My Life in the Bush of Wombats

11:00PM - Quick Review: Matthew Hughes's Template

It is almost impossible to discuss Matthew Hughes's science fantasy novels of the Archonate without using the word "Vancean". So I'm not even going to try.

Vancean. Vancean! VANCEAN!

It's just such a fitting description. Like Vance, Hughes writes with a fine, clear grace, sentences that are precise and polished but smooth and natural, and studded with little gems of exotic vocabulary, as in this, the opening paragraph of Template:

The tall skinny one and the one with the shaved head kept circling to Conn Labro's right. When they came at him their attack was well coordinated, the points of their epiniards darting in at different angles, aimed at different parts of his body. Now they came again and Conn timed the double parry exactly, riposted against the skinny one so that he had to block the thrust in a way that hindered his partner's recovery.

"Epiniards"--I don't even know what they are, but I have faith the author does. It is a word evocative of both "poignard" and "épee"; I discover that "épinard" is the Romance word for spinach; I find myself wondering if some Latin taxonomist decided that spinach resembled a blade (like the gladiolus) or vice versa.

Just so you know I read past the first paragraph: Also like Vance, Hughes writes stories in a vast, technologically advanced, but vaguely archaic transplanetary human diaspora, depicted with just enough key details to make it feel convincing and not enough to make it feel preposterous. The novel is a picaresque* of Conn's exposure to other worlds and other cultures of the diaspora, discovering that the values in which he was raised are not universally held. Our hero's world is a satirical libertarian paradise, complete with literal wage slavery and public executions for cheating at cards. Over the course of his adventure, Conn learns that the financial exchange is not the sole manner of human interaction. There are fights and chases, surprises and romance, and psychotic adversaries to best.

*Not literally; our hero is no rogue, but in fact a scrupulously honest man in pursuit of someone who wishes him dead for purposes of plunder.

Template is, in brief, a delight, a fast-paced, funny, suspenseful novel full of, yes, Vancean brainkicks, carefully crafted to deliver thrills. It's a type of novel that doesn't get published much any more, and that's a bloody shame.

Full disclosure: Matt Hughes is giving away electronic copies of Template to promote its small-press publication, coming later this month. In return for the free copy, Hughes asked that the recipient mention the novel publicly--favorably not a requirement. james_nicoll organized today's mini-blogswarm of reviews, in which I'm glad to have participated. I also should mention that I have a past professional link to Hughes--I wrote the cover copy to his Tor novel, Black Brillion, which I adored. The millions of you who refrained from reading and buying that book should kick yourselves for not getting it.

10:34PM - Politics: A rhetorical reframing

I realized about a week ago that there's a pretty simple rhetorical tool that progressives, liberals, and just plain sane people can use to help assure the defeat of the lickspittles in Congress who are not Democrats or Socialists.

From now until January 20, 2009, there is no more Republican party in my language. Instead, there is "Bush's party". If I need an abbreviation, they are the BOP (Bush's Own Party).

That's all.

This idea came to me when I was listening to Harry Reid on Morning Edition, talking about the "moderate" members of the opposition party--specifically Arlen Specter, but also people like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and sometimes Chuck Hegel. What Reid said was that Specter was "always on our side, except when we need him and he votes with the Republicans." What's really going on is Specter votes with Bush, on every crucial vote. Hence, Bush's party.

There used to be honest, decent members of Lincoln's party in Washington; when there were, they deserved the name of the party he lead. But for the past fourteen years, those officials have all been high on Gingrichism and drunk with Bush. Bush couldn't have driven this country into the abyss without the gleeful, consistent, and unwavering support of his Congressional lackeys. Let them all wear his name. Maybe after a generation of self-examination, chastisement, humiliation, purges, reconsiderations, and repentance, they might again be worth of the letter R. But not now.

11:08PM - Being way behind on LJ: Sex and Summary

I'm slowly wading my way back to the present, again. Many things conspired to set me so far back--Artie's death after surgery took a lot out of me, work has again been utterly craptacular, and I lost all of this weekend just past to a double-sized NYRSF work weekend. I had a much more pleasant weekend on April 26-27, interrupted only by the misfortune of having to rush redbird to the hospital.

