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Have They Lost Their Minds?

I mentioned a couple of days ago that my apartment complex had done a rather poor job scheduling a building-wide extermination. Well, they’ve one-upped themselves. This building pioneered high-rise recycling. Each floor has recycling bins near the garbage chutes. I would say at least 30% of residents participate.

Well, the new owners of the building had the wonderful idea of eliminating the on-floor recycling bins and consolidating all recycling to one of the loading docks “to improve the overall effectiveness of the recycling program.” It used to take me about a minute to walk down the hall, drop off my recycling, and walk back to my apartment. It would take, at minimum, 7 or 8 minutes to take my recycling to the loading dock and return to my apartment. I guess they were looking for a quick way to reduce participation to near zero. They found it!

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It’s a Very Small World

I ran into a buddy (Nathan Renick) from my Panama City Beach summer in the Knoxville airport, Wednesday night. That’s exceptionally obscure, since he lives in Mississippi and I live in North Carolina. It just worked out that the only flight I could book (late) was through Knoxville and Nathan’s family was getting together in eastern Tennessee for Thanksgiving, this year. It is a very, very small world.

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Umm, hello?

The powers that be at my apartment complex have informed me that they do a yearly preventive full-building extermination around this time. Unfortunately, they chose very late at night on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week to inform me that my apartment is scheduled for Monday and that I need to take certain steps to prepare. Let’s think about the logic on this one: probably half the people in this building (maybe more – there are lots of students here) are leaving town, tomorrow, and returning Sunday (or later; some people have probably already left). This was, perhaps, not the most intelligently timed notice…

On a side note, I will probably not be posting all that much, for the next couple of weeks. Despite my best intentions to get caught up on here, school is rather more pressing.

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Politicians Make So Much Sense!

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand is refusing to talk until next year, claiming the planetary alignment is bad for him. Quote: “Right now Mercury… is in a corner perfectly aligned with my star. Mercury is no good, so if it’s not good, I am going to request not to speak. I’ll just wait until next year to talk.”

Oh, how I wish this were a joke…

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What, You Mean That Line?

I just read one of my favorite comic strips…

If you ever find yourself analyzing sufficiency of service under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 4(c), while reading a comic strip, “the line” is a long way behind you…

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Hotel Bombings in Jordan

Terrorists today detonated bombs at three Western hotels in Amman, Jordan. Details here. This is disturbing; it seems the horror and stupidity of suicide bombing, once unleashed on the world, can never be rebottled. It’s also personally disturbing; I’ve been to two of the three hotels.

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Party of the Fourth Part

I knew I had a better reason than working on an outline for my Elements of the Law class for skipping the Law School’s Party of the First Part: I ended up taking a friend to the ER for an irregular heartbeat.

Life is interesting.

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Let the Uproar Begin

The Kansas Board of Education, voting 6-4, has approved a science curriculum for public schools which incorporates information about the “intelligent design” arguments on human origins and highlights problems with contemporary evolutionary theory. This is bound to create a massive uproar, of course; I won’t dive into any of the issues, here, but I thought it deserved a mention.

If you are unfamiliar with the intelligent design argument or have only heard the way it is presented in the news, you owe it to yourself to read Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box. Whatever the debate, whatever side you’re on, you should be familiar with the best argument for each side’s claims before commenting, yourself, and Behe’s book presents about the best explication of intelligent design around.