Southborough, MA moon photo, cropped

and when you crop the photo, the moon looks bigger . . .

a February 2007 morning

sometimes when you plan ahead a little (and remember where the moon sets from the previous year) . . .
[taken on a Sony camera in Southborough, Massachusetts]

Blue Monday no longer!

it's Wednesday (or Wodin's day), and Blue Monday (or Blue Moon day, even better!) feels far behind.  this picture is from Blue Monday morning, taken from our back deck.  we're moving back to civilization soon, or at least closer to it, and views like this won't be as close at hand.  Wodin, the Norse all-father, might not approve because our current locale somewhat resembles Valhalla (and our future neighborhood is a lot closer to Trader Joe's, which i doubt they have there, but i really like them).

speaking of Blue Moon, we'll be a lot closer to the site of Sandi's & my first date—Not Your Average Joe's, one of my favorite places to have a Blue Moon.  we'll probably be there in the spring, for our free birthday dinners (one of the perks of giving them your email), since our birthdays are close together.  and we'll be a lot closer to Concord, too.  good days ahead.

Obama's troubles vs W's troubles—Small Potatoes

Hmm, with all the current furor over the troubled roll-out of the Affordable Care Act (that is, the website for the health care exchanges), i was wondering how it compares to the troubles of the last administration (that of George W. Bush)...

The cost of developing the troubled website (by contractors with problematic histories):
   $600,000,000 (six hundred million dollars)

The cost of the Iraq war (over weapons of mass destruction that were never found):
   $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars)

So how much worse was George W. Bush's bungle than Barack Obama's?

One Thousand Six Hundred Sixty-Seven times worse! (approximately)

Like i said in the title:  Obama's troubles (in terms of his legacy) are small potatoes compared to those of George W. Bush.

rainy Thursday

rain comes down and down today, but i won't let it get *me* down.

am working on some OCR stuff of a scan of a book i recently made—converting PDFs into a Word file that i can turn into an ebook for my Kindle (despite its being expressly forbidden on the copyright page, which of course i'm faithfully reproducing as well).  my kind of wild & crazy civil disobedience!

i own a copy of Eric Baum's What Is Thought? (MIT Press), and there's no ebook version available; so why shouldn't i be allowed to make my own ebook?  there's no reason whatsoever.  to me, it's fair use.

and i've found that the ebook conversion process is a great way to read & study the text!

keeping me company on this rainy day is Paul Oakenfold's DJ Box from May, June, & July 2013 — along with a big pot of strong Colombian coffee.  plus it's still free Thursday at http://www.MixRiot.com which offers 24 hours of free downloading of DJ mixes each week, from 6pm GMT on Thursday to 6pm GMT on Friday (which i think & hope is 2pm EDT).

enjoy the day, peeps!

A Mockery, Pure and Simple

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being charged in federal court today with using "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in the Boston Marathon Bombing — WHAT A CROCK OF SHIT ! ! !

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/07/09/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-slated-appear-federal-court-his-first-public-appearance-since-being-apprehended-after-boston-marathon-bombings/M1xhQg8udEM421IXuN18iO/story.html

Iraq supposedly having WMDs is why Bush2 took us to war.  Did we find any there?  No.  So Dzhokhar Tsarnaev used something that *Saddam Hussein* didn't have in Iraq???  I think not.

What overblown hype by federal prosecutors, and secondarily by the media.

Pressure-cooker bombs are really nasty, but WMDs they are not.

Adult Content

Adult Content — why not?  i suppose i should wish to shield tender youths from the raw & unedited truths of real life.  This is it, kids; it doesn't get any more real than this.

who among us hasn't been disappointed by life?  no, really ... i don't mean that rhetorically:  i want to know if any of us hasn't been disappointed in some way by the way their life has gone.

disappointment is part of life, right?  sometimes things work out the way you hope, and sometimes they don't.  and so people try to focus on the former and let go of the latter (unless they wish to become annoying—hee hee!).

check back for more adult content!  whoo-hoo!