What’s surprising is not that the heat index went up to 106

I somehow missed a call from 212-555-5555. Either One of my friends has just learned how to spoof caller id, or I’m gettting a call from a movie.

update: It turns out it was my grandmother. Chances are the retirement home she’s in recently changed their phone system because it used to display her number when she called.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/18/AR2005071801339.html

Have you ever known one of those people who just talks incessantly? One of the projects I’m working on at work is currently being supervised by a person who talks endlessly without actually saying anything. He states a concept, and then finds a way to restate it fifteen different ways. Once we’ve resolved an issue, he states the resolution another fifteen times.

You know dude, I was the one who suggested that idea in the first place. You don’t have to recap it for me a dozen times.

He also insists on constant conference calls so we can touch base.

If I didn’t have to spend all my time on the phone, it would be a lot easier to do my job.

He’s not a bad guy at all. In fact, as a person he’s really a good guy to be around, and I’ve always found him friendly and personable. He’s also a conscientious employee and good at his job, he just needs to be more concise.

I think I may resort to screening his phone calls so that he’s forced to communicate via email. At least then I can read the emails quickly.

How long will it be until we reach a point where everyone in the world has a blog from birth? And when we do, will a small child’s blog look like the opening chapter of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Larisa Tremblover, the new wife of Yigal Amir, the assasin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, now has a blog. Unfortunately for those of us who would like some insight into the mind of someone who is clearly not what one might call “stable”, the blog is in Russian.

I don’t think this will really surprise anyone.

I had to run out this morning so that David could teach me and and a few other people how to change the water in the mikvah, which opened today with much joyous celebration. When I came back (around 11:30), I found Rebecca sitting on the couch in her pajamas watching Star Trek on my old laptop. Have I found the perfect woman for me or what?

I think I need to preface this post with a fact that people who have known me for a long time are well aware of. (AKA, people who knew me before I decided to stop discussing politics in public). I’m what conservatives usually like to call “soft on crime”. I want to legalize and regulate marijuana, end all criminal penalties for most “hard” drugs, eliminate three strikes laws and mandatory minimums, abolish the death penalty, institute more rehab programs and make education more acessible to prisoners, and lower the fines for traffic violations which do not lead to accidents.

Thats being said, I’m starting to rethink my policy on the death penalty when it comes to graffitti vandals. (I refuse to call them artists). In particular, I’m referring to borf. Borf (not his real name), scrawls his name and various pithy saying everywhere. I don’t usually have a huge problem with graffiti, but in this case borf drives me nuts. What he writes has no redeeming value whatsoever. There is no social commentary, witty observation, or humerous saying in any of his writings. Instead he just writes whatever random things seem to come into his mind. In the process, he has managed to cover a huge number of surfaces in the DC area, especially around Dupont cirle, foggy bottom, Georgetown, U-street, and Adam’s morgan. DC is usually a city with very little graffiti, but whever borf defaces property, it makes other people feel like it’s okay to do so, and more defacements usually appear the next day. (Since I walk a lot in these areas, I have the luxury of being able to keep track of graffiti proliferation). Although as a renter and not a homeowner I should be happy with anything that lower property values, borf has singlehandedly made the entire neigborhood much uglier, and simultaneously cost the city millions.

The best news I’d gotten this week was when I read in yesterdays newspaper that borf was arrested. What been very interesting is reading everything about borf in the post and various online sources. Turns out he’s an 18 year old rich kid from Great Falls VA where the average income is $160,000 a year. His politics can be described as typical whiny know-it-all anarchist/leftist/anti-globalization/protest everything moronic college student who has never had a real job and whose parents pay for everything. (Including the $14 he pays for parking every time he drives into the city to commit vandalism from his house in the sprawl). He despises rush hour as ridiculous because “People all heading downtown… And they do this with so-called free will”, yet he does the same thing when he comes into the city to commit his crimes. Why doesn’t he commit his serial vandalism close to him in the expensive suburbs? Why does he need to come into the city to deface my neighborhood and leave his defacation where I have to pass it day after day and I have to pay to clean it up? He claims to be an activist yet I can find no message in any of his graffiti. (If there were, I can almost assure you that I wouldn’t be so hard on this self-aggrandizing hack). This kid needs to wake up and smell reality. It’s very nice for him to claim that “property is theft” when he’s busy defacing other people’s property, but I wonder how he would feel if I came and defaced his million dollar house. He protests globalization, yet he’s perfectly content to have mommy and daddy pay for his airplane trip to Europe to protest the G-8.

The last things that gets to me is how people have covered this vandal. Many people keep saying they support him and his message. what message> All he did was scrawl his name all over because he wasn’t creative enough to think of anything worthwhile to say. He tried to make up aphorisms to sound deep that had no meaning to them whatsoever. As much as I hate to agree with Dummocrats, he’s right on this one. Borf is nothing more than an attention loving self centered selfish spoiled hack.

Since I am morbidly curious, I was looking through the real estate listings for Philadelphia and at the top of the page was a million dollar place which had no bedrooms and no bathrooms. I was curious, so I clicked the link. Turns out someone is selling a church.

I apologize to everyone who has been waiting a really long time, but uploading 2.5 GB of data is not something that can easily be done on an ADSL home connection, so I had to wait till I got back to work (ahhhh…. precious NASA T3), before I could finish uploading all of the wedding pictures. It is now however my proud duty to report that the wedding pictures are online. They are all uploaded, many of them labelled, and most of them sorted in such a way as to look like i had some semblance of a plan when I set about trying to organize 1800 pictures. I anticipate a few more trickling in over the next few days which I’ll try to upload as soon as I can. If anyone wants a DVD of everything (for example, people on slow internet connections), let me know.