Way back when I mentioned the D.A.R.E. slam published in "Rolling Stone". Now the law's  <1> fighting back, demanding millions of dollars in a libel suit. Too bad the article's author was the discredited Stephen Glass - this completely changes the story's spin, deflecting its message. An interesting coincidence with that issue was it also had a pandemic flu feature, with the same photo from 1918 you can see in this similarly scary article from this week's "LA Weekly."

What's the big deal about sending troops to Kosovo? It's right next to Bosnia, where there's already seven thousand of ours stationed among the multi-national peace-keeping whatever.

Step aboard the train of my thought for a moment:

Amongst a small pile of paper ephemera here I've got a Zürich-Basel train ticket stub, not from last year but '94, and the first line on it is

It's not a very good reason, and not really true - I first took German so I wouldn't have to endure any more French classes; this alternative was at last available once I reached High School. <2> (I was made to learn French between about ages 8 through 12; the attempt was not successful.) Only later did it seem like I was acquiring a useful skill, when I found that I could understand a little of what the Germans were saying, in movies. At the same time, I was also becoming skeptical about who the "bad guys" were. The moral of the story? Foreign films are great aides to learning a language, with and without subtitles.

Good Eno article in the current "Wired". He details his dismay with too many options in a software interface.