Memory and recitation

An essay by Lance Mannion on the power of recitation.

Photos of Scott's Antarctic expedition

• BBC article
  
• Scott Polar Research Institute (Cambridge University)
  
• Freeze Frame - over 20,000 photos of British polar exploration from 1845 to 1960, including photos from Robert Scott's ill-fated 1910-1913 expedition
  
• On these pages, click the photos to enlarge:
  
• Captain Scott and group, April 13, 1911
  
• Happy Antarctic expeditions run on Heinz baked beans

Wrecking the economy?

With what Obama and the Democrats have done and are planning to do, it almost seems they're deliberately wrecking business and industry, as though they want everything to be supported by the government so when the nation returns to its senses, we'll find it impossible to scale back government without causing the whole structure to collapse.

And do you get the impression they're not concerned about upcoming elections? With the White House takeover of the census and huge "stimulating" payoffs scheduled to go out just before next year's elections, it's as though they intend to rig what elections they can and buy the ones they can't.

Or maybe I'm just a new member of the tinfoil hat brigade.

Good music, randomized

Captain Obvious here. I've realized that when I find an mp3 file I like on our White House filesystem, I can just symlink it into, say, ~/Music, then do 'mplayer -shuffle *.*' that dir to get randomized musical goodness.

Tuesday night music for programming

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Lord Peter's Amazon

A list of all of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels at amazon.com. Short stories, too.

Here's a chronological list with links to amazon.

A note on tax hikes

"Rich" people are looking for ways to avoid slavery, as any sensible person would. I don't understand the notion of raising taxes on the rich. Personally, I've never received a family-sustaining regular paycheck from a poor person. If the President has his way, fewer families will receive them from rich people.

Funny how things work out

We've never put much into our 401K account, which is handled by Vanguard and invested in stocks and such. We figured we needed the money now more than we'd need it in the far future, and anyway, we knew we'd never have some vast account on which we could retire comfortably. And then early last year we raided the account for all we could get to pay off our very last medical debt - there was just enough available in those last few months before the crash when the Dow was above 14,000. Now the Dow Jones is in a nosedive, taking investment accounts with it, and it doesn't matter all that much to us - there isn't much money in there to lose. One less thing to worry about.

Though I do wonder, along with Thurston Howell III in an old Gilligan's Island episode, when the Dow will break 1000 - heading the other way this time on its way into a crater.