Gerald Ford isn't gonna be eaten by wolves!

RIP. I was fortunate enough to be born during his tenure in office and have my earliest TV memory be Ronald Reagan getting off a plane during his campaign, thereby avoiding any taint from association with or personal knowledge of the Nixon or Carter years.

Update: Passport provides the SNL Brokaw/Ford video.

God bless them, every one

Possibly my favorite store where I've never purchased anything is British Isle, a little shop in Rice Village full of British themed kitsch, novelties, and culinary abominations. I usually drop in once a year to sneer at the hideous dishware, smirk at the joke items, and enjoy a nice frisson of temptation mixed with horror over the selection of candies and sweets.

Today I discovered a line of action figures covering figures of varying cultural significance. BI had the British literary types, including Shakespeare, Dickens, and my favorites, Austen and Wilde. Sadly, I don't know any homophobic NASCAR worshipping acquaintances with a young son, so I had to put the latter two back. It's a pity, because I gather either of them could have totally kicked Jeff Gordon's ass.

I also almost bought a pair of Yorkie bars for my sisters ("It's not for girls!"), but I couldn't risk poisoning them. Not for $1.69 a piece, anyway. I should have pushed them on the English expat who was upset to learn from a similarly accented employee that his favorite chocolate snack wasn't in stock, probably due to international controls on biological weapons. Instead I walked over to the Disney store to see if a talking mouse would come in and try to buy a pack of cheese flavored cigarettes.

Related.

It's good to be Colbert

The Colbert Report is consistently the best written and funniest half hour on television, but my favorite bits are when he gets random celebrity guests to show up unexpectedly for brief, bizarre cameos. You can see a gleeful little boy expression leaking through the Colbert act and know he realizes he's got the best job on TV and he's going to milk it for all it's worth.

He blew up the dairy tonight. He'd been telegraphing all week a guitar shred off to settle his "feud" with the Decemberists. In addition to their guitarist as his opponent, he had on as his panel of judges the NYT rock critic, some music professor(?) and multiple Grammy nominee from NYU, and...Eliot Spitzer, who I guess has nothing better to do until he's sworn in as governor. To start off the contest - Henry Kissinger, who got three opportunities to solemnly say "it's time to rock" and similar nonsense.

But wait! Stephen injured his hand and can't play! Never mind, Peter Frampton just happened to be around to take over for him. And then the closed out their last Christmas show with Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, writer of the show's theme, making an appearance to play them to the credits.

I strongly suspect the corpse of Freddie Mercury was steadily approaching throughout, irresistibly summoned from his grave by this awesome collection of over the top camp. It reruns tomorrow at 7:30 Central and some times earlier in the morning I can't be bothered to look up.

Addendum: Oh, yes, there was also a warm up song by some guy from some band I'd never heard of singing a paean to Colbert's numerous perfect qualities.

My name's Stewart Ransom Miller, I'm a serial lady killer

John Scalzi on email signatures:

After a run of five good years, the current quote in my e-mail signature file ("You are a man too lazy to fail" -- Kristine Blauser Scalzi) is being honorably retired, to make way for the new signature quote, uttered last night, to me, by my daughter, Athena:

"Your insolent mind will never rule this world!"

Simple, strong, classic. And it makes a statement! Honestly, what more could you want out of a signature quote.

I have always been resistant to the cutesy use of other people's words as a signature, a particularly disgusting and prevalent feature of certain Usenet groups I frequented in the mid 90's.

But quotes you've personally earned from others are a different matter, and I proudly used the below from a University of Texas student who became somewhat displeased with my occasional observations on his school posted to various utexas.* groups.

Please Dylan, in the name of all that's holy, leave us be. If annoyance were a crime, you'd be Jeffrey Dahmer.

Reload

For those of you reading me through a Bloglines subscription, let it be known I'm going to be going through some old posts and adding labels to them in the next couple of weeks. This will cause ancient detritus to show up on your feed. I apologize in advance and will endeavor to update them in batches so that you get a couple of massive dumps rather than a steady trickle of the obsolete every day.

A Bloglines or other RSS feed service is recommended for those not currently using one who'd like to be informed when I start blogging again next year.

Over the cliff

Ten of the world's most dangerous "roads" (including some hiking trails), complete with pictures. Several of them are a pretty way to die.

