Halfway down the Danube

Dates are interesting

Well, they are.

I spent much of June running around the West Bank looking at the regulatory environment for agricultural exports.  (Yeah, it's taken me a month to get around to blogging about it.)  This involved visiting farms, greenhouses, packing houses, and even a date processing plant.  Up until then, I didn't even know that dates needed processing.  I thought -- insofar as I thought about it at all, which I guess I didn't -- it's a fruit, it comes off a tree, you eat it.  Turns out, no.  Lot of stuff has to happen first. 

Anyway, dates.  The things that look like giant raisins, yah?  They grow on date palms, which are medium sized palm trees that like a hot arid climate.  Popular across the Middle East, growing in popularity in the West as a healthy snack food.  Nice little hit of tasty calories, lot of fiber, some vitamins.  In Muslim countries they're a traditional food for Ramadan, of which more shortly.

Date palms are desert plants, but dates are a thirsty crop: if you want to grow dates commercially the palms will soak up astonishing amounts of water.  That's because the date palm adjusts its output of fruit to match the availability of water.  Palms can survive perfectly well on very little water, but then they won't produce a lot of dates.  So whenever you see a date palm plantation -- and they're a very common sight in Israel and Palestine, especially along the Jordan valley -- you're looking at a lot of water. 

Friday links from Bethesda, MD

We're having a friend's daughter over for a sleepover.  Two bedrooms, seven people: one kid on the couch, two on the floor.  I told a monkey story (i.e., something from the Journey to the West, which is full of cool stories).  Much sleepover-type poking and giggling, but they seem to be quieting down now.

So, links.  We flew into Dulles; I used to fly regularly into Washington National, but haven't in years.  This fellow explains why that might be a good thing.  (That blog has all sorts of neat posts -- I'm still browsing.)

This mini-series looks really interesting.  Don't know when I'd ever find time to watch it, though. -- Incidentally, I only just discovered that the Bhagavad-Gita is believed to be a later insertion, added at a time when Hindu elites were anxious about Buddhism, and drafted largely as a response to Buddhism and a critique of it.  When I read that, I actually said "of course it is" out loud.  The B-G is basically Buddhism given a half twist, and in a way that largely defangs its critique of Hinduism.

Anyway.  So I was reading a while back about the Millikan oil drop experiments, which established the magnitude of the charge on a single electron back in 1910.  They're pretty awesome: Millikan stared at a bunch of individual microscopic oil droplets through a microscope, tracking them for 60 days, waiting for them to suddenly change their speed or direction.  Millikan later got recruited to help found Cal Tech by a guy named George Ellerby Hale, who is now pretty much entirely forgotten, but who was one of the pivotal figures of early 20th century American science.  (In part because he helped create Cal Tech.  A fair number of the scientists who'd build the atom bomb studied in the house that Hale built.)  One biographer calls him "the patron saint of big science (and corporatized science) in America."  Hale was a brilliant man who unfortunately also suffered from some form of mental illness, possibly manic-depression; in between steering American science towards greatness and managing the first generation of great US astronomers, he heard voices, had endless sleepless nights, and grappled with multiple nervous breakdowns and collapses.  (No, there's no moral to this story.  The poor son-of-a-gun seems to have been just bipolar, and horribly overworked.)

Speaking of astronomy, I only recently became aware of the existence of the South Atlantic Anomaly.  It's no joke -- there are satellites that can't pass through that volume, because it's too dangerous.  No effect at the surface of the Earth, but still: interesting.  Also speaking of astronomy, this is one of the better anti-Shuttle rants.  (Except it's hardly even a rant.  Yes, the Shuttle really was that bad.)

What else... I also only recently became aware of the randomized response trick, though apparently it's been around for a while.  Yes, the dice-rolling aspect appeals to my inner gamer nerd.

Pine nut mouth.

Okay, this was kind of a nerdy collection.  I'll try to do better next time.

 

Last Friday links of 2011

Claude out shopping for a new faucet (because the one in the downstairs bathroom is shot), kids watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (because they've lost the Wii remote).  Quiet Friday evening in Fladungen, the sky clearing for what looks to be a frosty night.

So for a while it looked like we might be going to Mongolia next.  But now it appears not.  Oh, well!  That said, here's an interesting thing: most of us have heard the factoid about how X million men are descended from Genghis Khan.  Well, it appears that it's true.  Yes, one out of every two hundred men -- or more like one out of every four, in some parts of Asia -- is a descendant in the direct male line from the late Khan of all the Mongols.

A link I stumbled across while looking for something else: Devil's Lake, in North Dakota, has been growing steadily for years now, very probably because of climate change.

I used to live in Illinois, and I used to like driving around on two-lane roads.  Over time, this gave me a rather low opinion of small towns and cities in America's middle west -- most of them seem, frankly, kinda depressing.  But just from the wikipedia article, this small city looks like a nice place to visit.

A short article about childhood in the classical world.  There are things here I'd like to know more about.

So a Russian prosecutor's office opened a prosecution against the holy text of the Hare Krishnas, and it has turned into an international cause celebre.  Apparently this is part of a general crackdown against the Hare Krishnas, which in turn is part of a broader pattern of Orthodox churches encouraging state aggression against minority religions, especially ones that are "odd" or "foreign".  Which arguably is just part of an even bigger pattern of assholic behavior by state-sponsored churches worldwide, but never mind that now. 

The Hare Krishnas are an incredibly tempting target, because they're prominent and easy to spot (shaved heads, robes) and kind of obnoxious (chanting, proselytizing). That said, there are probably better ways of dealing with them.  The real world doesn't give a Gouranga Bonus.

Friday links from Chisinau!

 

Random Friday links from Moldova, for the first time ever!

I absolutely love this graphic.  It's the kind of thing that could never have worked in a book.  (A poster, maybe.  But I don't think anyone ever did one.)  When I get home, I want to show it to the boys.

This post asks a really interesting question: Is it an accident that Earth's oceans almost exactly fill Earth's ocean basins?  Or is there some underlying reason?  -- Apparently Earth's mantle contains a lot of water, dissolved in the hot rock.  "A lot" being somewhere between about half as much and several times as much as is found in all the oceans.  If all that water were out on the surface, there might not be much land.  But this hasn't happened.  Accident?

David asked me whether sharks could come into rivers.  The answer is, yes and yes.  That is, there's at least one species of shark -- the bull shark -- that tolerates fresh water pretty well, and that can swim quite far inland.  Bull sharks can grow big and can get fairly aggressive, so they can attack people hundreds of miles up a river.  But!  There are also actual river sharks, which spend all their lives in fresh water.  But they're rare, shy, and cryptic, and not much is known about them.  There are several species, none of which are well documented, and some of which are known from just one single specimen.

Last week I posted this link (long!) about the British Libertarian Party on Facebook.  Old friend Vlatko Juric-Kokic of Croatia said that it reminded him of Ostap Bendery.  I said, who?  and went off to look it up.  One doesn't generally associate the Stalinist period with light, fun, satirical literature.  There's The Master and Margarita, which is satirical, but I wouldn't call it light or fun -- and it didn't get published in Russia until the 1970s.  Ilif and Petrov were bestsellers under Stalin.  Also, they went on an American road trip.  Go figure.

This is a very depressing link.  Carlos sent it to me.  Not everything from Carlos is depressing as hell, but this is.  It's history, and history is always interesting, but... if you're feeling a little blue already, don't click.  Seriously.  Skip to the next link.

The next link: this is my two-year-old daughter's absolute favorite video clip.  (It's the tail that does it for me.  He knows he's being messed with, but he can't help himself.)

 

Chisinau, Day One

And here I am in Chisinau, Moldova.

The last month has been very, very busy.  I finished my work in the West Bank.  (Did I even blog about the West Bank?  Don't think I did.)  Spent a couple of days in Amman, Jordan.  Flew home for a few days, then flew out to Chisinau for three days in early February.  (Had to learn about the project very quickly.  Meetings, meetings, meetings. Very intense.)  Flew back to Germany, met Claudia and the boys in Frankfurt airport, and flew directly to the US. 

We spent two weeks in Washington, DC -- onboarding at the new employer, family and friends, taking the kids to the National Zoo.  (Didn't get downtown to do the museums and monuments this time.  But did get to see family and friends.) And then we flew back, and I had one day in Germany, and now I am here.

It's cold and snowy.  Martisor is coming soon, though, so there are flowers and little Martisor trinkets for sale everywhere.

And work starts tomorrow.

White, white Christmas

We've had some snow.

Coming back from the West Bank: snow.  Had to stay in Frankfurt overnight and catch a morning train.

Back in Fladungen: snow.  Lots of shoveling.

Then more snow.  And more shoveling.

And more.

We have... oh, between two and three feet of snow on the ground right now.  More than that has fallen, but we had a warm snap for a couple of days that melted it down a bit.  It snowed yesterday and it snowed today.  I'm pretty sure I've shoveled well over ten tons of snow in the last two weeks.

Not to complain.  The kids still like it.  They complain about going outside, but once they're out there they start thrashing around, throwing snowballs, playing King of the Hill on the drifts.  On Christmas Eve we went for a walk around town for a couple of hours, delivering Christmas cards to various relatives.  The boys grumbled and whined about being forced to go out in the snow and walk...  but then they spend two hours climbing up and down snowdrifts all over town.  (The snowplows have pushed them up over ten feet high in some places.)

Anyway.  We had a very nice Christmas!  We're bi-cultural, so we do presents both on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas morning.  And then we go to the grandparents' house for still more presents!  So that's good.  The boys got a lot of things they wanted (Lego Star Wars for David, a wooden crane for Jacob, Snap Circuits and a chemistry set for Alan).  We had a fire in the stove and lots of chocolate and goodies and a big Christmas Eve dinner and fondue at the grandparents' on Christmas night.  Like.

And now we have the kids home for Christmas vacation for a week.  Fortunately, there are things to distract them.

 

Zambian English

Zambian English is odd.  Perfectly understandable, but odd.

It's derived from British English, so it's non-rhotic -- if an r-sound is terminal, or interior before a consonant, it disappears.  So car, park and farmer become cah, pahk, and fahmah.

That's easy.  But they also do some odd things to vowels.  Many of them seem to rise up a bit, so that nurse becomes nehss.  Others fall, so that gaps become gups.  And some get stretched a little, so that here and again become heah and agayne.  Combine these, and shareholders becomes shay ho das.

There's also a reluctance to clump too many consonants together.  Clusters of three or more consonant sounds are likely to be broken up by a vowel, so that a word like mindset will acquire a third syllable: mind-a-set.  On the other hand, many polysyllabalic words are pronounced with great precision; interest, for which all Americans would say "intrest", here is spoken exactly as spelled.

They also use "yah" a lot as an all-purpose particle.  "The amount of capital available is small, yah?  So the problem, yah, is not the interest rates.  They are just charging what the market will bear, yah."  -- I strongly suspect this is a Dutch "ja", acquired from the Boers.  The problem with this theory is that there were very few Boers in Zambia.  There were a lot just across the river in Zimbabwe, and of course millions of them down in South Africa, but not many in Zambia. 

There are some pleasant expressions.  My favorite so far: where an American would say "and so on" or "and like that", a Zambian says "all this and what have you".  I like that.

The Zambians say they can tell a Zimbabwean accent from a Zambian one, and also that they can usually tell which tribal group a person is from by the accent in English.  I'm not there yet.  But it's a pleasant accent, and not at all hard to understand.  In a week, I've only been confused once.  That was when the man from the Millers Association was explaining the problems they had trying to shape government policy:

"We try to work together with others in the supply chain.  We work with the farmers.  We work with the grain traders.  We try to work with the beggars, even."

