My MacBook Pro has developed a weird behavior. It spontaneously turns on when plugged in to the power adapter. Each time it’s plugged in there’s about a 60% chance of it happening. It happens not only when it’s asleep, but when the thing has been previously properly shut down.

At first I figured it was the “Wake for Ethernet administrator access” feature, but I’ve since ruled that out; yesterday I opened the lid and waited about thirty seconds. I knew I’d shut it down the night before, and that AirPort had also been turned off, but I wanted to make doubly sure. No sign of life. Next, I plugged only the power cable into the thing, and it started right up, chime and everything. It’s something I can live with, I guess, but I have no idea why it’s doing this, and that’s irritating.

You’ve got to believe that the webmasters over at CNN are laughing hysterically at the expense of… well, everybody, sometimes. Last night I saw the following gem staring at me on their homepage:

Rumors that Elvis’ gun was found on the grassy knoll are, as of yet, unconfirmed.

One of my colleagues ordered a carrying case for an LCD projector. In due course, it arrived in the office, looking a little the worse for wear, but still intact, its contents undamaged.

Nobody was really sure what to make of the mysterious label it bore, however.

I have no idea how to interpret this.

There’s a Justin that lives next door. Several months ago, another family moved in down the block and brought another Justin with them. Thankfully, this one is much more intelligent and far less annoying, so it was with relief that my oldest son started playing with New Justin and his brother more often than the now less-interesting Next Door Justin.

Last week another family moved into a long-vacant house at the end of the street, across from New Justin’s digs. As it turns out, they, too, have a boy in the same general age group. One whose name is also Justin. According to this handy java applet “Justin” is on the wane as a popular moniker, but you couldn’t tell, apparently, from walking down our street. In the meantime, we’ve devised a much more efficient and scalable nomenclature, and now refer to them as J1, J2, and J3. Amusingly, this scheme was so transparent to our own kids that they readily picked it up.

What’s scary is that there are two vacant houses on our block, and two more that the current occupants are in the process of vacating. This raises the unlikely but real possibility of an additional four more Justins. It’s silly, but the thought is just kind of unnerving, and I can’t put my finger on why the idea should bother me so.

Some months ago—perhaps even a couple of years ago—something I heard on The Daily Show really stayed with me: what, if anything, has (Vice) President Cheney gotten right? Iraqi WMDs? Americans greeted as liberators? Klamath River water policy? The answer, of course, was nothing. Cheney has basically been batting an unbelievably straight .000, noted the acerbic Jon Stewart.

Au contraire. It turns out Cheney got everything right, at least about Iraq—back in 1994.

Over the weekend I had a sudden hankering to listen to the songs popular during my pubescent youth (in the late 1970s-early 1980s). For no particular reason, a quaint mix of ELO and early Billy Joel caught my fancy, and I spent the better part of an hour wallowing shamefully in soft rock. Everything was going along swimmingly until I listened to Joel’s “Don’t Ask Me Why”.

I’d always previously enjoyed this song, despite having no clear idea of its meaning. Then my ear, for the first time, picked out The Flaw. In the last chorus before the instrumental bit, Joel sings “don’t axe me why”. I played it over and over again to make sure I hadn’t misheard it. I hadn’t. Now I can’t unhear it, and the song is ruined for me. It’s maddening, but I can’t help focusing on it. I remember a similar circumstance many years ago; I had a tape of Beethoven’s music, and, one night while listening to it through headphones, I heard a faint but unmistakeable coughing sound in the background of one of the pieces.

It was doubtless some penniless third-string cellist slowly dying of catarrh brought on by his miserable life, starving for his underappreciated art in a filthy, unheated garret, but, then as now, the recording was irrevocably marred; I am apparently powerless to resist zeroing in on such tiny sonic imperfections, forever scuppering my enjoyment of the arrangements. Curse my aurally retentive nature, but damn you, Billy Joel, for allowing this blemish to exist unchallenged all these years, robbing me in a trice not only of my current listening pleasure, but also all my retroactive appreciation of this defective artwork.