I almost relented and told him that I wondered why you had four testicles and a marsupial pouch

I've been musing the past weeks over one of my life's great ambitions, the hope that I might some day encounter anyone in the science fiction/fantasy section of a bookstore, male or female, who is at least arguably more attractive than me. I know people with appropriate interests and physical attributes exist; I've met a couple. They're just very rare and unlikely to be encountered randomly.

The fairly obvious assumptions and observations lying behind this pessimism got Gene Expression's Razib in a lot of trouble for being surprised at bumping into one of my targets in another milieu.

And yet now I'm having a really weird moment, I'm at the local wine bar and a very attractive hostess is recommending books in the science fiction genre to another (far less attractive) hostess. So far I've heard Ender's Game, Hyperion and Snow Crash tossed off as appropriate for a "newbie." Is this the Twlight Zone??? Am I a freak to think this is freaky? I haven't had a sip of wine, so it isn't the alcohol.

Many borderline hysterical commentors find this more than a little "freaky." Beyond the standard-issue PC sentiment and garden variety stupidity animating most of his critics, they're all pretty guilty of a sad, blinkered parochialism of the type mentioned in this classic Onion article brought up by a Razib supporter.

Paulette Osley, 24, a moderately attractive fan of the Sci-Fi Channel series Farscape, had her self-image inflated to dangerous levels during the three-day ScaperCon 2004, according to Pepperdine University professor of psychology Wes Martin.

This is what professionals call Jacqueline Passey Syndrome. But men suffer from it just as much as women, just from the other side. They lose all ability to discriminate between Hot, Attractive, Doable, and My Silent Shame. As that rare fan of this shit who has also hung out with the cool kids and (briefly) dated improbably attractive women, I'm fascinated intrigued by this phenomenon but thanks to constant vigilance largely immune.

Alas, the various bloggers linking to Razib in disapproval...not so much.

One last datum: my daughter's bookshelf looks like a subset of what you'd find at Dreamhaven. If you want to argue that she ought to be homely, you'll find me looking pissed off at you.

I write sins not tragedies argue is not ought. I won't burden you with links to the other haters, most of whom use the same tedious arguments and post links to various pictures that usually arise to the high end of Doable but are mistaken for Hot.

I expect a similar phenomenon is going to be pervasive in the Army, but it will be hard to separate out from other variables, like local yokels raised with a pre-Army predilection for trailer trash. To make things worse, I understand there are significant numbers of D&D geeks enlisted in certain branches, like the Signal Corps. I'll have to be an especially sharp observer to tease the Army specific factor out of the data.

And that pharmacy tech I met Saturday was objectively Attractive, damnit. I gave her bonus points for the cute gap in her teeth, not the environment.

Update: Okay, this guy wins.

This just makes me despise geeks even more… Poor Razib at GNXP made the misogyny-exposing mistake of seeing an attractive woman talk about science fiction and then remarking on it in his weblog. Well, Razib, OR SHOULD I SAY HITLER, your sexist stereotyping has not gone unnoticed among your moral betters:

Why the heck would it be freaky that an attractive woman reads mainstream sci fi? You think attractiveness is inversely proportional to literacy?

Well there does seem to be a powerful inverse relationship between science fiction readers and literate, sane, and well-adjusted adults.

The whole thing is very odd. Every woman Scienceblogger who has a picture up is 'smokin hot'. Razib's corrolation has less factual support for it than suggesting that because the women Sciencebloggers are 'teh hot' most 'hot' women are interested in science…

Statistical theory posits that if the above writer were to type randomly for a hundred thousand years, he would eventually produce a gigantic sci fi space epic in which two female characters kiss as he tearfully masturbates.

And so on

We didn't start the fire

Pakistani weddings made more exciting by AK wielding guests and US dropped bombs have long been in dog bites man territory, so I was glad to see some wedding planners are finally breaking out of the old cliches.

Introduction interruptus

Putting aside my peeves with certain minor stylistic writing abominations, I was glad to see a complete and total fuck up in an AP story this morning. I always enjoy seeing poorly edited stories where some person is thrown in without any introduction. The AP's Kristie Rieken managed a double dose of "who?" en route to a complete train wreck of an article.

NEW YORK — Denver's J.R. Smith was still seething as he was escorted to the locker room seconds after he and nine other players were ejected for a brawl in a game against New York on Saturday night.

Kenyon Martin, who is injured and not playing, draped his arm around Smith and coaxed him to the locker room while Smith continued an obscenity-laded tirade. Smith appeared to have a raised red mark along the top of his cheek.

