Enoch

Outside of a layover at the airport, I've never been to Detroit, but crime in the District doesn't seem to be all too bad to me. There are areas to avoid (generally, everything south of the Anacostia river is to be avoided, although the new ballpark opening in a month might help change this), but the business disctrict, the big government offices, and the Mall are as safe as any big city can get. Likewise with Georgetown and the northern parts of DC along the MD border (Friendship Heights, Takoma, etc.). Northern VA is much like these latter areas. The Rosslyn area is really an adjunct to the business district-- DC doesn't allow buildings to go higher than the Washington Monument, so if you want to build a real high-rise, you've got to do it over the river (the Gannett headquarters, home of "USA Today" is among these buildings). The nicer areas clustered around the Metro stops have lots of high-end residential and retail development. As you get further from the subway, it gets more suburban. Here's the wikipedia page on Arlington County, chocked full of citation-needed goodness. For example, it is the smallest self-governing county in the U.S., and CNN Money ranked it as the most educated city in the country.

I'm in Arlington. And I seem to be paying significantly more rent, yet have fewer amenities than you do. Then again, mine isn't really a bachelor pad anymore since I'm sharing it with my fiancee. You working in the district?

Well, it won't show up on the MBE because it's state-specific statutory law, but there are generally criminal punishments for mistreatment of animals. This is not to be confused with giving rights to animals, of course (no more than a house has a right not to be burgled), but it is one measure of the protections that we, societally, have decided to give to animals. Back to the main topic, though, I agree with the general sense on the thread that, although something generally needs to be done about stray dog populations that threaten people, mass poisoning is not a particularly attractive way of doing so.

Leonard Cohen -- By the Rivers Dark

R.E.M. - Strange Currencies

Cake -- I Will Survive The funked-up bassline makes it a worthwhile cover.

One other thing: picture the reaction in the black community if Barack Obama walks into the convention with the lead in both counted delegates and popular vote, but doesn't get the nomination. There's no way that the superdelegates open that particular can of worms.

Consider the source. The headline should've been "Home-state Senator says everything is going to go to hell if the DNC doesn't do exactly what he wants." The FL and MI Party organizations were warned what would happen if they moved their primary dates up. They did it anyway, and now they want the national party to bail them out for their mistake?! I wouldn't have a problem seating the delegates based on the first elections if those elections had been conducted like all the other elections out there. But they weren't-- the campaigns ignored the states and the voters didn't turn out like they would have had it mattered. I'll refer you to Jonathan Alter's take on Hillary's chances. Even if there's a re-do in FL and MI, she's still a huge longshot. EDIT: And there is absolutely zero grounds for any kind of lawsuit based on the seating/non-seating of delegates. Courts are exceedingly deferential to political parties in deciding their internal rules. Even if Hillary's people are brazen enough to take the party to court (which would never happen), the case would be dismissed quite swiftly. We disagree. More than anything, they want a Democrat in the White House. (Most of them haven't committed to anyone yet because they want to be on the side that wins.) And they're shrewd enough politicians to know that nominating a candidate who got less than a plurality of both the delegate count and popular vote is an excellent way to doom that effort.

Heh. I posted about this comic in the "funny pictures" thread about a week ago. It is excellent work, although someone should really teach the author how to spell "bipolar" and "loneliness."

Well, sure. But in the event that all human life on Earth is wiped out by some catastrophe, do I really care if there are a couple dozen humans on Mars to carry on the species?

No complaints about reliability, performance, or service, but I have also had a difficult time upgrading a Dell. Had to take a hacksaw to the back of their non-standard case so that a new power supply would fit properly. On the brightside, that experience gave me the resolve and confidence to do my first home-build.

Arcanum stunk. The setting was an interesting idea, but the execution (outside of the excellent background music) was so horribly botched that I was embarrassed for them just playing it. A team of retarded rhesus monkeys could devise a better rules system for a CRPG. Everything from the ability balance to the TB/RT combat to the way experience points were handled was pretty much 180 degrees from what a sane person would come up with. And, despite the interesting setting, the story and characters were just dull.

The long term future of humanity isn't/shouldn't be limited to Earth. Too many eggs in one basket so to speak (which Is why I prefer the above option that features some redundancy) Space exploration to help us understand the nature of the universe = good. Space exploration as a first step toward human colonization = silly. Really, what would have to happen to Earth in order to make the moon or Mars a better habitat for humans? Even the most disastrous nuclear war/comet impact/robot uprising scenarios would still leave Earth far more habitable to humans than any other hunk of rock that we can currently throw rockets to.

