Sweet Justice

Alan Keyes is currently running for the Senate against Barak Obama. They're both African-American men, so it's kind-of a draw there... except, Obama has a white mother. Alan Keyes suggested that he was "blacker" than Mr. Obama, saying in regard to the experience of racism, "I have been wrestling with something all my life that perhaps Mr. Obama hasn't had to take as seriously." (Interview with Steve Malzberg, WABC New York).

Keyes has also condemned Mary Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter, calling her a "selfish hedonist" who was condemned to Hell.

Well, Alan Keyes got an unwelcome slap in the face this week, on both counts. The girl on the left is Maya Keyes, Mr. Keyes's daughter. The girl on the right is not.

Stunningly cool: Open Course.

Okay, I'm going to apologize in advance to all of you who have litle time left in your lives, because I'm about to suck down the rest of it. Really, I am. I know my audience. It's the kind that can't let a piece of knowledge float by without latching onto it and interrogating it to within an inch of its life. We're not always clever or wise, but by gods we are informed.

That said, I hereby doom you to MIT's Open Courseware. MIT classes, complete with syllabi, textbook listings, class schedule, and homework assignments. You don't get credit and you don't get class time but if you're one of those people who wants to learn something at home... Well, put in a note when you come up for air.

Of special interest to some of you (just trolling around), is the class on Developing Musical Structures. Note especially that of the three class materials needed, the software is freely available and runs on any java-enabled platform with a pair of speakers.

Blog like nobody's watching

I have recently noticed that many of my posts have been, shall we say, colorless. Well, there are some reasons for that, and I'm not going to list them not because they wouldn't add color, but because they're not the topic of this entry.

A person I trust for various reasons, and who has no financial or even personal interest in doing so, asked me if I'd ever been diagonsed as having ADHD. Not exactly. When I was diagnosed, it was 1977 and the "H" wasn't part of the diagnosis yet. Had I ever taken medication for it? No, not really. Did I drink a lot of caffiene?

Yeah, just a bit too much. On the worst day in the past couple of months, I had more than five cups of coffee-- and I have a very big coffee cup on my desk.

She suggested I try something else. Alderall or strattera. Strattera is freaking expensive; a month's supply would be $240 at least, and I don't know if or how much my insurer would cover it. Alderall is cheaper, but it's one of those ritalin-analogues, basically from the amphetamine family of drugs, and I don't know if I'd want to try something like that.

But my inablity to focus has gotten worse in the past couple of years, and Omaha has noticed it, and she thinks it might be something worth investigating. I just wish I believed my own rhetoric, that there are states of mind that can be achieved better through direct intervention, and that I should try them.