teach me tiger

This year Valentines' Day and the Chinese Lunar New Year coincide.  This year is the year of the Tiger, and according to the Feng Shui Index it will be volitile but especially auspicious for people born during the year of the Dragon (I count myself as one of those, dim sum and then some).  As you celebrate the dawn of the new year with your special Valentine, I'd recommend listening to the April Stevens classic.

semantic memories

I have a host of strange dreams, almost nightly.  A lot of them invoke some architectural associations, vast halls and impossibly high and steep drops, endless stairwells.  I dreamt the other night I was in an ancient Russian fortress, which had seen an incarnation as a firestation.  Deep wells ran through the turrets that formerly had fire poles to slide down.   Nothing so strange or spectacular there, but I distinctly remember taking out my digital camera and snapping a few shots of the castle.  I cannot recall ever having the wherewithal to have a dream camera at my disposal.  When I woke up, I reviewed the photos on the camera, just to make sure.

the mouse that roared

Ahmadinejad at Muppet Laboratories really amuses me, like some dancer in the chorus of a Busby Berkley musical number.  I do appreciate Iran's efforts to fill the science void that the devestiture of NASA will bring, and I am not sure if this was part of the promise to deliver a powerful message to Western global powers, but a rocket launched a little menagerie of two turtles, a mouse and a "few worms" to a sub-orbital clime.  A few worms doesn't have the same celebrity as Latka the Russian space dog.

2.0

The US army services are being dragged into the next decade over the broken debris of its missed opportunities.  Last month's close call with the underpants bomber was blamed in part on out-dated government computer systems, and now the military is rethinking its stance on all sorts of types of blocking.  Despite not having uniform policy and enforcement, the army is embracing WiFi and the so-called Web 2.0 to allow the hive-mind full freedom and unrestricted dastardliness, through the vehicles of Facebook and Twitter.  140-word spasms are certainly grown-up steps.  The army is even moving to repeal some of its more nonsensical information security measures, which contributed to neither information nor security.  And now there's buzz about gaying the whole party up a notch.  Brava