I ached all over. Everything hurt, all the way to my bones. It's like when you have the flu, bad, but without any other symptoms to distract me. I had a lot of trouble sleeping Friday night, even though I was bone-tired, because it hurt so much. I took Xanax and it didn't help much.
Saturday: I got up at 7 AM and realized there was just no way in frickin' hell--
So I stayed home Saturday (beginning of new pay period, OT safe!) and all I did was lay in bed. Sometimes I slept, but after 3 PM I had such a massive headache sleep was no longer an option. I didn't even touch the computer, nor did I watch TV. I didn't put on music. I just lay (and then sat) in silence. I read A Princess of Mars and ran to the store for a few necessities, but otherwise I did absolutely nothing.
By bedtime Saturday night I was feeling moderately better. I still ached, but not as fiercely as I had even twelve hours earlier. When I got up this morning (at 7:20) it was to mere fatigue without the pain, so I hied myself to work.
Tomorrow, another 9-hour day, but I don't have to be there until 12:30.
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The Chicago teachers' pension problem is going to get worse. Right now Chicago politicians think they can stick the state of Illinois with their pension woes. As one useless extrusion put it, "The Illinois taxpayers will just have to foot the bill." But she's going to find out that no, the Illinois taxpayers do not have to foot the bill, and won't.
Millionaires are already leaving Chicago and Illinois by the dozen, because they can read the writing on the wall and know what's going to happen. But the flight of money won't be the end of it, because even if the Illinois legislature tries to saddle the rest of the state with that crap there will be an enormous taxpayer revolt. People from downstate won't pay confiscatory taxes just because a bunch of Chicago lunatics don't know how to do arithmetic.
Absent anything else happening, it'll take decades for it to play out, but eventually the insatiable tax machine will run all the producers, all the industry, right out of the state, leaving nothing but takers. Where will the money come from then? Probably a federal bailout, if (by then) the feds can still run the printing presses.
The pension system is unsustainable. People facing retirement in the next five to ten years are not going to get very much of the money they expect, because it is simply not there, and there is nowhere to get it. No matter how many times the Illinois supreme court rules that this or that fix is unconstitutional, they cannot change the laws of mathematics by judicial fiat.
Most of Cook county will look like Detroit before this little drama is well begun.
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Steven Den Beste makes some excellent points on Shakespeare revisionism.
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That was an expensive demonstration. Assume a single Humvee runs $100,000--that's $300k wasted because some grunts didn't get the tiedowns right. Of course the flight time on the C-100s and all the parachutes and everything else probably cost at least a few million dollars, because the military doesn't really care about wasting money.
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If the Earth's magnetic field collapsed right now, we would notice it, but not for the lunatic reasons quoted in this skeptical piece. The Earth's magnetic field is not particularly dense, but it's huge, and if it were to collapse it would induce huge currents in transmission lines. The blackouts would cover the globe in darkness and last for months until fuses and other equipment could be replaced.
But we wouldn't all die of radiation poisoning, because we still have a hundred miles of air between us and space. It would be a castrophe, but not because of radiation and such.
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Today was a ridiculously nice day, too. I spent all of it indoors answering phones. *sigh*