Right Here, Right Now 3.0

I'd like it noted in the permanent record, that I have officiated at four weddings. The first was for a co-worker when I was at CTSA, in Placer County. Sherie has kept in touch over the years and about five years ago, organized a reunion up in Auburn, which was fun.

I get jokes from her about once a month. This is the most recent:

Back in the woods, a redneck's wife went into labor in the middle of the night, and the doctor was called out to assist in the delivery. Since there was no electricity, the doctor handed the father-to-be a lantern and said, "Here, you hold this high so I can see what I'm doing." Soon, a baby boy was brought into the world. "Whoa there," said the doctor. "Don't be in a rush to put the lantern down. I think there's yet another one to come."
Sure enough, within minutes he had delivered a baby girl.
"No, no, don't be in a great hurry to be putting down that lantern ... It seems there's yet another one in there!" cried the doctor. The redneck scratched his head in bewilderment, and asked the doctor,

"Do you think it's the light that's attractin' 'em?"

Apple - Mac OS X - New Features: Hundreds of new features. Coming to a store near you April 29.

The British medical journal, "Lancet" will report that about 40% of U.S. Prisoners executed were quite possibly aware of and suffered during their execution.

The way it works is that the prisoner first gets a drug to anesthetize him, then a drug to paralyze him and then a drug to kill him. The problem is the anesthetic is sometimes insufficient.

BBC NEWS | Health | Prisoners 'aware' in executions: "They add: 'The absence of training and monitoring, and the remote administration of drugs, coupled with eyewitness reports of muscle responses during execution, suggest that the current practice for lethal injection for execution fails to meet veterinary standards.'"

Or, put another way, we wouldn't treat a dog this way.

Thanks to John for the head's up on the article.

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:

"The filibuster allows a minority within a legislative body to thwart the will of a majority. But that is hardly the worst of the Senate's democratic imperfections, most of which spring from the arithmetical disparity among state populations. Fifty-one senators - a majority - can represent states with as little as seventeen per cent of the American people. Sixty senators - enough to stop a filibuster - can represent as little as twenty-four per cent. That's theory. What about reality? Well, if each of every state's two senators is taken to represent half that state's population, then the Senate's fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority - a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time."

Hendrik Hertzberg is one of my two favorite political writers these days. He goes on, in this article, to point out that the fillibuster has historically been used for fairly non-progressive goals - it slowed down anti-lynching laws and other civil rights legislation, for example.

Quoted in the Washington Post: "Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.'"

And he has bad breath too.

But wait, it gets worse:

"Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said."

So, this is clearly the fringe (Phyllis Schlafly is quoted as well.) But the mainstream (and isn't it amazing that Tom Delay is the mainstream) isn't that far behind.

"After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."

Charles is atoning for the sins of rich, middle-aged men everywhere. By June Thomas: "In an age when preposterously coiffed tycoons engage in serial matrimony with ever younger and more beautiful partners, Charles is doing his bit to atone for the sins of rich, middle-aged men everywhere. He's making an honest woman of his age-appropriate partner, a woman with whom he is well-matched in looks, habits, and hobbies, whom he has known and loved for more than 30 years. Charles' mistake was to get his weddings out of order: He married his first wife second and his trophy wife first."

So, today is 'royals' day at the here and now. God bless her for making an honest man of the Prince.

Princess Caroline's husband is ill.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Monaco royal taken seriously ill: "The prince holds joint British and German nationality.
He is the head of the house of Hanover which ruled the UK from 1714 to 1901, but by marrying Caroline - a Catholic - he removed himself from the line of succession to the British throne.
However, he remains the pretender to the throne of Hanover, which was an independent kingdom till 1866."

Does he put that sort of thing on his resumê?

Sesame Street: 25 Of My Favorite Memories - Progressive Boink: "The Martians, oh, how I loved those constantly affirming
Martians. "

The girls were raised on Sesame Street. Unlike Barney, it had something for everyone. I liked Elmo, the early Elmo. (that's a joke to references to the early dylan, young, etc. that may be too obscure. I seem to specialize in obscure these days. But I digress.)

Of course, I'm one of the three adults in the world that thought Barney was ok specifically because it didn't try to pander to adults.