I experienced the most hideously reprehensible episode of personal and professional disrespent I have ever been through at work today. I mean since I was 14 years old and working on a camper shell assembly line no employer has ever stooped this low. I received more professional courtesy as a delivery driver at Domino's.

Joke attribtued to Rich Little via the New Yorker, cf.

Bill Clinton and his pal George Bush senior were sitting around, and Clinton says "George, have you ever tried Viagra?'

"I can't say," George H. W. Bush answers. "I don't even know what the hell it is."

"Mr. President," Clinton says, "it gives you great staying power."

The objects of my desires will never satisfy my desires.

Having sex will not end the desire to have sex.

Food does not extinguish hunger, it always returns.

Is one ever pretty enough, smart enough, or strong enough to extingush the desire to be pretty, smart and strong?

Yet isn't the extinguishment of desire what compels and attaches us to our objects of desire?

We seek those objects as sacrificial offerings to our desires.

Thanks for the effort. Another uninstall/reinstall didn't help. A reset didn't help.

I have not yet done the erase and re-install but it might still be necessary.

Guess what? If I log into the iBook with a different user name, it just works.

Yes, get your jaw back up off the floor. It is something in my user account that is causing the problem.

Many thanks to an applecare phone support tech for that suggestion.

First, I have a recent backup.

This summer, I bought a new iPod for a friend as a birthday present -- the U2 video model. I used my iBook to initalize it for her and transfer her music library to it, using an account I created for this purpose, not my account.

Then, iTunes 7 comes out, I install, and it immediately tells me I need to do the iPod updater. I do this.

Scene: CNN's Situation Room, 12/28/2006 - Transcript.

Players: Ed Henry, CNN Whitehouse Correspondent - Fran Townsend, Homeland Security Advisor

HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we're going to get him. Still don't have him. I know you are saying there's successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That's a failure.

Steak Florentine does not involve spinach.

This was among the most impressive of dishes I discovered in Tuscany last fall. Everything and nothing about this dish is about the region itself. Classically it involves a special cut of beef, analogous to the American porterhouse, dry-aged, from a special breed of cattle, the Chianina, prepared as one should prepare a $25-$50 piece of meat, skillfully and carefully.

I'M BLACK AND I'M PROUD!!!

Well, I'm not actually black and pride presents something of a religious problem for me personally, but I was a witness today to the event that was James Brown's final appearance at the Apollo theater on 125th street in Harlem, which is a very short walk from my residence. An impromptu crowd led and followed the Godfather's horse-drawn carri

Because of the mid-term election I have been watching a little TV the last couple of weeks and I notice that Domino's is selling something they call Brooklyn-style pizza. By way of disclosure, I should mention that I was a Domino's employee 1980-1985.

WTF is a Brooklyn-style pizza?

Does Brooklyn have good pie? Sure. The best? Well, pizza is like sex. So much depends upon the time and place of the particular encounter, it's hard to say.

Ever since I upgraded iTunes and accepted an iPod firmware update it wanted immediately, when I connect my iPod to my iBook iTunes iCrashes.

It is iTunes 7.0.2 build 2 and a 60GB iPod, pre-video, running version 1.2.1 of the firmware, Model 9830LL.

I know, I need to dig through the usual places (apple support, macosxhints, etc) to look for what the community is saying, but I was just wondering if any of you MacHeads had blazed this trail already.

A plane crashed into an apartment building in Manhattan, about a mile from me, this afternoon (I was in Manhattan on 9/11/2001). Even though this ended up not being a dramatic and agressive violent attack, there were some weird common experiences.

First, how I heard the news. First the plane hit the west side, then it was a helicopter, then no, it was the east side. The 20th floor of an apartment building, no, more like the 40th floor, there's a guy dead on the ground, no, two guys.

Lamole: home sweet home away from home.

Lamole is the little village southwest and up in the hills from Greve-in-Chianti where we stayed during the visit to Tuscany. Lamole is "known" in the region for it's sweet dessert wines, but Lamole means "home" to me in Chianti, and for more reasons than this is where we statyed.

Think about what would be happening if the individuals who committed these murder-suicides in public schools this week had been of even vaguely arab/muslim descent. Or black? Or hispanic? Or asian?

Oh, there'd be all sort of noise from the news-pornography and info-tainment industries about the new terrorists, the deep and profound meaning this has for mankind, etc, etc, etc.