"... the beggars?"

"Yes.  But they're very stubborn.  The beggars have their own association, but they don't want to work with us."

"Er..."

"They think because they are buying our flour, we can't be on the same team."

"...the bakers.  The association of bakers."

"Yes."

Some linguists call these African accents "New Englishes".  I don't see it, myself.  If they were using a lot of loan words, or odd constructions derived from the underlying Bantu, then maybe.  But they don't seem to.  It's just English with another funny accent -- no stranger than Dublin or Dallas.

Zambia: Cross-border trade

There's a lot of trade between Zambia and the DR Congo.

Makes sense, right?  Congo's agricultural sector is a mess.  And the southeast corner of the country -- Katanga Province, next to Zambia -- is all mining country, with few farms or ranches anyway.  Someone has to feed those miners, and it might as well be Zambia.  Food from all over the country flows up the Great North Road to Congo.

But!  Most of the trade?  is informal.  That is to say, it's smuggling.  Trucks full of (say) sacks of grain drive north towards the DRC and then park a couple of miles from the border post.  Guys on bicycles swarm south across the border, using bush trails that snake well wide of Congo's Customs checkpoint.  The truck is unloaded, a sack at a time, and its contents dispersed onto dozens of bikes.  Back they go through the bush.

(A while back I blogged about a border post between the DRC and Uganda.  There was smuggling around that border post, too, but not so much -- it was in a mountain valley, so smugglers would have to go far around, and through some pretty rugged terrain.  The DRC / Zambia border, OTOH, runs through a lot of flat land that's covered in scrub forest... easy to get around.)

Since Zambia doesn't charge export taxes, the Zambian government doesn't get too upset about this.  (Congo is losing a lot of money on import duties, but hey: that's Congo's problem.)  In fact, Zambia rather likes the current system.  The Congolese pay in dollars -- their economy is very dollarized, and anyway nobody's going to take Congolese francs.  That's hard currency for Zambia, which is good. 

The smugglers in Zambia -- sorry, the "informal traders" -- are actually organized; they've set up their own group, the "association of small cross-border traders" or some such.  It's formally registered as a business organization in Zambia, and it barely bothers to conceal its members' activities.

However, Zambia is losing one thing: good statistical information about exactly what is leaving the country.  So, a year or two back, the Zambian government contacted the "association", and offered them a modest sum of money to produce a study estimating just what, and how much, was crossing the border from Zambia for the DRC without going through Zambian Customs first.  Effectively, the government was saying "Hey smugglers -- we'll give you some money to tell us just what you're smuggling out of the country".

And they did.  It's a nice study, too -- very professional.

More on this anon.

Summer vacation

For Alan and David. that is.  Started last week, continues for six weeks until mid-September.  The two little ones get just three weeks out of kindergarten; they go back on August 23rd.

We were... "dreading" is too strong.  But not looking forward to this.  Last year we solved the problem by taking a long trip to America, but that's not in the budget for 2010.  So, weeks of having the kids just hanging around: suboptimal!

But it hasn't turned out that bad.  The boys are getting big enough to amuse themselves, sometimes.  A judicious doling out of electronic entertainment goes a long way -- behave yourself all morning, you'll get an hour of Nintendo in the afternoon.  We read books; we're about 300 pages into the "good parts" version of the The Fellowship of the Ring.  (Totally readable to an eight- and a seven-year-old, if you first read ahead and mark the paragraphs to snip.  I love Tolkein's backstory, but you can't really ask a first grader to sit through a couple of thousand words on the history of the Second Age.)

The weather has been weird, weird.  July was two weeks of desperate heat followed by two weeks of unbroken rain.  (Really.  Rain every single day, for two weeks.)  Yesterday we had one nice day, and I went out and mowed the lawn, and then today it rained again.  I assume this is connected somehow to the heat wave in Russia... anyway, it's very odd.

What else.

Leah had her second birthday, aka the last birthday you don't have to make a big deal about.  (A two year old has no idea what's going on.  A three year old, on the other hand, totally gets it.)  It was nice!  She demanded cupcakes, and got them.

Job stuff: a whole bunch of job possibilities -- almost all the ones I talked about back in May -- came and went.  Some new possibilities, however, have arisen to take their place.  None of them will hit before mid-September at the earliest, so there'll be no news on that front for a while.

It's quiet.

Death in the rainwater tank (2)

Tank full of wriggling mosquito larvae.  How to kill them?

Can't just dump it out.  Putting aside that it weighs half a ton, the whole point of having a tank is to COLLECT the water.

Scoop them out?  They squirm and wriggle away.  Probably doable anyway, but would take a long time, and I'd end up scooping out half the tank or more, and I still wouldn't get them all.

Strainer?  Actually, this never occurred to me.  (We don't have the right sort of strainer anyhow.)

Put fish in the tank?  I considered it!  But the goldfish in our little pond are loaners (they belong to our neighbor) and they're fine where they are.  Also, I don't think two goldfish could eat several hundred larvae.  Thin the herd, at best.  Buy more fish?  The nearest pet store is some distance away...

So: poison.

Death in the rainwater tank (1)

So we have a rainwater tank.

Claudia had been wanting one for a while, for watering the garden.  (She's been getting more ambitious with the garden.)   So we finally got it a few weeks ago.  Sits by a back corner of the house.  The rain downspout had a flip-switch on it, waiting and ready.  

And for a couple of weeks, all was well.  It rained!  Water poured in!  The tank holds 500 liters; soon it was mostly full.  Claudia turned the flip-switch back, filled her water can, and marched off happily to douse the tomatoes.  Yes, all was well...

...until the mosquito larvae showed up.

Friday links on a day in May

Here's a page where you can test your hearing at high frequencies.  (Scroll down a few screens.)  I stop around 14,000.  No idea if that's good or bad.  The kids claim they can hear all the way to 20,000!

In our case the answer is no but, damn.

