The entire human staff of the law firm called in sick today.  A high-cholesterol breakfast and several hours of saline and UV therapy were prescribed and administered.  Vision checks at varying distances were conducted regularly and the staff passed with flying colors.  No phone calls were missed, and the parapuppy reports one non-spam e-mail was received, which the quadraplegic droid (ADA…) has flagged for response.  Time to remind the admin section to stock up on aloe gel and sunscreen.

With a little heat wave going this week, and most of my professional contacts trying to make the long weekend even longer, the week is pretty much focussed on tan maintenance.  Once I get through a conference call due to start in a few minutes, I’ll be back poolside.  Does anyone know if the radiation from the prostate cancer will have any kind of prophylactic effect on the threatened skin cancer?

North Korea 2006.

Architecturally: 1950.

Politically: 1984.

[via]

It was bright and sunny at 6:30 this morning.  Now at 8:30 the sky is dark and the thunder is drowning out my NPR and causing Pongo to burrow deeper into his Fortress of Solitude.   The only consistency is a mugginess in the air that’s been leaving me unconfortable sticky for a couple of days.

That sticky feeling, combined with a soreness on my left side that’s been keeping me from swimming for over a week now, just puts me in a rotten mood.  Yesterday’s foreshadowing seems to be playing out – this may not be a good week at all.

He was a great actor and a tribute to his breed.  Sixteen is much too young.

Pongo and I got rained on while sniffing around the park this morning, and now the downstairs neighbors are having a knock-down, drag-out argument. I think all the thuds related to doors and furniture, but I’m not certain. This is not an auspicious start to the week,

Now that we’re all used to the administration’s bland and slightly misleading euphemisms for its excesses in the War on Terror™, someone at the top apparantly feels the time has come to harmonize history as well. If we remove the nasty labels, then maybe people will forget and everyone will just be, well, content. Or at least be quiet.

The National Park Service wants Congress to remove the word “internment” from the name of a national park commemorating a World War II prison camp for Japanese-Americans.

National Historic Site, the proposed new label for the prison camp, just doesn’t work. I would consider it insulting to every American who passed through those prison gates.

I know that in modern ‘Merika “detention” doesn’t mean guilty of any crime, or even charged with a crime, but thousands of American citizens were locked up in these places for no reason other than race and ancestry. It deserves a name that accurately labels the reason the site is (in)famous, not a name that allows bureaucrats in Washington to sleep better at night.

Interesting to note that the same day this makes the news, Secretary of Transportation Mineta‘s resignation is also getting some air time. Mr. Mineta spent most of World War 2 in a similar camp in Wyoming. No point, just sayin’

Parts of this site have existed online for about eight nine years now, and these writings, here and at a “free” space at Earthlink have been around for five. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when it was new that the various CMS tools had integrated comments, and one of the reasons I migrated off Blogger was for an integrated comment system. I lost a lot of priceless old discussions in that move, but learned my lesson – I don’t store data on third-parties’ servers and I don’t trust “free” services to be there when I need them. I love Flickr, but will keep my photos local through Coppermine or some successor gallery software. Youtube looks cool today, but would it eventually just leave gaping holes in my archives? I’ve worked retail and defended alleged drug dealers and will look a gift horse in the mouth every time. Free is what the price tag on the Trojan Horse said (probably with an extended service agreement). So, of course, I’m shocked – shocked and appalled – that a “free” blog hosting service would go fee, claim ownership of user photos and threaten to destroy users posts with no warning. [via SeanBonner]

This is the personal site – sometimes the good stuff is elsewhere.

Happy Summer Solstice.