No remorse on this score 

Not only is he handsome and excruciatingly cool, Blaine is a fine little desktop employee. He holds my mic upright in its makeshift stand without complaint.

This joyous pose brings to mind Slim Pickens riding the missile at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

In smart company 

Sarah Vowell likes Sports Night, Aaron Sorkin's pre-West Wing sitcom. She quoted from it in an essay on This American Life I heard just now.

Robert Guillaume: "No rich young white boy ever got anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks."

Buyer's remorse 

My laptop is toast, and I've been dithering about what to replace it with for a week. Finally resolved on a Tosiba A105. And now I'm not sure. God knows I can't afford any kind of new laptop, but I feel too chained to my desk without one.

Funny comment on Gillmor blog 

"I'm Irish and we have a long tradition of cutting observations and ill tempered recriminations so I feel like you're a brother. I miss you bro, come home all is forgiven, dads not well and its time to harvest the potatoes."

I miss the Gillmor Gang, too. Wonder if we'll ever find out what happened.

Warming trend 

Warming up in Chicago to the 30s today and the 40s the rest of the week. It's a good thing for me, because I go into hibernation mode when it stays this cold for this long.

Alvin Maker kept me company 

Nothing like curling up with a book in the winter time, though. Remember I told you a couple weeks ago I was reading the new Orson Scott Card fantasy with an all-Black cast? (Yeah, he was able to pull it off pretty well, and for me it helped to know he questioned his right to attempt it.) It made me want to dip into the Alvin Maker series, and of course, once I started I had to read them all again. Just started the sixth and last one last night and hope to put it away today, get them out of my hair.

Nice news 

My little guy got his first college acceptance letter on Thursday from Iowa State, a not-bad place to study engineering. He's pretty happy this means he won't get stuck at Northern Illinois, the fallback school for so many kids around here. It was one of his "target" schools, what counselors call a college you should be able to get into, as opposed to a "reach" school, which is a stretch. He's still hoping for yesses from the University of Illinois and Rose-Hulman.

My guess is he'll end up at Purdue, but we'll see. If that happened, his big brother would be pissed. We lived in Bloomington long enough to internalize the Oaken Bucket rivalry (it extends to more than football), but Aaron was really too young for the religion to sink in.

Rose-Hulman would be neat, setting aside its setting (Terre Haute). A cool private engineering school might just go for a kid like Aaron, with a great ACT score, not so great grades (for our district), and geeky liberal-arts resume points like Latin Club president. But who knows. I'm proud of him no matter what, and always will be, no matter what.