Court and Cthulhu!

Well, the big question is: how did court go?

I learned that comissioners have very little power of discretion. They are the janitors of the legal system, cleaning up what the judges don't want to deal with. They have a comission from a superior judge and marching orders and that's about it. They do "raw numbers" work and the petty spats over monthly enforcements and crap like that. The comissioner in our case looked over the details and had more or less made up her mind when we walked in; she didn't want to deal in petty grievances or micromanagement, she just wanted to get the child support done according to the letter of the law.

And that's what she did. Ex predictably tried to argue, to wheedle, to contradict; I figured out quickly enough that this was a no-nonsense comissioner, but Ex managed to get the comissioner's ire up a bit. She does this every year. Still, I get the feeling the commissioner's been doing this enough that it would take a lot for her to get personally worked up about such a small difference. So the Ex gets told that she does have a financial responsibility to Yamaarashi-chan whether she wants it or not, gets told what that amount is, and that was that. Ten minutes and it was over. Omaha was actually disappointed that out of the four inches of documents submitted to the court over the past two years, it all came down to four pages the commissioner herself filled out in a spreadsheet. That and absolutely unambiguous law and doctrine.

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Cthulhu lives! Yes, ladies and gentlement, Cthulhu has washed up on shore in Chile. When night comes, be prepared for screams.

Nooze.

Harry Potter has been banned at a College in Australia. Does the word "college" have a different meaning in Australia? The school has a "principal" who's quoted as saying, "As a mature reader I can see the difference between fantasy and reality but some children cannot and this is where it becomes dangerous."

One of America's deepest secrects has finally been revealed: thirty years ago, the Feds set about defending Santa Claus. The "joke" memo was apparently saved according to policy, and the government fought to keep it classified. The National Security Archive got their hands on the document and the director called "more evidence that most 'top secret' material is held back not to protect national security but to avoid embarassment."

A middle school in Tennessee is in trouble for setting up a digital camera to film students undressing, and the computer on which these images were stored was Internet-accessible that may have been hacked into-- or worse. File this under "an outraged 'hmmm....'"

Human Rights Watch has more to say about the horrors in Gujurat. I'm not going to comment further. India scares me because it produces so many competent people and has the kind of violence and horror we associate with the past.

Good news: scientists have now confirmed that pain sensitivity is all in your head. It seems that people who report high sensitivity to pain have a missing 'pain regulation mechanism' in their hypothalamus. This is "good" in that it allows doctors to better judge what kinds and how much pain medication some people should receive.

For fallenpegasus: A report on brain structure and associative memory demonstrates one of the primitive technologies that gets us closer to the Introdus.