Pat's Place

Black humor time.

This headline crossed my desk today:
U.S. sends arms to Somalia, rebels amputate limbs

Say what?

The whole article is at The Washington Post. While still unpleasant, the truth is a bit different than the headline!

Dear Sen. Kennedy:

Today I learned that the National Park Service/DOI is using eminent domain to procure land in Somerset County, PA, for a Flight 93 memorial, without having made a good faith negotiation with the landowners, merely because of impending paperwork deadlines.

The DOI has had the nearly 8 years since 9/11 to work on this. Yet it waited, and now the people of Somerset County are suffering the loss of their land and their homes so that a bureaucratic deadline could be met.

Yeah, the Big Red lost to Syracuse today. I watched the game on TV and was thrilled to watch as Cornell kept the lead away from Syracuse. With about 4 minutes left in the game, the score was 9-6 Cornell.

Then the final four minutes struck.

This article at the New York Times caught my eye today. Yesterday was the anniversary of Duke Ellington's birthday, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by the musician's grandson, played "Take The A Train" while riding vintage NYC subway A Train cars to Queens. Pretty neat!

A few months ago, I set up a BlackBerry for a Curry College student so he could use it to get his email. This worked fine up until a few weeks ago, when BlackBerry informed the student that his account information needed to be revalidated. Revalidation failed, so I took a look at it.

All the settings looked reasonable and were as I'd left them. However, a quick look at the servers showed that they no longer accepted connections from email clients, including the POP3 service the BlackBerry had used. I thought that was odd, so I called Curry College IT to ask what was going on.

I'm noticing an unusual number of pro sports injuries. Does this suggest a crisis in training, in coaching, or in playing? Or is it just me...?

Discuss...

I didn't E-File my taxes this year. I've never done it. I'm really not interested in unrelated third parties handling my tax data. I simply don't care how much they swear up and down that they'll hold it in confidence forever, that they won't look at it, that they won't use it to market stuff I don't want to me, and that their promises will hold true when their companies are bought. I simply don't buy it.

I'm soliciting quotes to have a chimney repair done. Of the four places I called, two came over promptly. One hasn't called back yet (though to be fair it's only been a few hours). And one called back promptly, but...he wants to charge me $85 to produce a quote.

Another tradition falls victim to environmental regulations.

Every year, Cornell's freshman architect students build a giant dragon and parade it around main campus. The festivities culminate in the burning of the dragon on the Arts Quad.

Because dragons generally contain varying amounts of paints, glues, and other materials that emit toxins when burned, the event would have run afoul of new environmental regulations in New York banning the intentional burning of substances that are neither wood nor agricultural products. This year's dragon was spared, and a symbolic dragon's nest was burned instead.

The students are rightfully disappointed that regulations quashed part of a cherished campus tradition. It's unfortunate that the regulations don't recognize a difference between habitual or repeat offenses, and very occasional events such as Dragon Day.

I hold out little hope for a regulatory change or loophole, but knowing the ingenuity of Cornell students, I am certain that it is only a matter of time before we see dragons that can be burned in compliance with the regulations.

My sister, who works at the Library of Congress, published an article about her lessons learned helping build the Library's online "American Memory" collection. Congrats Liz!