Well, I was a little premature yesterday, but it seems to be official now. The College of the Cardinals will be selecting a new pope in a couple weeks. I wonder if there will be white smoke for a black pope? More on that later…

Apparently, Pope John Paul II is dead.

Not being Catholic, or even a theist, I’m not big on popes, and I disagreed with him on many issues, but like Ronald Reagan, who died almost a year ago, he was one of the great men of the latter half of the twentieth century. He, like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and to an only slightly lesser degree, people such as Lech Walensa and Vaclav Havel, was not willing to merely “contain” a brutal totalitarian empire, but was determined to stand up to it and end it. Along with them, he succeeded, and for that act alone he will go down in history as one of the greatest men to wear the shoes of the fisherman.

It will be difficult for the church to find his like as a replacement.

It was one of the wettest winters on record in southern California this year, and having moved to Florida last fall (just in time to be hit by two hurricanes), I missed it. All the rain has apparently made for a fantastic bloom of wildflowers there, particularly up in the Golden Poppy Reserve in the hills west of the Antelope Valley. Transterrestrial web designer Bill Simon took a trip up there this weekend, and this is a sample of what he shot.

I liked this one, too:

The rest of the images can be found here.

Can there be a jot without a tittle?

American Express has an insecure login. When you enter the URL http://www.americanexpress.com (a natural enough place to go take care of your accounts, and the address that comes on the bill), you’re redirected to this page. Note that it’s an “http” site, not an “https.”

You can get a secure login by adding an “s” to the URL and reloading the page, but most people wouldn’t know to do that, and you shouldn’t have to. There’s no link to a secure option, and they shouldn’t even allow a non-secured login. This is kind of amazing for a company with the reputation of AmEx.

Walter Cronkite has lost his wife of sixty-five years. That has to be a blow.

I just realized that today’s the Ides of March.

Why yes, yes I am trying to avoid work. Why do you ask?

Rosie O’Donnell has a blog. It’s much worse than you might imagine.

…why Harry Stonecipher was really fired.

He wasn’t popular, particularly with a lot of the former McDonnell Douglas people, and a lot of people think that he’s been doing with Boeing’s aircraft business the same thing that he did with theirs–running it into the ground, with Boeing now second place to Airbus. Certainly the Sonic Cruiser was a bad joke.

I’d like to know what the rest of the story is.

…why Harry Stonecipher was really fired.

He wasn’t popular, particularly with a lot of the former McDonnell Douglas people, and a lot of people think that he’s been doing with Boeing’s aircraft business the same thing that he did with theirs–running it into the ground, with Boeing now second place to Airbus. Certainly the Sonic Cruiser was a bad joke.

I’d like to know what the rest of the story is.