Attack of the burrito

Obligatory link. A funny, light-hearted story, right?

Or, possibly, if you're me and overanalyze absolutely everything, and possibly get far too worked up about things, just another example of zero-tolerance gone far too far. Here's this kid who brings a giant burrito in to school, as a project for a marketting class he's taken. It's wrapped up in foil and cloth, so you can't see what it is, just that it's big.

You're at a middle school, and you see someone, a student, carrying a large, wrapped package into the school. Hey, you think, this could be something suspicious. You ought to do something, right? So, naturally, you go and call the police, rather than walk up to the student and say, "Hey, what are you carrying?"

At least the kid hasn't gotten in trouble.

The Guardian now has a blow-by-blow breakdown of the whole Blair mess.

Question: Why have we not seen anything like this here, about Bush's actions?

The BBC is, of course, coming across as slightly less biased. They say: "Opposition parties hope that by raising Iraq they will increase doubts in voters' minds about Mr Blair's trustworthiness." I should certainly hope so: your prime minister flat-out lies about what he's been told, and you "hope" it would "increase doubts"? If I were a British citizen, I'd be pushing for a vote of no confidence.

Misery just loves company

Misery and, apparently, injustice.

According to The Guardian, one Mr. Goldsmith's - the British Attorney General's 13-page memo has been declassified and published. Read it here.

May I call your attention to paragraphs 27-30? These contain such gems as "In these circumstances, I remain of the opinion that the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution to authorise the use of force."

Which, as we all know, didn't exactly happen.

Okay, so Tony Blair gets this 13-page chunk of legal advice, and, unless he's like the vast majority of American congressmen, reads it. That very same day, May 7 2003, then-UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said that Iraq had made progress in disarming itself. Goldsmith then changed his mind and told Blair that sure, going to war was a perfectly legal, great idea. Blair, throughout the ordeal up until recently, claimed that Goldsmith's legal advice had not changed.

So: a wavering, agenda-driven Attorney General, an agenda-driven, lying head of state, a dubiously-legal war despite a complete lack of evidence of said war's necessity...what country was this, again?

Outrage of the night

Or day, or week - whatever. This is absolutely insane - not the column itself, but the subject matter.

Land of the free and home of the brave, indeed.

A mish-mash of sorts.

Well, it's official: the San Fransisco Chronicle has one of the oddest headline showing on GoogleNews that I've ever seen: Man Who Put Mom In Freezer Had Odd History. My goodness, I'm stunned! Here I thought that the type of man who'd keep his mother's remains in a freezer in the basement for two years was the nice, sane, normal type. I mean, who hasn't at least had that urge sometimes?

I've read about four articles on that so far, I guess hoping for more information or something. I know that it's one part purely morbid fascination, akin to the rubber-necking effect that you get at the scene of a car accident. It's gruesome but you can't help but look and watch. And I suppose I just have a (perhaps unhealthy) fascination with odd news stories. This one doesn't seem, at this point, horribly insidious. They're planning an autopsy, and the guy's claim is that his mother died naturally. This is a man who, according to the Chronicle article, once purchased $150 worth of Spam, at once. Now, I personally believe that $150 is far too much to pay on canned meat in a lifetime. The whole thing is just so strange.

Speaking of odd news, I absolutely despise Yahoo! News' new look. However, I tolerate it simply because 1) it's a nice place to get lots of Op/Ed pieces all in once place, and 2) it does a nice job of satiating my aforementioned inexplicable desire for weird headlines. Like this gem, about a herd of buffalo that got loose, and, eventually, were corralled in a tennis court in an affluent suburb.

In Maryland.

Because Maryland has so many buffalo, I guess.

The times are a changin'...

I'd like to start this off by saying that a fresh spring breeze is blowing out the old, but that's not entirely accurate in Santa Fe today. I had a rude awakening at about seven thirty this morning, with the wind and the incoming rain doing its best to assault my poor blinds and my iron. The reason why my iron lives in my window is because the combination of inevitable night breezes, a metal window frame, and metal blinds means that unless something physically restrains the blinds, there's a constant "fwip-thwap" during the night, which does not facilitate sweet dreams. It's a whole big thing that took me a long time to get a hang of in the beginning of the year.

So, there's a new pope. Preface to my opinions: I really don't care, because I'm not Catholic or religious in any way, shape, or form, and have better things to worry about. That said, the Pope is A) 78 years old, B) quite conservative, C) pretty much John Paul II, con't., and D) really, really scary looking. Seriously. Take a look at this picture and tell me that he's not creepy looking. Apparently, the popular theory is that he looks like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, which I really am not qualified to comment on. Though perhaps that'll give me an excuse to watch Star Wars sometime in the near future. I think he's creepy, and that's my final word.

Next up: Summer. Coming up fast upon us. Seminar essays are done, my oral is Wednesday, and we're starting the infamous Freshman Atomic Theory paper. To those who say that St. John's isn't challenging: Hah! You go ahead and write a high-quality seminar essay on Sophocles, with Aristotle as your break. Then go ahead and read some Dalton and Guy-Lussac and Avogadro and so on, and then go ahead, and write a paper about whether or not there really are atoms, and why, and how you know, etc. In your free time, learn ancient Greek and Ptolemy. Hah.

*ahem*

Sorry. That happens sometimes. Anyway, there's a month left of school, which will be minorly hectic, mostly due to the Aristotle and the Ptolemy and those pesky atoms. After that, it's homeward bound for me, for a week, in which I will hopefully secure a paying job for the summer and get lots of sleep. Then it's westward bound, once again, for the sister's graduation (my sister is so totally an adult now. That's awesome.), and then a road-trip back home with her. Then, settle into whatever paying work I've found, and my internship. I'm excited about the internship, not only because it hopefully will be fun and quite educational, but it'll give me something concrete, career-goal-oriented to put on my resume. Currently, I pretty much have a short stint at a fast-food place, my current work-study job as a "marketing intern" at a publishing company (which, I think, makes it pretty obvious that I spend my working hours stuffing envelopes, for the most part), and a liberal arts degree.

That's one of the vexing things about St. John's. I'm never quite sure what to put on job applications, my resume, etc. According to none other than the St. John's website, the major awarded to those who are crazy enough to survive 4 years here is a B.A. You don't get a choice and it's not, technically, a degree in anything. It's just a degree. The common answer is that it's a major in Liberal Arts, but telling someone you're a Lib. Arts major often is equated to telling them that you're an aspiring McDonald's Team Manager and you can't be bothered to take real courses. If someone takes a close look at the St. John's curriculum, you do see that it's not really a major in anything particular: we study everything. But we go in-depth into the major parts. We study a solid chunk of chemistry, we study a solid chunk of astronomy, of physics, of language, of literature, and, of course, of philosophy. I could say I'm a philosophy major, though that's sort of cheating myself, because I'm studying a hell of a lot more than philosophy. Philosophy majors don't, generally speaking, also intensely study Ptolemy and Atomic Theory. I personally propse a major in "Everything, and I am Far More Intelligent Than You Are, or Will Ever Be." That, though, might not do much good for getting rid of St. John's slightly-elitist image.

Ho-hum. No one can say we didn't bring it upon ourselves.