Thursday, January 29, 2009

A Better Day

Feeling a bit more productive today. I completed a couple thousand words by noon and decided to take a short break. I'm still breaking four hours later. But that's OK; I got more done today than I did all day yesterday, and I will get back at it after dinner tonight. With some luck I can put another thousand words or so to bed and actually feel like I'm caught up.

We may be seeing the end-game for the Spirit rover. The NASA guys may be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat once again, but we may soon be down to only one functioning surface rover on Mars. Given that the rovers were only expected to live three months or so, no one can really complain about Spirit only making it to five years. That doesn't mean that this won't be a sad day if it can't be revived.

On the economic front, the recent stock rally came to a decisive end today. No one should be surprised by that; any stock rallies for the next six months and maybe all 2009 will be suckers' rallies. Not hard to figure out why: record numbers on unemployment, while the financial wizards on Wall Street punish themselves for the worst one-year performance in history by giving themselves only the sixth-biggest bonus ever. Oh the pain. Maybe we should all send some canned goods and mac & cheese.

Our weather out here has been a bit dicey, getting down in the teens at night and only up to the high forties during the day. Two days ago, we even had snow. You read that right: snow!! It was gone in less than 24 hours, so I didn't have to get my winter boots out of storage, but it was a close call. Of course, we could live in Kentucky. Some people there will be waiting until mid-February for electricity. Ouch.

In the interest of some light reading, here is a story that tops pretty much everything. Paging Thomas Hobbes. A good example of how dysfunctional government is indistinguishable from no government. State of nature, indeed.

And just because I haven't gotten to use HCHSBTSPODTUTBGTUTHADHOI in a while. I wonder how many times I have to use that before it shows up in Google searches?

And I just checked: the answer is twice. I'm almost famous!!

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