And as long as I'm linking to disturbing stuff, here are some guys who are running for Congress and apparently have a decent shot at winning.  I truly don't know what to add here.

On a more cheerful note, here's some science.  So there are two pre-signalling waves: one about fifteen minutes in advance and one about fifteen minutes in advance and another about forty seconds before.  Every parent knows about the second one -- it's when they get that glassy-eyed look -- but the existence of an earlier signal is interesting. 

Quality video games for free: has anyone tried this or, more correctly these?  Are any of them kid-friendly?

Sand art.  Reminds me of the work of Andy Goldsworthy, who has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years now.

And speaking of art, this guy turned some 200+ year old prints into modern photographs.  (Slightly NSFW.) 

Via Noel's blog, I really like this paper (.pdf) on the economic impact of black disenfranchisement after Reconstruction.  (There's an alternate universe where Marx was an economic materialist, but neither a revolutionary nor a Hegelian, and we started doing stuff like this a hundred years ago. Well, at least we're doing it now.)

Most of these link-roundups contain a special link for nerds or geeks.  This is that link.

Finally, this is an interesting idea (.pdf): have poverty professionals periodically spend some time in actual poverty.  FWIW, I self-identify as a development professional, which is a slightly different thing.  That said, this doesn't strike me as an inherently insane idea.  Idealistic, definitely; probably pretty uncomfortable in practice, and so very unlikely to catch on.  But... well, interesting to think about.

Snowy Saturday in January

Snowed last night.  Cold and grey today.

Lots of TV and Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii.  (Have I mentioned just how freakishly hallucinatory Super Mario Galaxy is?  Because it is.  Really.)  Did get all four kids outside for an hour or so, despite the cold.  The baby is the only one who actually likes to go outside; the boys balk and whine and resist.  Outside?  Noooo, Daddy, it's cold.

We keep the fire burning from morning until bedtime.  A wood-burning stove can produce a fair amount of heat, which is nice.  It can also consume quite startling amounts of wood. 

Movie night in the evening, with Kiki's Delivery Service, which everyone likes.

Friday links on Thursday

Because of the holiday, and all.

Newt Gingrich wrote his Ph.D. thesis on education in the Belgian Congo.  Apparently Newt speaks French?  Someone should ask him about that.

Carlos mentioned the Congo band Konono No. 1 to me.  I keep meaning to order their Congotronics CD.  Anyone out there heard them?

I had never heard of the Bullwhip Effect until recently.  A pretty good explanation is here.  There's an online game you can play to test it.

The deer learned.  They learned the hard way.  And they still remember.

How deep into one of the dark places have you been?  I've gotten to orangey-brown.

This list of stuff from ten years ago is mildly interesting.

Most of these are dopey, but a few are dead on.

You may or may not be interested in bloggers meeting with Treasury officials, but it's worth a moment to skim forward and read the last three or four paragraphs of this post.  Learning when someone is trying to do this to you, and when and how to do it yourself, are really useful skills.  (I have a mental category of "really useful skills that nobody ever teaches you".  Many are work-related, but by no means all.)

Iggy Pop began as a cheap Jim Morrison knockoff; see, e.g., here.  (Well, actually he began life as James Osterberg, Jr., the son of a high school English teacher in suburban Michigan.  Anyway.)  Yet at some point he became something... more.  It's not clear to me when, how, or why, though I'm pretty sure David Bowie was involved.  Nothing much to add there; it's just something I sometimes think about.  Well, and that it would be cool to read a character-driven science fiction novel whose main characters were based on Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Lou Reed.  Yeah, maybe I need to get out more.

On the historical roots of government competence in two regions of Nigeria.  Fascinating, if true.  I am faintly reminded of the very marked difference between southern Serbia (formerly Ottoman) and northern Serbia above the Danube (Austro-Hungarian until 1918).  Stuff works a lot better in one region than the other, even today.

And here is a cool paper about adaptations for walking and running in genus Homo.  (.pdf, but not long.)  I like that they provide a summary table, and the graph is good too. 

And that may be it for 2009.

Really, really random thoughts after Christmas

Bacteria are small.

Your average bacterium is a few micrometers long.  That's between five and six orders of magnitude smaller than you.  So, if humans were the size of bacteria, the planet Earth would be about the size of a large house or a small apartment building.  It would orbit a couple of hundred kilometers away from the Sun, which would be the size of a small mountain.

If the Earth were the size of a bacterium... okay, have to think here, let's see.  About twelve orders of magnitude?  So the Sun would be a tiny glowing speck about the size of a grain of dust.  The Solar System, out to the orbit of Neptune or so, would be about the size of a small room.  The Milky Way Galaxy would be um, um, about 10 to the ninth power meters is about a million kilometers across -- about the size of the Sun.

Bringing it back a little: to a bacterium, you are a world.  A small one, like a moon or something, but three-dimensionally full of holes and tunnels and such.

* * * * *

The boys got this Lego set for Christmas.  (That's not its official name, of course.)  It included a P. Squiddy alien -- this guy.  (See also.) 

But while the boys liked the set, they were nonplussed a little, because they already had a P. Squiddy.  Daddy, is he twins? 

Well, he can't be twins because we already have the Skull Twins.  So there has to be a backstory.

Friday links once more

From coffee bean to carbon atom.  I really like this one.  I can remember when I thought all single-celled organisms were more or less the same size.  Not so... if an amoeba was a blue whale, bacteria would be dogs and cats and rats and mice, more or less.  (And viruses, hey, would be insects.)

Is Bosnia doomed?  I should blog about this over at the Fistful.  Meanwhile, readers who find this sort of thing interesting will find this interesting.

An Atlantic article about an interesting town in Azerbaijan.  There was a little bit of this in Yerevan -- Iranian kids coming up there to party, type of thing -- but not nearly as much.

I had never heard of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative before I started researching this Congo trip.  But, wow, they have a blog and everything.  Unfortunately, it's not clear if they're actually doing any good yet.  Still, props for trying -- someone should be doing this, and one has to start somewhere.

