Taxes and Census and Such

There was a line in one of the West Wing episodes where one character invites another to go out to a bar with him. "We'll speak as men do", he says.  That line stuck with me - it sounds like it was cribbed from Shakespeare.  I started wondering about it while I was lying in bed this morning.  Normally, I'd look it up on the laptop in the kitchen while the coffee was brewing - orange flavored coffee; heavenly scent - and the sausage was cooking -- sizzle, sizzle -- and maybe the waffles were baking or the French toast was frenching.  But this morning I'm not allowed to eat anything because I'm going to have a spot of dental surgery, and they said now remember, don't eat or drink anything after midnight.  The fact that other surgeries have been at 8AM, and this one is at 10:30 doesn't change their prescription.  Well, I thought, I'm going to stay up really late - by my standards - and I'll sleep until it's time to leave, and I won't have time to get hungry.

Which plan worked until I heard my wife get up at 7AM to check if the weather forecast -- rain and snow - was valid. (The roads are dry, but maybe later?)  Ahem.

So, knowing that going out to the kitchen right that moment was a bad idea, I fired up the small tablet (really, too small to write on; you go into email, and you can see one line of what you're writing, and sometimes not even that.  On the other hand, it does contribute to brevity in communications. And the size is dandy for watching videos and bouncing through sites with StumbleUpon) and did a search for that phrase.  Didn't find any Shakespearean references, but I did find a site called WestWingTranscripts.  Whereupon, like the WW junkie I am, I then scrolled through the whole script for that episode, smiling as I encountered phrases I remembered, scowling just a bit when the phrases weren't exactly as I remembered them.  But, overall, pleased. It's a dandy episode, with references to why a statistical polling method for the census is both better than headcount and unconstitutional.  Not to mention a succinct statement of the differences between Democrats and Republicans when faced by a budget surplus. Nice.

Then I went out, grabbed the laptop from its normal resting place on the kitchen table, and sprinted back into the bedroom.