Events

My accountant, whom I always considered to be a nice person and free of malice, sent this to me this morning: A Good Pun Is Its Own Re-Word Energizer Bunny arrested - charged with battery. A pessimist's blood type is always b-negative. Practice safe eating - always use condiments. A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death. I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded. Marriage is the mourning after the knot before. A hangover is the...

I took a quick trip up to Kennebunk, Maine, and then to Portsmouth, N.H., yesterday. In Kennebunk I found the Wedding Cake House, constructed (legend has it) by a sea captain who was forced to put to sea during his wedding: And Portsmouth is just plain charming:

Excellent column by Bruce Schneier: A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home....

Direct Democracy has a wonderful pair of maps showing, shall I say, a subtle change in political colors since the 2004 election. For those keeping score at home, there are only 171 days and 22 hours until the 2006 election.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Anheuser-Busch is buying a stake in Goose Island Brewing Co.: Anheuser-Busch Inc., which brews Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob and other beers, is close to purchasing up to 35 percent of the local brewery and taking over distribution of the Chicago beer that is growing in popularity. Neither Goose Island president and founder John Hall nor his son Greg, Goose's brewmaster, could be reached for comment on the negotiations that have stretched on more than six months. A deal...

In the ongoing, and now expanded, case the Electronic Frontier Foundation has brought against AT&T for its role in aiding the National Security Agency's efforts to spy on us, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughan Walker will allow confidential AT&T documents into the case: The evidence at issue was filed as support for EFF's motion for a preliminary injunction against AT&T, seeking to stop the company's ongoing violations of the law and the privacy of its customers. AT&T had requested that the evidence be...

It's about time. After years of being robbed and lied to, a new ABC/Washington Post Poll shows Americans finally connect the Republican control of government with the theft and lies: Dissatisfaction with the administration's policies in Iraq has overwhelmed other issues as the source of problems for President Bush and the Republicans. The survey suggests that pessimism about the direction of the country—69 percent said the nation is now off track—and disaffection with Republicans have dramatically...

Incompetence and cronyism, the handmaidens of the Bush administration (980 days left), explain its failure to create a working prescription drug program. Simply put, they (a) don't want government to work and (b) want to enrich their friends, as Paul Krugman underscores (sub.req.): [W]hile a straightforward addition of drug coverage to Medicare would have been good policy, it would have been bad politics from the point of view of conservatives, who want to privatize traditional social insurance...

In the four days since USA Today reported that the NSA has millions of phone records, millions of decent, hard-working Americans have said, "So what?" I think there are two reasons for this: first, data security seems like an esoteric and hard-to-understand sub-field of computer science, which makes people disinclined to think about the problem; and second, most people need concrete examples to understand things clearly. How about this simple, concrete example: ABC News is reporting today that...

I arrived in Nashua, N.H., from Chicago just a few minutes ago, and two hours later than anticipated because of rain. Lots of rain. In fact, it turns out, they've had more rain than during any May on record—and the month isn't even half-over: Two weeks into the month, rainfall totals in Concord were expected to wash out the May record of 9.52 inches set in 1984, Cannon said. Official totals have been tracked since 1864. I believe it has rained almost every day this month, and rain is forecast every day...