The cottonwoods are heavily shedding what look like very late snowflakes.

The first distinctive feature I’ve noticed in the local dialect is a habit, among some people in retail (and the like), of responding to every datum with “Perfect.”

Are you together? … Perfect.
Do you need more time to look at the menu? … Perfect.
Strawberry milkshake? Perfect.
Can I get your date of birth? … Perfect.

How wide is this tic’s range?

I couldn’t write here for a while because my webhost’s firewall blocked my IP. Did anyone notice?

I must have done something suspicious, perhaps my attempt to change a file’s permissions using FTP. (One of my mathematical pictures returns 403 for no obvious reason.)

Dissatisfied with my last couple of haircuts, I got the idea to shave it all off and take pictures over the following year before deciding what length I like best. The spring equinox seemed the most natural time to start such a project, so as to have short hair in summer and long in winter.

I denuded my scalp but chickened out as to my chin.

I promptly caught a cold which lasted 16 days.

Five weeks’ growth:

Answering the casting call for an Angry White Male!

My face has enough small asymmetries (my nose goes right and my chin goes left) that I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that my hairline recedes more on the left than on the right. Perhaps that’s because I parted it on the left for thirty years, so the hairs rooted there were longest, so those follicles were most stressed?

Last week, on the anniversary of something or other, Bill Clinton wrote (or at least signed) an op-ed containing this phrase:

we do not have the right to resort to violence — or the threat of violence — when we don’t get our way.

Wow, how often does a former head of state join us anti-government extremists?

Of course, by “we” he meant “the rest of you”. Jim Bovard‘s response to this obvious hypocrisy is the best I’ve seen so far.

In 197_ Mom’s cousin Alyce married Tony, about whom pretty much all I remember is that he wrote a book on how to tell species of bats apart. After Alyce (already frail from polio) died of flu, we lost contact with Tony.

Today a random chain of thought led me to Tony’s obituary. Wow. (NSFW.)

“Exclusive Swiss jewelry will make you a queen. The 100% authentic jewelry will make any girl to be by your legs!”

Robin Hanson on Lord of the Flies: schools as a decivilizing force

I got a spam entitled Very Discrete Packaging and Billing. One would hope so!

Dissatisfied with my hairstyle, I decided some months ago to shave my scalp in the spring, take pictures over a year, and then decide what length I like best. So on the equinox I initiated the plan, and promptly caught cold. Ten days later (still congested) I notice that my hairline is asymmetric: it has receded more on the left (where I usually parted it until 1998) than on the right. Hm.