Anyway, one of the good things about being way way behind is that I don't feel any need to get up to my elbows in the Open Source Thing That Ate Livejournal. Almost every idea I might have contributed was already wrapped up in a superb piece on the subject, an essay by synecdochic, a writer previously unknown to me: "sex-positive". what a loaded term. (I think I found this through a link to a slightly later essay of hers, Don't Be That Guy., which was widely linked; but I found the "sex-positive" essay much more interesting.

The key sentence in "sex-positive" is a parenthetical (oh, the daring!):

(For ease of reference, let's call the two groups "sex-positive" and "getting-laid-positive".)

I might quibble with her terminology; I think "sex-positive" and "sex-for-ME-positive" gets at her point even better. But damn. that's the entire dilemma of frank sexual positivity right there. "We must all be free spirits loving like the angels . . . so make with the dry humping alreadys."

10:27PM - Worst-written headline ever?

I just spotted this in the MSNBC headlines on my LJ Portal page:

Holocaust recalled at Auschwitz

Obviously, it was defective.

6:55PM - Public Service Announcement: Eschaton has moved

I thought it was weird that my Eschaton RSS feed hadn't updated in several days. It transpires that Eschaton, the indispensable blog of political snark and random music videos, has moved from its old address to a new one: www.eschatonblog.com.

7:32AM - Health update: Acute

Last Monday morning, before work, I went to my podiatrist to get a couple of broken toenails looked at because they were interfering with my ability to sleep on my belly. (Sleeping on my belly greatly ameliorates my apnea symptoms.) This was the only progress I made on my chronic health problems last week, because I then spent the next 60 hours completely wiped out by a severe cold. From the podiatrist, I went to the office, where everyone told me I should go home, and after 45 minutes I believed them. When I got home, despite the visit from enegim and ri_whittlesey I took to my bed and slept for 20 hours. I spent most of Tuesday and a good chunk of Wednesday sick in bed as well, or sick and reading the intratubes. (I did bestir myself to drive into the City for the NYRSF weekly meeting on Wednesday. I couldn't have managed a train ride and rush-hour subway, but driving was okay.)

I was back to work on Thursday and Friday, and I had a very active weekend. I'm still somewhat coughy, but I'm feeling much better. So, back to the quest to better health. Go me.

11:23PM - Catchup: Health

I'm sick: a bad head cold with some lung involvement, which is making it nearly impossible for me to sleep.

I am borderline sleep apneaic when I'm not congested, and serious congestion pushes me into the world of No Good Sleep. I am finally going to address this, starting this week. First, I am going to return to my Ear/Nose/Throat doctor and get my deviated septum repaired, which I've been putting off for a decade. (The first time I saw him--for an ear infection--his first words to me were, "So, how badly do you snore?" Given my weight and my septum--apparently as visible across the room to a trained professional as my weight is to most people--there is no way that I wouldn't snore like an eighteen-wheeler full of chainsaws. Which I do.)

Then I'm going to a sleep clinic to determine what treatment is right for the apnea. I'd be amazed if I didn't come away with a CPAP, but who knows? Maybe the septum repair will be enough. I don't have any objection to a CPAP, so I'm not particularly concerned.

More details later when I know more. Must go to bed.

10:26PM - Catching up: Not Health Related

Work has been going moderately well. After the panic panic PANIC 30 hours I put in at the office on the weekend of March 1 and 2, work has mostly settled down to its overwhelming 11-hours-a-day-plus-commute. That, in turn, is slowly winding down and I have some hope of getting home around 7 PM most weekdays. I wouldn't bet big bags of cash on that yet, though.

I can read "my stories" (we've started calling my political blogs that) at work in slow moments, so I'm mostly caught up on that, but I am about ten days behind on LJ. I can't read LJ at work--too much of it is links to NSFW material real or imagined--so I only get to read it on weekends. This weekend was the (usually monthly) NYRSF work weekend, but because I missed last Work Weekend (see paragraph 1--it was held March 1-2, and I was otherwise engaged), I was way behind and this one ran longer than usual. (Also had to take one of the rats to the vet at noon on Satuday; and because I was very tired, I ended up taking naps both yesterday and today, something I never do.)

So, very little LJ catchup got done this weekend.

Last weekend I actually had "off" for relaxation, so here's the list of chores I did:

( This is mostly for my records, so I know how much I can get done on a weekend if I really try. )

I did do some LJ reading in among that.

