Events

Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. Half of the developers on my team are old enough to feel sad; the other half said "Dungeons and what?"

Via Talking Points Memo, Reuters reports the reception Iran's president got in Baghdad this week: Pomp and ceremony greeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his arrival in Iraq on Sunday, the fanfare a stark contrast to the rushed and secretive visits of his bitter rival U.S. President George W. Bush. Ahmadinejad held hands with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani as they walked down a red carpet to the tune of their countries' national anthems, his visit the first by an Iranian president since the...

After a several-week absence, the ParkerCam is back up.

Via Bruce Schneier, a true horror.

...died last night, aged 82: William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

The UK humor site Daily Mash has a different take than, say, the Chicago Tribune: THE price of a bushel of wheat rose yet again in the markets of Flanders yesterday presaging a monstrous tribulation and a grave rise in the price of mead, the Lord High Guardian of the King's Purse has warned. ... The noble lord forewarned that a time of privation would surely be visited on the kingdom, when the peasant would find himself cast from his wretched midden and the knight dispossessed of his estates by the...

Via Calculated Risk, in Sunday's Chicago Tribune: The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at the house they won at a foreclosure auction. They took the plywood off the front door and went inside to make sure the utilities had been shut off. Then they called the police. Sitting upright in the corner of a bedroom off the kitchen was a human skeleton in a red tracksuit. Next to him lay a dead dog. Neighbors told police the corpse was almost certainly Randy Johnson...

I don't know how to introduce this comic, except to say that another developer sent it to me.