Question

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Am I disabled

From Orlando's livejournal:

How disabled are you?

We have calculated that you are 7% disabled.

You are barely disabled. You tell all your friends you give up your seat to those poor disabled people on public transport, although you rarely do. You only stumbled across Ouch! because you thought it was some kinky porn site. You freak.

A Pleasant Surprise

Today, a card was dropped off for me at the main desk. There was a woman about 30 years of age who was planning to go on a church mission two weeks long to Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She wanted a colour map of Congo, and central Africa from Nigeria to the Seychelles, but unfortunately the printer wasn't working.

It was a nice card, with a very friendly message. The last line was "The world needs more people like you in it," ending with a smiley-face emoticon.

Now, if only work could be like that every day.

Livejournal articles

At work, I did a search on INFOTrac for articles mentioning livejournal. I found ten.

Here are the most relevant ones:

( Diary Lands )

( Getting Personal )

( Lord God Almighty )

( Writing with Web logs )

( Who's blogging now )

( Who Was Billiam and Why Was He Murdered On the Net. )

Music

I got two CDs that I'd ordered via Amazon today: Tatu's 200 KM/H in the Wrong Lane and the Eurythmics' 1984. Tatu, as I expected, is basically disposable if pleasant dance-pop; I've already gotten the mp3s for 1984, but as a big Eurythmics fan I'm happy to have CD-quality tracks.

As I write, I'm eating dried dulse (picked at Grand Manan) which I bought, along with sundry other stuff, as The Root Cellar downtown on my lunch break. I like the dulse, actually--salty, but oddly nice. There was a naturopathic doctor there who made further recommendations (check to see if my thyroid is working so I can lose more wait and use if all else fails a metabolic accelerant; get full-spectrum bulbs to give me enough UV; et cetera). That was fun to do on my lunch hour.

Annoyance

This thread at the prominent warblog Little Green Footballs is the kind of thing that makes me fear for the future of Canadian-American relations.

I wrote a letter to the Charlottetown Guardian on this topic:

Editor:

In Ivan Bulger's letter "For Our Spineless Behaviour We Will Pay the Price" which appeared in The Guardian earlier this week, he argued that if it is morally right to remove Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party from power in Iraq that it should be done. Arriving at a rough global consensus through global institutions (like the UN) that this should be done is irrelevant.

Mr. Bulger neglects to realize, I fear, that ends do not automatically justify the means. Invading Iraq is difficult in itself, trying to make Iraq (which will just have emerged from a generation-long Stalinist dictatorship that superbly atomized society) anything close to be a liberal democracy will be next to impossible. Doing both (or, as I fear, only the first) without any firm consensus among the United States' allies, associates, and strategic adversaries that doing so now in this way is legitimate will
succeed only in making a bad situation even more unstable.

Canadians remain friends with Americans, and Canada remains an ally of America. On neither count should we be expected to alter our fundamental policy goals in the face of generally hostile public opinion. To expect us to do such would be to expect us to become a vassal state, and despite his manifest flaws, I'm happy that Jean Chrétien resisted the temptation to make Canada just that.

Sincerely,
Randy McDonald

I'm just annoyed. And no, I'm not making any war posts.