The weekend before that was the tail end of the ICFA, which was, as it usually is, wonderful. It's actually kind of spooky the degree to which people there know who I am now. It was splendid, but it was a week of only minimal reading.

So, I'm ten days behind. I'm not going to skip ahead--I've caught up from further behind that this. I mention this because I'm probably going to be leaving comments on posts you've long since forgotten, because ten days in internet time is comparable to the age of the Appalachians.

Good to see you all.

Oh, and read this post by nellorat about her client and friend Sherry Britton, who died this week. I didn't know Sherry nearly as well as nellorat did, but I met her several times (during the period that she and nellorat were working together, she lived about a block from my office, so I would act as a courier), and found her utterly charming. And, of course, I got a lot of her wonderful anecdotes, both from the memoir and from gossip with n. I will miss her--the world is poorer without her.

11:23PM - Everything Else In the UNIVERSE Is Less Important than...

the fact that Fafblog is back!

"Then it's only three hundred eighty thousand miles to the moon. We can swim for it!" says Giblets. "Giblets's crater friends can smuggle us to the border from there."
"We'll haveta travel undercover if we wanna stay aheada the law," says me. "By the time we reach the checkpoint I'll be Henri DuMarche, international financier, socialite and diamond thief, an you can be NGC 5024, a mild-mannered globular cluster."
"The guards will suspect nothing!" says Giblets.

This is why the Internetz exist. That and lolcats and pictures of major political figures done up all porny and nice.

Fafblog!

1:12AM - This works frighteningly well

A found-art method for generating alternative rock album covers. (via Making Light)

Mine is behind the cut.

( That would be this cut here. )

7:39AM - E Gary Gygax: Two brief memorials

Rich Berlew, creator of the D&D-based comic strip Order of the Stick, has two great tributes, one in prose and one in comics.

Gygax was one of the most contradictory figures in the field. His personal devotion to his zany new game--his energy, his dedication, his evangelism--took D&D from a self-published fanzine-with-delusions-of-grandeur he sold from the back of his station wagon into an international phenomenon that became a touchstone of nerdiness for an entire generation. I met Gygax at my first Gencon in 1980, and he went out of his way to be kind to a fellow nerd whom he had never met, buying me breakfast for basically no reason and regaling me with tales of the early days of the game and the industry.

Contrawise, his business practices were reprehensible; the number of people he shafted on the way up is just barely justification for how badly he was shafted in return on the way down. (I have been lead to believe that later in life he and Dave Arneson were on good terms again, which amazes me in much the same way that Jack Kirby's eventual reconciliation with Stan Lee does.)

Mainly, though: How many people get to create an entire art-form? Gygax did, for better and worse, and today he's gone and the world is poorer for that.

updated to add: The two best one-off comments I've seen so far are "The memorial service will be held in 1d4+2 days" and "So, did his doctors rifle through his pockets to find gems and magic items?". The memorial suggest in the link given by lavendertook in the comments is brill, too.

11:12PM - Happy Birthday, Tim Powers!

I don't normally send out birthday greetings, especially not to people who aren't even on LJ, but he's the only person I know with a Leap Day birthday and I figured he has to jam as many best wishes into the day as he possibly can.

Here's to at least 14 more!

12:16AM - I'm probably the ten millionth person on your flist to post this

But if I'm not, go, watch, even if you normally don't "go, watch".

Sarah Silverman's romantic message to Jimmy Kimmel:
( Sweet love )
and his loving response (broadcast immediately following the Oscars):
( Sweeter, sweeter, lover )
Probably not work safe. But you could have guessed that from the words "Kimmel" and "Silverman".

10:42PM - Steve Gerber, 1947-2008

Before I even understood the idea that comic books were created by individuals, I had a favorite comics writer.

He died on Sunday.

Mark Evanier, who was a good friend to Steve, has been overseeing the online tributes at Gerber's blog. If Steve made a difference in your life--and if you've read comics in the last thirty-five years, he probably did--you might want to stop by and tell the world. I can attest from my own experiences, these acts of kindness and memory mean a lot to those who remain to go on.

Heidi MacDonald--one of my favorite writers about comics--has her remembrance here which does a great job of explaining how Gerber's biggest works hit us at the time. Tom Spurgeon, the best reporter in the field and a fine writer on his own, has a more traditional, and comprehensive, obituary.

