dim sum

I'm tired and incoherent so here, have some chicken feet:

via road to surfdom: "When the axe came into the forest the trees said: at least the handle is one of us".
Also this -

The trouble for people like Donald Rumsfeld and any number of pro-war bloggers and pundits who continue to take credit for a liberation as if this was the sole intention, or even a primary intention, of unleashing a war on Iraq, is that there are those, not least amongst them the Iraqi people, who are going to hold you to it.

If you tell someone that you are liberating them, don't be surprised if they take you seriously and demand the right to, say, choose their own system of government...

via personal experience: Microsoft does not always know what is good for you. I finally submitted to the full-body upgrade/patches/etc due to the usual dire security warnings, now Outlook takes an at-least-daily (and generally very inconvenient) fatal antipathy to what once was known as the carriage return. Not fun, not appreciated.

Amin Maalouf via Christopher Lydon:

I never try to think what should be my opinion coming from this or that background. I try to think as a human being. I hate for example to see people in debates, each one defending the opinion of his tribe, with all the bad faith that is put into defending his own tribe. I love people who defend the other side, you know? I love to see a debate in which an Arab and a Jew debate, but the Arab is defending the opinion of the Jews, and the Jew is defending the opinion of the Arabs. I love to listen to that, and I feel I belong to this kind of debate.

truer and more heartfelt words rarely spoken, from Geoff at work: "it's amazing what a difference a single digit makes"

via Deborah Branscum, marketers' humor (or not, depending on whether you are among them)

the not so great Santorum ("If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy . . . polygamy . . . adultery . . . incest . . . anything.") - handily neutered by Andrew Tobias today - brings to mind a .signature from years ago, "I'd rather have a bigot mistake me for a lesbian than a lesbian mistake me for a bigot"

Slate on McSweeney's, the literary mag that's "created in darkness by troubled Americans," typeset "using a small group of fonts that you already have on your computer, with software you already own," and "proofread, but not by paid professionals." (actually this McS tagline is the best part of the article)

the Red Dress Run (you have to scroll some). sad to say Nevada City could never pull something like this off - Grass Valley could though, or Penn Valley if not summer.