Category Archives: Etc

In a discussion of the security aspects of last week’s post office shooting, Bruce Schneier says that the US Post office’s reputation for harboring (or creating) a workforce of repressed homicidal maniacs is in fact undeserved,

There is a common myth that workplace homicides are prevalent in the United States Postal Service. (Note the phrase “going postal.”) But not counting this event, there has been less than one shooting fatality per year at Postal Service facilities over the last 20 years. As the USPS has more than 700,000 employees, this is a lower rate than the average workplace.

I love this story. Although I’m not utterly sure I know what it means, I can certainly think of times that it would have been appropriate. Jonathan Dworkin guest blogging at Political Animal tells a Kurdish parable:

A man is crazy. He believes he is a flower and birds are trying to eat him. A doctor takes him to the hospital. After months of treatment he improves. “I am not a flower,” he tells himself. As he is walking home from the hospital he looks up at the sky. “I know I am not a flower,” he thinks. “But those birds still want to eat me. How do I convince them that I am not a flower?”

Via TalkLeft (sporting a very nice new layout these days, by the way), a link to the LA Times’s account of the sort of real-life happy ending — horribly delayed, but still a happy ending — that you never believe when you see it in the movies.

In fact, if this isn’t going to be a major motion picture, or at least a made-for-TV movie soon, Hollywood deserves to be outsourced.

They claim that no one can play Strange Attractors without laughing at least once. I believe it.

This game uses only one control, the space bar, which turns gravity on when you press it. Weird, silly fun.

Blogging will at most be light until Monday, as I’ll be visiting family in the DC area.

One risk the British Prime Minister's family doesn't have to deal with that others do: the risk that forgetting to take their passport to the airport will interfere with their travel plans.