Well, it’s back to the grindstone after a very relaxing holiday vacation.
The other big news is my lovely wife Karen (aka Princess Fix IT) was Slashdotted! This news for nerds post deals with the potential limits, if any, of high-end machines. Of course, Karen always posts about “stuff that matters,” so you know it was only a matter of time before she got some link love.
The first comment links to her post about an account exec who requested a ridiculously powerful machine.
Way to go, babe.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had difficulty waking up on my own at a regular time. Even an alarm clock is not a fail-safe.
I have gone so far as to, while drifting in and out of consciousness as the alarm-clock radio blares away, concoct elaborate rationales to explain to myself why it’s OK to oversleep.
And so on.
Then I had a giant mug of coffee, and now I’m buzzing all over the place. Funny how that works, ain’t it?
You may have heard the news from various sources about Google’s new Deskbar quick-search tool, which is now only available in beta form, which is perhaps why many articles did not link to a download URL and why you won’t find it publicized at Google itself.
But aha! I found it. Pretty nifty, I tells ya. It sits right in your taskbar as a toolbar and allows you to search for all the usual, plus movies and software downloads. Awesome. Go get it. Now!
I love you, Google!
For the first time in my air travels since Sept. 11, I was pulled aside for extra-special attention while returning from a business trip to San Diego. I went through the metal detector and I buzzed. My belt and shoes wound up being the culprits. Next time, I will just show up naked. Talk about a danger to homeland security.
I noticed while waiting in line to be debriefed that the brand name of scanners they use — in the San Diego airport, at least — is Rapiscan. I assume that first syllable is supposed to rhyme with the word “wrap,” and indicate the efficiency with which the machine monitors people’s personal belongings.
But I initially read it, instead, as if the first syllable rhymed with the word “rape.” How appropriate, I thought and chuckled. I stopped laughing after I was wanded and my crotch area started beeping (thanks to belt).
I was fortunate enough to have my Mom waiting at Midway Airport to pick me up, but I temporarily forgot that she wouldn’t — couldn’t — wait for me at the gate. It was so dispiriting to walk off the plane to a completely empty terminal, as it was a late flight.
I fondly remember how many times I met family or friends at the airport gate. There were all the times I visited Grandma in Philadelphia, or Aunt Trudy in Dallas. Most of all, I remember the first time I met Karen in person. I walked off the airplane and spied her in the corner of the gate, looking radiant. She says I smiled from ear to ear.
That kind of meeting couldn’t happen today. “I’ll meet you in baggage claim” doesn’t quite bring a flood of warmth to the heart. And it’s hard not to think, every time, I “deplane” to an empty gate about why that gate is empty, and what has been taken away.
Rush Limbaugh on black Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb:
I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.
McNabb, naturally, didn’t take kindly to the comments, and neither did the usual suspects, who called for ESPN to fire Limbaugh from their Sunday NFL pre-game show. They didn’t. He resigned, instead, saying a statement that his comments weren’t “racially motivated,” but I think that’s a crock.
The only reason for Limbaugh to speculate that “the media” overhyped McNabb because of his skin color is because he subconsciously believes that there’s still some doubt about blacks’ ability to peform as NFL quarterbacks.
Why would “the media” need to hype McNabb, given that there are several successful starting NFL QBs out there already — Michael Vick, Steve McNair, Kordell Stewart (OK, he has been successful) and Daunte Culpepper, to name a few. Randall Cunningham and Warren Moon are just two of the great retired black QBs.
So there would be no need for “the media” to overhype McNabb any more than they do with any other quarterback. NFL QBs usually get too much credit for their teams’ successes and too much blame for their failures — that’s true regardless of skin color.
How that thought could even occur to Limbaugh is because he, at some level, has some doubt about blacks’ ability to perform as QBs that would somehow necessitate the naturally liberal-minded news media to shade the facts to favor an African-American like McNabb under some kind of secret sports affirmative action program.
It was a stupid thing to say, but perhaps not as stupid as having Limbaugh on the ESPN show in the first place. He has no football expertise or experience. He’s never coached or played the game. He was on there to generate excitement and unfortunately he generated a little too much excitement for ESPN.
If ESPN is so badly struggling for ratings that it resorts to these kinds of stunts — hiring Limbaugh, I mean — well maybe football fans aren’t interested in watching eight hours of pre-game coverage. But on that I could only hazard a guess, not being a football fan myself.
Sure, my birthday’s not for a few months yet, but it’s never to early to let people know what you want.
Here’s the full tour of the Gold Coast mansion my alma mater, Columbia College, bought for its new college president and rehabbed for millions of dollars only to put it back on the block again. What a waste.
Meanwhile, at least one Columbia student has learned the true value of an internship … at Playboy.
Thanks to articulate.babble for pointing to a couple of cool Chicago blog maps which list Windy City blogs by rail line.
Chicago Bloggers is the more inclusive of the two, while the Chicago Blogmap only includes El stops.
Incidentally, I’m a member of Windy City Webloggers, a Chicago blog Webring.
The Stris (aka my mom, Sarah Bornstein, seen here in 1970-something, a few years before I was born) sent me a note occasioned by the 40th anniversary of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington in August.
