I would never beat my wife! I just want to have the option.

Ah, I love it when iTunes picks appropriate music.

There's a strange rhetoric coming out of the White House. Bush is adamantly and repeatedly saying "We do not torture" as part of his arguments opposing a congressional ban on torture. He and Cheney are trying to insert a torture exemption for the CIA, but the whole time they're doing it they're saying, "Of course we don't torture people." This seems unusually blatant; there's usually some sort of pause between "I have no intention of booting Mother Finkelson in the ass" and Mother Finkelson on the floor rubbing her bottom. Am I just dumb, or is Bush, in essence, operating a large amusing mechanical bunny-puppet with one hand while stealing carrots with the other? Or, indeed, some analogy that makes sense?

Bush goes on to say, "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law." Well, yes, Mister President. If you create a legal exemption for torture, then you can torture people legally. Duh.

The justification is "Ack, ack, we're all gonna die!"—aka "torture may be required to save American lives." It doesn't seem to occur to them that the people of a nation, if it is to be a nation of principles, must be prepared to accept small personal risks to support those principles. Never mind that torture is a rotten and slow way to get information; if we take a principled stance against torture, like our principled stance against biological weapons and unreasonable search and seizure, it puts American lives at risk. That's unavoidable; we live with it, or we give up our principles.

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Unrelatedly, there are few statements more undeniably true than "I don't pretend to be the bellwether of what's cool."

And that's how Susan got scurvy

I played my first couple of games of Einfach Genial on BSW with gerbilicious85, and pronounce it good. My basic strategy, which I suspect will only work in a two-player game, is to earn lots of points in the first half (getting close to 18 in one or two colors), then stop scoring altogether to aggressively deny my opponent access to whatever color she lacks. It worked like a charm in the second game, when I had one orange point and she had zero; I could afford to play tiles that earned me zero points if they walled off the remaining orange tiles. I would have felt more clever if she hadn't said, "Oh! I didn't notice I had no oranges!" when we were done, but I think the strategy is sound. ;)

For those who have the physical set, do you think it would be an interesting variant if score-lines could cross empty spaces?

(For those who haven't played, Genial is a hex-tile-laying game in which you score points by laying tiles of the same color next to each other. Your final score is your lowest scoring color, so if you have 13 green, 18 red, and 14 purple points, they do you no good if you have zero orange points, as your final score will be zero.)

Hm.

I think B&D should be called "funishment".

That is all.