I love the comedy potential that snatches of personal conversations, heard out of context, deliver. As you might imagine, cell phone conversations are great for this sort of thing. I heard this one today just outside my office:

It shrank? Oh my God, what did she say? Really? Yeah, well, I guess she would. I’m sorry. That really sucks.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

The Democrats have captured the House, and it looks like Cheney is going to be spending a lot of time in the Senate chamber breaking tied votes, if the Democrats manage to pick up the seat from Virginia in the next few hours (or days, depending on whether or not some catfight erupts over a recount).

I am pleasantly surprised that Rumsfeld is leaving, but since the GOP can no longer count on a rubber-stamp legislature, somebody had to be thrown to the wolves. As sacrificial lambs go, you couldn’t have picked a timelier one than Rumsfeld, a man now so widely reviled for his stubborn ineptitude that even the Army Times ran an editorial demanding his ouster. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Hopefully the Party Formerly in Opposition can actually make something of this opportunity. While “we’re not Republicans” was a strong enough philosophy to carry them to power, it’s probably not quite enough to govern with. Not that I’m complaining at this point.

Apparently the handy (and free) Process Explorer utility has been around for quite some time, but I’d never run across it before, so I figured perhaps you hadn’t either, gentle reader.

It’s a GUI app that shows you not only which processes are running (big deal, Task Manager does that), but which application is actually using them, making it pretty damned handy for isolating problems and malware activities.

I’ve read a bit more than my fair share of comic books in my time. Though in the last decade I’ve been reading titles that are just a bit outside the standard spandex-and-supervillian context, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be occasionally found with my nose in something closer to that long-established standard.

Ever since Watchmen was published, superhero deconstruction has been all the rage, but it’s usually delivered as a gritty, humanistic retelling of traditional storylines. Until I read The Physics of Superheroes, I’d never heard of anybody actually tackling the pseudoscientific backstories behind superhero powers. This book made for a very entertaining read, (though I have to admit I skipped over some of the discussions of actual math).

Could Ant Man really shrink himself down that small? (No, not, at least, until Marvel recently came up with an explanation that attributed for where all his resultant excess mass goes.) How could Shadowcat possibly have walked through walls? (Quantum tunneling.)

There are other interesting tidbits to be found in the book as well (Superman, for instance, used to go after corrupt industrialists and Washington lobbyists; would that we had that iteration around in real life today). It’s a good read for the geek on your Christmas list.

Halloween is supposedly a bigger and bigger deal every year, at least in dollar terms. After last night’s trick-or-treat trawl through the neighborhood, I’m confused as to where all this money is going. At least half of the houses on my block were dark and silent. A good two-thirds of the houses that did participate didn’t even have pumpkins on the doorstep. Less children showed up at our door than last year.

I heard the common refrain of "when I was a kid, the streets were always full of trick-or-treaters" from many of the neighborhood parents I talked to. Where did they all go? It isn’t the local shopping mall. We did that one year (thank God my son was too young at the time to understand how deeply disappointing that experience was) and there weren’t many kids there, either.

So where do they go? What do they do? The streets around my house hold plenty of little urchins. Where are their parents taking them? If Halloween is bigger than ever, why does it seem harder to find?