When the Rain Comes...

It's somehow fitting that a dark and driving rain ushers in the first morning after the holidays. OK, you've had your fun, it seems to say, but enough of this Peace-And-Good-Will stuff. Here's reality, and welcome to it. There was a time when I enjoyed the sound of the rain. Now, it makes my shoulders slump even when I'm lying down...

The wrist continues to improve. My hand remains shaky, stiff, and weak, but the dexterity is markedly better and I'm starting to get something like a grip. I still can't open jars, but I can pick up anything that's lightweight. It's something!...

Madeleine Bair writes of an Oakland neighborhood that discovered the future by turning to its past...

It's About Time Dept: For years, corporations opening new new sites have pitted municipalities against each other by promising new jobs in exchange for favorable tax conditions. This race to the bottom often costs the cities in competition with each other more in tax revenue then they get back in employment. Finally, some are fighting back, insisting that companies either make good on job guarantees or return the corporate welfare checks they've received from local taxpayers...

David Sirota's Top 10 Quotations of the Past Decade...

The New York Times reports this morning on a connection between a recent visit to Uganda by three evangelists and that country's current attempt to institutionalize hate crimes against homosexuals. The evangelists, naturally, deny any connection at all, despite the fact that they spoke before Uganda's parliament and that one has written admiringly of Ugandan resistance to western attempts to "re-homosexualize" (I kid you not) the country. The same evangelist, one Scott Lively, writes

I do not support the proposed anti-homosexuality law as written. It does not emphasize rehabilitation over punishment and the punishment that it calls for is unacceptably harsh. However, if the offending sections were sufficiently modified, the proposed law would represent an encouraging step in the right direction.

Big of you, Scott. Apparently, a law that emphasized punishment in the appropriate degree would be fine; it's simply a matter of calibration. How about twenty years of hard labor? Of course, that could be "forgiven" should the "offender" undergo reeducation at the hands of the International Healing Foundation (at his expense, of course)...

A riff on my favorite moment from the best TV show filmed in the Pacific Northwest: