In Our World

We took a whirlwind trip to Chicago over the weekend, stopping in for a few bites to eat, to take in a show and to visit the two of the three tallest buildings in the city. We made our plans last Wednesday, having planned well in advance to…

I'm sick of getting mail that I don't want. Sure, I've signed up at the DMA. It helped. I've told the credit bureaus that we don't want unsolicited offers. But we still get them. Three in the last two days. So I have a new idea. I'm just…

Watching Good Morning America, and Kenny Rogers is singing now. I realize he can't be the Santa Clause-looking guy he was in the 80s (in fact, I winced when that picture came on earlier). But wow – he looks like he's had a lot of work done, he…

From the print version of this morning's paper: "Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company in the United States"… nice….

In 1984, AT&T (Ma Bell) was split up into 8 Regional Bell Operating Operating Companies (RBOCs, also called Baby Bells). In 2001, two of these Baby Bells, Southwestern Bell (by then, SBC Communications – it sounds so much nicer) and Southern Bell (by then, Bellsouth) joined forces to…

Ted has another post about the UAE ports deal (which in turn references another post). I've been reasonably quiet to this point because I don't have much to say. This pretty well sums it up. In a nutshell: The people running the port at the highest and lowest…

A reader of Scott Adams' blog has written in to express her concern over the willy-nilly way in which Mr. Adams portrayed the listless, drunken, bib-wearing hillbilly in a recent cartoon. Get a life, people. It's a comic strip, and if you don't like it, look away….

After the folks at the American Community Survey demonstrated their persistence by not only coming back over and over again, but actually changing the address on the form so that it reflected the correct one (it did say "drive", where it should be "avenue"), I finally broke down…

A 12-year old finds himself in trouble at school because he took some powdered sugar with him one day. He allegedly made a joke in the bathroom about it really being cocaine, then said "just kidding". Stupid? Sure. But come on people. He's twelve years old. To illustrate…

Apparently there's a piracy boom in Latin America. Music and video media is ripped off and sold for prices way below what the giant media companies would give you. I'm not advocating piracy – I think if the companies provide us with the entertainment, they ought to reap…