’tis a season

Lent began Wednesday; as Rebecca so wisely observes, what’s a Catholic occasion without an Irish joke?

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close the borders, say immigrants

Regular readers can skip over most of this entry; nothing here that I haven’t said before.
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a trillion here, a trillion there

I never hear the US debt limit mentioned except in the context of raising it. Why have a limit at all, if whenever it is approached Congress routinely raises it? I notice that it is already higher than the trigger of the “Ultimatum Resolution” that was going around State legislatures a decade ago.

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time flies

Remember what happened ten years ago?

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truth has more strangers than fiction

Six degrees of Captain America: some scientists at the University of the Baleares “studied the statistical properties of the network of 6,486 characters in the 12,942 Marvel comic books” since 1961. They found that the network of acquaintance among Marvel characters is “very weakly clustered – about 1.5 times more than a random network. Clustering in real networks is typically ten (or more) times greater than in random webs.” (Naturally, I found the link at a comic strip site.)

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distributed defense

Aubrey Turner reports that Condi Rice, for good personal reasons, is firmly for RKBA. (Link from Bitter Bitch)

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øuch

Yesterday I leapt over a shrubbery, twisted my right ankle (mildly), and landed hard on my left knee. Somehow this stiffened the muscle(s) behind the knee. I think of it as a learning experience: like, I never noticed before how strong my habit is of putting my pants on right leg first.

Today I bought a Danish-English dictionary published in 1953/4. To my amazement, it uses aa rather than å; I thought å came in at the same time as ø (former oe) and æ (former ae).

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