Alack, alas, alackaday

Among the casualties in Microsoft’s recently announced plan to lay off five thousand employees is the entire team behind Flight Simulator.

- Patrick at Popehat

Note to self

Mustn't put a tube of hydrocortisone cream next to the toothpaste. Mustn't put a tube of hydrocortisone cream next to the toothpaste. Mustn't put a tube of hydrocortisone cream next to the toothpaste ... on the other hand, there has been a pleasant tingly sensation in my mouth all day.

The wheels of justice grind on

The CIA has reportedly killed Fahid Mohammed Ali Msalam and Sheikh Ahmed Salem Swedan in Northern Pakistan, only 7 years, 3 months and 21 days after the crimes of 9/11.

Drew M. at Ace of Spades' headline was: "Two Top Al Qaeda Figures Killed By Vicious New Year's Eve Hangovers And Hellfire Missiles But Mostly Hellfire Missiles."

Current events

From a letter to the Wall Street Journal today by Murray Ross, of Pleasant Hill, California:

I must have dozed off and skipped a page. Our new policy is to sell government bonds to raise cash to give to private equity firms to lend to non-creditworthy borrowers so they can drive new Chevy Suburbans down our crumbling roads and bridges, converting Middle East oil into greenhouse gases at the highest possible rate?

New Year Quote

The academic partiality in recent years for telling multiple stories in preference to the urgent single narrative, whatever its intellectual merits, has deprived beginning students of those coordinates of time and space by which they might take their bearings. After all, a fact unconnected with other facts is no fact at all but a snippet of trivia. It is hardly art history alone that suffers in this respect.

- Michael J. Lewis, from a book review in the New Criterion, December 2008 (p. 14.)