I think your $100 is safe Tarna. As I've stated before, Hillary is a machine politician. She is the safe choice, the known quantity. The party hacks that make up the superdelegates WANT to vote for her. They want a reason to vote for her. If she wins in Pennsylvania (as seems likely) she will have swept all the big populous states. She can not catch Obama in pledged delegates but she is close enough that her wins in Florida and Michigan would have made the difference and the majority of the supers will use that as the pretext for voting for her. A fresh face like Obama riding a populist groundswell scares the machine democrats half to death. I agree, the convention will be where the nomination fight ends and it will be ugly. And Hillary will come out on top. Wishful thinking. The superdelegates are not as dumb as you hope they are. If the bulk of the superdelegates want to vote for Hillary, why haven't they pledged their support to her yet? Most of these "party hacks" want to vote for the person who is going to win in November. Yeah, she has won the bigger states-- so what? The delegates available in each state are weighted by population, and Obama is leading in the delegate count and the overall popular vote. Florida and Michigan would be relevant if the campaigns had done any actual campaigning there (Obama wasn't even on the ballot in MI), and if the voters had gone to the polls thinking that their vote would matter. But it was announced well beforehand that the delegates wouldn't be seated, so the campaigns didn't show up and the resultant turnout was not particularly representative of the overall opinions of Democrats in those states. Pissing off Obama's "populist groundswell" is the Democrats' best chance to blow an election that the GOP really has no business winning. The convention bigwigs know this.

I never played Bloodlines. Modern vampire stories don't appeal to me. (Modern meaning the Rice/Wheedon approach wherein there's a subculture of bloodsuckers living in present-day cities who may or may not be conflicted about their macabre nature. Dracula still rocks, though.) Plus, very little about Troika's previous titles made me think that their work was worth my time. Twice bitten, thrice shy.

Sure it would. Normally, lack of funds (which, in U.S. elections, are donated from the public at large) drives candidates with little-to-no chance of winning out of the race. The problem is that, although Hillary has been essentially DOA for weeks, she still has a hard-core of supporters-- mostly either loyalists to her husbands administration or ardent feminists-- who continue to fund her campaign. (And, of course, she lacks the magnanimousness* to step aside of her own volition.) As for the general election, the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about now is still Iraq. If the temporary "surge" of troop levels ends (as it's scheduled to in a couple months) without achieving it's stated goal of fostering compromise among Iraqi politicians, the war moves right back to being a front-burner issue. Look for an endless stream of DNC ads emphasizing how McCain has been every bit as pro-war as Bush has. And if the end of the surge also brings an increase in violence back to pre-surge levels, the McCain campaign is absolutely dead in the water. * Yes, that's actually the noun form of "magnanimous." What an odd word-- I thought it would be something like "magnaninity."

Really, it's been effectively over since the MD/VA/DC primaries. Clinton pulled out a few narrow wins yesterday, but the proportional nature of delegate assignment on the Democratic side means that she has virtually no hope of having the lead in pledged delegates going into the convention. She'd need to win all the remaining contests by better-than 65-35 margins, which ain't happening. Yes, there's still the superdelegates to consider, but they're all reasonably shrewd professional politicians who all want very much for a Democratic candidate to win the White House in November. They're not dumb enough to nominate someone who failed to get even a plurality of the votes over the preceding months.

Just finished Portal. Lots of fun, although it gave me a bit of motion sickness from time to time. Normally, I'm OK with 1st-person FPS-- I think Portal is different in that it frequently gives the player the disquieting sense of not knowing which way is up. I loved the federal contracting jokes popping up on the projector screen in the area just before you confront the 'end boss.' Although they make no sense-- Black Mesa isn't subject to the "Government Performance and Results Act"? GPRA is a real law, but it imposes no requirements on contractors, just federal agencies. Valve really needs to hire some attorneys with experience in federal management laws. I'm sending my resume in tomorrow.

I don't understand the Jets at all. If you have defensive personnel under contract who look like stars in a 4-3 front (Vilma, Robertson), doesn't it make more sense to actually play a 4-3 front rather than trade these guys for pennies on the dollar and give huge contracts to new guys who fit the 3-4 better? Oh, and it looks like the World Champions are close to signing journeyman safety Sammy Knight. Old and slow, yes. But he's also cheap, and there's a reason that he has stuck around the league for so long. He'll compete for a starting job, but I see him as an acceptable "floor" at the position-- one that will hopefully be exceeded by the likes of James Butler, Michael Johnson, and/or whoever they bring in at the postiion in the draft.

Good luck! I wasn't very good at particularly skilled at the subtle art of AD&D exploitation ages and ages ago when I played those games. I knew enough to avoid the level caps, but I'm sure that my spell use was rather sub-optimal (and I never did figure out how to transfer my characters). I recall that my PoR party never made it past the Boss' squadron of 8th-level fighter guards, and my CotAB party got stuck/lost somewhere in the lower levels of Zhenthil Keep. It'd be interesting to see if my more polished D&D juju could get me further in the games now (and maybe even take a stab at the Mulmaster Beholder Corps!), but I don't have the tolerance for tedium that I once did. I doubt I'd make it out of the Slums. On topic, I played some Portal, but stopped when I started feeling a bit ill. I don't know if it's motion-sickness related (which I've never had a problem with before), but better safe then sorry.

I can't believe it has taken 26 posts for someone to point out Freddie Mercury's view on this subject.

Dinah Washington -- Trouble in Mind (featuring Ben Webster on tenor sax)

The Clash -- Lost in the Supermarket

Eric Dolphy -- On Green Dolphin Street (with Freddie Hubbard, Jaki Byard, George Tucker and Roy Haynes)

White Stripes -- Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine