Our Indoor Future

Today, events transpired to keep me in the office all day.  Apparently I missed quite a rainstorm.  But, upon reaching the bottom of the stairs of the 23rd St. subway stop, I looked up and was surprised to see a square of beautiful blue sky.

I'll leave it to someone much more talented, with much more money invested in their photographic equipment, to capture the image (just wish it was in color):

When You Gamble... And Lose

It's a dark era for online poker.  Its legality has been under fire for years.  And it turns out that the card-sharks-turned-entrepreneurs willing to circumvent the law and financial interdiction may not have been the most trustworthy of characters after all.  The Justice Department came out firing last week, branding Full Tilt Poker - by my reckoning, the best-known, most mainstream online poker site - a fun but still fraudulent Ponzi scheme.

Memories of Illyria

This last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the Brown Box Theatre Project's rendition of Twelfth Night.  I don't have much to add to the already positive reviews; enjoyed the play immensely, laughed out loud, thought it was very well done -- acting (as far as I'm qualified to judge), costumes and sets, even the few instances of stage fighting.  Much more fun than reading Shakespeare for English class.

A Small Tribute

Ten years ago yesterday started as a typical fall day for me, early in my senior year of high school.  We first heard the news about the attacks on the World Trade Center in Mrs. Weissberg's English class, I think.  I remember it being confusing and shocking, but not quite scary.  It wasn't real at that point, not until we watched the towers come down in a plume of dust in NRHS' smokestack area.

Rumblings...

There I was at work, minding my own business, when I felt a wobbling in my desk chair.  I immediately dropped all of the important things I was doing to assess.  Seconds later, I felt the same, barely-perceptible shaking in... what?  My chair?  The floor?  My ass?

Shortly thereafter, coworkers, with the help of Twitter, confirmed that, yes, after apparently sleeping through seismic activity in two different hemispheres in my youth, I had experienced my first earthquake.

A truly sad compromise?

Let's hear it for our heroic congresspeople who have averted an apocalyptic federal default!  ...Ignoring for the moment that it was a crisis of their and their colleague's own making.  But now that the deal has been all but approved, all that's left is for the talking heads to determine who won and lost in this whole debacle.

I've come across an old saw that "a really good compromise is the one that leaves both sides equally dissatisfied" in a few different and eclectic contexts recently -- the NFL lockout, A Dance with Dragons.  So potentially, both sides should be and, indeed, are "find[ing] fault with [the] bill."  However, not all of those opinions are easy to reconcile with each other or the standard partisan storylines.

From the CI cutting room floor...

I've officially gotten the kibosh on a recent post intended for the CI blog.  It's disappointing to have a somewhat interesting topic (referencing an article in which I was quoted, no less) rejected because it has a small potential for controversy.  I sincerely think CI's loss to not have it published, and the debate has made clear the blog's lack of potential.

It was still a worthwhile mental exercise to look at the two contrasting data points and compose a few succinct reflections, though.  The only way to get the post published on the CI blog would have been to neuter it, replacing all the interesting bits of outside data with something vague like, "Other poll data indicates..."  In my mind, that would take away the whole point of the post and make it just unsolicited self-promotion.  I wouldn't want to put out a blog post in my name that just does that.

My work won't make it onto the CI blog this time, but to keep it from totally going to waste, I've surreptitiously posted a version right here: