How am I doing on my New Year’s resolutions? Well, yesterday I cleaned up the house. Cleaned it well enough to make it acceptable to visitors. Preferably near-sighted visitors who never touch anything, because it could still stand some dusting. But it’s still a damn sight better than it was. It’s so nice to come home to a neat, organized house. Let’s see how long it stays that way.

The best part of it all is that, now it is Sunday, and if I don’t do anything today, I could still call it a productive weekend! So today might be a day full of watching DVD’s and football.

Has anyone seen my newly neat house? No. Plans for last night changed. I was supposed to have dinner out with friends and their parents, because the parents are leaving today for a few months in Florida. But at the last minute they decided it was too cold to go out. So they stayed in; we all went over there, and just ordered pizza. And played Tripoley, instead of coming back to my place and playing poker, as was the plan.

You’ll notice that in the above paragraph, I didn’t name the friends and parents. That’s because the parents are nervous about burglars while they’re gone. And if I named them, there are just enough clues on this site that their empty house could be discovered. Not without a lot of research, mind you, but it would be possible. Luckily, burglars and other criminal types are extremely lazy. And stupid.

And thank goodness they are. Otherwise they’d never be caught. Look at the lady in Cleveland who claimed to have lost the winning lottery ticket. She should have realized that it would be easy enough to prove whether or not she had purchased the ticket, and that her past and arrest record would be investigated. Any intelligent person sees the folly in that scheme within thirty seconds of pondering it. And look at Kevin Dowling (link to the left, there). Again, it was his own stupidity, and his lack of awareness of that stupidity, that foiled his plan from the beginning. He thought he was smart enough to get away with it. A dumb criminal with hubris is a detective’s dream.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. He quotes Socrates as saying, “…he thinks that he knows something which he does not… it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.” If you ever hear wisdom being defined as “knowing what you do not know”, that is from where it comes.

A truly genius criminal could probably get away with things. I’m not saying I admire Ted Kasinsky, the Unabomber, because I don’t. But he got away with it for a very long time. It took a relative recognizing the ideas and style in his manifesto to catch him. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

If you’re out there contemplating a crime, do us all a favor. Don’t do it. The fact that you’re even taking the idea seriously is proof enough, statistically, that you’re too dumb to get away with it.

And lest you think that I am getting too egg-headed up in here, with my quoting Socrates and shit, let me point out that I like to watch the cartoon Kim Possible. Because of the way they play their villains over-the-top and self-aware at the same time. Hilarious.