There have been about four diaries recently aimed at Tony Snow's alleged financial problems, cited as a reason for leaving his $168,000 job as the White House press secretary.  See here, here, here, and here.

Now let's say for the sake of argument that you or I, fellow Kossack, are accustomed to make $250,000 annually.  I know, it's a stretch, but we need to talk in nice round figures here.  One day we wake up and find out that we're only going to be making $168,000.  We've just lost 1/3 of our income for some reason.

How might we scale back our budget and lifestyle to make ends meet?

Nothing illustrates the collective cognitive dissonance of the citizens of Wingnuttistan quite so eloquently as the e-mails they share amongst themselves.  You know the ones.  You probably get them too.

This one has been around for a while, at least since 2003, says Snopes.  But what good dittohead can resist hitting the Forward to All button when their prejudices are so mightily reinforced by the likes of this:

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink, is not sympathetic.  He said Wednesday that he told the inmates:  "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths."

While this screed is unusual in the sense that it's true, and not cut out of whole cloth (with pinking shears), what is very unusual today is that someone on the receiving end actually stopped to "think" and to write some independent commentary and analysis, and use that other button, "Reply to All."  But don't get your hopes up.  In fact, prepare to be appalled.

A recent diary by Eternal Hope contained what I believe to be a (likely inadvertent) factual inaccuracy.

[The Republicans] are unwilling to rotate the troops home every 15 months …  steps that Roosevelt did in World War II.

This error, taken in context, is just a small detail.  I am not directly concerned with the error, but I am inspired to write just a little on the general topic of troop rotations.

A recent diary by teacherken raised some interesting points, although the commentary in a few cases disappointed me when a number of individuals might have implied that the study of calculus is not justified by the limited frequency with which the discipline of calculus is applied outside academia.

Without calling out any individual, because this comment was merely consistent with a recurrent theme and not uniquely offensive, or even extraordinary:

I am an engineer with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and I have used calculus in a non-coursework-related setting at most five times in the 12 years since my Bachelor's degree.  (Non-coursework-related includes all the research I did for my advanced degrees as well as all the time spent working since, but does not include calculus done to generate solution sets for homework problems in classes I was TA'ing.)  In only two cases did I actually use the solution derived from calculus to solve my problem.

I respond below.

Every time it is an adventure of personal rediscovery.  I am a procrastinative packrat by nature with a conflicting obsessive-compulsive organization fetish. Thus every couple of years I find myself once again sitting on the carpet, where spread out about me are dozens of utility bills, insurance documents, and mutual fund prospectuses.  It is time once again to do battle with the piles of paper, which I dutifully sort and file away in a steel four-drawer file cabinet, certain that any one of these documents might someday be my salvation from financial ruin.  My only allies in this battle are a stapler, a label maker, and perhaps a good, strong G&T.