Went to the eye doc today. I need new glasses — no duh — but otherwise everything was normal, except that she kept using the word “mature” a lot, as in “as your eyes mature” and “mature retinas” and so forth.

If my eyes are so mature, why are they continually drawn to icanhascheezburger.com? Just askin’.

From Tony Plutonium, on all the folderol about what Wes Clark said about John McCain’s being shot down vs. his qualifications to run the country: “Does that imply that if I get sideswiped while riding the Suzuki, I’m qualified to be a county commissioner?”

The James David Boyd in this story was David Boyd, my good friend and classmate all the way through junior high and high school. I last saw him at our 10-year reunion, when he seemed to be pretty much the same David I’d gone to school with. But I guess a lot can happen in 20 years.

Damn. I can only begin to imagine what his family is going through … and what they still have to face.

Daddy: Hey, Hooper — did you have a good day?

Hooper: What do think I am, some kind of FREAK who didn’t have a good day?

Jerry 1, OPEC 0.

My hard drive died a couple of weeks ago. I only got the computer back from the shop yesterday (more on that in a minute).

Everybody who lives through this kind of thing learns some lessons. Mine was: Despite using XP Media Center’s backup function faithfully and backing up to an outboard hard drive, which appears to have saved most or all of my data, many of my apps are now gone for good. Among them was Office, although after I raised hell with the repair shop, they installed a temporary version I supposedly can combine with my authorization key to make permanent. (I’ve finally found my disc for the permanent version, so worst case, I can reinstall. Still….)

But I had a number of other apps for multimedia, and they apparently are either outright gone or else fatally damaged. Among them were Photoshop Elements, Premiere (video capture/editing), an audio editing suite, Click 2 DVD (video capturing and DVD burning), and others, enough to make me a one-man multimedia center, lacking only Flash and something like Dreamweaver for creating Web pages. They were factory-installed on the original hard drive, with no discs accompanying the computer. Their total replacement value is somewhere north of $2,500. And they’re gone for good. Also gone: Norton Antivirus (and my attempts to install AVG freeware have been running into problems).

Interestingly, it was my freeware apps that seemed to survive in the best shape. Firefox, IrfanView (photo-editing), Ad-Aware antispyware, Audacity audio-editing software and most of the others survived, by and large. But the expensive stuff? Bye-bye.

I also was underwhelmed by both the quality of the work this place did and the length of time it took them to do it. In particular, when they called me to get authorization for the work after running a diagnostic, I specifically asked them to recover both data and apps. No one told me they couldn’t recover the apps. Had I known that, I might have looked into getting a new computer rather than trying to fix the one I’ve got. Also annoying: They appear to have created a new user, one that isn’t listed among options for sign-in but under which most of my data appears to be stored if you look at the DOS directory. I’m not going to name the place here on the blog, but the parent company is going to be getting a long list of specific complaints.

So, to protect your stuff, learn more about backing up than I did. And do it regularly. Mean time to failure for hard drives is something like 5 1/2 years, but that means a lot die much sooner than that. My repair bill would have paid for a slightly-better-than-low-end laptop, and if I had really needed the multimedia apps for work, I’d be looking at that repair bill PLUS close to two grand for a new PC.

And software makers: Get over yourselves and start including discs with the PCs to which you license your stuff. I don’t give a rat’s hind end if it costs you more.

Gregg Easterbrook asks a darned good question: Why is NASA worrying so much about building a moon base when the sky could be falling?

David gets around to the deep, dark secret behind getting around.

The Louisiana House has voted 94-3 — 94 to 3!! — for a bill that apparently would allow the teaching of creationism in science classes.

Creationism isn’t science. “Creation science” isn’t science. And as much as the pro-creationist liars would like you to believe otherwise, there is no controversy within the scientific community about evolution.

Evolution is a theory as “theory” is defined in science, where “theory” is a term of art meaning a hypothesis that has been tested repeatedly and can be used to predict certain outcomes. Saying that evolution is wrong is like saying germ theory is wrong, or the theory of gravity.

This bill, if enacted, will be a crime committed against the children of Louisiana, who, frankly, have more than enough on their plates as it is.