Eating a roqueforty-ouncer, spilling some for my hommies

Ments of the day: atone, base, content, pig and la

It burns when I peer into the abyss

Sharpening my Heroes-period Bowie knife

Cyrano Aspergerac

O tempura! O s'mores!

Your kiss is on my list — in what appears to be your handwriting

My other car is running over your honor student

Crossing and re-crossing the Bosphorus in order to eat the things that swim in it.

If being overly dramatic is a crime then maybe I should just kill myself

Celebrating Crush Hashanah

Sines of the day: ur, co and kero

It takes forty muscles to frown, twenty-seven to smile, but none to just shut it

How to explain to someone that the attraction you feel towards them is strictly gravitational?

Today's pressions: re, ex, sup, im and more op

Activity idea: die in a fire

God grant me the strength to crush the things I can / a knife to stab the things I can't / and sixty million dollars

Vote up if you think this is Reddit

Craving one-time-pad thai, the only cryptographically secure noodles.

I have you listed here under "Accounts Crushable"

Ments of the day: atone, base, content, pig and la

Petunia non olet. Sending it back

Happy 9/11!

Eating a ritalinzer torte

Today's featured pres: monition, ening, ference, tension and hensile

Check out my spread in the "30 sysadmins under 300" issue of Basement Living magazine. Only Mom can tame these server room bad boys!

Why is the democratic convention not combined with Burning Man? On Saturday, we set Obama on fire!

E shortibus tardum

Today's parties: dance, third, sausage and Donner

Camembert and Ernie

Misread an olympic fencing event title as "men's individual fail"

Today's featured overdrives: maximum, electronic and Bachman-Turner

Koan of the day: how do you get to third base when they're too young to understand baseball?

Enjoying an organ dönor kebab

No oxygen, no sherpas

Quality is job NaN

Supine: the thinking man's prone

Secretary at Twitter has portrait of Trotsky for her desktop. They don't make a stress ball strong enough for the squeezing I need to do

Today's featured equilibria: punctuated, hydrostatic, and emotional

Craving a bucket of fried tuna of the sky

Rails makes coding hip / no architectural plan / birds fly off with whale

SPOILER ALERT: inevitable death

Touching your perfect body with my mind. Also maybe a little bit the hands

Scraping love barnacles from the hull of my relationship

Bukkaka-doodle-do!

Today's roons: came, ma, octo, c and polt

Whatever does not kill me can only sap at my dwindling strength

Maybe the reason my laptop's motherboard is having so many issues is a withholding fatherboard

20 year old Twitter consultants talking stocks. "Sometimes it's nice to look at the market and see you're up 10K." Only A/C prevents me leaving.

Doing my best to follow Jesus but I think He's trying to shake me

When life hands you Stanisław Lem, make Stanisław Lemonade

Filling out a textarea

Real winter has descended on a Poland still trying to recover from its Christmas binge.  The main Polish celebration falls on Christmas Eve, but both the 25th and 26th are  holidays spent trying to make up for the brief interval of meatlessness on the 24th.   Three years out of seven, the Christmas holidays fall between two weekends, creating a nearly uninterrupted streak of days off from somewhere around December 20th into the New Year, when a bloated and hung over nation finds itself back in the streets, shivering and waiting in the dark for a morning tram.

The New Year has brought with it two midwinter traditions.  The first is a pitiless Scandinavian air mass that descends from the north, drops a few flurries of snow and then clears at night to allow any faint bits of remaining heat to radiate out into space.  In the mornings the sun drags itself over the horizon, takes one look at what it sees and heads right back down again.  No one blames it.      

The second tradition is the ritual swordfight over natural gas between Russia and Ukraine.   The countries fight over just how much money Ukraine should be paying Russia for its gas (which it gets at a discount rate), and they like to do it in January, when actions like turning off all the natural gas flowing through Ukraine to Europe have a way of capturing everyone's attention. 

Greybeards around the world are arguing over the purpose of the dispute: whether the Russians are desperate for money, or playing power politics against Ukraine, or trying to lean on Europe to built a Baltic undersea pipeline directly to Russian territory, or all of those things.   Constellations of envoys are in the air, and soon the ritual will come to its annual conclusion, with an uneasy truce and no clear idea who the bad guy was.

Whatever you think of the merits of the case (laid out in heroic detail by Wikipedia), you have to pity the  Russians a little bit.   For centuries the biggest country in the world, Russia could never conquer its way to a single economically useful land border or seaport.   What used to be a comfortable ring of client states (the 'near abroad', in Russian terms) went away with the fall of Communism, and now the former heartland of the Soviet Union is getting all up in Russia's business and demanding to be treated like a sovereign state, instead of remaining a complacent little throw pillow like Belarus.   The Russians react to this a bit like the Americans might if the Midwest were to secede, begin speaking French, and demand boxcars full of quality merchandise at low, low prices.  It really burns them up.

Ukraine, for its part, is not in its happy place.  In August they got to watch the Russian Army crush Georgia, an unpleasant reminder of one thing the Russians are actually good at.   In November, the Ukrainian economy gave a soft cough, rolled over, and died.   Industrial production fell by 9% that month, an unheard-of thing in the former Eastern Bloc, where there is so much latent productive capacity left from forty years of the victorious march towards socialism that  growth rates are usually double those in the West.       Since the end of the year, Ukraine has been in the position of Wile E. Coyote after running off a cliff, hoping to defer an extremely long and distressing plunge by not looking down.   The Russians have now tossed them an anvil.   It is going to be a grim few months for our poor neighbors to the east.  

While we Poles stand and peer over the cliff it would be a good idea to notice the rope tied around our ankle, and perhaps ask what might happen next.  As the gas crisis demonstrates, no one in Europe can pretend to be unaffected by the post-Soviet dinosaurs.  In a normal country, this might mean a time of focus, concern and creative diplomacy across factional lines.  In Poland, of course, our political traditions point towards heroic defiance, principled intransigence, and nobly going down in flames.    It is going to be an interesting year!