In a move that should surprise nobody, agents of the Bush Administration are hard at work protecting business interests from the evils of upstart entrepreneurship by continuing to fight against private beef testing. It seems a Kansas meatpacker had the idea of testing every cow in their herd for BSE. And since the USDA doesn’t conduct such extensive tests, relying instead on sampling, said intrepid Kansans decided to do the testing themselves, spending lots of money on facilities and equipment to make that happen.

This was not meant to supplant USDA testing, but would be redundant testing, giving the ranchers a leg up on selling to the skittish Japanese market. But oh, no. No, no, no, said the USDA. You don’t have the right to test your own cattle under your own higher standards, said the USDA. And why? Because major meat packers like IBP, Cargill, and ConAgra don’t want to have to be pressured by consumers into spending the same kind of money for their massive operations, especially if consumers can hold “but those guys are doing it!” over your head.
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Oh yeah, the new site theme is up! What do you think?

I spent much of the Memorial Day weekend doing nothing besides taking drugs, but not in any sort of remotely recreational or positive way. Instead of spending the holiday weekend in indolence, I spent it in anguish, tormented by abdominal pain bad enough to send me to the hospital, supplemented by random lower-back spasms from Hell. It didn’t help, of course, that I’m basically a total pussy about this sort of stuff.

It’s no fun when it’s painful to stand, sit, lie down, or just plain exist. On the one hand, it’s good that I went offline during a long weekend instead of during the work week, with the attendant hassles of having to shuttle the kids to school, et cetera, regardless of whether I was well enough to actually go to work. On the other hand, it sucks, and sucks hard, that my three-day weekend was spent flopping around the house to the pity and consternation of all. So I guess number three finally landed with a vengeance.

I haven’t posted very much this week, because I’ve been working on a retooling of this site’s theme, getting it widget-friendly and eliminating the hand-coded sidebar I haven’t updated since forever, as well as some of the funky layout issues that only appear in Internet Explorer.

Stay tuned for awesomeness! Or maybe something pitiable. Either way, it’ll be ready soon.

They say bad luck comes in multiples of three. In a way, I hope that’s so, because I’ve had my three, and I’m ready for a more felicitous turn of events.

First, the Mighty Mouse on my home iMac has so much gunk built up in its internal scroll wheels it can’t be cleaned, no matter how much alcohol I lubricate the scroll ball with, or how vigorously it is thereafter rolled, upside down, on a lint-free cloth. I would have braved taking the thing apart last night, and was on the verge of doing so, when our four-year-old got out of bed and wandered into the den. Though it wasn’t obvious, this was about to be the second piece of bad luck.

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Upon arrival at work I see my window is half-covered with plywood from the outside. What the hell?

The view from the inside was even more charming. Not pictured is the small smudge of dried blood I found on my desk or the tiny, crunchy shards of glass still littering the floor.

When a message was sent out inquiring as to what mayhem had occurred in my absence, my boss’s boss sent out a response there had been a “situation” but that it was not serious, and that my boss would explain. When my boss called in, he in turn would not provide any details other than to punt the explanation to a third person, who does not arrive until noon today.

Clearly, my enemies have found me and the power structure is in on the conspiracy.

UPDATE: The mystery has been explained. I don’t know whether it’s cool or ridiculous that I got the story from my coworker’s blog first.