The march was of course the scene of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, now commemorated by McDonald’s placemats every February (you’re not a true historical figure until special sauce drips out of a Big Mac onto an artist’s rendering of you).
So here it is:
August 28, 2003
On being part of a history by accident
Like millions of Americans, I am thinking about the historic march on Washington forty years ago today. I am thinking about the dream still deferred and the wonders of inspiration one day can provide. I was lucky and privileged enough to be in Washington on that hot August day. But I’d forgotten about my precise motivation for making the three-hour bus trip from Philadelphia to D.C. until I received a call from an old friend.
It was close to 11 last night when I got a call from Sallie Zemlin. I hadn’t seen or talked to her in at least 25 years. But she was one of the members of my synagogue youth group who made the trip to Washington for the march. She was thinking of me, she said, and decided to call. Since I am the only “S. Bornstein” in the Chicago phone book, I’m not that hard to find. It was great to hear from her.
We caught up on the details of our lives, of course, and then she hit me with the zinger.
“So, Sarah, do you remember why you agreed to go on the march?”
“Gee,” I replied, “I guess I just thought it was a good opportunity, and the youth group was paying, and all that.”
“No,” she said. “You had decided against going, remember? And then I called you and told you that Michael Silver was going. That’s why you went.”
Oh yeah. Michael Silver. I had forgotten about him. He was a guy I knew from our religious school classes — he went to another high school, so the bus trip was a good opportunity to flirt with him. He was very bright and very intense and had these beautiful blue eyes. Probing my memory about all this, I remember that it was actually rather selfish of me to chase after Michael Silver. I already had a boyfriend that I had met at camp that summer. But, as the vagaries of adolescence will have it, he liked me more than I liked him, so he was automatically less attractive than someone who appeared to have absolutely no interest in me whatsoever.
Again, searching my memory, I recall that, as usual, Michael barely spoke to me on the three-hour trip to Washington. But about two hours into the journey, as I began to see hundreds of buses on the highway, filled with people, black and white, from all parts of the country, with signs and banners adorning their vehicles, I knew that I was about to be part of something phenomenal and monumental and extraordinary. I had been conscious of the civil rights struggle, of course, and had been part of “weekend workgroups” in the inner city with African-American counterparts (I think we still used the term “Negro” then). But I wasn”t fully aware of or engaged in the magnitude of the movement. Never before had I been anyplace where so many people were brought together by shared commitment to a cause. It was a life-changing experience. And, who knows, if Sallie hadn’t called me to tell me who was going, I might never have been part of it.
So many words have been and will be written about what that day meant to America. Nothing I can say will add insight into the historical significance of Martin Luther King’s dream and its still unfulfilled promises. But it makes me smile to think, as I reflect on my own life and the directions it has taken, that had it not been for a vain girlhood crush, I might never have been part of one of the most historic events of the twentieth century. But then, history is full of accidents like that. And I remember thinking on the trip home, as I was filled with exhilaration, pride and excitement, that I didn’t care at all about Michael Silver.
I told The Stris I wondered whatever happened to Michael Silver. She said she thought he wound up at MIT. Michael Silver, if you’re out there … just be thankful you’re not my daddy!
Thanks for letting me share, Mom.
To say that we remember or commemorate the tragic events of two years ago tomorrow is to imply that we’ve somehow forgotten them.
But of course we haven’t. To remember the immense sadness of Sept. 11, 2001, takes but the slightest daily effort to notice the undeniable joy, evil, and absurdity of life on this planet.
Every breath taken by a loved one is a reminder of what we lost — what was taken from us — that day by those murderous thugs. It doesn’t take an act of mental decathlete gymnastica to appreciate the simple fact of a life’s rippling value and the searing pain of its absence.
Multiply it 3,000 times and more. Multiply that by the number nearly lost, the could-have lost, the similarly lost in the past and the ones who will be so lost in the future in every murder, every war, every dictatorship and we begin to approach the throat-swelling effect of the memory of Sept. 11, 2001.
What we can do is confuse the matter with something other than grief. We can use the dead to sell a car alarm, a gas mask, an insurance policy, a charity, a law, a war.
We can. We obviously have. It’s human nature to react to horror with every emotion but the one it so obviously demands. It’s human nature to splash the water to stop it from rippling its small, slow waves that eventually encircle us all.
Click here to read a bit about the trip Karen and I took to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our wedding.
It was delightful.
It’s not for lack of passion (well, maybe a bit) that this blog has been silent lately. Rather, I was busy wrapping up six weeks’ work on a 2,500-word story on surplus lines.
Don’t know what surplus lines are? Yeah. Exactly.
Insurance Journal has purchased me a very nice digital camera so I can take pictures for the magazine at all the very exciting insurance events I attend.
Naturally, I had to test it out, which I did at the Cubs game yesterday and on a walk with Sporto in the early evening.
Here are a few of the pictures I kind of liked:
I doubt I’ll be posting photos with any regularity, as I usually shoot with my good old fashioned film camera and I’m too lazy to scan them and too cheap to pay for those digital CDs or whatever.
kboreilly.com 
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