I am so sick and stunned and furious about yesterday's Supreme Court decision. This country will become one hundred times the corrupt mess it is today. Welcome to your new shithole.

If you have a strong opinion about what you want your congressional representatives to do about health care reform, call them today. Emails (I am told) get ignored, paper mail is processed too slowly, but they really listen to phone calls. Keep the phone ringing off the hook.

Myself, I think the House passing the Senate bill, with a sidecar reconciliation bill simultaneously fixing it up if possible, without if necessary, is the only way to get there. But if you've got a better idea, call with that. Here's the phone numbers.

Go. Now. Do it.

Dear Mineshaft:

A friend sent me this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/garden/14nolock.html She knew that for
the last 20 years, I've lived in a major metropolitan area, in a single
family home with no doorman or fence, and almost never lock the door. Walk
the dog: unlocked. Go to work: unlocked. We'd go away for a week:
unlocked. For maybe 15 of those years, we had no keys. Our friends knew
it, and would stop by, say to use the bathroom or get a glass of water, when
we were gone. It's been very convenient when I've needed someone to pick
something up from the house. We've experienced no crime at all, although
there have been break-ins every now and again in the neighborhood.

I don't generally admit this is public, for obvious reasons. I'm curious,
though, just how far out in the tail of the distribution we are.

John Adams

Dear John:

That's interesting. Buck's got a tendency to leave the door to our apartment not only unlocked but standing open in the summers to get a breeze -- we're on the top floor and our apartment's very hot. This freaks me out a bit, but just because it feels weird, not that I particularly think its unsafe. And the door's usually unlocked if we're home, but we do lock it if we're going out.

But come to think of it, what are the odds that someone who's going to break in is going door-to-door trying knobs? A burglar is going to assume everyone's doors are locked, and plan to either break the door or a window, or I suppose high-end burglars might pick locks (I actually don't know if anyone really does that.)

You could think of it as like vaccination -- the non-lockers have herd immunity from burglars who might just try the knob, because everyone else's house is locked. Anyone else out there scorning home security?

In a three+ hour broadcast of a football game, you watch about 11 minutes of live playing. You watch about an hour of people standing around. You spend about 30 seconds looking up scriptures that players have referenced on their face paint.

Via Contexts

I had to rush today from work to a long band practice, in which we played a twenty-song set list we're performing later this week. I just wasn't into it.

In talking to my roommate, I was oh-duh'd by her observation that she has a similar bug about not going out for the night without a break for a nap or whatever.

I totally need that recharge, which feels like an armchair observation to make, but there you go: an armchair (resting now) observation.

I admit That Thread Below's (you know the one) France-US nuclear-war discussion amused me in a perverse way.

It brought to mind college discussions, where I found myself arguing that it wasn't insane to think of places like Mexico having nuclear weapons and, with hindsight, wishing I had the LB*-fu to say things like, "Look, if you want to make an argument that any country having nuclear weapons is insane, go for it; as it stands, your argument is that brown people can't be trusted with nukes." O, nostalgia.

So, you should all have a conversation about hypothetical nuclear situations, except this time make it funny, to make up for my college years.

Also, I guess you can talk about Massachusetts. Or food and sex. Or food. Or sex.

*Not attributing this argument to LB; rather, noting that she makes statements like this, which often clarify arguments for me.

From the helpiest chalk I know:

I'm fourth in line for tickets to Obama's town hall meeting here in Lorain, Oh. I'm not sure how they decide who gets to ask questions, but I'm working on mine. So far this is what I have:

"Mr. President, are you troubled by the allegations [fact?] that Goldman Sachs short sold mortgaged backed securities, and this is part of why they weathered the financial crisis? If you are troubled, how does this effect your policies toward executive compensation."

"Mr. President, how do you respond to charges that your economic team is too close to Wall Street. I'm thinking specifically of Timothy Geithner's handling of the AIG bailout and the possibility that he tried to hide the fact that AIG paid back some banks 100 cents on the dollar using bailout money, banks that otherwise would have otherwise not been paid at all."

Also, I'm worried that I may have to give up my place in line to get Caroline to one of her after school activities.

One question that I've been wondering is what exactly they're going to do about all the zillions of holds that Republicans have put on his nominees. Are they just going to sit there? Why isn't there a big media circus about how disastrous it is to have no one running anything?

What else?

I know many of you find Penelope Strunk to be a boring, Aspie-faking, gimmicky marketing personality. Somehow I still like her. Anyway, I can give you the gist so that you don't have to click over here.

I think choosing a life that is interesting to us and choosing a life that makes us feel happy are probably very different choices.

For one thing, people who are happy do not look for a lot of choices, according to Barry Schwartz, in his book, The Paradox of Choice. People who want to have an interesting life are always looking for more choices and better choices, and they make decisions for their life based on maximizing choices.

Basically she poses a dichotomy between seeking happiness or seeking to optimize your choices, as general approaches to life. That you can't be happy if you're eternally seeking the most perfect option, and people who are happy are happy to settle, more or less. She says of herself that she'd rather seek the most perfect option than be happy, because her goal is for life to be interesting.

I buy it, as a premise. I'm definitely happy to settle*. Is it good enough? Then it's good enough for me. Certainly the little choices, like a dentist or what's for dinner. But also the bigger choices, like my career path or place of employment, or if, hypothetically, Jammies interacts with our children in some way that takes me by surprise.

I suppose there's a trade-off between how high you set a bar along your personal gauge of perfection, and how flexible you are. And since this is all self-reported, probably the only thing I can actually conclude is that I like to think of myself as being really flexible and awesome and this whole post is starting to decompensate. (See? Low standards!)

* Not you, Jammies. You're the pilot episode of Veronica Mars of my heart.

This is a good tune.

I noticed that my cereal's mascot is a blue kangaroo named Cool Blue, who wears shades, and has a little tan joey named L'il Oaty.

So I went online to find out more. It turns out you can make your cereals fight (Marshmallow Mateys FTW!) And recipes, too.

To make a Crunchy Cereal Toss, you need:
* 4 cups Malt-O-Meal® Marshmallow Mateys® cereal
* 1 cup raisins
* 1 cup candy coated peanut butter-flavored pieces
* 1 cup cinnamon and sugar bear-shaped crackers

Directions

1. In a large bowl, toss together all ingredients. Store in a tightly covered container.

Well that sounds delicious. The most special recipe is probably this. Please someone cook this and report back.