative, thimerosal, poisoned their brains, causing autism. Multiple studies have failed to find any relationship between thimerosal exposure and autism, and nearly seven years after the preservative was removed from childhood vaccines, autism rates seem unaffected.

There's more, particularly on the new theory that mitochondrial disorder has something to do with any perceived link. A relative of Hannah Poling is quoted as looking for answers, a second case is listed as possibly being related, but reason and science and consensus always get the last word.

This is how to write about "controversial" science.

Never That Simple

I think it is very hard to be absolutely honest with oneself, especially if words come easily. Before I write, I have to ask myself what I think, and if the answer comes too quickly, I have to stop and ask again -- Now, what do I really think.

--Reeve Lindbergh in Forward From Here

Every once in a while, along comes a quote that makes me take a step back. Reading this was one of those "Hey, I'm not the only one" moments.

It's so easy to go arguing along, laying out the evidence, and find that I've followed a tidy path to a conclusion I don't believe. It's even tempting sometimes to leave that perfect little argument in place, to let it stand as a monument to its own rhetoric.

But no, I know better. I have to backtrack to figure out what I've misstated, and I always find it in the same place--the tidiness. It's always the same mistake: I've allowed myself to be seduced by the elegant simplicity of my own thesis as I build it.

It's funny, because simple is the one thing no one who knows me will buy. It's the argument I never get away with. I'm the queen of qualification. I get suspicious when I don't see contradictions. The one common theme of all of my stories, even the tiny 500-word ones, is "It's not that simple." So back I go, to rip my original thesis apart and expose its flaws on the way to saying whatever it is that I really do think.

I sometimes have to do the same with people, particularly people I don't know well. I'm so used to telling stories about the fictional people in my head that I can slot new people into their own little narratives if I'm not careful. Small behaviors mark larger character traits in fiction, why not in real people?

Because real people are masses of contradictions that would never be tolerated in even the most "literate" of fiction. And because if I tell myself simple stories about the real people in my life, I'm missing out on all the wonderful oddities that appealled to me in these people in the first place. Back I go again, to separate memories of what was actually said and done from the structure I've built up to store them in, to reject the story and embrace the messy reality.

It always hurts a little to let the story go, even though I'm much happier when I'm done. In the end, real people are so much more satisfying than imaginary ones.

But that doesn't mean I won't do it again. It's just so simple to do.

Lukewarm Coffee

Around here, we're big fans of Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series. One of the things we wanted to do last time we were in Edinburgh was have our picture taken at their offices on Calton Hill. We didn't make it, for reasons largely having to do with hurricanes, but that's another story.

Point being, not long after we were there, the Hot Coffee "scandal" broke.

You remember Hot Coffee? This was where some content not accessible from GTA: San Andreas in-game was still present on the discs that shipped. If third-party software was used on a PC, the dedicated player could see some low-polygon clothes-on nookie. Very shocking, particularly in a game where your city is being torn apart by gang wars and corrupt police.

In 2007, Take-Two Interactive, the distributor, announced that they would settle a pending lawsuit on the matter by providing up to $35 to anyone who "(a) bought a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas before July 20, 2005; (b) were offended and upset by the ability of consumers to modify and alter the game's content using the third-party Hot Coffee modification; (c ) would not have bought the game had they known that consumers could modify and alter the game's content using the third-party Hot Coffee modification; and (d) would have returned the game, upon learning the game could be modified and altered, if they thought this possible."

Nearly a year later, the results are in. There were 2,676 people who were willing to tell the world (for money) that they were shocked. That amounts to a settlement for Take-Two of about $300,000.

Nor is that all the good news:

Theodore Frank, director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that the lack of claimants proves that the case was meritless from the beginning. He submits that this lack of response proves that the plaintiffs claims were overblown, and as a consequence the suit may be deemed meritless and the lawyers who tried the case will not be able to collect their $1.3 million in legal fees they are demanding from Take-Two.

The lead lawyer who may not be getting paid "doesn’t understand why so many people don’t care." Dude. Maybe because the 21.5 million (mostly) adults who bought the M-rated game are more capable than you are of acting like grown ups--at least about a game.

Now how do we get them to do the same about everything else?

The Blizzard

I took a post off here a while back saying things about an ex-boyfriend that were true but neither widely known nor entertaining. This story, containing three ex-boyfriends, is something none of us are going to forget. You can tell me whether it's entertaining.

So there we were, coming back from Duluth in the middle of a November blizzard, me, the guy I'd been dating about two weeks (S) and my ex-roommate (V). We'd been to see a play on campus. Either V or S must have known someone in the production, but I was there to get out of town. The road trip up had settled my nerves nicely.

It started snowing as we came out of the theater, and once we were a few miles down the road, we were facing a whiteout. Being between exits, we had no good place to pull over where we wouldn't be a target for any cars silly enough to be on the road behind us. Along we crept as slowly as V's car would go.

