I tend to be on the side of the little guy against big business, but this kind of stuff really irritates me:

“The paper is getting much attention. A spokesman for the American Dietetic Association, a group well known for its close ties to food companies, emphasizes that food is not tobacco. Of course it’s not. But food companies often behave like tobacco companies, and not always in the public interest. The Milbank paper provides plenty of documentation to back up the similarity.”

I had typed out a few paragraphs on corporate responsibility and the difference between a shoddy product that spontaneously causes harm and a “vice” that everyone knows causes harm when not consumed in moderation, but you’ve heard it all before, and I realized that my reaction was just emotional to begin with: This is lame. This is 10-o’clock-curfew, abstinence-pledge, stand-up-and-say-three-things-about-yourself, “non-traditional”-baby-shower lame. I don’t know what it is about this kind of smarminess that’s so distasteful - Maybe it’s the subtle suggestion that you can’t handle your own affairs. Now, I am not one of those Ayn Rand-reading balls of congealed resentment who thinks anyone who doesn’t want to own all the money in the world (or isn’t a programmer or an engineer or something) deserves to get run over with their own Prius, but there’s something in this kind of thinking that makes me bristle. It’s like it’s trying to turn you into a yuppie. This is yuppie-thinking. Not even the good kind of yuppie.

Going to be doing some program covers for the Billings Outlaws football team, here’s a quick conceptual sketch of the coach as the archetypal “chessmaster”:

Here’s an ode to the Russian Soyuz-type spacecraft, still putting around in orbit after 40 years. Keep on cruisin’, little guy: