Click if you like flowers!

My love, you take my breath away,
What have you stepped in to smell this way?

I see your face when I am dreaming,
That’s why I always wake up screaming.

I love your smile, your face, and your eyes,
Damn, I’m good at telling lies!

In an editorial for The American Spectator, Ben Stein offers commentary on the state of business and money in the US.

The most sought after jobs in the United States now are jobs in finance in which basically almost no money is raised for new steel mills or coal mines, but immense sums are raised to buy companies, recapitalize them — which means pay the new owners immense special dividends and other payments for going to the trouble of taking over the company. This process results in fantastically well-paid investment bankers and private equity “financial engineers” and has no measurably beneficial effect on the economy generally. It does facilitate the making of ever younger millionaires and an ever more leveraged American corporate structure.

After three weeks of flawless operation, I think it is safe to declare my computer fixed.

When my PC first crashed only a week after Microsoft released Windows Vista, I alluded to a worldwide Microsoft conspiracy to take down Windows XP in an effort to sell copies of their “latest and greatest” OS. I was joking, of course, but it turns out that I wasn’t that far off the mark.

After my PC died for the second time — dying twice in a span of only a week after running flawlessly for over a year — I started researching my problem and came up with a new old theory: maybe Windows was crashing itself. Indeed, I found internet forums filled with angry and desperate posts from Windows users telling their stories of receiving the same error I found myself facing. The culprit, it turns out, was Windows Update.

Windows Update downloads and installs software updates for Windows that are supposed to make my PC more reliable and secure. Ha! One of those updates was killing my PC.

For the second time in a week I re-partitioned, re-formatted and re-installed. But this time I didn’t update — in fact I turned off Windows Update, and my PC has been running beautifully ever since.

Worldwide conspiracy? I leave that for you to decide.

At just one year old, Daisy the Orchid is growing her first flowers and I’m excited.

Then play these: 50 US States in 10 minutes and 192 UN Member States in 10 minutes.

How many US States and UN Member States can you remember in 10 minutes? My scores: 48/50 and 56/192 (though spelling hurt me on the UN states, especially on the “stans”).

I love stories like this:

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn’t have an army.

What, the Swiss can’t bother to get a UN Resolution before invading someone?

Were they greeted as liberators?

Note to President: Avoid Iran, invade Liechtenstein. Apparently it’s pretty easy.

Here is what I want you to do: Think back for a minute about the professor you had who was always prepared for class, who always gave well-organized and instructive lectures, who always returned assignments promptly and with constructive feedback.

Got a name? Good.

Now go dig up that professor’s email address and write that professor an email. And in this email I want you to say thank you for all the hard work that he or she did for you that you never appreciated as much as you should have.

I’m saying this because I never appreciated how much work my professors did to be prepared for each and every class. I never knew how many hours it took them to sift through twenty-odd homework assignments, carefully commenting on and grading each one.

Right now I’m sitting here grading assignments on a Saturday night; an hour in, six assignments down, sixteen to go.

Yes, I appreciated my professors, but never as much as I should have.