Bloggers have more cats than is usually considered reasonable, a sambal.org study revealed today. Of the blogging population, fully 87% have 3 or more cats.

The study also showed that blogging was highly correlated with being overweight or having been overweight; exercise; and right-wing politcal views.

Film at 11.

Where can you get sambal in Western Canada? I mean besides here, of course.

You can get it at Edelweiss Imports down in Calgary. Sambal Badjak is the good stuff, but it's all good.

Charter school kids test worse than public school kids, according tothis article. Usual disclaimer that charter school kids are "looking for a way to improve their skills."

Down near the end there's the following assassination sentence: "Because charter schools' finances aren't always closely scrutinized, they sometimes close after only a few years because of financial mismanagement." Wow! Charter schools are run by criminal fraudsters. I didn't know that, and now I'll never know otherwise.

What is the charter school failure rate? Not reported. What fraction of failures stem from "financial mismanagement"? Not reported. What fraction of such cases could have been prevented by closer scrutiny? Not asked nor answered. How does this compare with the fraction of public schools which suffer from financial mismanagement and would benefit from closer scrutiny?

The uncritical reader is left with an impression of charter schools as educational mini-Enrons, run by swindlers, and getting paid to teach without doing any teaching -- certainly not improving test scores. What's left is to decide if this was deliberate on the author's part. I'm inclined to blame ignorance instead of malice.

The full report from the Brookings Institute

Tom Tomorrow used to be a lot funnier, when his comic was mostly about the travails of temp office workers. In this comic, the punchline (don't worry, I'm not giving anything away -- go read the comic, I'll wait here) is
"We've got to pay for the tax cut somehow!"

Actually, no. Our government does not have to "pay for" the tax cut. It just has to spend less now that it's sucking less blood from the income-earning citizens. Taxes and economies are not zero-sum, especially not in the very narrow sense implied here.

Folks, there's nothing sacred about any particular year's federal budget number -- we don't have to meet or exceed that next year. One day (gasp!) our federal expenditures could actually decrease. And that would be a good thing. And when it happens, I hope they cut taxes.

But you know they're going to be sitting around figuring out how to spend "our" surplus. And an attempt to cut taxes will be decried as a "raid" on some "trust fund".

Yesterday at Symphony under the Sky there were a bunch of soldiers standing around in fatigues, a first aid truck, and three artillery pieces.

Anti-aircraft? Crowd control?

No. They're just doing the 1812 overture.