The terms "right wing" and "left wing" come to us from the eve of France's Revolutionary era, and refer to the gathering of aristocrats aligned with Crown and Church on the right-hand side, and revolutionaries on the left-hand side of the National Assembly under King Louis XVI. Louis wasn't such a bad guy really, but he was a weak and ineffectual King and did little to rein in the excesses and brutality of the aristocracy, most infamously exemplified by that iconic libertine debaucher, the Marquis de Sa... (...more)

Lately I've had this phrase kicking around my head, "The Wrong From The Right", as a working title for my thoughts on the advance of right-wing agendas in my lifetime. I really want to dive in by defining my terms, but before I even get there, let me note that a) political terminology is slippery, because almost every term in political discourse is nuanced both by historical context and by doctrinal orientation; and b) some of it is so widely misunderstood, or misused for propaganda purposes, that we ha... (...more)

One of the things that always bothered me about my bread-and-butter client's web design was the horizontal menu. It was a set of images of "tabs", with related menu item text encoded right into each image. Thus, anytime they wanted to add or change a tab, I had to muck around in GimpShop with font matching and smoothing and positioning for visual consistency between tabs. I have a fair eye for such things and what I produced was Good Enough. But it always rankled me, because I knew there had to be a mo... (...more)

3.3mi / 55 minutes (seems to be my standard), mixed in a little more jogging than usual, peaked at a new high of 4.6mph for a half-lap after the 2.5mile mark.

Dreamed I was in grammar school (Clifton PS 8), but all my friends and I were our real ages. I had to catch the bus at the end of the day, but at every step I was forgetting my laptop, desktop, or bookbag. When I got outside it was raining and I had to run back up to the classroom for my umbrella. On teh way back down I called a teacher Dr. Ruth but on second glance she didn't look anything like Dr. Ruth. By the time I got back outside with my umbrella it wasn't raining, merely overcast but dry. Walking an... (...more)