Everyone should go spend some of their lunchtime at the good things tumbler.

My energy is going to go with love to Maria.

I need a good lunch today. no ideas though.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

I'm at the point where I think you can vary the 'weight' of your 'soul' or whatever with your actions. I have no reason to think I've done much investment, but some people have, and will be mourned more widely and deeply that I have, and some people have done the converse, and will have the opposite effect when they die.

Not that I believe in souls, really, but it's a convenient package unit for what I mean.

The traditional Jewish response to hearing of a death is "Baruch ha'dayan emet," which means "Blessed is the true judge." I've found that, for me, that's a good way for me to think about a death of someone I disagreed with -- I'm very sad for his family, and anything more about him personally isn't for me to say.

I just made dinner! This slow cooker thing is pretty cool.

I just made dinner! This slow cooker thing is pretty cool.

I love my crockpot. True, I mostly use it to make steel-cut oatmeal.

My thoughts have been a mix of everyone else's -- truthfully, his removal from the political talkosphere feels like a great boon. But he had a wife, and four kids, and if he was just 43 those kids have got to be both young enough to be totally, nakedly devastated and old enough to really understand the magnitude of their loss (and I can't imagine what the combined weight of widowhood and single parenting four children is going to do to his wife). I'm glad his voice is gone from the public sphere, but I wish like anything it was gone because he'd suddenly retired, or had a conversion experience, or anything else that would let his family keep their beloved husband and dad.

eta: Even before I'd read about his family and realized what a huge howling loss his death must be to them, I was still kind of surprised by how not-happy I was to hear that he'd died. For someone just my age to go to bed, apparently healthy, one night, and probably noodle around with crosswords or sudoku or a chapter of whatever they were reading, and set it down and set the alarm and sigh and roll over and then just never wake up again... no matter who the person was, that just feels so viscerally, wretchedly unfair.

I know! I made venison roast in my crockpot yesterday and it was like magic how I came home from work to delicious, delicious food someone else (AM!Me) had cooked.

What's for dinner, Amy?

Hm. We could turn our outrage toward the Wisconsin senator who wrote a bill classifying single parenthood as child abuse.

[link]

Instead of FCM, we really need I,E,PA

Insane, Evil, or Performance Art