I'm not sure if the jury, the crazy legislation, the prosecution or some combination is responsible for the travesty that is the Trayvon Martin case. If it's just the legislation, I wonder if George Zimmerman is going to be able to rest easy knowing that he now lives in a place where armed men may confront people in the street, armed or unarmed, ( Read more... )

I find it interesting that Tea Partiers can be so pleased with the SCOTUS upholding Arizona immigration law requiring state trooper to investigate immigration status of "suspected" undocumented aliens. After all, isn't the effect of this, essentially, opening the door to laws that will require US citizens to carry documentation on them at all times ( Read more... )

I got an email from the Embassy this morning advertising a Poutine party at some DC bar on June 29. I clicked the link, it's sort of epicly screwed up as a Canada Day celebration IMO. As I noted in a FB post:

If you want to take part in "honoring Canada's independence" (the Queen is still the Canadian head of state, and we spell it "honouring") with ( Read more... )

The gym that I use, like most gyms/pools I suspect, has a rule against using cell phones in the change room. The main reason for the rule is obvious, I think, they want to protect people's privacy and ensure that nobody is surreptitiously using their phone to snap nude pictures of people. However, I very much appreciate that the rule has the ( Read more... )

I just opened an account with TD Ameritrade so I can start doing stock trading on my own, no broker needed. They have an interesting security procedure for transferring money in from another account. They actually make two small deposits to the account and then ask you to tell them the amount they deposited. (maybe this is common, but I've never ( Read more... )

The SCOTUS is hearing objections to the Affordable Care Act and people are making a big deal of the fact that they're going to listen to six whole hours of oral arguments! OTOH, the Michael Rafferty (the scumbucket accused of killing Tori Stafford)  trial ( Read more... )

This Trayvon Martin case sort of defies belief. It seems that so long as they simply *claim* self defense white Floridians are allowed to kill black people that dare walk in their neighbourhoods. The police wouldn't even arrest him because he *said* he defending himself. And apparently they didn't bother to seek out further evidence and were ( Read more... )

This weekend my son's middle school sent out an email entitled "Important News". The news in the email was that a student at the school had died unexpectedly over the weekend, but it didn't indicate which student had died. I thought this was quite odd as it could lead to all kinds of unnecessary worry and speculation. There is a girl at the school ( Read more... )

There's a fascinating account of one of JFK's affairs in the New York Post (link). Salacious details:

• she was only 19
• he took her virginity
• she was an intern under him, so probably grounds for a harassment suit in today's world.
• he once had her perform oral sex on an aide and watched.
• he tried to get her to do the same to Ted Kennedy.

I'm working through codeacademy because my wife would like to work through it as a way to learn to code. I have to say, I think it's a really really awful set of lessons for first time coders.  The error messages are very unclear, and the setup is very brittle. If one gets stuck, there's really not a lot to do if the hint didn't suffice or there is ( Read more... )