Ice your phones!

Hi y'all,

Chris said something interesting to me that I thought I'd pass around. Nationally, EMS (Emergency Medical Services) personnel are being trained, when finding an unconscious, demised, or otherwise incapacitated person, to check their cell-phones for emergency contacts by looking for the acronym ICE preceding the contact's name. ICE == In Case of Emergency.

Marking your emergency contact in this manner takes all of 5 seconds, and could make the difference between finding out your spouse died, or getting to say goodbye.

The Bricklayer's Story

After twenty years, I've finally found The Bricklayer's Story. This isn't the original monologue (which's hilarious in its own right, but lame when printed); this's the song version, which I strongly prefer.

Hearings on Judge Roberts: absolutely disgusting

Ugh: these hearings are absolutely disgusting. A bunch of the senators on the Judicial Committee (although mostly Democrats -- I won't speculate here as to why) are trying to maneuver Roberts into revealing whether or not he supports the policy positions of their constituents, and want to judge whether or not he's a member of the supposed "mainstream".

It's irrelevent! Judgements about whether someone's in the mainstream are judgements about policy decisions. It doesn't matter if a Supreme Court nominee thinks that all Catholics should be drowned at birth; it's just not relevent. Judges have same job as basketball refs: not to judge who wins or loses, but to make sure the rules are followed. This means that a correctly operating Supreme Court justice's decisions may result in injustice if the fix for the injustice is unconstitutional. SCOTUS members aren't there to uphold individual instances of justice, they're there to protect our legal system itself. Correcting particular rights & wrongs is the job of the legislature, which is the reason legislatures are accountable to the voters. This job has nothing to do with the Judicial Branch.

monster blanket accomplished

The monster blanket is finished; it's made of 3-ply Misti Alpaca bulky on size 35 needles, and is so soft that it's hard to fold (it doesn't stay square).

And yes, your eyes aren't decieving you -- those are colors. You can call me a dork if you like. :-)

It's roughly Queen-sized, somewhere in the ball-park of 5'x7'

Most importantly, though, it's kitty approved!

New Orleans flood might have been prevented

A right-wing news outlet is reporting, with the usual hyperbolic language associated with Democrats or those who hate them (note the Venn diagram so implied), that the Army Corps of Engineers tried to build floodgates in the '70s that would have protected New Orleans from a cat-5 hurricane, but was prevented from doing so by environmental groups.

If this's true, let's all whip out our Alanis Morissette song books to page 13 and start singing "Isn't it Ironic, don't you think?"