I've considered murder. Not in any real sense; I've too pesky a conscience for that. I've just wondered if I would be clever enough to get away with it. I don't know if murderers are stupid in general, or if it's just the stupid ones whose stories make it to TV, but it seems that there are a lot of not-so-clever bad guys out there. Last night Josh and I were watching a program where a man killed his ex-step-father with an axe handle, and disposed of the weapon by throwing it on the roof of a nearby building. Other mistakes are more subtle. One killer tried to alter the decomposition rate (and thereby the time of death estimate) by cooling the room he left his victim in. He then went on a sailing trip with friends to establish his alibi for the "time of death." Thing is, his technique was to simply leave the window air conditioner on at full-blast, so when the body was discovered, people noticed the chill, and the investigators were able to adjust the time of death. Then there's trace evidence. Insidious. Hairs and fibers and bits of dirt and dust. A man lures a little girl into his apartment with a dog, and investigators use the dog hairs left on her body to tie him to the crime. While it might be best to not let your victim roll around on the floor with your purebred dog, there is only so much you can do about trace evidence. So the other day Josh says, "If I was a murderer, I would plant all kinds of fiber evidence." Would that really do it? I don't know. I'm tempted to try. But not that tempted.

I like to think of myself as progressive; forward-looking. Especially among Americans. As a country, we devote our selves to the Christian god and capitalism, and this tends to keep us well behind Europe in terms of human and environmental rights. A controversy in Germany, over a zoo-bred polar bear abandoned by his mother, has made me first question my own progressiveness, and second, that of Europe. The polar bear, now named Knut, and a twin brother were born in December and abandoned to the cold by their mother. When the brother died, zookeepers intervened, and began hand-rearing Knut. He's now a healthy three-month-old, and ready to make his public debut. According to the BBC, some animal-rights activists are complaining that Knut was not allowed to die/euthanized that the time his mother rejected him, and suggesting that it would be in his best interest to euthanize him now. This shocked me. We know that whenever possible, hand-rearing should be avoided, but the idea that death is better than hand-rearing seems outrageous. Is that really the progressive idea? Note that the principal complaintant in the article is a keeper at another zoo. So his problem doesn't seem to be the idea of keeping animals and breeding kept animals. But nature should have its course, as it were, with the little abandoned bear. Am I the only one to see a logical inconsistency here? Or am I simply trying to work my irrational thoughts into a framework of reason so that I don't have to admit to harboring vestiges of my paternalistic culture? I don't know. But I'm glad they didn't let the bear die.

Apparently central Minnesota hasn't had this much snow on the ground since the winter of 1996-97: the last winter I spent here. I don't remember that year to be particularly snowy--though I do remember the year before being particularly cold. That stuck with me. I was a junior at Hamline and living off campus. Three blocks off campus. Three long, cold blocks off campus. I had just purchased my first car, a piece-of-crap Ford Tempo. I didn't have a garage, so every night for about a month, I would put in a dipstick heater and a pan heater--I want to say there was a third one, but I can't remember where it went--and cover the car with blankets in the hope that it would start in the morning (at which point it would squeal horribly because of a pre-me after-market air conditioner that screwed up the fit of the alternator belt). The coldest week, I also brought my car's battery into the house so that it wouldn't freeze. I'm glad I have a garage now.

I'm a spoiled American brat. I know this because I do not have "just one" AK-47 in my house. I do not need "just one" AK-47. I do not need any AK-47s, and that's why I can conscientiously argue that the second ammendment (firstly) does not guarantee the right to own firearms and (secondly) is an antiquated remnant from the world was a different place. It turns out that the world is the same place, just not here. I was listening to a native Iraqi NPR correspondent tell a story about how the U.S. military came to his neighborhood and went door-to-door searching for "bad guys" and weapons. "When they saw we have just one AK-47, they let us be," he said. Apparently the military let him keep the gun.