Happy Halloween!

Tonight I had 106 Trick or Treaters come to my house for Halloween.  I started the evening with 102 full-size candy bars, with plenty of backup candy when that ran out.  The house was well decorated by my #5 daughter (pictured).  

Happy Halloween!

Generally Wrong

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

-- George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (1845 - 1933), prolific and popular English historian and literary scholar, as quoted in A Last Vintage (1950) John W. Oliver et al. (eds.) p. 172

Absolute Conviction

All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong.  The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies.  With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority.  There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

-- Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013), British writer, 2007 Nobel laureate in Literature, "A Notorious Life" -- interview with Dwight Garner at salon.com (11 November 1997)

Armed Men

Armed men don’t sit down and talk.

-- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018), American writer, recipient of the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, The Eye of the Heron (1978) Chapter 8 (p. 107)

Facebook Privacy

Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation Settlement Administrator has sent you $36.12 USD.

Note from Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation Settlement Administrator:

"Your Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation settlement payment is now available in PayPal.

Thank you."

-- Email from PayPal telling me that I received $36.12 USD from the Facebook privacy class-action initiated in 2018 and settled for $725 million (27 October 2025)

Yi Dan

A hearty congratulations to my Taekwondo student, David, on achieving the rank of Second Degree Black Belt (Yi Dan) this past Saturday, October 18th.  

Although he turned 13 years old just 2 weeks before the test, David is an experienced martial artist with considerable skill.  His fine test performance demonstrated the integrity with which he prepared.  

Last October David became my third student to go from White Belt to Black Belt.  He is the first to continue on to advanced rank.  

Safety Valve

The continuing episodes of protest and dissent in the United States have their basis in the First Amendment to the Constitution, a great safety valve that is lacking in most other nations of the world.  The First Amendment creates a sanctuary around the citizen's beliefs.  His ideas, his conscience, his convictions are his own concern, not the government's.

-- William Orville Douglas (1898 - 1980), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; longest-serving justice in the history of the Supreme Court with a term lasting 36 years and 209 days, Points of Rebellion (1970) p. 3