The World Bank Development blog and Vox are the sorts of places I go to once or twice a month, to skim.  Most of the stuff there isn't for me, but occasionally a piece turns up like this one.  It's not a world-shaking insight, but I'd say it's correct, relevant, and useful -- which is not bad for two pages long.

There's no particular reason to link to this article, except that I think it showcases a number of tropes pretty well.  The first sentence of the third paragraph, for instance, includes the words "languishing" and "infected" -- which, right there, tell you what kind of article this is going to be. 

Also, there was a line that made me laugh out loud.  Can you spot it?  It's near the end.  It is --

Happy Saturn Equinox Day!

It's Saturn Equinox Day today.

Hey, it only comes once every 15 years.  Here are some pictures and, if you like those, here are some more

We celebrated by, um... hanging around.  Alan built a really impressive helicopter out of Legos.  David did a reading lesson on the computer.  We did a lot of swinging in the hammock. I finished telling them a particularly long and convoluted Monkey story.  (Monkey vs. Red Boy.  It's about three chapteres of the Journey to the West.)  Claudia went shopping.  A summer vacation day.

Oh, and I finished my work.  I'm officially done with agricultural inputs in Senegal; pharmaceutical supply chains in Uganda; and regression analysis of factors in successful Business Startup projects around the world.  The good part is, I don't have any of that stuff hanging over my head any more: all done!  And I should get paid for it.  (Soon, I hope.) 

Less good is that now I have to start beating the bushes for work again.  Such is the freelance life.

Friday links

For the first time in a while, yeah.

The intersection of two sets.  If you recognize most of these (I did), take a drink.

There's a team in Austria that's been running the famous two-slit experiment for a while, but with ever bigger and bigger particles -- like, molecules.  It's tricky for a couple of reasons.  One is, the bigger the particle, the shorter its "wavelength" -- so you need ever narrower slits to get diffraction.  Another problem is, a molecule, unlike a single atom, can emit thermal photons.  If it emits those photons en route to the detector, that will give away its location and cause the wave function to collapse.  So it's very finicky work.

Unfortunately, firing a living organism through an interference grid is unlikely to ever happen.  That's because the wavelengths required get ridiculously shorter: to get diffraction of a bacterium would require a slit so narrow its width would be down around the Planck length.  Oh, well.

Awful library books.  Most of these seem to be just old, but a few are indeed awful.

The blocked drain of Senegal

Some more about Kaolack.

Kaolack should be Senegal's second largest city.  It sits at the top of a 100 km long estuary, a brackish arm of the sea.  This lets Kaolack be a deep-water port -- something that's not so common in West Africa.  (Senegal has two.  Most of the other countries in the region have one apiece.)  However, the estuary is muddy, so any port will silt up and need to be dredged every few years.  If it's not dredged, it's shallow-draft only.  It hasn't been dredged for a while.

Kaolack sits in the middle of the Peanut Basin, which is an area with decent soil, a fair amount of rainfall (though concentrated in three months per year) and rather a lot of sunshine.  The Basin should be an agricultural powerhouse, exporting all over the world.  Instead it's full of poor subsistence farmers, small peanut growers who can barely produce a modest surplus, and some plantations run by the Mourides.  (The Mourides are a religious... group.  Need a post of their own.) 

Kaolack used to have a rail line to Dakar. Senegal's rail system was privatized a few years back, the privatization was botched, and the rail line has been dead for years.  The rails are still there, but I suspect it would take some money to get the railroad running again -- there are years of deferred maintenance.

Kaolack has roads, of course, but they're not very good.  The one to Dakar is a two-laner with a lot of potholes.  Others are worse, or much worse.

So what does it all mean?

Last Friday random links of the Year of the Earth Rat

Ridiculously snowy Friday afternoon in Fladungen -- one of those days where you shovel the walk for the third time, turn around and realize it's all to be done again, and go inside and lie down for a while.

I've been telling the boys "monkey stories" for years now: stuff adapted from the Journey to the West.  Since these always involve Monkey beating someone up with his magical iron cudgel, they're popular.  Recently I was noodling for more material online.  That led me to things like this, but on the other hand also to this.

I am now on Facebook.  Not quite sure what to make of it.  I mean... what does it do, exactly?  Once you've looked up all your friends from high school, and fretted a bit over all your unanswered friend requests, what happens then?

There are a lot of good biology blogs out there, but I am particularly fond of the Catalogue of Organisms.  Any blog that regularly has posts with names like "More Giant Larvae" is likely to be good, but this one just covers all sorts of interesting ground.  I was moved to mention this by the most recent post, which tackles the question of how modern insects evolved metamorphosis.  Apparently one broadly accepted theory is that larva are, in evolutionary terms, embryos that have hatched early and gone off on their own, free-range and voracious.  Yes, it's an interesting image.  Also, Things I Did Not Know: there are insects whose pupal stage is mobile... coccoons with legs.  Insects.  Just damn.

Speaking of biology, nobody who smiles all the time can be quite right.

Why are a lot of credit card companies based in South Dakota?  That and so much more in this article.

...then what would have been an appropriate medium for the last inauguration? 

A random thought about architecture

Interesting article on Le Corbusier in the Washington Post today (via Three Quarks Daily).  Turns out he was just as loathsome as you'd expect, though the details get a bit... well:

In 1938, while visiting a new villa built by the Irish designer Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier was inspired to improve on her work. He admired the white-walled classicism and industrial finesse of the home, which was built in the spirit of his own domestic architecture. But he thought it needed a little something.

And so Le Corbusier stripped naked, took out his paint brushes and covered the house with large, sexually provocative images. "One of the murals was on the previously spare white wall behind the living-room sofa, so that what had been specified by Gray to be a point of visual respite was now an animated scenario," writes Nicholas Fox Weber in his new biography, Le Corbusier: A Life. Gray, who admired Le Corbusier and was, like many architects, proprietary about her work, felt "raped" by the incident.

