Fairly Symmetrical

This story should really need no explanation. Two quotes:

"I asked her when you became a police officer didn't you take an oath to protect and defend the constitutions of the United States and the state of Colorado. She said, 'I guess I did; I can't remember.'

and:

[Judge Patterson claimed that] precedents of the Colorado Supreme Court and even the Constitution of Colorado are not applicable in Denver, because Denver is a home-rule city… [Assistant City Attorney Paul Puckett claimed that] "The Constitution has no force or effect in Denver, because this is a home rule city."

Friday night Jen, Lindsay and I went to see Lilo and Stitch… this is the best movie to come out of Disney in years. We were practically falling out of our chairs for the first half of the movie. Definitely a "buy".

If you still need some yuks after seeing L&S, head to Barnes and Noble and hunt down a book called I am Puppy, Hear Me Yap. Cute and amusing at the same time. The picture of the Aussie puppy (somewhere around 2 or 3 from the last picture in the book) looks very much like Cindy did when she was a puppy.

Then, Jenny, Lindsay, my Grandma Phyllis and I all took a day trip to see New Harmony on Saturday. It was a bit of a drive (2 hours or so each way), but well worth it -- it's a very interesting ex-utopian community, primarily active between the early 1800s and the Civil War. If you're into history definitely a place to check out.

Finally, Conner, Lindsay, Jen and I played roller hockey this morning for a few hours. It's been a long time since any of us played (and it was Lindsay's first time), but we had a lot of fun for all that. Great weekend, even if it did involve 16 hours or so in the car. :-P

I'm starting to get really tired of the letter X. In fact it is beginning to achieve the same level of dislike previously reserved for the small letters i and e, the phrase "information superhighway", and related phrases. XM radio. Windows XP. The Athlon XP. Aqua Extreme. OS X*. The XFL. Knock it off with the Xs already. Sheesh.

* Yes, I know it's supposedly "OS Ten". But it's an X nevertheless.

Means: the 1923rd most common name in the U.S. Jenny's last name does not appear in the top 88,799. :)

This has me laughing out loud.

Think of it. Every musical experience will be like the first time. Every track will be exciting and new. And you'll never have a song stuck in your head again.

Classic.

Addendum: Just saw (via Instapundit) this article on LawMeme regarding cheaper, downloadable music. I have to agree with Miller: I think it's inevitable that the music will include some sort of nonportability tech, and that using Liquid is a very obvious tip-off of this. The industry seems to have wised up a hair (if they do in fact sell entire CDs for $9.99, and new CDs instead of just old stock), but them getting entirely clueful all at once is a bit hard to swallow. I hope they surprise me, though.

I was reading this post on euthanasia (along with several other posts by Mr. Den Beste on the same topic) when something interesting struck me -- something I've noticed before, but that hadn't quite coalesced until now, about the way religious people often look at this issue in contrast to how atheists tend to view this issue.

Why is Europe still so hung up on appeasement? How is it possible that they missed the lessons Hitler taught about appeasing an enemy? Does it have anything to do with their historic desire for consensus?

These questions brought to you by an interview with an Israeli woman I saw on Andrew Sullivan's page.

Looked at one way, I suppose it does make some sense that countries with large populations of vocal Muslims would rather try to appease the Palestinians -- at the relatively cheap cost (to them, of course) of Israeli lives than they would risk angering people already in their country. Looked at another way, what precisely would the French, for instance, do if the Palestinians did manage to get everything they wanted through terrorist tactics? Is that really a lesson they want to teach anyone? I think this is just a weakness of democracies, unfortunately -- elected politicians do better solving immediate problems (calming rioting subcultures) than they do avoiding long-term, nebulous future problems (what happens when terrorism is really validated as an effective "negotiation" strategy). Aside from just "wanting to do the best job they can" they really don't even have any incentive to try to avoid those future problems.

I don't know whether this is incredibly funny or incredibly sad, but I read some of pirated-sites.com over lunch today. It's amazing how blatant these ripoffs can be. Someone on the Evolt mailing list today pointed out the following URLS:
http://www.web-designers.co.uk/design.htm and

http://www.ezewebdesign.net/faqs.htm

Check the second heading specifically.

Update: It appears ezewebdesign has found out about being found out. You can still see the page in Google's cache, though I don't think it's the same version I saw earlier today. IIRC, earlier today the web page actually still had "Web Designers Limited" in at least one place.

Update: Even better, this site not only ripped off a website quite well-known among web designers, they did so in such an inept fashion that they left intact the HTML tag that identifies the copyright holder:

<META content="© 1999-2001 evolt.org and its members" name=copyright>

!! Well done, guys. All that and a bouncing marquee, too…

Songs: I really like Counting Crows' new single (American Girls). Catchy. Scanning the lyrics from the rest of the CD it looks like this one will be a must-have. If only I didn't actually feel guilty about buying CDs and thus supporting the RIAA…

Bleats: I really like James Lilek's Bleats blog. He's fun to read, and Gnat sounds adorable. Jenny will cite this link as merely one more piece of evidence pointing to me wanting kids; I will then note that as much fun as it is to have a dog who urps if I take corners too sharply, I'm not really eager to add a small child to the circus yet. But I do like reading about them. ;)