I suck at a lot of things, most of them related to keeping paper records. And chief among these is filing expenses. Of course, because I work from a home office, and have to pay most of my operating expenses out of pocket, that means frequent, excruciating torment for both me and the poor accountant on the other end that has to deal with what passes for my reports.

You would think, in this day of e-everything, business expenses would be a trivial issue; that I could, say, direct bill recurrring expenses like my phone bill to my company, or have a credit card account that automatically created my expense reports for me. I hear about these things, and know they are possible, yet I've only rarely experienced them personally.

Always good for a dissenting view, Noam Chomsky puts in his two cents about events in Israel and on the West Bank–comparing the structure (up to now) of the Palestinian Authority to a “Bantustan” (as in the homelands set up by South Africa under apartheid).