Lunchbreak Flowerblogging

Why the building management would choose the first week of October to put flowers in the planters out front (which have been barren all year) is beyond me. Since there's not a lot at stake in my interpretation, though, I'll go ahead and assign the action an admirable degree of optimism.

I'm almost as pleasantly surprised as the time last month when they actually got around to installing functioning mailboxes in the landing.

It's actually been really nice out this week, so maybe it'll be a while yet before the Blumine are excised from the ol' nature symphony.

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I hadn't actually been aware that the Connecticut Supreme Court was hearing arguments on the constitutionality of barring gay marriage, but I'm of course quite happy they reached the morally correct result. In a better world, I continue to think, government would bother only with civil unions and leave the word "marriage" for the churches (or, more to the point, the people getting married) to sort out, but, well, we all know how much people are terrified by sensible, incremental policy changes towards secularization.

Apparently gay-marriage opponents still have a measure on the November election ballot on the question of convening a state constitutional convention to dial this back. I don't know how this polls in the state.

Suggested derogatory right-wing state nickname: "Connectichusetts."

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Elsewhere on The Internet, respected political journalist James Fallows builds a fairly substantial blog post on the theme of making references to old Simpsons episodes.