Wednesday morning and we are woefully unprepared. No, I’m not referring to hurricane preparations. I’m talking about our anniversary, which happens to be today. To the curious, I respond, “38”. What’s worse, it’s followed on Friday by my birthday. This one is a major round number. We’ve managed absolutely no advance planning or event planning for either of these occasions. I suppose being spared by what is now a former hurricane is a reasonably good gift to receive. Will there be more? We’ll see.

The best we could come up with for our anniversary eve was leftovers for dinner. A bit embarrassing, isn’t it? But it was an excellent meal of refried beans and a filling featuring bits of leftover meat wrapped in corn and flour tortillas to taste, with fresh salsa and a bottle of wine. Not bad for a pick-up meal. Actually, I offered to cook but Meda waved me off after getting the idea for this meal in her brain earlier in the day. So that was the evening before the big day. Who knows what’s in store?!

Law.com reports that the American Bar Association will not be taking up proposals to seal many criminal court records after all. The proposals were withdrawn by the ABA’s Commission on Effective Criminal Sanctions after protests from the media and others. That’s good, but the fact that the resolutions got this far indicates that support for open records needs considerable bolstering as we go forward.

An August 10, 2007 column in the Chronicle of Higher Education identifies Hawaii as one of the states with weakest controls of unaccredited colleges and universities.

The worst are the so-called Seven Sorry Sisters, the states with such awful oversight of college quality that they are considered havens for diploma mills. The actual number in the group varies, depending on which states have the worst standards or oversight at a given time; the current Sisters are Alabama, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, and either Missouri or Wyoming, depending on which way the political winds blow at the moment. Indeed, in several of those states, operators of substandard colleges are major political players whose goal is to make sure that the states never have genuine, enforceable standards.

As the column points out, these insititutions are regulated by the states, which is why policies vary so much across the country.

Larry Geller responded with some advice for my kitten woes:

There’s another way to teach kittens to keep their claws in that
works with many of them–take one or both paws and with your
thumb and forefinger fold the claw back in. That way they
understand that what you want them to do is fold the claws back
in. It takes some repetition and of course has to be done
immediately.

Cats may or may not know what you want them to do when you
squirt them. Some figure it out, some don’t.

Might work….

A Washington Post story yesterday by Jeffrey Bimbaum reviews assessments of the new Congressional ethics bill. It’s a lesson in filling a glass half full.

And there were a number of reports yesterday on finding that the dramatic fall in the U.S. ranking for life expectancy. Here’s one version from the Guardian (UK). Sicko, indeed.

And I did get around to collecting my favorite Kaaawa photos from last month. It’s always hard to pare the month’s pics down to a manageable number, but I try. Just click on this one for the full July Gallery.