I also think that no mention of Gerber's death should go without a link to The Hero Initiative, a charitable organization devoted to helping comics creators in severe need. Gerber was famously mistreated by the American comics industry, and his last years would have been much worse without the Heroes.

10:39PM - No dog in this fight

I am not a Facebook user; I am not a player of Scrabble or Scrabulous; and generally I'm not very excitable about trademark violations.

However, I have to point to this this comment from the BBC's article on the Scrabulous affair. (Background: Hasbro and Mattel, who split the worldwide ownership of Scrabble between them, are requesting that Facebook take down Scrabulous, which is a precise clone of the board game and physically resembles it to a degree that it's a clear trademark violation. There's a good screenshot of Scrabulous in this ABC article. Games--the rules of games--aren't covered by copyright, but their components can be, and they certainly can be protected by trademark. On the face of it, Hasbro and Mattel--which can agree on nothing else--are almost certainly well within their rights to do this.)

The comment was this:

Interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live Karl Savage, a member of the Save Scrabulous group, said: "A lot of people are saying shame on Hasbro, shame on Mattel, if you wouldn't be so short-sighted about this then you have an opportunity to actually make some money from this rather than alienate your existing customers. . . ."

Well, yes, except for the fact that neither Hasbro nor Mattel controls the online rights to Scrabble. The world's largest computer game manufacturer, Electronic Arts, does, at least for the next few years--they apparently picked them up from Infogrames/Atari after Hasbro renegotiated the sale of Hasbro Interactive to Infogrames in 2001.

Yes, this is a tangled thicket of rights and reassignments. But you'd think that a) someone who is deeply interested in the online version of Scrabble might want to do a smidgen of research before telling reasonably successful multinational corporations how to run their businesses, and b) that the BBC reporter covering the matter might take the time to find out if the person interviewed has even the slightest sense of what he's talking about before quoting him.

11:34AM - John Edwards Loves You And He Wants All Your Money, with Footnote about Larry Niven

The Kossac known only as KingOneEye is organizing a get-out-the-money blog swarm* on behalf of Edwards. It is scheduled for this Friday, January 18. As he says,

$7 million dollars is a lot of money to raise online, and 5 days is not a lot of time to organize. But if Ron Paul can do it, fer gawds sake, we ought to be able to.

*One of the few truly prophetic works of science fiction was Larry Niven's set of "teleportation" short stories from the late 1960s--"The Alibi Machine", "All the Bridges Rusting", "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", and especially "Flash Crowd". Although they are ostensibly about teleportation--a technology I consider basically impossible as described--they managed to predict many of the dynamics of life in the wired world, where distance and location are, in many ways, less important than affinity groups, notoriety, and the flow of information.

In the early, most popular years of Slashdot, it was a common occurrence for a site to get mentioned on Slashdot and then crash under the weight of all the people linking through. Although usually known as "the Slashdot effect", I've always called these events "Slash crowds." I supposed that these blogosphere-wide fundraising drives could, in turn, be called "cash crowds".

8:51PM - In case we forget

Karl Rove is a human sewer.

1:23PM - One of the best political aphorisms I've ever heard

This came from a short-lived alternative magazine called X in the early 1990s:

Oppose censorship. It makes heroes out of assholes.

This is illustrated quite well by today's Glenn Greenwald post about Mark fucking Steyn becoming an icon of speech suppression in Canada.

A similar complaint was recently filed against Mark Steyn, arising out of the publication in Maclean's of an excerpt from his odious book, America Alone. That complaint was also filed by a Canadian Muslim group, claiming that the passage "misrepresents Canadian Muslims' values, their community, and their religion." Steyn will also now likely be hauled before some government tribunal, forced to account for the ideas and opinions he expressed, incur substantial attorney fees in defending himself, and be subjected to the trauma of some government proceeding against him which can result in numerous punishments.

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing "offensive" or "insulting" or "wrong" political ideas. The mere existence of the "investigation," interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

9:24AM - Harmonic convergence

Because I'm working full days both days this weekend (the death march has officially begun, although it's more of a Death January), I didn't read my daily comic strips from yesterday until today.

I read 35 daily strips courtesy of The Houston Chronicle. Of those, two are reprints from the 1960s, so 33 current strips. Of those 33, yesterday, four were jokes about some combination of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. I guess the new jokebooks are out for 2008.

