Random Opinions and Observations About Stuff

I reckon Plaxico Burress has been punished enough for stuffing a handgun into the waistband of his sweatpants. He has a hole in his leg, and he can't play football. Also, he is now a known dumbass who will never live the moment down. Any other punishment is just piling on at this point.

My liver appears to have started functioning properly again, so I am going to celebrate by drinking more than I should.

Mrs Vache Folle agreed not to get each other any Christmas gifts this year. I hope she holds up her end, because I really didn't get her anything. She has a birthday on the 27th, so I have to get something for that. Our 25th anniversary is three days after that, but we never get anniversary presents. I reckon we'd as soon forget that day.

I rooted for Obama in the election because I didn't want the GOP to win. Somewhere along the way I developed unrealistic expectations about the Obama regime and actually began to care about the administration. I've done this before with sports teams, so should know I have this tendency. Well, looking at Team Obama and the Warren thing has helped me to set those irrational feelings aside. Team Obama looks way more competent than anything the GOP could have cobbled together and way less corrupt, but there's nothing visionary or special about it. I reckon they are marginally less likely to get me killed over the next four years than a McCain regime.

I read somewhere that Obama is a "libertarian paternalist" as described by Sunstein and Thaler in Nudge. I'm about a third of the way through the book and like what I read about "choice architecture" and policymaking that depends not on coercion but on facilitating good choices. I hope Obama really subscribes to something like this.

Do SUV drivers believe that the laws of physics are suspended in their case? I'm trying not to get killed on the icy roads, and SUVs are passing me at speeds that would be excessive under the best of conditions. As far as I know gravity still applies to SUVs as do Newton's laws.

Speaking of gravity and what have you, I caught a show on one of the educational channels about a Portuguese physicist who theorizes that the speed of light used to be faster and that there is no need to posit dark energy to explain accelerated expansion of the universe. HIs theory is known as VSL (variable speed of light) and it pisses other physicists off. I don't know why a physicist would take a cosmological theory personally, but evidently they do.

Is it just me, or did Luke seem really go to great lengths to arrange for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem? Apparently, the census he cites didn't happen or didn't require anyone to travel. It would be more plausible to have Joseph and Mary get out of town because of the questionabe circumstances surrounding Mary's pregnancy.