CNN this morning had a story about Muslim cab drivers in MN who refuse to carry passengers who have alcohol on their possession. At first I thought they meant beer-swilling louts but they are in fact referring to things like a bottle of whiskey wrapped in a box inside a duty free bag. The cab drivers say its about freedom of religion, its against their beliefs to carry alcohol.

What a load of crap. No one is forcing these people to drive cabs. If a pacifist went to work for th DoD and refused to write bomb-making software he’d be laughed at - why choose a job which you know may offend you? The cab drivers should stop whining and either avoid their eyes from that poorly packaged Jack Daniels or sod off and do something else. It makes me mad!

Moved all my sites to a new hosting plan at site5.com, everything appears to be working surprisingly well except for some formatting on this page [now fixed]. I did not move the gallery as I want to find a new solution for how to display the pictures. Watch this space, as they say.

If you find any other problems, please leave me a comment or send me an email.

Watching some (alleged) child-kidnapper get arraigned this morning on TV I had the following thought. We all know that everyone is allowed their day in court no matter their innocence or guilt. But I think people should be made to be more upfront when they plead not guilty. We already have ‘not guilty by virtue of insanity’ so how about ‘not guilty by virtue of wasting the court time to see if you guys can make a case, yeah I done did it but can you prove it’. Standing up and saying ‘not guilty’ when you were caught in the act annoys the heck out of me.

The freeze continues… mid-20s overnight at the weekend, and still just under or at freezing point since then. We’ve lost a few plants to the cold, including some shrubs that we really liked. Our trees in front of the house look dead as well but I am hopeful they will recover once the temps get back up. Of course this is nothing compared to the huge losses in the citrus and other crops in California. A head of lettuce could soon get expensive.

Mother Nature was having some fun with us yesterday. In the afternoon we had a series of a 10 or so little tremors, nothing really worth talking about, biggest was a 2.7. Then overnight the temperature got down to at least 25F - isn’t this supposed to be the desert?! Back up to 60F right now, though. Looks like we are going to have sub-zero temps overnight for much of this week.

[25F is -4C for those lucky readers using a metric system]