9:31PM - Two things that make me like Hillary more

First, what she said around the tears:

It's not easy, it's not easy. And I couldn't do it if I just didn't, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don't want to see us fall backwards, you know? So.

[applause]

You know, this is very personal for me. [Voice quavering.] It's not just political, it's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game. They think it's like who's up or who's down. It's about our country, and it's about our kids' futures. And it's really about all of us, together. You know, some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds. And we do it, each one of us, because we care about our country.

But some of us are right and some of us are wrong.

(My emphasis. Transcript from Media Matters for America.)

This is the first time I've ever gotten the feeling that she sees the current situation as anywhere near as fundamentally wretched as I believe it is. That's good.

And then there's this, via James Wolcott:

Lance Mannion offers this helpful incentive:

Every vote for Hillary Clinton is a knife through the heart of Maureen Dowd

7:24AM - If you feel strongly about a primary candidate

Give money. The four weeks between now and Super Tuesday will be decisive, and elections run on money as armies run on food and oil.

Also, seriously consider volunteering, especially if your state is one of the 32 with a primary before or on Feb. 5.

And tell people who you're supporting, and, more importantly, why. Get people engaged. They might learn something, and so might you.

10:37PM - Smarter than the average test-taking wombat

I am smarter than 98.33% of the rest of the world.
Hardest Quiz Ever

via agrumer.

Be warned--if you take it seriously, it will take you a while, even though it's only 20 multiple-choice questions.

11:46AM - The Case for Edwards

My first political post of the year! Huzzah!

I've been mostly supporting John Edwards since the beginning of primary season, for reasons to which I've alluded before, which boil down to "his priorities are similar to mine." He's the only candidate directly confronting the fundamentally broken nature of political news coverage in the US; he's the only candidate directly engaging the problem of economic inequality at any length; he's the only candidate I've seen directly address the ongoing catastrophe in New Orleans; and his repudiation of his early support for the war on Iraq leads me to believe he's interested in a less interventional foreign policy than any of the other candidates (except Ron Paul and Dennis Kusinich). He made many of these points while running for VP, of course, so I was inclined to like him when the primaries began. He's not afraid to be a liberal, and he's not willing to parrot Republicans' rhetoric to bash Democrats, both of which are habits that drive me nuts about the other leading Dems. He's charismatic and smart and a good campaigner--it's really not easy for a bleeding-heart liberal to win a Senate seat in North Carolina, as I know from watching the state close-up for nearly twenty years.

But yesterday I had pointed out another reason why I support him: The entrenched power elites are really scared of him. Glenn Greenwald pointed out this letter to Sunday's New York Times Week in Review which I had already seen, from Theodore Frank of the American Enterprise Institute:

There is a critical distinction between Mitt Romney's and John Edwards's wealth. Mr. Romney, as a businessman, made investments that created wealth. Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process. (Mr. Edwards's multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdicts almost certainly hurt the quality of health care in North Carolina.)

Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards's policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

[Greenwald:] Anything that results in accountability for our largest corporations is inherently bad, even when they're found under our legal system to have broken the law or acted recklessly. Thus, John Edwards' self-made wealth is deeply dishonorable and shameful because it came at the expense of our largest corporations and on behalf of the poor and dirty masses, while Mitt Romney's wealth, spawned by his CEO-father's connections, is to be honored and praised because it benefited our establishment and was on behalf of our glorious elite.

The true message of the "conservative" movement is "there should be no accountability for the powerful". John Edwards has spent his entire life making the opposite case, literally. I have such a big man-crush on him right now.

3:08PM - Hobby Games: The 100 Best, a list

Via agrumer, I find that someone has transcribed the table of contents of James Lowder's Hobby Games: The 100 Best.

Lowder's book is an appreciation of games for people who really love games, written by people who really love games. Basically, Lowder gathered 100 major game designers and publishers and asked them to list three of their favorite games about which they would be willing to write a 500-1000 word appreciation. He then determined the 100 top vote-getters and assigned them to the voters. The resultant list is thus not deliberately "representative", but it manages to include a wide variety of games that are historically important archetypes and recent refinements and perfections. And the enthusiasm expressed in the essays is infectious. Highly recommended if you're one of those people who really loves games, or someone who wants to understand those who do.

