My company had a meeting today with the insurance company that provides our 401-k plan. I hate these, because all I can think of is how I would rather live in Sweden and not have to deal with this.

The sales people from the insurance company were quick to point out that it is a bad idea to rely on government and the social security it offers. ( Read more... )

The kind of motivational speech that is often used in praising school and after-school programs for children of all ages often trips over its own hyperbole. This is the more true, the posher the context. On Sunday, I was at the local community center, and there was an advertisement for a girl's school, with some such line as "for tomorrow's women ( Read more... )

txgreengoddess and I had planned to take Clio, the Muse of History, out for a nice Italian dinner in downtown Austin at the La Traviata. To everyone's utter surprise, the downtown was cordoned off and had been turned into a gigantinormous biker fest, with expensive chrome parked everywhere along the streets, a heavy metal rock concert going on on the ( Read more... )

This morning the family left for Puebla. The kids loved the flight to Mexico City and the bus ride, _mwife_ reported. They had no problems finding my mother-in-law and the only bad thing so far is that the dinner in the hotel, which was included at a very low price, turned out to be very cheap indeed.

I now have free evenings and even parts of weekends ( Read more... )

If you live in the Hill Country/Central Texas area, you may be interested to know that the Harry Ransom Center at UT is currently doing a big Ansel Adams exhibit, showing some of the more famous and some of the less famous prints.

The exhibit is accompanied by a host of talks and presentations. One of these _mwife_ and I attended last night (together ( Read more... )

mijopo always manages to inspire me to think - or to rant , depending on your point of view. (Did I really spend two and a half hours replying?)

I think this is the reasons we had our "philosophical Fridays" back when we shared an office.

Read this morning an interesting update on the current state of the discussion regarding genetic infrastructure for being gay in the AAS. Looks like they are beginning to identify highly relevant clusters of genes in other (primarily lower) animals that can be manipulated to trigger homosexual or heterosexual behaviors.

I was also intrigued to ( Read more... )