Sunday wrap-up

Got up at 9:30 after a very restless night. So much for getting an early start. Took a short walk around the Rose Garden, with my usual quick backtrack through the southeast corner to look at the Royal Amethyst, which is blooming. Works out to about 45 minutes.

At a few minutes to 1pm we took off for a drive. It was the "long afternoon" variant: South on 9 to Santa Cruz, North on Highway 1 to Half Moon Bay, East on 92, and South on I280. The main reason was to stop at Don Quixote's in Felton to figure out where it was, and pick up tickets for Tuesday's Janis Ian concert. Figured out that we ought to get there between 6 and 6:30 for dinner.

Going home on 92 took us past a produce stand, where we picked up a couple of bunches of fresh broccoli for dinner. The astute reader will notice that our route contains no component labled "West" -- I won't go so far as to rename our locale the "San Francisco R'lyeh Area", but the geometry is a little strange, due to the fact that the whole state is laid out on a diagonal from Northwest to Southeast. And let's not even mention the fact that if you go far enough South on 280 it makes a U-turn at the bottom of the bay and turns into 680 North.

Spent some time looking at the current state of "Little Computing Machine". It's pretty marginal; I think it may be easier to redo it than to fix it. My throat is improving, but it's not all the way there yet.

I damaged my throat last Thursday with a coughing fit; it finally occurred to me yesterday that, since the symptoms were basically those of laryngitis, I should treat it as an inflamation. So I switched from one aspirin per day (my usual blood-thinner dose) to two naproxen. It seems to be working.

Not saying "We told you so" or anything, but...

Boing Boing: Iraq invasion sim from 1999 warned of problems

A secret US wargame called "Desert Crossing" produced during the Clinton era showed that an invasion and post-war presence in Iraq would require around 400,000 troops -- about three times the number of troops stationed there now. Even with those resources, according to simulation output, the mission could result in chaos.

Why am I not surprised. (Article includes a link to "Post-Saddam Iraq: The War Game," released November 4, 2006 at George Washington University's National Security online document archives.)