Of course, any such list will become what you young hepsters call "a meme".

( Behind the cut: a lot of games )

12:44AM - How They See Us

Blogger AlterX on America as seen from Germany.

. . . these are people I've known for more than 40 years. People who thought Jack Kennedy was the greatest thing since sliced bread and whose dream it was to come to America. People who used to ask me to send them anything (t-shirts, stuffed animals, posters) with an American flag on it. As far as they're concerned now, we can shove it all up our collective ass.

But the real reason I posted this is because of the banner at the bottom.

( Over-the-top but amazingly satisfying political comparison here )

11:44PM - "Digger! Don't be a bitch!"

Short film of a penned (zoo?) wombat named Digger and his handler, Donna. Most of the films I've seen of human interacting with wombats have involved babies; Digger is at or close to full growth and gives a good sense of exactly how massive an adult wombat is. All these years of being a wombat hobbyist and I've never heard them before. They sound remarkably like irritated grey squirrels.

And oh that darling nose!

( So, so cute.  )

6:35PM - The Great Republican Meltdown

Back in 2004, I posted here the observation that the modern Republican Party is a deeply divided coalition of four major power groups, which I called "libertarians", "plutocrats", "jingoists", and "theocrats". (In a later post, I mentioned "racists" as a fifth group, with some reservation; racism is often fomented by the plutocrats to divide the poor against themselves.)

I noted that not only do these groups have little in common, under most circumstances they'd be at each other's throats. Their ideals--and all of them do have ideals, worthless as I think some of those ideals are--are generally contradictory, most involving seizing government control to favor one or another constituency at the expense of others. The only glue holding together the party is shared hatred of liberals.

That glue is dissolving rapidly and noisily. The party's standard-bearer has fallen and can't get up; Chimpy McHitlerburton has so completely failed as a president that his potential successors can't agree among themselves how to pick the standard up and rally the troops. What's amusing is seeing how neatly the top candidates in Iowa fall into the camps:

• Huckabee, the Christianist;


• Romney, the unabased plutocrat who is groveling for Christianist forgiveness;


• Giuiliani, the jingoist, whose idea of foreign policy is "Every day can be September 11th" ;


• McCain is a duplicate jingoist whose campaign slogan might as well be "Four More Wars!";


• Paul, the libertarian (who best shows how the libertarians and jingoists are at each other's throats);


• And at the back, there's Tancredo, the rabid xenophobe.

(Fred Thompson doesn't fit the model, alas. I don't know if there's anything distinctively Republican about celebrity-worship; given that Al Franken is running for the Senate, I have to say there isn't.)

This is a fairly sharp contrast to the Democratic candidates, where the differences among the three top candidates (Clinton, Obama, and Edwards) are differences of nuance and implementation rather than appeal to completely different ideological groups within the party. I could see President Clinton having Edwards and Obama in her cabinet, or vice versa all around; I can't picture Huckabee and Paul even being the same room without clawing at each other's eyes.

It's nice to see one's political observations confirmed so dramatically. Advantage: me!

3:43PM - Biggest laugh of the day: a tie

This comment from Tom Spurgeon is tied with this video link from Mighty God King.

7:16PM - Civics quiz

Here's a surprisingly tough quiz about American history, governance, and economic theory which was designed to test the knowledge of high school college seniors. Sixty questions.

By "surprisingly tough", I mean, "there are actually questions on it which I wouldn't expect a high school student to be able to answer"--for instance, questions about Federal Reserve policies, the Federalist Papers, and public good theory. I got a 95%.

(via sarah_ovenall)

Correction from dhole. I would expect a college senior to know almost all of this.

7:08PM - How I spent someone else's honeymoon

My old friend quility and her new husband jdoggiedogg were joined together in wedded bliss a few months back, and finally got to take their honeymoon: a week-long visit to New York City, where quility lived for most of the 1990s and into the 00s.

jdoggiedogg has recently posted a very detailed and photo-filled trip report, in which I (and the rest of my household and, it seems, half of my flist) make several appearances of varying lengths. It is in two parts, here and here. It's a great advertisement for the city.

I do wish I had been able to spend more time with them; I hate being a grownup. It seems like half my life is spent counting down the few minutes I have available until I have to leave to do the next thing.