We were pretty tense by the time we passed the white Saab barely visible on the side of the road, but the weather had nothing to do with why I flinched. Anyone who knew me when knows that D drove Saabs. D, of course, was the most recent ex-boyfriend, the one who'd been making out with V back at our apartment while I was in the hospital after my appendectomy, the one who shortly thereafter had refused to talk to me after deciding to break up, the one who had recently told me about how he was considering killing himself if we didn't get back together now that he'd slept with V. In short, D was the reason I needed some time where I couldn't be found.

But there, in the middle of this nightmare blizzard, was a white Saab with no one in the driver's seat. I didn't say anything to V or S. They hadn't seen the car. It couldn't be D. Right? We were three hours from home. D couldn't have known where I was going, and the car was pointed the wrong direction to be following us. We kept inching along.

Sometime before Hinkley, we were just driving through snow. No more blizzard. But by that time we were all shaky and up later than we'd intended to be. It was time to take advantage of Tobey's all-night breakfast.

We were laughing over cinnamon rolls and bad coffee, just settling down again, when a head popped around the corner and back. "C, get back here!" The restaurant wasn't crowded at whatever a.m., but I'd have yelled even if it had been.

The face reappeared. C held up one finger and disappeared again. Ex-boyfriend number two, and I was still only halfway home. I think I refrained from swearing while I waited.

C was a high school boyfriend, the one I lost to Catholic guilt. It wasn't that he felt guilty about anything we were doing. It was more that B decided it was time for him to stop seeing me and date only her, and she, being Catholic, was much better at using guilt than I was.

I'd salvaged some of my pride the summer after we graduated with a major make-out session, punctuated by "How could I have been so stupid" remarks from him. Of course, I was dating D at the time. What can I say? I was young and dumb. And in the last couple of years, D and C had become best buddies. D knew all about C, or thought he did, which hadn't given me much moral high ground in the recent dust-up over V.

Oh, and just to make the situation more complicated, V had also recently been after both S and C. I don't know whether she was boy crazy or just wanted what I'd had. I wasn't much impressed with V's big unobtainable crush, so it wasn't that we shared the same taste in guys.

Forget triangles. Mapping this situation required three dimensions.

Finally C came back. Yep, that had been D's impossible Saab. Yep, he'd been following me to Duluth when he'd had an accident in the blizzard. He'd bounced off a guard rail, spun across the median, and ended up on the opposite side of the oncoming lanes with a car that shouldn't move. C was on his way to pick him up.

Only C's car had just died on the freeway. C was at Tobey's to call someone to come get them both. He'd found us before he found the pay phone. But hey, since we were already here....

Yeah, we went. We persuaded C to have some food first, since he'd just had a nice snowy walk, but we went, back up into the heavier snow to the rest stop where D was waiting.

I chickened out on the way home. D was in the front seat with V, but I curled up in the back and pretended to sleep, head on C's shoulder. Somehow it seemed like the safest choice, better than snuggling up to S. I should have gone the other way, though.

I had a third ex-boyfriend by the next afternoon.

Happy Birthday

You ever meet someone who just, flat out, makes you think harder than you're used to? Someone who challenges your assumptions even when agreeing with you? Someone who bustles along at their own pace while expecting you to keep up, because you can?

That happened to me a few months ago. Well, not the meeting part, because I've never technically met him. But hey, out here in the blogosphere, what are technicalities? Still, perhaps I should say I was introduced to him.

I've been hanging out at ScienceBlogs for a while, mostly in the Brain and Behavior section because, well, once upon a time at least I was interested enough in the topic to get a degree in it. One day, I wandered onto ScienceBlogs front page, where recent articles are listed, and discovered one of the best toys ever. You want to put an ever-changing array of information on a bunch of interesting topics at my fingertips? I'm all over that. So I surfed.

After a while, I noticed that I kept ending up in the same place. Not all the time, but more than even Greg's insane number of blog posts would account for. Because, of course, the place I kept finding myself was Greg Laden's Blog. So I decided to hang out for a while to see what else was going on.

I'm glad I stayed. I've been having great fun. I've been trying to perfect the art of smacking the trolls without feeding them (I'll let you know if I ever get there). I've learned tons about evolution and ecosystems that I really need to know for the kind of science fiction I want to write and been entertained while doing it. I've been made to examine my own ideas by dealing with someone who's come to similar conclusions for different reasons. I've had arguments that have sharpened my wits, my research skills, my ideas, and my writing. I've "met" wonderfully unusual people I'd have been unlikely to come across on my own. I've even guest blogged, which was a hoot, despite a niggling feeling that the opportunity should have gone to a student.

And I have, for the first time, really talked with another blogger about blogging--about purpose and strategy, about etiquette and ethics, about voice and content. That means I've had to think about those things, because I hadn't before. So for those of you who hate my blog in it's current incarnation (which is really the same as the old one, just more so), you can lay part of the blame at Greg's feet. Of course, if you're reading this at all, there's a good chance it's because of the link love Greg's thrown my way--in which case, the blame is all his. :)

So for all that, Greg, and for saying things like, "things are more complex than that," on a regular basis, thank you. And may you have a very happy birthday, today and for years to come.