The L.A. Times asks "Is Donald Trump a fascist?".

I feel like the March 15th primaries deserve a "Super" name. No one appears to be calling it Super Tuesday II or Mini Tuesday.

It is heartening that The New York Times has decided to separate pledged delegate counts from superdelegate counts.

It is surreal to contemplate the possibility that Nancy Reagan effectively ran the White House while Ronald Reagan was starting to become incapacitated by Alzheimer disease.

I was looking for the Tongvan (also known as Gabrielino) word for coyote (it's

‘iitar

What being hit by the belt or smacked in the ass for misbehaving taught me was that the best way to deal with frustration is with violence. This lesson is now something I constantly struggle with to suppress.

cracked, but still I've got to keep it together
time out of joint, the sunlight seeps through the window pane
am I coming or am I going
hope is like a little gnat, biting and buzzing
that I can never swat away.

(Sardonic flag on. Don't take any of the following too seriously.)

As I mentioned previously, I find myself conflicted about having my blog posts live in a database. And, really, I don’t see that much difference between a blog post and a generic XML file. (As I mentioned, I wish I could write posts in XML.) I feel that blog posts, like generic XML, don’t map naturally to a relational database, particularly if you want to have fine-grained access to individual elements. Matt Liotta and Chris Preimesberger discuss the possible performance problems you might run into by trying to store XML in an RDBMS, and how a more elegant solution lies in native XML databases that can be queried in more natural (at least for XML) XPath and XQuery instead of SQL. As the name implies, XPath (which XQuery utilizes) has a lot in common with file-system paths. Consider that the browser’s location field is better suited to handling a file-system path than a query written in SQL (and file-system paths are in fact how most blogs are queried—whether by date or category, regardless of whether the blog engine stores posts on the filesystem or in a database.) And, especially in a shared-hosting situation, I don’t know if a database really gets you all that much more performance than simply dealing with the file-system. Then again, considering that I don’t find hierarchical categories all that useful, I don’t know if paths are all that great either, except for accessing specific elements in an XML document. Decisions, decisions.

This song is absolutely perfect.

Holy crap, does this mean that we won't be able to bring iPods onto airplanes anymore? (As if TSA actually worked…)

How do you dispel fear? By confronting it.

Every so often, at a particular time in the evening, all the dogs in the neighborhood bark. I always thought it was just their set time to meet, you know, like they'd hold some grand council remotely, just by barking. Because I can hear my dogs bark, and then wait for some other dog to answer.

ay caramba (i have been watching "the simpsons" way too much), for some reason blogger doesn't like me. it keeps eating my posts. oh well.