"They caught up. They know I live here," said Smith, who is from New Jersey.

WTF, over? We haven't even gotten to our first mystery person and we've tripped over a complete non sequitur. Who are they? Why do they want to attack him there in particular, let alone at all? Maybe the next paragraph will make more sense and use some sort of effective segue to a comprehensible point.

Spike Lee and his young daughter hurried away from their courtside seats, which were near where the brawl occurred, and briefly stopped in the hallway to watch a replay on the monitor. "They show it? Whoa," he said before leaving the arena.

Or not. But let's move on from people we know who are irrelevant to the story to people who were directly involved but we apparently don't need to know.

The Nuggets' players were the first ones removed from the court after a fight that began with Denver leading 119-100 when Collins grabbed Smith around the neck with both hands as Smith was going in for a breakaway layup. Smith got up and jawed with Collins, and New York's Nate Robinson jumped in to yell at Smith.

Collins? Collins who? This is the first time this name has popped up. I haven't followed the NBA since Jordan left - is this some sort of one name nom de ball ala Madonna that I'm displaying woeful ignorance of? But perhaps this is part of the new writing, and he'll be properly introduced in the next paragraph.

New York's Jared Jeffries ran from the baseline toward Anthony, but was tackled by a Denver player. The brawl stretched to the other end of the court toward the Nuggets' bench before coaches and security finally pulled Smith away and restored order.

Anthony was the first player in the hallway after the ejections and peeled off his jersey as he stood defiantly in the space between the doors leading to the two locker rooms.

"I ain't going nowhere," Anthony said before being nudged toward the locker room.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. Anthony who? I refuse to believe Anthony and Collins the NBA version of Siegfried and Roy and I'm just hopelessly ignorant. At least it doesn't look like I can blame this on weird local editing choices; a Canadian paper ran the same piece.

Geek show

The circus freak show is alive and well in cultural memory, but the geeks, those who were normal looking but performed bizarre and disgusting acts like biting the heads off live chickens, have sadly devolved into an unrelated tech subculture and Ozzie Osborne.

Or have they? I think I get much the same experience these days on my occasional forays into reading Making Light. I'm disgusted; I'm fascinated; I'm wondering if they're mentally ill, exceptionally eccentric, or just deliberately fucking with us normal people to make a quick buck keep up their hit count.

Watch in amazement as the deranged Jim Macdonald suggests new passport requirements for crossing the Canadian border are intended to prevent political refugees from Bush's future police state from escaping his madness!

It’s clear that the new passport requirements have nothing to do with security. This is all part of the same plan that is putting armed gunboats on the Great Lakes for the first time since the War of 1812.

Why would anyone want to do that? Let’s quote from Murphy’s Laws of Combat: “Make it tough for the enemy to get in and you can’t get out.”

That’s George Bush’s motive for wanting to build a Berlin Wall around America.

Gasp with horror as Teresa Nielsen-Hayden completely loses her grasp on reality and takes it one step further!

Since Jim has put up his post about passports on the Canadian border, I feel a little braver about this one. I wrote it at the beginning of September of this year, then talked myself into not posting it. I still wonder whether I’m being too easily spooked.

If I get any more froward with my paranoias, I’ll have to dig out that old unpublished post of mine speculating about whether Bush is planning to use nukes on Iran. —TNH

==============

05 September 2006: For some time now I’ve been twitchy about news stories that suggest the possibility that the U.S. government might try to limit the ability of its citizens to travel out of the country.

The latest one is a report from the London (Ontario) Free Press saying that U.S. Coast Guard ships operating in the Great Lakes have been equipped with machine guns that can fire 600 rounds a minute, and that they now want to test-fire them in 34 “safety zones."

[...]

No one’s going to invade the United States through the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. If they did, our primary line of defense wouldn’t be Coast Guard cutters with machine guns. And if terrorists were trying to slip into the U.S. from Canada, they wouldn’t do it in ways that warranted a 600-rounds-per-minute response from routine patrol boats.

All this firepower is going to be limited to the American side of the lakes. I can only think of one thing an armed Great Lakes Coast Guard would actually be good for: stopping boats leaving the American side for Canada.

