In non-gift-giving news, one of the housecleaning staff in my building has been arrested for kidnapping (of an adult, for ransom) and is now in jail on $1,000,000 bond. !!!!!

Holy carp. If I'd known it was a hotbed of criminal activity, I would've come over to work in this building more often.

The Korean one?

Sure. He might have been visiting China.

(Thought I read in a thing he was Chinese - wasn't being an ass, I swear. Well, not on purpose, anyway. Look! A baby wolf!)

What did your dad get you from China?

Jesus, Flea! That is freaking scary.

What did your dad get you from China?

A dagger. Not a Korean one.

Kee-rist. Project of hell is being hellish again. I'm FLABBERGASTED by the behaviour of the people being tested. And I wouldn't be surprised if the tester doesn't let us try again.

You know, P-moon, I thought you staying in town was going to prevent this.

That was contingent upon the badness of the driving commute this morning -- my boss has a minivan. (And it was surprisingly painless, once we got out of Brooklyn. No traffic at all on the bridge or FDR drive.)

I'm not generally a fan of gift cards. Though my last birthday was gift-card-a-licious. But my sister knew something I wanted, and dragged dad and bro to the store, pointed it out, and led them to the counter to pick out how much they wanted to chip in via gift card. Then she and I went shopping the next weekend and actually got the stuff. So that was kind of neat.

I don't like giving them so much in part because I either feel cheap, not getting a "big enough" one, or spend more than I wanted to so the card has the right number on it, and feel like I got push into it. My issues. Also I'm a crazy good bargain shopper and can often get things that are really amazing for very little money, and I feel like the card is a waste of my talents.

I just spent way too much money on one gift, and I'm getting my brother in Russia to pay for part. I'm wondering now if the easiest way for him to do that would be for me to tell him to get me a gift card from Target or somewhere I'll use it for necessities rather than trying to figure out a way for him to send me a check or something.

Didn't see this mentioned here yet. Court bans Intelligent Design from PA Classrooms: [link]

TomW linked to a different story about that earlier. This quote makes me quite happy:

"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote in his 139-page opinion

It's about damn time someone said that in a legal context.

My BF mentioned a Buffista in his CarBlog post today. (scroll down--his name is Jason) [link]

They keep track of which contributors get comments on this blog, so please leave a comment on this or any of his entries if you have a second.

Woot! I read an article about that PA judge a few days ago - he's conservative, but he's known for making rulings based on what he thinks is right, even when those rulings go against conservative ideals.