It gets worse.

Visiting the planets (or, wish I could do tables)

I need a "total nerd" category.  Ahem.

We've been visiting other planets for almost 50 years now!  But we've visited some much more than others.  Mostly, that's because some planets are much easier to reach than others... Mars and Venus are closer both in distance and in delta-v (basically, the energy a spacecraft needs to get there).  The outer planets are very far off; Mercury is so deep down the Sun's gravity well that it's very hard to reach.

Just for the hell of it, I did a tally.

Vaguely science-fictiony open-ended speculation about oil

Interesting factoid: about 94% of world oil production gets burned, while about 6% is used as feedstock -- piped into factories to make chemicals, fertilizers and (especially) plastic.

There's been a fair amount of discussion about how to gradually phase out oil in transportation.  I haven't seen any about the feedstock issue, though.  Go figure.  The world drinks a huge amount of oil every day, and 6% of a huge amount is still a lot. 

Presumably petroleum products run the gamut from stuff that could easily use other inputs, through stuff that would be possible but very hard and expensive to make without petroleum, to stuff that cannot plausibly be made with any other input.  I'd guess offhand that a lot of plastics fall into those latter groups, but I really don't know. 

This led me to a few moments of speculation: imagine a future where all transport has shifted to hydrogen (or whatever), but a small crude oil extraction industry stays alive to provide high-end plastics.  Which are luxury goods, of course, and status symbols...

But no.  The price of petroleum-only products would hit a ceiling once it the price of oil rose high enough to make petroleum synthesis profitable.  That would be high by today's standards -- hundreds of dollars a barrel -- but not high enough for plastic jewelry to replace gold and platinum.

Still: soaring crude prices must have various industries looking around for alternative feedstocks.  Wonder why we're not hearing more about that.

All Souls Day

I always liked this holiday. 

But we didn't do anything about it today.  Still single parenting -- three more days.  Some TV in the morning (must... cut down... on TV) and then over to the in-laws for lunch.  Then mother-in-law A____ took the boys to an small-animal exhibition in downtown Ostheim (chickens, ducks and bunnies!) while I took a nap on the couch (nap!).  And that was pretty much the day.

But I don't want to spend the entire month blogging about our everyday lives.  So let's see.

A while back -- um, like a year ago -- I started a short history of the Armenian Republic.  (Part One, part two.)  I should finish that.  Not tonight though.  -- What brought it to mind: an article today about the Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan meeting yesterday in Moscow to sign a joint declaration about Nagorno-Karabakh.  This is one of those "nothing actually happened, but just them being in the same room was a huge deal" kind of things. 

Kid's movies and TV.  Yeah, I want to write some stuff about that too.  It seems like something of a fallow season... the best thing on TV right now is "Avatar: The Last Airbender" which is pretty good but not, you know, great.  (Carlos watched the pilot episode of Samurai Jack when he was here -- the one with the talking dogs -- and was bouncing up and down on the couch over the Kurosawa references.  Samurai Jack really was all that.)  But not tonight. 

I guess this is more of a coming attractions kind of a post.  Way to build reader interest, there.

Trivia: hedgehogs eat mice, apparently.

Okay, it's Sunday night, tired, I got nothin'. 

Anybody vote early?  Anybody not planning to vote?

Friday round again

Fighting off a chest cold -- I started getting sick as I was putting the last touches on the Jordan paper.  Oh, well, better after than during.

Went to the doctor this morning, but not for the cold: it was to talk about my medical exam and shots for Burundi.  Turns out that yellow fever shots are only given at eight or ten locations in Germany -- "tropical medicine centers".  Apparently you get a consultation with the shot, on things like tropical diseases and hygiene.  That's nice, but it means a four-hour round trip drive at some point next week.

Had a nice afternoon with the boys.  How long can you can entertain a five year old and a two year old with a swing and a hammock?  Oh, an hour or so. 

Watched a couple of eps of Battlestar Galactica with Claudia.  We're just starting Season Three.  Cheerful stuff.

The baby has dropped, which means that suddenly the various pains and discomforts that were keeping Claude up at night have... moved to new locations.  On the plus side, she can eat now.

Some random links:

Random Thursday links

Because in Jordan, Friday is Sunday, so Thursday is Friday.

Olli is a Brit who used to live in Albania, but has recently moved to Munich, and is blogging about expat life in Germany.  I especially liked this post.

I encountered the following factoid the other day: 

"...on average, at age 5 we engage in creative tasks 98 times a day, laugh 113 times, and ask 65 questions.

By age forty-four, the numbers fade to 2 creative tasks a day, 11 laughs, and 6 questions."

Well, that's kind of depressing, if true.  On one hand, I really wonder who measured this, and how.  On the other, considering myself and my kids... um, maybe. 

And while I'm being mildly depressed by stuff on the Internet, here's an article that asks if google is making us stupid.  (If so, then I'm in big trouble.)  Also, I'm a few months late for this, but eBay has had to get rid of their old, democratic feedback system because people suck.

Is it all bad?  No.  Police just arrested a wanted war criminal outside of Belgrade.  The body of a man of Arab descent has been discovered in a burial site in Roman-era Denmark  (via Carlos). And finally, there's most awesome nerd post of the week, possibly the year. 

Friday!  Um, Thursday.  What've you got?

Last Random Friday Links from Armenia

Because I fly out next Friday night.

This is a week old, but still well worth our attention.  A Texas district attorney is on trial for -- among other things -- using office funds to build himself an awesome computer system for his office:

The computer – equipped with two hard drives, seven fans, high-end video and audio cards, a wireless Internet connection and cables that glow under ultraviolet light – is designed for playing video games, prosecutors say.

Alan Timberlake, assistant director of information technology for Rockwall County, called the computer "gimmicky" and more suited to a college dorm room than an office.

Rod Gregg, an FBI senior forensic examiner, said 80 percent of the content he found on the computer appeared to be personal rather than work-related...

