Wikipedia has a category called "assassinated Dutch politicians." Besides the unlucky Pim Fortyn, the only others with such a label are the de Witt brothers, Cornelis and Johan, who were killed and mutilated by an angry mop after Orangist, anti-French (and anti-English) sentiment swept through the Netherlands following the attack on the small nation by those two countries.

That was in 1672.

Little Rock, you're so bad at so many things. If it weren't for your irresistable charm, I'd leave you. That, and my lack of plans. Does the world really get more interesting, though, than the sight of a drunk guy playing easy listening jazz from his boom box at the corner of Scott and 7th, across from the bizarrely massive Al Pike temple, now vandalized with a line of black 666s (behold! Christ-y graffitti! maybe just the dregs of anti-catholicism), while blue lights flicker in the distance on a warm, humid February night? Yes, things get much more interesting than that. But you have to appreciate the interesting things as they come to you. At least I leave in an eclectic neighborhood.

New Iraqi Flag

Does anyone remember back in Spring of '04 when they hyped up the new Iraqi flag? The idea was promptly aborted, mainly because the design was so god-awfully ugly. I've thought about it several times and wondered why it was never, ever mentioned again after April of 2004. A search for it finds far fewer sites than one would expect. Maybe no one was paying attention. So, here's a graphic from The Onion about it, which is really spot on.

See? Isn't that amazing? What is amazing is that people thought that it would ever be used for anything other than cleaning up vomit.

Teaching! Only one more day until I'm again sitting in a windowless office, speaking to high school kids who are seventy miles away, trying to get them to recall some nugget of Spanish that has been leeched from the murky waters of their brains!* God really has blessed the DLC. They might be saying that again when I announce that I'm leaving after June.

IN THE MEANTIME, I'll be enjoying tomorrow's sunniness (sunnyness? surely not- but sunni-ness certainly has some sort of foreign policy or socio-political ramification ["Sunnis are the true people of the sun", "they are blessed and radiant", etc.]) and trying to get some lesson planning done. I'm really unsure of how to keep drilling them on stuff they've already had. I know that I'm boring, but can that be helped? Distance education foreign language classes are inherently boring, I would think.

Photo from a beautiful autumn day last December.

*I'm embarrassed that I'm unable to further develop or refine that metaphor.