Dear friends, the following thing made me laugh out loud. It is possibly the best this anyone has done in the past month. Are you ready? Here it is: the qwantz.com daily dinosaur comic for March 24th, 2004

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time — this may be the best video game since the Wind Waker Zelda game. There are a few things about this game that I find really enjoyable. Firstly, the graphics (at least on the XBox version) are fantastic, and the huge areas and vistas are beautiful. The way the prince moves is so fluid and natural, I find myself stopping to marvel at it, even halfway into the game. Second, the gameplay is really well designed and fun. Nothing seems hard exactly, but there is just enough challenge to keep me interested, but not so much that I’m losing patience with the game, like in Splinter Cell, where things were either ludicrously easy or insanely difficult (for me, anyway). Also, the designers built the levels in such a way that new puzzles and types of actions are constantly becoming available to maintain interest, in contrast to games like, say, Deus Ex 2, where the only things that revealed themselves over the course of the game were lame new type of guns and enemies that were harder to kill.

From the weekly standard:

Is there in the end a fatal contradiction between Israel’s Jewish character and its democratic form of government? Only if you accept the idea–rooted in Rousseau, promulgated for more than a century by Marxists, and embraced by left-leaning intellectuals throughout the Western world–that the aim of democracy is to reflect in its institutional forms peoples’ highest hopes, overcome individual alienation, and make all its citizens whole in heart and soul. But there is a more reasonable understanding of liberal democracy, one more in keeping with its first principles and classical formulations and less bound up with utopian hopes and Communist nightmares.

In this understanding, majorities are given wide latitude to legislate, circumscribed principally by energetic protection of the individual rights that belong to all citizens. In this understanding, states do not have an obligation to affirm equally the grandest aspirations of all citizens, but they do have an obligation to ensure that all are equal before the law and that none falls below minimum or basic requirements for education, health, and material well-being. And in this understanding, there is no reason in principle why a Jewish state–one which is open to Jews throughout the world, and gives expression in its public culture to Jewish history, Jewish hopes, and Jewish ideals–cannot protect the political rights and civil liberties, including religious freedom, of all its citizens, provide them with equal opportunities, and require that they take their fair share of responsibility for maintaining the state. And there is every reason, grounded in both democratic and Jewish imperatives, why Israel ought to do precisely that.

Substitute “heterosexual” or “blonde” or “right-handed” for “Jewish” in the above paragraph, and you’ll understand why things like this make me so sad.

I enrolled in a beginner’s aikido course last May, and took about 8 classes before I broke my clavicle in a bicycle accident. Then, after getting clearance from my orthopedist, I went back to aikido in August and re-injured my still-fragile collarbone. X-rays, poking, prodding, and the doctor came up with a new figure: three months. In January, I went to see the doctor again, and he cleared me for action. I’ve been procrastinating since then.

I remember really enjoying aikido when I was doing it last year, but mostly now I have a familiar feeling of dread when I consider trying it one more time. I think it’s equal parts worry about hurting myself again and fear of coming in as a novice for the third time. When I first started, the feeling of beginning, of honestly admitting that I had no idea and accepting instruction — these appealed to me. Now I’m no longer a true beginner, but I’ve got to start all over anyway.

I’m still not sure I’m actually going to start again in April. At this point, it feels like something I ought to do, rather than something I want to do. Am I trying to talk myself into it or out of it?

So, what’s new with R. Kelly? Well, he performed here in Chicago last night, and the local papers had coverage. The Tribune even had a paragraph that seemed to speak right to me:

Kelly will go on trial here in Chicago for charges relating to child pornography, and as lamentable as the charges are, Kelly has put on a pair of blinders that have allowed him to become one of the premier songwriters and singers in all of pop music, let alone R&B. But the show nonetheless carried the air of an implicit defense. [emphasis mine — tew.]

So the Trib’s got a theory about the mask thing, and there is someone out there on the internet who has made a life-size mannequin of R. Kelly. Scroll down a bit to find the pics. There’s also some sweet RoboCop content there for Phil’s Phanatics if you’ll scroll down even further.