Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I'm not wearing a speck of green today. Better fix that before I go outside next. Purple and blue are not a problem right now, but it's not St. Eggplant's Day, so that really doesn't count for much. As far as I can tell, Enfield, New Hampshire does not have a St. Patrick's Day parade on the order of New York City or Chicago (they actually don't seem to have one at all). Neighboring Lebanon is celebrating with a 5K race this weekend, though, and Ellen decided to enter. I'm looking forward to going and rooting her on!

Ellen and I recently discovered Netflix and we're enjoying it so far. It's nice having ready access to such a wide selection of movies. We don't have terribly esoteric tastes, but there have been a number of films Ellen or I enjoyed growing up that we've been wanting to share with each other that we haven't been able to obtain at the local video outlets. Most recently we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which we both enjoyed. And I was pleased to learn that Butch Cassidy's real name is Robert.

I was reading recently that the discontinued production of sodium thiopental (also called pentothal), the first of three drugs used in the lethal injection "cocktail," has wreaked havoc with some states' lethal injection plans. Texas, for example, has hundreds of inmates on death row but a stockpile of pentothal that expires at the end of the month. Pentobarbital, another drug in the barbiturate family, is widely seen as the successor to pentothal. Ohio and Oklahoma both use it, and Texas has announced its intention to adopt it as well. Defense attorneys are vigilantly monitoring the proceedings to make sure that the rights of their clients are not infringed upon, but I don't expect the replacement of pentothal with pentobarbital to have any functional impact on the way death row inmates' cases play out. If the medical community has deemed pentobarbital safe when patients are intended to survive its use, presumably the legal community will not object to its use in an execution setting.

The 2011 U.S. Chess Championships start April 14 ... which means Fantasy Chess is almost here!