"Spring is Here, Uh-Suh-puh-Ring is Here!"

That equinox thing is around here somewhere...

(Why yes, I am playing the appropriate Tom Lehrer song.)

We're having one of those sunshine-and-precipitation days that require both an umbrella and SPF 15 lotion.

During the gig that drove home to me just how lousy a waitress I would be, I started on Peter Straub's A Dark Matter, which I finished a few days later.  I hadn't, outside of the first collaboration with Stephen King, read any of his books after Ghost Story, probably because of the occasional loose end.

It was OK.

Part of it takes place in Madison, Wisconsin.  (It's a coincidence.)

Anyway.  It features ...something... which kills one of the characters.

Arthur Silber characterizes the U.S. as something similar, only with insulting names and some examples.

The United States government is led by blood-guzzling, flesh-eating pigfuckers. Fuck polite.

I must mention one other aspect of much of the criticism being offered about the assault on Libya. Many writers point out in excruciating, mind-numbing detail that the assault won't "work," that it will fail to achieve its announced aims, that it will certainly lead to more death and suffering rather than less, and so on and so forth. All of which is true in one sense -- but all of which is, from the only perspective that genuinely matters, completely irrelevant.