Kids getting eaten by bears sounds like some sort of deranged background image for putting Kings 2:23-24 on.

Maybe there is a way for you to be more involved at church!!!!!

I've never taken an IQ test. I'm thinking it is high enough to be brilliant without being so high as to make me bizarre.

I just remembered to watch the Noah videos Lori posted a few days ago. Holy cute!

Baby Devon Rexes!

Awww... cute! I love their flat-ish heads and huge ears.

I'm kind of happy about the trade-offs of mental processes that come with age though. I no longer feel sharp enough to write an incisive treatise about the blood motif in Macbeth, but by the same token I didn't have a panic attack when I had to get my car towed out of a ditch this February, and that would have had me freaking out like Daffy Duck at 18.

I've never taken an IQ test. I'm thinking it is high enough to be brilliant without being so high as to make me bizarre.

You probably have. Schools were pretty good at stuffing them in with other things when I was a kid -- I think that was the norm.

Bush has advice for presidential candidates:

In an interview with ABC's Charles Gibson Wednesday, George W. Bush said he thinks the 2008 presidential contenders don't understand how hard it is to be the president.

"I would tell you what I think, uh, these candidates don't really understand is how complex the environment is inside the Oval Office," ABC's transcript has Bush saying. "And how important it is, to have a set of principles from which you will not deviate, and, so that you can make good sound decisions. It is impossible I . . . maybe not, but I think it's impossible for anybody to fully comprehend, you know, how much incoming there is into the Oval Office, and therefore it's important, to have a very orderly . . . disciplined process, that enables people to come in and give you their opinion, in a timely fashion, so that there's enough data available for the president to deal with the problems in the world."

...

Bush on how quickly his presidency is passing: "You know, just last year I was thinking about, how to deal with Iraq, I -- you know, I was, I was part of the people who didn't approve of Iraq. And when they asked the endless questions -- 'Do you approve of Iraq?' -- I was one, no, I didn't approve of what's going on. And wanted to do something about it and was confronted with a serious decision. It was just a year ago . . . that I was, you know . . . listening to people and getting ready to make the -- make the decision, and it just seemed like . . . it was just yesterday, I mean it's unbelievable how much time's passed."

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I am markedly dumber than I was twenty years ago. Age, head injuries, drug side effects, migraine-related brain changes...whatever. I can feel my brain straining against things that would have been fine three years ago.

I do terrible on any parts of the spatial parts of IQ tests, I can't follow visual patterns at all. I know that when I was a kid and taking a test when it got to the part with the half red-half white blocks and the tester would make a pattern and then mix it up and I had to remake the pattern I literally could not do it.

I forget shit all the time that even a few years ago I'd have no trouble remembering. And then there's stuff I could learn but I figure it's not worth the effort - stuff that would have been much easier for me to learn years ago....