Geek of All Trades

Another scary day

It's tough to concentrate on work while thinking about the bombings in London.  Like so many others who were within spitting distance of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it does not take much to transport me back to that day.  And as I sit in my office now, floating 14 stories in the air overlooking Boston Harbor - at Boston's own diminutive World Trade Center - I can't help but cast frequent nervous glances at the airport and the tankers and barges that meander past in the inner harbor. 

I am amazed that coordinated subway attacks like today's in London or the attacks in Madrid last year do not happen more often.  Perhaps their relative scarcity is an indication that making and transporting explosives is not quite as easy as it seems.  Or maybe it means that people with the desperate and warped perspective required to undertake such an attack are not as legion as it seems.  Either way, it's not much comfort today to the people of London that terrorist attacks are rarer than you might think.   

The religion that dare not speak its name?

I couldn't read much of the article in this week's Times Magazine about the crusade against gay marriage, because the people who oppose it make me almost too angry to think.  But in the few snippets I read, I couldn't help but notice this (on page 2 of the web version):

[Anti-gay activists'] passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.

Emphasis added.  Hey folks - seeks to spread itself?  Doesn't that sound a lot more like evangelical Christianity than like homosexuality?  Yeah - it did to me, too.

Worst Michael Jackson acquittal headline so far

In the Boston Metro:  HE BEAT IT