Whig Hill

need to say...

This new version of Firefox is being difficult. Why?

UPDATE: Ok, got the 2.0.11 upgrade..we'll see how that goes.

And while I'm here... the new upgrade to Gmail is awful. It's losing it's simplicity and dumbing down. But worse than that is that I've been getting spam. One or two a day. Before this upgrade, I never got spam. Never.

R.I.P. Sean Taylor

This is unbelievably heartbreaking. Sean Taylor, the extraordinarily talented safety for the Redskins has been shot and killed. He once made a receiver running a route flinch. You never see that. Kinda wish I was up in D.C. right now.

movie review

No Country for Old Men has my most favorite movie ending ever.

Stuffs

Up in Virginia for the holiday. Dad is well, but wore out. He's at the hospital today getting new blood. That will perk him up.

My brother and his family are going to Namibia to work in a small mining town caring for orphans and other people devastated by AIDS (thats the short version). They're heading over in January. Here his his blog about raising money for it. Frankly, some of my friends might be turned off by the missionary aspect, but Steve will be over there getting his hands dirty in the trenches to help improve peoples' lives. I'll be feeding my fat ass while reading history. 

Anyhow, I finally got the paintball urge out of my system. Steve, Brian, Brother-in-Law Albert, and I went out and battled a bunch of Steve's friends. I got wacked twice. I slaughtered Brian twice and Albert once, but the best thing was me and Steve's fire-and-manouver at eachother where I was running sideways shooting and he was diving forward with gun blazing. I was the crouching tiger and he was the hidden dragon and it was all in slow motion and airborne and real cool and I nailed him. Ha!

At school we've finished the book and review part of the class and have gone on to writing longer historiographic essays. That's why I haven't posted any reviews lately. Now I'm reading about six to eight books in three weeks so I'm not posting about anything else either.

Alright. Got to go. But before I leave, I want to leave you with something that happened to me and a group of friends the other night...

INTERIOR, BACK SECTION, THE FEDERAL

Form Letters Gone Wrong

Got this today

THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR LEGAL SERVICES

<snip>

Dear Mr. Graham

I understand that you have recently been charged with a Leash Law Violation. Facing such an accusation, you are probably confused, angry, even afraid. Going into a courtroom alone to face a professional prosecutor can be worse. We can help even the odds.

The criminal laws of North Carolina are extremely complex. Convictions can cost people their jobbs, their reputations and even their freedom. It is crucial that you have someone on your side who knows the law and will fight to protect you.

Our attorneys have decades of experience dealing with cases like yours...

<end>

I should probably pay them the $500 to make my $145 Lease Law Violation go away. 'Cause, you know, my very freedom is at stake!

(Kacey...this is your friend.)

a plug

Xiloa on 9th Street now has a lunch and dinner buffet (boo-fay, they call it.) Great price. Very bad for my portions, but very good on flava. You should go.

some things

1. I can't begin to tell you how much easier my life would be if I knew Dreamweaver.

2. If I were Queen of the Universe, the first thing I would do would be to ban high heels. As an observer, I just don't see what the upside is to all the obvious discomfort, damage, and pain.

3. I wrote a review of Roll, Jordan, Roll, but it's so awful I'm not posting it.

4. I'm sitting on the porch and being eaten up by mosquitoes. It's November ferchrissakes. I guess the little devils got a right to enjoy the nice weather, too.

5. I need to do better at making a cogent point.

review, not a very good review

Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Southern whites thought hard about the problem of slavery and the problems of managing the enslaved. When they worried over the question of why the enslaved ran away, their conclusions revealed staggering delusion. The near universal belief that blacks desired enslavement and only absconded at the suggestion of foreign agents or an unstable mind must represent the most fanciful flight in American history. It might be humorous had the assertion not contributed to the vicious enslavement of an American people and the murder of civil war.  (Whites did adopt a realistic view of slave management, from the expectation that runaways would always plague planters, to well-developed systems for the recovery of lost bondsmen.)

Friday Nonsense

a liberty-loving dog can be costly

I should never have encouraged Lizzie to read that biography of Patrick Henry because ever since, whenever I try to put the leash on her, she's all like "I know not what course other dogs may take, but give me liberty or give me death!"

The risk of that, of course, is running across frustrated cops assigned to the park patrol, who will give you a citation totaling $145 for having a dog off leash. That happened this morning.

Lizzie, citing the Declaration of Independence, refuses to hand over that money, so I'll have to pay it myself.

dammit.