The US is burning through $3.9 Billion per month in Iraq. At the same time, Massachusetts is cutting services to the bone, laying off teachers, policement, and firefighters because of a $3 Billion deficit (caused entirely by tax cuts). I wonder if I'm the only one that finds that ironic.
The most recent irritation has been that our free bus service has been revoked. It's still free for UMass employees, but not for their spouses or kids. The Republicans like use fees. They can't stand 
lucky duckies getting anything for free. This nonwithstanding that use fees are incredibly regressive. In the newspaper yesterday gun owners were angry that gun licenses have been quadrupled (an increase of $75). One owner said that voting for a Republican was the biggest mistake he ever made.
I'm continuing to work through Bowling Alone. The chapters I read last night described the correlation between social capital and many interesting factors, including geography (measures of social capital are lowest in the states of the Confederacy and the South generally), child welfare and educational attainment (positive relationship), and mortality and violence (negative relationship). OK. I believe it's important -- now how do we fix it? It's clear that a big part is simply going to be finding ways to get people involved.
Lucy and I didn't manage to exercise this morning. I got up late. It was raining. She had to be back at a particular time. I missed the bus. The page was torn out. Whatever.
When I first created the Istvan Bierfaristo site, I set it up as a set of static pages, because PHP wasn't available. When I moved to the new server, I never got around to recrafting the pages to use PHP so I could load a header and footer using an include statement. I finally got around to rebuilding the pages. I updated the header to use the new graphic of IB. I also added a page with the haiku we wrote at my LK presentation.