Who would ever imagine that there would be an engineering competition to see who could build the best concrete canoe?

I just got an E-Mail from my mom saying that she had one of our two cats, Mahler, put down today. He's had a chronic sinus infection for, well, at least 5 years now, and I guess that, along with other health problems, it just got too expensive to keep him around. I don't remember his exact age, I think it was around 17. But he was a good cat, affectionate to everyone; even dog people liked him, because he was the type of cat who would actually come up to you when you first enter the house and give a friendly meow (as opposed to a "what the hell are you doing here" meow, which our other cat certainly is fond of). He was also not picky - if you sat down next to him, he'd start nuzzling your hand to try to get some attention, and he'd purr if you so much as looked at him. Definitely will miss him when I go home this summer, but I guess I've been expecting it for a while, so it was no surprise. Still, as I said, he was a good cat.

Ridiculous levels of partisanship in Washington have even spread to softball games.

Andrew Sullivan, currently the only political blogger I read with any regularity, makes a good point today about the price of gas. While everyone screams about price fixing and big corporations gouging us for every penny, they forget that frankly without this massive price jolt we'll never be able to kick our nasty oil addiction. Yes it's painful, but hopefully these high prices will be part of what sends us scrambling to find new sources of energy, because let's face it, if we want the price of oil to fall, WE'LL HAVE TO STOP WANTING IT SO BADLY. Simple economics, people. If you want price controls move to a communist country. Bush can pretend all he wants, but really there's nothing he can do about gas prices short of even more drastically overreaching his powers than he's used to.
By the way, anyone looking for a reasonable, balanced take on the political issues of the day should read Sullivan. A conservative, yes, but a very reasonable, sane one. Besides, reading someone with whom I frequently disagree is more fun than reading someone who has exactly the same opinions as myself. Plus, he always provides links to what he's commenting on. I hope to follow that model myself, as frankly I don't want to pretend I actually get any of this information on my own.

Ok, so the url is "sandersrants", meaning Im actually going to post on a more regular basis, and probably about boring stuff that you don't care about, but that's ok, because I need an outlet. So here's the "back story" on this blog.
As for the "nabir" at the bottom of the page, my parents once told me that when I was very young they sat around thinking up anagrams of my name, and "nabir" was the one that they really sat on and had a good laugh over. So hell, I can at least use it for SOMEthing.
I'm sitting here tonight, and my roommate and I made one too many white Russians, and as is our frequent habit, were chatting on AIM (despite the fact that on many occasions I can actually hear him typing a room away). He noted how I seldom blog, and so I said I'd make a real one and actually start blogging, so here I am, at 2:33 AM, making my first post on a "real" blog. I'm sure I'll get around to modifying it and customizing it later, as currently I'm too drunk to try to learn html. Ah well, I have so much time in the next few weeks to learn a thing or two about coding, it'll come in useful in the future I'm sure. So here goes nothing . . .