The Runcible Blog

Reading the news about Israel's latest attack on Gaza lead me down several tangential thought paths while I was walking around earlier. Let's see if I can congeal them. Zwartboek neatly exposes war's moral ambiguity. Verhoeven hits the viewer over the head with the same theme: nobody in a war is truly "good." The sympathetic characters in the film often have ulterior motives for their good deeds, while the deplorable Nazis sometimes have redeeming qualities. We see, all too graphically, ......
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Is it weird that every time I come home, before I unlock the door, I turn the doorknob to check whether the door is already unlocked, which would mean that someone broke into my apartment and may still be inside waiting for me?  I don't think it's weird.  I figure, it's best to be prepared to face an intruder.  Am I right? Also, sometimes when I walk down the hall in the dark, I make a sudden turn into my ......
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What torture it is to walk upon concrete slabs shorter than my stride. Must. Not. Step. On. Cracks....
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One of my neighbors has been practicing a saxophone piece for the past few weekends.  He's been struggling but has improved over time.  Today I picked up my guitar to try to figure out what he's playing.  It's a fairly straight-forward, faintly Klezmer, D Aeolian mode spanning three octaves, broken into four phrases.  It's not too difficult to play on the guitar, physically, but its twistiness must be more challenging on the sax.  It's fascinating to hear him keep hammering on ......
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