"I would not configure a backup computer in that way," Mr. Gregg said.

Seven fans?

Weekend filler blogging

Saw There Will Be Blood the other night. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for that? He didn't gnaw on anyone's arm, or the scenery, but he could have. It's a beautiful movie though, cinematic in the best sense, and it has an excellent soundtrack by that guy from Radiohead. And I got a kick that a major plot point involved pipelines being much cheaper than railroads.

(NB: No one from Fond du Lac talks like that. Day-Lewis was channeling John Huston. The Los Angeles oil magnate Edward Doheny, the man who the Plainview character is loosely based on, probably had something of a Wisconsin-Irish brogue, which is now pretty much extinct. Fritz beat Pat in the great Wisconsin accent contest.)

At the end of the movie, I turned to Z and asked, "Wanna go bowling?" So we're going bowling.

It wouldn't be HDTD without bacon news. Look upon these works, ye hungry, and rejoice.

Monday/Tuesday: I got nothing. hooray!

Still catching up on the news. Apparently, Barack Obama won Washington state, Nebraska, Louisiana, a Grammy (?), Maine (!), the Pro Bowl, Maryland, Virginia, Washington D.C., and the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

Some reading. Mister Leonard Pierce of the Texas-based American Milk Solids Council went to this year's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., and has kindly written up his experiences with the aid of several bottles of cough syrup. The series is titled, The Beast Is Red, and it may bring back fond memories of those glorious days when even attractive young women would dress like Nancy Reagan, instead of our current miserable scene, when only lonely senators from Idaho do.

Chapter 1: An American God
Chapter 2: Invisible Asia
Chapter 3: You Shan’t Go Home Again
Chapter 4: In a Mad Frenzy, Stinging Themselves to Eternal Death
Chapter 5: Soy Un Perdidor
Chapter 6: She Don’t Like, She Don’t Like, She Don’t Like… McCain
Chapter 7 (Interlude): Holding A Shard of Mirror Up To Nature’s Throat
Chapter 8: Twice Presented Him a Kingly Crown
Chapter 9: Brought Me To Darkness, But Not Into Light
Chapter 10: The Sugar and the Shit
Chapter 11: Pestilence Goes For The Big Laff
Chapter 12: Show Us Your Twits
Chapter 13: Getaway

Also, don't forget, there's a lecture on KOSHER BACON Tuesday night at Union Hall. I look forward to having my one unknown New York reader/stalker stare at the back of my enormous head all evening long, too appalled to speak. (You can buy me a drink. no roofies.)

A few more Random Friday Links

Another challenging week, so not so many links.

Here's an article about the physics of viruses.  Key point: the contents of a virus capsid can be under about five atmospheres of pressure.  Creepy but interesting.

These days I mostly skim Crooked Timber, but once in a while a comment thread sucks me in.  This took way too much of my time in a week when I didn't have much time to spare. Does suggesting that a bloody handed authoritarian ruler was anything but pure evil make me an apologist for genocide?  CT commenters say yes!

The Onion says it all about the Super Bowl.

It's the end of the project and I'm discovering just how complicated closing a large project can be.  Remember a couple of months back, when I was chuckling about how to draft a misleading spreadsheet?  Turns out the joke was on me.  Pushing people out the door is no fun, let me add.

So let's talk about something else.  Claudia and I finished watching Firefly.  Go figure: the last ep was the best.  (That's the one with the existentialist bounty hunter.  No Wild West stuff at all.)

Oh, and I've been re-skimming T.H. White's Once and Future King books.  You know what?  They hold up really well.  You can certainly see White's particular hobby horses, and they're very much books of their time and place (1930s England).  But still.  If you haven't picked these up, give 'em a look -- the first one (The Sword in the Stone) is a Terry-Pratchett like comedy (it was made into a bad Disney movie), and then they get "higher and deeper and darker" as they progress.

And I'm reading Gumby comics to the boys.  Did you know there were Gumby comics?  New ones?  Well, there are, and they're damn good.  If you have a kid between 3 and 7, I highly recommend them.

Okay, poem time. 

Very Few Random Friday Links!

It's been a challenging week.  So, just a couple of links.

To fully understand this one, you have to be American and at least 35 years old.  And some sort of nerd.  Fortunately, this is a key demographic for this blog.

In an Uzbekistani context, this story qualifies as heartwarming.  I wish the lady luck.

That's it.  Project shutdown stuff, trying to make the last bits of money go far enough.  Job transition questions (or question, singular: where next?).  A little distracting.

Oh, and we've been watching Joss Whedon's Firefly, which my sister gave us on DVD for Christmas.  It's... very mixed, but overall interesting.  We have enjoyed watching an ep or two evenings after the boys are in bed.

(Um, except the DVD player broke down this morning.  Weekend with no TV.  This should be interesting.)

Let's see.  Comments on Firefly if you've seen it?  Otherwise, what've you got?

Mummery!

Remarkably few people (okay, one person) wondered why Imperial Stormtroopers had occupied downtown Philadelphia.  So I'll tell you.  It was the Fancies of Mummers Day.

I'll turn the floor over to Amma.  "It's sort of a white people's Carnival.  And since it's cold, they can make more creative costumes because they don't have to be concerned with, you know, battling the heat with nakedness."  And to continue the parallel, the fancies are sort of like Carnival bands, kinda sorta not really, only that Mummers tend to be older and fatter as well as paler than your typical Carnival reveler.  Which makes it a good thing that they wear more clothes.

Boring serious grown-up types have asked me to put the rest of the revelry below the fold.

Support the Troops

Like you have a choice.

Thank goodness that's over

2007 is over, and 2008 smells like recession. This should be fun. I remember the Reagan recession. "Why is this old man wearing makeup and lying to me?" It's true: the man wore a lot of rouge. There's now a generation for whom Reagan is only a wheezy voice tired impressionists try to mimic on late night cable. A reputation constructed to have world historic importance has vanished like so much flash paper. Interesting.

