Data control and IBM, science is mankind's brother

Today is my mother's birthday. We brought her mysteries, Dashiell Hammett and Reginald Hill, Dick Francis and Margery Allingham; yesterday we took her to see The Band's Visit. While the waffles were cooking for brunch, my grandfather told me how the first time he saw her, only a few hours after she was born, he couldn't imagine that she would ever be sixty-two. Of course, he couldn't imagine then that he would ever be sixty-two, either . . . This was in Oakland, California; still close enough to wartime that my grandmother remembered being told, We don't have any doctors free, don't have that baby yet! But even if her mouth was crooked until the second day of her life, my grandfather tells me, my mother was beautiful.

In other, odder news: there's a giant robot on the International Space Station and it wasn't on the front page of the Globe? What is wrong with this country.