As always with the geek show, the superficial viewer enjoys a twinge of horror, a dollop of superior contempt, and a dash of guilty excitement at witnessing this depraved act or seeming lunacy. The more sophisticated critic has to wonder, though: are they pulling our collective legs are they really this fucked up? Should we feel ashamed that we've been had, or pleased that such dangerous, sick, and twisted people have found semi-productive diversions that keep them off the streets?

I'm particularly conflicted over this, as I the one area of government action I feel is shamefully neglected is the forceable institutionalization of and care for crazy people wandering the streets. When I worked downtown I'd feel terrible when I saw a homeless woman sitting on the sidewalk and urinating in her clothes. Can I in good conscience give less concern to JM and T-NH? I suppose there's an argument that their quieter and relatively well functioning madness is a lesser moral problem and obligation, but I'm not convinced.

Surprising

But absolutely not fascinating. Despite the numerous spikes to my blood pressure inflicted by various blog authors overpraising the relatively mundane this week, Google blog search is only aware of 721,345 instances of this abomination in whatever time frame it tracks, a drop of nearly 12% from the last time I checked.

A 50% drop would be easily achieved if Prawsblawg would just lay off. Can't something you read ever be merely interesting? Noteworthy? Insightful? Persuasive? Informative? Congratulations are also due to our runner up, who I suspect an empirical investigation would show is batting a comparable percentage on fewer substantive posts.

And let us not neglect to award Kevin Drum a boobie prize for getting it half right.

FAMILY HISTORY UPDATE....In the 1950 National Debate Tournament, my father outscored future Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter 969-964. Who knew? He also outscored famed future public policy guru James Q. Wilson, though Wilson came back to kick some serious butt the next two years running.

Fascinating, no?

No.

Update: Will Baude misunderstands the nature of my criticism. Of course fascination is in the eye of the beholder. But if we are to use others praise as a guide to what we might ourselves enjoy, more discrimination would be helpful.

It may be nice to be someone who thinks every woman in the world is beautiful, but I wouldn't trust such a man to set me up on a blind date. I realize that if you're blogging about something at all you find some merit in it. Is it really necessary to add on effusive praise to everything so that people who might choose to more closely investigate some subset of your recommendations have no idea of the relative merits? If everything is fascinating nothing is.

The real mystery is what perverse masochism causes those who dislike this blog to keep reading it.

I suppose it's the same reason I continue to speak to my mother despite the fact she has one or two personally annoying habits. I don't demand perfection or even exceptionally high achievement; I just want to be able to identify it on what would think would be the rare instances it comes along.

The "fascination" disease is pervasive throughout the serious blogging community, but seems especially rampant among academic minded lawyers. I have several theories as to why this might be, but I'm not sufficiently fascinated by the question to investigate it in too much depth.

But I did think to rate some legal (and legalish) blogging sites by their use of "fascinating":

Prawfsblawg: 91!!!
Concurring Opinions: 39
Crescat Sententia: 32
Volokh Conspiracy: 31
Althouse: 29
Instapundit: 0
How Appealing: 0

Interestingly, I'm bored with and don't read Instapundit or How Appealing. Why? Because they're just-the-facts-ma'am fact regurgitation with little commentary. I'd rather have some color and editorializing added in. Puffing every concept, case, or paper as being equally "fascinating," however, rather defeats that purpose.

Update II: In a terrible apotheosis, Time magazine has decided that we're all fascinating.

Plastics

I apologize for inflicting two grotesque pictures on you in a row, but what the hell is going on with the soon to be former Miss America here? That power of that belt thing to horrify me and draw my eyes like a magnet just won't fade. Why is it there? What is made of? At first I thought it was aluminum(!), but the "plates" look too bendy. Did it come free with her implants?

Ichthy

In today's gross out news, apparently you can't survive being swallowed by a whale. But you can stick your arms down a dolphin's throat and scoop out its stomach if you're the tallest man in the world.

(Yes, pedants, I know.)

Update: And here we have a perfect combination of slimy creatures and human freaks of nature trying to be heroic.

Highway 6 runs both ways

I had a bunch of browser tabs open yesterday morning containing blogging topics, but my day trip to College Station to meet a couple of classmates who will be in OCS with me ended up taking eight hours, and I didn't feel much like writing when I finally got home.

I do want to belatedly mention that Foreign Policy magazine, a pretty poor publication in its category providing little value added over its competitors, sponsors the best international news and commentary blog I've found, Passport. The contributors include more than one who fall into the "credulous fool" category on certain issues beloved to the left, but it manages to unearth at least a couple of interesting or amusing gems on its worst day.

You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake

Tired of those sappy Briggs-Meyers tests that will make you feel good about the real you that no one understands? Then try The Brutally Honest Personality Test. I, alas, am a Loser.

Loser- INTP

Talked to another human being lately? I'm serious. You value knowledge above ALL else. You love new ideas, and become very excited over abstractions and theories. The fact that nobody else cares still hasn't become apparent to you...

Nerd's a great word to describe you, and I seriously couldn't care less about the different definitions of the word and why you're actually more of a geek than a nerd. Don't pretend you weren't thinking that. You want every single miniscule fact and theory to be presented correctly.

Critical? Sarcastic? Cynical? Pessimistic? Just a few words to describe you when you're at your very best...*cough* Sorry, I mean worst. Picking up the dudes or dudettes isn't something you find easy, but don't worry too much about it. You can blame it on your personality type now.

On top of all this, you're shy. Nice one, wench. No wonder you're on OKCupid!

Now, quickly go and delete everything about "theoretical questions" from your profile page. As long as nobody tries to start a conversation with you, just MAYBE you'll now have a chance of picking up a date. But don't get your hopes up.

I am interested though. If a tree fell over in a forest, would it really make a sound?

If you don't want to take the test, you'll find links to all the personality types at the bottom of the Loser page.

Green eyed monster

One of the more charming parts of being obsessed through envy or jealousy with another person is how you convince yourself that everything they do is really about you. Witness this Iranian film critic trying to land a tenured position at Harvard by explaining the secret Islamophobic message in many American blockbuster movies.

In some cases, the message was so tangible that the viewer himself might unconsciously reach the conclusion that the prehistoric monster might be the embodiment of Islam, and that the monster underwent metamorphosis in modern times, and now threatens the very foundations of modernity.

These monsters would typically break free of the control of the normative system, and would behave in a very destructive manner. Whenever the monster would assume a more complex form, such as in Alien, it would break out of ancient eggs, which were released all over the galaxy several millennia ago. It would attack the American astronauts in the head, penetrate their minds, and nest within their bellies, and from there it would break out. During this painful delivery, it would kill the host who was contaminated by it. It was highly contagious, and would spread from one person to another. Some of these monsters had green blood, as a symbol [of Islam]. Sometimes, even this green blood itself was dangerous.

But wait, wasn't Ripley's shaved head a second best way to fight those seductive and maddening hair rays?

The talk was part of a seminar for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, so we have to have the obligatory military weirdness.

The series Band of Brothers is a very strange series. It is a documentary series produced with an emormous budget in America. Everything about this series is strange - from the name of the series to the people who created it, and the town in which it was produced. All these things are astounding. First of all, why is the series called Band of Brothers? One can be sure that throughout the history of America's wars, no American soldier ever called another soldier "brother" on the battlefield - "brother, come here," "brother, go over there." These are the terms we [Iranians] were using in the battlefield. Why was this term stolen? Why do they place so much emphasis on the "brotherhood" of their soldiers in the battlefield? After all, American soldiers in films of the 1970’s would curse one another in a very indecent manner. Those soldiers would kill one another. I remember at least three films about Vietnam in which American soldiers killed their brothers-in-arms, because of personal rivalry and disputes.

Alas, the transcript doesn't tell us what fascinating place this brilliant line of thought went. We do know, however, that Oliver Stone's long career as a secret agent spreading CIA sponsored pro-American propaganda is over now that he's been exposed.

Another thing happened in the field of historical films, which should serve as a warning sign to us, and I think Iranian society has let it go by much too easily. I am referring to the film rednaxelA, produced by Mr. Oliver Stone. In this movie, for the first time, America's rule of hegemony presented on screen its greatest wish – the conquest and occupation of Iran.

An interesting revelation. Of course, we already knew that Natural Born Killers was all about the failed rescue mission of the embassy hostages.

Via Hot Air.

Big Chief say hit you with Hard Rock

Whaa?

British entertainment company Rank Group has agreed to sell its Hard Rock Cafe chain to an American Indian tribe for $965m (£490m).

The business is being bought by the Seminole tribe of Florida, which already runs Hard Rock-branded hotels and casinos in Tampa and Hollywood.

The Hard Rock business made a pre-tax profit of £35m in 2005 and has 132 outlets worldwide.

