Tuesday
15 April 2003.
Tax Day.

The day when you can hear puckering of the collective recta of They-Who-Waited-Until-the-Last-Minute as they realize exactly how much they owe Uncle Sam. I am not counted among that group (… thankfully. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I barely had to use a writing implement and paper – I filed using the IRS’ Telefile option. It was amazingly simple: Telefile form on the table, pencil in one hand, phone in the other and ten (10) minutes. That was it. Quick and painless. Not bad at all.

NPR/PRI Stories

  • In a pleasant break from news of the war in Iraq, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered had a interesting segments about tax day and related items.
  • All Things also had a nice story/remembrance of 1960s singer Little Eva, best known for her #1 hit song The Loco-Motion.

Song of the Day

  • Money by Pink Floyd
  • Taxman by The Beatles

Stray Toasters

  • Google’s news server had a link to an article that offers a different look at the exercise myth about the benefits of walking vs. jogging. Here are some other links that went along with it.
  • Click here. No coersion. Just… “a friendly suggestion.”
  • According to this article on Slashdot, it seems that both DC Comics and the folks behind Sliders (at Fox and the SciFi Channel) may have been right about parallel universes, after all.
  • It seems as though Russia has committed to seeing to it that the International Space Station remains in orbit.
  • A DJ on one of the local radio stations was talking about an upcoming scene on the popular ABC soap opera All My Children today. It seems that there is going to be a lesbian kiss on it. Oh, my stars!!! At first, I thought that the DJ was going to get up in arms about the scene and denounce it as a “bad thing.” I was pleasantly surprised: His attitude was “What’s the big deal?!” He made a good point that heterosexual kisses don’t get the kind of media attention that this seems to be generating. We won’t count the “Will they…/ Won’t they..” questions about Mulder and Scully, in this instance. It’s two actors portraying two people who care about each other (or are at least in the midst of discovering how they feel about each other). It’s being hailed as “groundbreaking” for daytime television. How about just saying that they have finally decided to depict an act that anyone can see in their daily lives… and then get on with our own lives.
  • Northern Snakehead fish, where have you gone?

Quote of the Day
Today’s QotD is an encore presentation of a quote from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency…

The electric monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes, thus saving you the trouble of washing them yourself. Video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you from looking at it yourself. Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you… thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task – that of believing all the things that the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately, this electric monk had developed a fault and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.

It’s early and I have to get up later, so this will suffice for tonight.

Namaste.