Jim Henley says, amid flattery:

Unqualified Offerings wishes that Sherwood would condescend to narrow his text columns, but then, Unqualified Offerings wishes a lot of bloggers would condescend to narrow their text columns.

Handy tip: you can narrow Sherwood’s text column to your own taste, simply by narrowing your window. Here in the Cave we don’t go in for that newfangled stuff (and we’d frankly prefer to see less of it).

Contentwise, thanks for the tip about the meth lab.

Chicago’s key contribution to civilization.

I applaud the Ninth Circuit for recognizing that teaching schoolchildren to recite “one nation under God” is an establishment of religion; though without the offending phrase the tots are still being taught that their first duty is to “the republic for which it [the flag] stands”. I dimly remember (or imagine that I remember) being bothered by the implication that whatever conditions prevail in my “nation indivisible” are the definition of liberty and justice.

Let it not be forgotten:

The Pledge of Allegiance . . . was written by an avowed Socialist, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. Bellamy was at one time the vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists, and once delivered a sermon entitled “Jesus the Socialist.” Bellamy wrote the pledge to help a Boston publisher sell flags through one of his magazines . . . he also saw it as a way to instill veneration of the state and its symbols in the hearts and minds of schoolchildren . . . . —David F Nolan, Libertarian Party News, September 1995

A Coyote at the Dog Show has second thoughts about a discussion we had lo these four months gone. Well, since I understood him then to be making exactly the opposite point from what he now reveals he had in mind, I agree that one of us must have been muddled. I hope this acknowledgement pleases him.

By the way, Swen, things have changed at Blogspot: you now have to take the ‘?’ out of the link.

Udhay Shankar sent me this link: Black Sabbath songs covered by medieval music band Rondellus. Yow! Have you heard this?

BART was stuck for about half an hour this morning when its master computer crashed. If the crash were unrecoverable, I wonder how long they’d have waited before cobbling up a way to run a limited schedule by hand (or, alternatively, laying on some busses). Has it always depended on computers, for thirty years?

Someone’s having fun a little early: I just heard the unique sound of a display rocket.