The first step is admitting you have a problem.

…then don’t pick anything back up.

The Guardian publishes a great essay on the virtue of idleness. So, so great. My favorite extract:

When the sickly velvet-coated dandy Robert Louis Stevenson fell ill in 1873, aged 23, the diagnosis was “nervous exhaustion with a threatening of phthisis” and the prescription was a winter on the Riviera, “in complete freedom from anxiety or worry”. Once upon a time, we knew how to be ill. Now we have lost the art.

(via Crooked Timber)

Thanks, Tucson Citizen

With a new emphasis on detecting terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, the mood and focus along the U.S.-Mexico border has changed significantly, says 55-year-old Joe Lafata, who last month became the new port director in Nogales.

“The responsibility has gotten more awesome,” says the 32-year veteran of the former U.S. Customs Service, who began his career in 1971 as a federal Sky Marshal.

“Our big concern used to be bugs,” Lafata says, laughing as he recalls past work.

(emphasis added)

I’ve fixed the iCal calendar I make for the Fireside Bowl — it seems that mpshows stopped updating the website I was scraping, and switched to a php-based deal. The new-format page has more information, but is in some kind of awful, horrible, non-validating HTML. I changed my script to use BeautifulSoup and now it works even better than before. I also added a calendar for the Bottom Lounge, even though beer is WAY too expensive there.

I’ve fixed the iCal calendar I make for the empty bottle — I didn’t realize it was broken until today — how long has it been screwed up? No idea. I should really check my log files to see how active it is.

Actually what I should do is talk to the webmaster there and get access to the database they’re using to build the pages, saving me the trouble of having to scrape all the info out of their horrible non-validating HTML.