My Cubs are going to the playoffs. That is all.

CNN has a video interview by some reporter with two deeply geeky Rubik’s Cube champions. It’s very impressive and funny at the same time. I like how they talk rapid-fire over each other, explaining the secret of the Rubik’s Cube with no more than, “the center doesn’t move!”

I openly point and laugh, but I will also dig out my old Rubik’s Cube (or buy a new one, as mine is chipped up from me prying it apart with a butter knife) and see if I can understand what they’re on about.

General Peter Pace has finally clarified his statements about the morality of homosexual sex. It’s high time he got back to this crucial part of his duties. One quote is particularly good:

“We need to be very precise then, about what I said wearing my stars and being very conscious of it,” he added. “And that is, very simply, that we should respect those who want to serve the nation but not through the law of the land, condone activity that, in my upbringing, is counter to God’s law.”

So as I understand this, we as a nation should not condone something that HE was told is immoral. Apparently another of his duties is speaking as the moral compass of all Americans. I wonder how he feels about Jewish and Muslim soldiers? They’re likely not following HIS God’s law. Atheists? They’re going to have quite a bit of trouble if they start thinning the ranks based on Pace’s narrow view of what a proper American is or does.

This is an Evanston Review article about Bradley Kuklis, a New Trier student who scored a perfect 36 on the ACT. He scored 35 when he took it last spring, but a bunch of his friends also scored 35 and he thought he could do better. So he limited his fencing regimen to fencing season (he was a champion fencer, as well), buckled down on his studying (or swashbuckled down, as fencers no doubt prefer to do), and scored a 36. He attributes good study habits, plenty of sleep, and a good breakfast to his score.

Apropos of nothing, my daughter will be eligible for marriage in approximately fifteen years. Mr. Kuklis, if you’re Googling yourself in 2022 and find this here and yourself single, please consider subjecting yourself to my Suspicious Dad suitor screening process. You’ve already got a couple of green checkmarks going for you, friend.

There was a great headline on the CNN website today:

Oprah asks Justin about Britney

I can’t begin to figure out where to start not caring about that.

Blackwater, the private “security” firm that has thousands of employees in Iraq, has finally upset the Iraqi Interior Ministry enough to have their license revoked. According to Wikipedia, 90% of Blackwater’s income is derived from government contracts, two-thirds of which are no-bid contracts. This comes after Blackwater employees apparently started a firefight that resulted in eight civilian deaths. That’s really just the last straw, though — there have been plenty of highly questionable deaths thanks to Blackwater’s presence.
Iran, here we come! Blackwater has a lot of friends in the White House, and they’re going to need to make up that income somewhere. Or maybe we’ll send them all to Afghanistan instead.

I’m watching a news story on ABC-7 News here in Chicago, and we were just informed that a bank robber entered a grocery store bank branch and “inferred that he had a gun.”

As near as I can tell from that, he entered the bank and said, “I think I might have a gun.”

I’m going to have to start buying hats with cutouts in the front for this bulging vein on my forehead.

Sorry. Always wanted to write a headline like that.

In possibly the most premeditated suicide ever, a man in Allen Park, Michigan carefully designed and built a personal-sized guillotine and then used it to kill himself.

Apparently the Troop Surge in Iraq is working. Odd, though, that this story ran right next to the one about having to use volunteers to bury the unidentified dead bodies found in the streets because the sheer quantity of them is too big to manage otherwise.

I know the two things are, in fact, only partially related. But it sure seemed an interesting contrast: the renowned general in his finest dress greens in an air conditioned hearing room in Washington spouting success stories while the decaying bodies pile up faster than they can be dealt with in Iraq.

If the Iraqi government doesn’t have sufficient manpower to bury the bodies, how can they be expected to ever have enough to make the bodies stop piling up? Maybe they can’t, but if this is how it is WITH our help (and I have no doubt it would be even worse without our troops than it is with them, but still), is it anything we can fix anyway?

Jeffrey Toobin has a new book coming out about the particulars and peccadillos of the Supreme Court justices, and ABC News has rattled off a few of the juicy ones. Souter plays prominently as a quiet technophobe who almost resigned over the lack of ethical behavior surrounding the 2000 elections. Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist all come off as whiny divas with varying amounts of hatred deep in their souls. And Sandra Day O’Connor continues to elude easy definition. Sounds tasty either way, if I wasn’t already so deeply tired of hearing about how bad all the powerful people at the top of all three branches of government really are.