IT Insights Blog

Last week I knocked off a couple of items on my bucket list. I flew into Miami, Fla., drove to Fort Lauderdale, then all the way down to Key West (90 miles from Cuba), back up to Port St. Lucie, south to Miami, crossed the state to Naples, and then back to Miami. I drove through the Everglades three times! (I can’t believe Ponce de Leon walked this far.) It was basically the Mother of All Road Trips.

At last year's Academy Awards, the big scandal was that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong Best Picture winner. At this year's big ceremony, held Sunday night, nothing even remotely similar happened to disrupt the proceedings. Well, at least we at the IT Insights blog are pretty sure that nothing happened. We, er, didn't exactly watch the show.

Tomorrow is March 6, a date that will live in infamy. Not because President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that it would. Roosevelt said that about Dec. 7, the day on which, in 1941, Japanese pilots bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and dealing massive damage to the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The carnage and destruction led the United States to enter World War II on the side of the Allies.

It's Friday, there's mild chaos in a suddenly turbulent stock market, and a gigantic snowstorm is bearing down on the East Coast (from roughly Maryland to Maine) of the United States. Is everybody ready for the weekend? A favorite weekend pastime is going to the movies, which many people do to escape the sometimes persistent troubles and weighty responsibilities of reality.

Everyone, at one point, has had a moment of frustration in which they said more or less the same thing Princess Leia does during the scene in the trash compactor in Star Wars. Han Solo has just finished bawling her out, and Leia snaps, "Could be worse." What happens next is the first indication of the trash monster, followed by Han glumly stating the obvious: "It's worse."