Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

That's the name of the Nigerian man who tried to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day.  His father had notified authorities that Umar had become more radical and had disappeared.  The father's concerns were ignored.  According to authorities, this is not unusual.

Danger, Falling Ice

I live in Chicago, where we have cold, snowy winters and some tall buildings.  This combination often creates an accumulation of ice and snow on the buildings, which may then fall onto people below.  Occasionally, someone is killed.

Here We Go Again

My readers (both of them) know that I already had a nice little blog.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to keep the hosting company, so I had nowhere to point my domain name.  I recently learned that I could point my domain to blogger.com and have my various pearls of wisdom hosted there.  The only slight catch is that there's an annoying "blogger.com" banner on the top, but it's only a single line.  I can live with that, considering the price I have to pay for the hosting.  It's free.

I've decided not to port most of the stuff I'd written on my old blog.  This would require some effort on my part, and some conversion between the old format and the new.  Are my pearls worth the effort to convert?  I don't think so.  They're barely worth the effort of writing them.

I hope you find what I've written enjoyable, or thought-provoking, or at least interesting somehow.  But mostly this blog is just a place for me to vent about things that piss me off or grab my interest.  When I rant on about these things to my friends, they tend to get bored or annoyed with me.  If I rant here, anyone who gets annoyed has only himself to blame, unless he is a woman, in which case he has herself to blame.