Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Posts from September 2005

2 + 2

A former engineering student has written a really funny article speculating on why college students are leaving engineering programs in droves.

The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy [...]


Errata

Speaking of corrections … I think the conclusions I came to in my last post, on Sullivan’s reasons for instinctively shitting upon this weekend’s anti-war rally, may have been a little hasty. He could have been reacting to one of the event’s main organizers, a far-left group called Inernational ANSWER, whose coordinator once had nice [...]


Dominoes

In the course of belittling this weekend’s anti-war rally in DC, Andrew Sullivan makes outrageous allegations about the size of the crowd, and then, quickly, corrects. Sullivan is a proto-conservative, and so his views are largely antithetical to mine, but he’s also one of my favorite bloggers, because he writes well and seems to build [...]


The Extraction of Blood

Last week, I went down to my local donor center to give blood. When I walked in, two of the clinicians, a man and a woman, were arguing over which of them was faster at doing donor interviews. The woman was especially vehement. “You think you can beat me?” she said, finally. “Prove it!” She [...]


Loud

We were standing in line at a ticket counter at Bushkill Falls, in the Poconos, surrounded by people from New Jersey, a few of whom fit the New Jersey Person stereotype perfectly: they were big and loud and florid and mulleted and when they spoke it sounded like a small bullhorn factory exploding. Their accents [...]


Bucks

For just the briefest instant, there, I thought that Bush and his pack of viles were on the verge of actually owning up to a mistake. Before he went on his show-tour of New Orleans, the man Himself said that the results of the relief effort were “not acceptable.” He didn’t attribute the unacceptableness to [...]


Katrina

Yesterday I heard Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff saying that here were actually two catastrophes in New Orleans this week: first Hurricane Katrina, and then the breach in the levees that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to flow into the debilitated city, and drown it.

At the time, this struck me as kind of an odd thing to [...]


Goddam Muses

My Muse has fallen silent. She’s never really had much to say to me, but lately I’m getting nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Which is, I think, extremely ungrateful, given the fact that I not only let her live in my head, but also feast on a veritable treasure trove of repressed subconscious angst. And besides … just [...]