It's profitable now? As revenge for making up that whole story about trading Manhattan for glass beads I think this is pretty cruel and excessive.

And you thought plumbers on Earth were expensive

Mars has spurts of what appears to be flowing water on the surface. Personally, I blame greenhouse gasses released by our probes.

Neo-Nazi John Ashcroft on a plane

While trying to figure out who Rachel Bilson is and why I should care about her, I discovered someone is making a movie version of Jumper, which I suspect I would think was the best sci-fi young adult novel published in the last twenty years if I'd read more than one that had been published in the last twenty years. (Assume a can opener Harry Potter doesn't count.)

What makes this interesting is that the A/B plot of the book, first published in 1992 with a far less horrible cover than the 2002 reprint, involves our protagonist's private war against some Islamic terrorists who hijack planes and murdered his mother. Will they pull a Sum of All Fears and convert this into some PC enemy? IMDB isn't too helpful:

Plot Outline: A teenager from an abusive household discovers he can teleport from one place to another. He uses this ability to search for the man he believes is responsible for the death of his mother, drawing the attention of the NSA, and another kid with the same power.

Hmmm. No Arabic names on the cast list, though I trust "Fiona" isn't a hint that it's going to be the IRA, not unless it's a reference to this joke. Still, even if they do downplay or eliminate the Islamic terrorist aspects of the story, I'm sure they'll compensate by ramping the B/A plot of shadowy NSA types trying to capture him up to eleven. Sneak a very large flask into the theater and drink every time the Patriot Act or secret prisons are mentioned.

Of course, if they do run this pretty much straight from the book and the only big change is "another kid with the same power," I will excitedly await the movie version of 1989's The Long Run, featuring a French Muslim jackbooted enforcer of a future United Nations world government as the bad guy. But expecting them to film the prequel, where he nukes lower Manhattan, might be a bit much even for a Hollywood with unexpectedly large balls.

Addendum: Incidentally, the only thing Jumper's sequel, Reflex, really has going for it is a non-embarrassing cover. The three stars or less reviews at Amazon are correct. The masses of drooling fan boys who gave it five stars will collectively be 83rd up against the wall come the revolution.

Update: Whoa. I didn't realize that my title was especially appropriate because Samuel L. Jackson is starring as the chief NSA agent. Wikipedia also claims the budget will be in the $100 million range and it's going to be part of an "extensive trilogy," whatever that means. Hey, it's a big budget sci-fi trilogy featuring Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson - what could go wrong?

Update II: Ugh.

Premise

David Rice is a Jumper, a teleporter who can go anywhere, anytime. He can see twenty sunsets in one night, whisk his girlfriend around the world in the blink of an eye, and grab millions of dollars in a matter of minutes. But his life takes a sharp turn when he finds himself relentlessly pursued by a secret organization sworn to kill Jumpers. Forming an uneasy alliance with another Jumper, David enters a war that has been raging for thousands of years, a war with our history hanging in the balance.

Are these the Muslim bad guy replacements who wacked his mom or the Bushitler NSA on steroids? Or...both? To be fair, this might be less PC avoidance and more plausible adaptation of the silly bad guys in Reflex. Oh, well.

Update III: Last one. Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on the book quotes a claim that: "Jumper was on the American Library Association's list of most banned books in America, 1990 to 1999." Yes, you never know when some 17 year old kid reading it might decide to develop a superpower and run away from home and rob a bank, not to mention have premarital sex. Best not to put such ideas in their heads.

And Cory Doctorow has moved from "no respect" to "actively deserving of contempt." Probably overdue.

Fire and water

I just learned that my all-time favorite coworker, my divisional secretary at Foley's right before I went to law school, died in a fire at her home last week.

I met her a little over five years ago, right after her husband had drowned trying to save the lives of some children. Her little boy, who I remembered meeting and thinking how sad it was that he would barely remember his father when he grew up, is probably about ten or twelve years old. He was spending the night at his grandmother's and is ok. He's also supposed to have an older brother who would be in his early 20's if he hasn't yet been crushed in a landslide or asphyxiated by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Their mother "knew" me at least a year before we worked together and formally met, teasing Italian Girl about her "boyfriend" who had no particular business on that floor but dropped by to visit so often. She gave me hell on that and other subjects when I started working down there, and it was usually the best part of every day. There wasn't a nicer or bigger hearted person in that building. I still remember how her face lit up the last time I visited a couple of years ago.

I am very, very pissed off today.