Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

31 Jul 2002, 13:21 p.m.

I'm in Sacramento. I write this from the well-furnished…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I'm in Sacramento. I write this from the well-furnished and pleasant Sacramento Public Library, which provided me with a temporary library card so that I could use the Internet terminals here.

This morning I rushed to the US Government office here to take a series of exams that might qualify me to work in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The motto of the Department of Justice, as I saw in the seal on the tests, is "Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur." From some rude word-order inferences, I thought this might mean something like "from power follows justice" or "who has power has justice." But no, there's a weird controversy: "The motto has been variously described as 'hopeless: its translation ha[ving] baffled more than one good Latin scholar'..." This sounds like a job for...Seth David Schoen!

In the tradition of the loony CIA Kids Page ("Policy makers, like the President, do not have time to read all the other countries' newspapers ... there are just too many of them. Also, there is information that other countries will not share with the United States, called secrets."), here's the DOJ Kids Page.

I walked through a farmer's market in Cesar Chavez Plaza after the tests. A man was playing the acoustic guitar and accompanying himself by whistling with awesome virtuosity. I came here and leafed through some Pauline Kael -- most of her work is out-of-print. Soon I'll get some lunch and go back home.

Finally, someone wittily notices those disturbing ads.