This makes it official. 2002 was one of those years when it’s good to be a Boston sports fan. The Patriots won the Super Bowl, the Celtics resurged, the Red Sox got out from under Harrington’s thumb, and the Bruins had a great regular season. We won’t talk about the Bruins in the playoffs, though. The early tidings for 2003 were not so great. The Celtics split up the band, half the Bruins decided not to come back, and — well, the Patriots talked a good game up until the fourth game of the season. It’s pretty clear at this point that 2003 is not gonna be stellar. ...

One of the things I’ve come to terms with is my gadget habit. It’s there, I can control it, it’s fun giving into it once in a while. Right now was not the optimal time to do that, but I did anyhow. Thanks to EBay, I got myself a nifty analog video converter. What will I use this for? I have no idea. It just offends me that there’s a type of media in my apartment which I can’t convert to digital form. I can scan books and pictures, I can rip my CDs to disk, but I can’t turn a stupid videotape into Quicktime? Totally unacceptable. ...

Apparently, this sex toy thing is quite the issue for Alabama. The state has [appealed the decision](http://web.archive.org/web/20060322122141/http://web.archive.org/web/20060322122141/http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20021031&Category=APN&ArtNo=210310737&Ref=AR (original) “Tuscaloosa”) (original) which permitted sex toys to be sold therein. You know, if sex toys were legal in Alabama, the legislators would have something to distract them from ineffectual prudishness.

So, was the Wellstone memorial too political? In my tradition, one of the things you do at wakes is vow to carry on the work of the deceased. It’s OK to be really emotional about that; emotion is part of what a wake is for. Emotion represents respect for the dead. It shows you cared about him, or about her. I would expect that, at a politician’s wake, his close friends would want to make strong statements; that they would exhort the attendees to “keep his legacy alive.” ...

In sharp contrast to the previous: [I also like apes](http://web.archive.org/web/20160401193151/http://web.archive.org/web/20160401193151/http://blaklion.best.vwh.net/ape.html (original) “Super Non-Human Simians”) (original). Thanks, Max!

I can’t ever resist a good discussion of online identity (original). This one seems to me to assume that pseudonyms must by nature be fragmentary. I think that this is true if you assume that our online identities are discrete units, without overlap, but I also think that such an assumption would be false. I can’t speak for the law bloggers whom TPH discusses (original), but for me, a pseudonym shares many aspects of the “real” me. Alice, at least, seems to agree with that (original). I speak English; so do my theoretical pseudonyms. I’m sarcastic; so, generally, are they. On the occasions when I’ve had reason to construct a shield around my identity, it’s been a matter of thinking about what I want to change rather than building a persona from scratch. ...

ColorMatch 5K: bookmarked cause it won’t work under Mozilla derivatives, as far as I can tell. Conceptually cool, though. Perfect for design gimps like me.

I’ve thought to myself, from time to time, that J. K. Rowling’s world is just a little bit on the bigoted side. The Washington Post has an nice editorial on the subject. Mind you, the tendency isn’t reserved for fantasy — it might have been interesting to cross reference Slan for an example of the same thing with a scientific spin. (Hey, that review was written by Tasha Robinson. She used to be a housemate.) When it gets right down to it, the distaste of technology we find in the Harry Potter books is just another avenue through which we express our desire to be different. ...

One more quickie… people have observed that the University of Arizona campus was a weapons-free zone, and that this didn’t prevent the recent shootings. This is about as significant as pointing out that the UIowa student shootings (original) didn’t take place in a weapons-free zone. If you don’t know how many people decided not to go on a rampage due to the policies in either case, you don’t know anything. ...

I was going to get bitchy about some (original) reactions (original) to Paul Wellstone’s death, but James Lileks says it so much better.