Archive for April 2011

Earworms, Musical and Otherwise

Around 1:30 on the Sunday morning, someone mishandled a cigarette near some combustible Christmas decorations. The ground floor was promptly engulfed in flames, which then quickly spread up the one stairway to the second floor. People on the second floor were trapped. Many jumped from the window, some were pushed from the window by frantic partygoers behind them …

An Empty Room, Green Trolleys, and Brubeck

However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.

Speak Inaudibly and Carry a Stick of Indeterminate Size

So basically Obama is out of compliance. He has made a calculation to ignore what the written rules say, because history is on his side. Unfortunately, as far as the law goes, that bet is almost certainly right.