rules to live by

"When I was a kid my family seemed so stable. I was the flaky kid and my mom was always right, my sister was perfect, my dad was the rock. It hasn't been until recently that I've come to realize nothing is that simple. People are complicated and chock full of problems. That said, my family's problems don't seem so huge. We're a family of plodders. We put one foot in front of the other and keep going forward. And eventually we get someplace. Maybe the place isn't spectacular, but it's a place all the same. And while we're plodding, sometimes the problems solve themselves, sometimes the problems get pushed low on the list of priorities, and sometimes the problems cause little pockets of irritation in our bowels.

Mostly we solve our problems with cake."

-- Janet Evanovich, To The Nines

more non-news from the department of insecurity

Stolen from fj:

Watch out when doing your homework; you too could be charged with Photographing While Black.

Lose your resident alien paperwork, spend seven months in detention. Part I and Part II. (I'd like to find more coverage of this issue to find out exactly what the backstory is, but this is all I can find so far.)

I like bookteacher's suggestion quite a lot: if you're white, the next time you see agents in a public place searching or checking IDs of a non-white person, demand to join the party. "Excuse me, officer? Are you here to perform random searches? Here, please search my bag. No, no, I insist that you search my bag!"

(At least it's more productive than my other instinct, which was to say "no" to anyone demanding to search my bags on the T and thus become a test case for the ACLU when I got arrested.)