Are you watching?

The Australian Open has provided some great tennis the last few days, especially on the women's side. Both Williams sisters and Justine Henin are out, all three major upsets accomplished by much younger, less experienced players. At least at this point the matches are on ESPN2 each evening. Check it out.

The video to the right is just for fun (both screens give the same result). I guess the Jr. High mentality transcends culture.

Can you explain why, in the last month, the clock on our microwave has started running fast? We're talking several minutes per week fast. How does a digital clock suddenly go bad, especially running fast? Does this portend bad things for the microwave itself?

Remember army men? The 2" green plastic figures that were an essential part of every boy's collection of toys. I'm hunting down a bag of those for...well, never mind why at this point. It would spoil the fun. But it turns out they are hard to come by these days. Want action figures? They're all over the place in dozens of forms. But ordinary army men are no longer the staple of every toy store in the nation. Which is not to say they're not popular! Check out
http://www.thortrains.net/armymen/
Who knew there were rules for playing with army men?

Speaking of links, I apparently goofed up a link from an earlier post with another game. So here's a second try:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/sheep/
I'm as bad at this one as I am at the canon game. And for the rest of you, I'm SICK AND TIRED of hearing from smart alecs who send me emails about how easily they reached level 15. So just keep it to yourself, OK?!

I spent three hours this morning getting ready for my appointment with the guy who does our taxes, and I have a little more to do tomorrow. I'm going to change the way I keep my records, which will cut down on the work for next year. But I couldn't help but notice my frame of mind as I did this morning's work. As I grouped expense receipts by category and then added them up I imagined myself getting audited and having to justify to an accusatory IRS agent why I put this receipt in this category and not in another, or defending an individual purchase as business related.
Maybe it's unavoidable, but it seems to me that the govt. should find a better way of collecting taxes than a system which, at least among almost everyone I know, produces a sense of fear, defensiveness and often animosity among the citizenry. In a democracy the govt. is supposed to be of, by and for the people. Does anybody feel those prepositions fit the IRS?
The irony here is that the one IRS agent I've dealt with, over a year-long process related to issues at a church I pastored, was a very helpful and gracious individual. Which suggests to me that the weaknesses, or perhaps only the reputation, of the agency are indeed seriously problematic.
How could things be changed to reduce the adversarial relationship that seems to define the way we picture the IRS?
One of the problems is that I (and, I suspect, most Americans) see the IRS as both an absolute power and arbitrary, the worst possible combination. I've called the IRS with a question and received different answers from different agents. But when the agent across the desk says "disallowed!" I have no recourse but to pay up. They probably have some system of appeal, but my perception is that the effort would be fruitless.
The point here is not that the IRS is, in fact, dictatorial and capricious, but that our perception of it is thus. This perception becomes our reality, and it produces the animosity we feel toward our govt., especially at this time of year.
So, how 'bout we get rid of the IRS? I don't mean that in the way that the crazy tax revolutionaries who live in the woods of Montana mean that. What if we went to a flat tax with a code that was 20 pages long, with minimal exceptions only for those at or below the poverty line? Or a national sales tax to replace the income tax? Both get rid of any hint of being arbitrary, and we wouldn't need all those agents. Yes, it would kill us to pay, say, 15% in sales tax on every purchase, but wouldn't it be nice to get all of your paycheck? And the people buying $80,000 Porsches and $2 million homes won't be able to hide behind shelters.
Yeah, I know. It'll never happen. Too much bureaucracy for that kind of change. But I wish I didn't feel about my govt. like I do for the first four months of every year.