"Speak!" she said to test the spell.
The boy could not speak, but he laughed.
Then his aunt was a little afraid of his strength, for this was as strong a spell as she knew how to weave: she had tried not only to gain control of his speech and silence, but to bind him at the same time to her service in the craft of sorcery.

—excerpt from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My image host has gone cracker-dog on me, completely flop-bot. If it doesn't clear up soon I'll have to move my images to a different host and I don't want to do that because it's boring. I'll give it a couple of days. There does seem to be quite a few new free image hosts out there since I last took a look.

TNA has been off-line for two weeks, but has made it back onto the Net as of today. Q: If a database crashes does it make a sound? A: Sometimes it makes a little buzzing sound but not always.

ZERO TOLERANCE

What does zero tolerance mean to you? For a lot of you it means weed, as in harsh penalties for being in possession of. But what I'm referring to is the change that took place in this country after Ronald Reagan was first elected. Basically what I'm talking about is the increasing emphasis on business and profits and the external appearance of things, and a decreasing emphasis and concern for civil rights, the working poor, the social safety net; all things that don't have to do with making a lot of money.

Do you remember the change? Do you remember, oh people, the way it was before?