Idle thought

Appeals to fairness are doomed to fail where the people do not share fundamental principles.

This drives me crazy.

From Sports Illustrated's Peter King, a professional writer.

The other day, Browns president Mike Holmgren inferred strongly to his season ticket holders in a conference call that he felt the trade St. Louis made with Washington was influenced by the relationship between the two coaches involved -- good friend Mike Shanahan of the Redskins and Jeff Fisher of the Rams.

No he did not. No one ever "infers to." "Infer" is not "imply." One "implies to" and "infers from." It's analogous to the difference between "read" and "write." One "implying" is communicating; one "inferring" is receiving the communication.

And a writer ought to know the difference...

"Sitting is killing you..."

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

So what's the alternative?

This can be part of it...

St. Patrick's Day in Holyoke

Many thousands of people showed up for the 2nd-largest (behind Boston) St. Patrick's Day parade in New England.

Steyn - Obama’s History Lesson

Mark Steyn eviscerates the President over his latest set of cheap rhetorical speech points...

So let’s see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th-century Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste. Marie. A man who sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers.” A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.”

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It’s not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle Crowd-Pleasing for Dummies as a keynote address.

Read it all...

One question

This story in the Christian Science Monitor is about young adults living at home with their parents after college. But I can't get past the first line.

After graduating from Brown University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and completing a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil, Cassie Owens was left with a few dollars on her stipend and no job in sight. So, Ms. Owens returned home to her mother in Philadelphia.

The tuition schedule for Brown University from 2006-2009 was:

Brown University - Tuition only

Academic year	Tuition
2005-2006	$32,264
2006-2007	$33,888
2007-2008	$35,584
2008-2009	$36,928
Total	$138,664

That's tuition only - no fees, no room and board.

So the one question is this - under what conditions is it rational for an 18-22 year old person to spend four years of his or her physical and mental prime, and $138,000, and receive, as a return on that expense, a degree in comparative literature?

I'm not going to say that those conditions can't exist, or that they don't in this case, but I bet there are a lot more people doing it for whom it is not a rational decision than there are those for whom it is...

Man Walks All Day to Create Spectacular Snow Patterns

Wow...

Many more incredible pictures at the link...