Which threat to the Bush administration are you?

Threat rating: High. The Bush administration is
concerned that it may not get a second term.
Therefore, we are going to change the rules so
that each Democrat vote only counts as 0.2
votes because Democrat is a shorter word than
Republican


What threat to the Bush administration are you?
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The Uh-Oh Book

Two years ago, in Robert's kindergarten (which is about to be Katie's, in a month), the teacher showed us the Threat Level. Well, not really. But the kids had magnets that they had to move up the chart for misbehavior -- from blue to green, yellow, orange, red, and white (green was "oops", yellow was "the uh-oh book", orange was "lose recess", red was "principal's office", white was "call your parents").

One thing in particular struck me. The teacher confided that no one ever got above Yellow -- having to write their name in the Uh-Oh book was traumatic enough to send the misbehaving child home in tears.

I note this because our national Threat Level appears not to have five colors, but rather two -- in the year and a half since its inception, we have never been at any threat level other than yellow and orange. Will we ever? Perhaps they'll move it to green for the election, or red after the fact -- following the inevitable 9/11 sequel we'll be seeing in a couple years, after the Iraqi expatriates get their act together and head over here to give us some of what they got.

(I'm going to start taking the advice of this humor site -- we're at Threat Level La-La, and occasionally go to Tinky Winky. It seems appropriate given the kindergarten communication level of a falsely broad "color code".)

Worlds

The kids all clustered around the computer to watch the el-cheapo RealVideo NASA feed of Opportunity's launch, this past Monday.

Saturn's definitely a non-point-sized object now to Cassini. The planet itself is only 2.5 minutes of arc across, but when you count the rings, it's 5' -- that's as big as the separation of Algiedi, the naked-eye optical double in the northwest of Capricornus.

I missed the -1th-anniversary ten days ago: Cassini's now 355 days to SOI. (Of course, a couple weeks before that we get the Phoebe close approach).

So there're reasons to look forward to 2004, all in all.