Category: Thoughts

Newspapers are supposed to refrain from voicing opinions, but sometimes you can tell they care, at least a little. Or maybe I’m projecting. For example, some guy in Weston built an enormous house. Enormous even for Weston, I mean: $21M to build, 20 rooms, 21,000 square feet. Yes, each room costs about a million dollars and is approximately the size of my entire apartment. Why would the Globe point out that kind of wretched excess if not to instill shame in its creators?

Nets would stop this from happening, but they’d block the view, so it keeps happening. They did take the time to install some emergency phones of course… but they occasionally break.

But sadly, they didn’t catch anyone entering or leaving the porno shop over on Mystic Ave:

I went down to the basement today to get the laundry and opened the door into the basement and there was a thing that looked kind of like a chunk of lint or a sock hanging on the edge of the door. I grabbed it and it was warm and furry and surprising. I dropped it and jumped back. It was a bat. It wasn’t moving. Did I stun it? Was it sick? It can’t have been dead. It was still warm and twitchy when I grabbed it and dropped it.

I opened the door and shoved it out gently into the cold. It didn’t move. Later I checked back and it was gone.

Flown away? Eaten?

Krugman points out that comparing Dick Cheney to Darth Vader is hardly fair. After all, Darth Vader once served in the military, and his contractors at least finished building the Death Star.

My father points out that Dick Cheney was actually not a terrible person forty years ago. Conservative, sure, but not vicious. It was only after his first or perhaps second heart surgery that he became the vicious monster he has become today. He’s not the only person to have had personality changes following heart surgery. In a lot of cases, people take their post-heart-surgery lives and use them as an opportunity to turn into evil bastards. Only Dick Cheney, however, seems to have been in a position to turn his years as an evil bastard into war crimes.

You can stream your Rhapsody music subscription through your TiVo. And I am listening to the complete works of the Mountain Goats while my girlfriend is out of town because she totally hates them and I have just decided they are the only thing I can listen to right now.

Indexed explains that a strong Euro means more ugly men in Speedos on American beaches.

Changes in tax code should be revenue-neutral. Just like with the Massachusetts income-tax repeal, which has been described as “public policy arson”, we’ve got a similar situation at the national level. Congress, under pressure from the prez, is shooting itself in the foot. Yes, the AMT needs to be fixed. But it needs to be fixed in a revenue neutral manner, and instead Congress has just said it’s going to pile up some more damn debt.

The Gentleman’s Emporium, despite its name, sells reproduction Victorian clothing for men and women. Oddly, it sells Victorian lingerie but no reproduction men’s underwear. I’m not sure why.