2008 smells like recession, and Manhattan smells like unoccupied condos. Sadly, I don't know of any way to make money from this guess. Everyone is hunkering down, the animal spirits are churlish, and the Zeitgeist is checking its watch, like in Klute.

The only liquor store in Manhattan I've found which sells Korbel brandy was closed New Year's Day. I blame gentrification.

Three degrees of buttered bacon

It's the end of the year again, and once again I'm stuck sick in the apartment with lung clap. Juice and amoxicillin, which is like napalm for bacteria. I can feel entire villages of them being burned screaming alive in the jungles of my lungs. It's a good feeling.

The Packers! They are 13 and 3, and I'm not going to talk about that last third. So there's a chance we'll be in Arizona playing the Colts, yeah! An unbelievable year. The Favre family chili, incidentally, is more a hamburger etouffee. The can of cream of mushroom soup acts as a roux.

I'm spending this penultimate evening of 2007 looking up nostalgic crap on YouTube. Old clips of Mike Rowe on QVC? Sure.

Making plans for Nigel

Took Big Daddy, Bad Mama's husband, to dinner at Veselka tonight. Veselka is one of the surviving Ukranian restaurants in the East Village. Ukranian food has fed two generations of New York hipsters, and God willing, it will feed two generations more, dammit. We had pierogies and some beer made in Lvov Lviv. Of course I told him to get the bigos.

Anyway. It was sleeting, so we talked a little about football. He's an adopted Midwesterner, so he's new to this whole "Packers" thing. On the other hand, he's from the South, so he knows.

No reason.

Random weekend musings

Packers 38, Raiders 7. Wisconsin newspapers are running recipes for the Favre family chili. This is the Wisconsin equivalent of smack talk.

It's a neat little recipe. Did you know the use of multiple alliums with meat and legumes in a stew is found in the first recorded recipes from Mesopotamia? It's true! It's got the classic Cajun trinity: onions, green peppers, and celery. It's got the Wisconsin can of cream of mushroom soup. I'm going to try it. (Will Baird, I like mushrooms in my chili.)

Karlheinz Stockhausen died, so I decided to listen to his Helikopter-Streichquartett. Four musicians, four helicopters.

I had a dream: I heard and saw the four string players in four helicopters flying in the air and playing. At the same time I saw people on the ground seated in an audio-visual hall, others were standing outdoors on a large public plaza. In front of them, four towers of television screens and loudspeakers had been set up: at the left, half-left, half-right, right. At each of the four positions one of the four string players could be heard and seen in close-up. Most of the time, the string players played tremoli which blended so well with the timbres and the rhythms of the rotor blades that the helicopters sounded like musical instruments. When I woke up, I strongly felt that something had been communicated to me which I never would have thought of on my own.

I was expecting a stunt and was pleasantly surprised. So much conceptually badass art is so bad in practice. But this is fun, a string quartet making zooming noises like a child with a toy plane, synchronized with the flight of the helicopters. And it's dedicated to all astronauts, which touches my geek heart.

Son of Random Friday Links

I love the first sentence of this article.  I guess this goes under "our cool century".  (Hm, need to create a category for that.)

Speaking of things that are Awesome, I urge all American readers of this blog to write or e-mail their Senators in support of H.R. 392.  That is, of course, the bill that would extend the State Quarters beyond the fifty states, by issuing six additional quarters for Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas Islands, and the District of Columbia. 

Yes, it was introduced by Eleanor "gummy residue of the Civil Rights Movement" Holmes Norton, but so what?  It's a great idea.  Think about it: if this bill doesn't pass, then after next year there will be no more new state quarters.  That tiny little thrill you feel sorting through your change, when you see a state quarter you haven't before?  That thrill you've had about forty-five times now?  It will end forever, unless H.R. 392 succeeds.

And if it does pass, the number of people who are aware of the existence of the Northern Marianas Islands will increase tenfold!  That has to be good.  So, if you have a Senator on the relevant committee, go now and do your civic duty.

(One caveat: the bill says that if a territory becomes a state or leaves the US before its coin is issued... then they lose their quarter.  So Puerto Rico will have to put that discussion on hold until 2010.)

Day 23: The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat

I wrote most of my posts this week ahead of time. But for this one, I needed the actual score of the game: Green Bay 37, Detroit 26, and it wasn't even that close. Some highlights:

• I discovered that my cousin Aaron reads this blog. Hi Aaron! He got two deer on this visit and liked the Panama Canal paper.
  
• Also -- as I suspected -- my mom sometimes reads this thing. (yikes.) Hi Mom!
  
• I've also learned there's a picture of my brother somewhere on the Internet wearing a pair of chaps. [evil laugh] He can actually pull off the unbuttoned silk shirt with gold medallion look. It's a little terrifying.
  
• And I did confirm that Mark Tauscher is a cousin-in-law. I got to play with our mutual blood relative, Jason, a cute big one-year-old. He's got the family forehead.
  

Oh yeah: Favre is scary accurate; players are stepping up but still making mental errors; and if the defense only needs $500 to make the big plays, the cousins are more than willing to throw a few Benjamins into the pot. Just keep it clean, guys.

Day 22: Thanksgiving blogging

Gosh, I have a huge family. Both my parents had five brothers and sisters, so I have a small army of first cousins. Many of them have kids. I need a chart just to keep track of second cousins. The family roots in Wisconsin go back to territorial days, which is difficult to do unless you're of French or Native American descent. My family chose the difficult, stubborn, German route. The Danes came later, and the guys named Carlos somewhat after that. I have gone to Packer bars around the country and randomly found unsuspecting relatives.

There's the feast, and the Detroit game, and then sixteen hours of night. I brought some Proust, but I probably will pick on my sister's fiancé. My dad once made him eat a bug. We like him.

I have to get some Korbel brandy, for the old-fashioneds. (They taste worse with fancier brandy; there's been some coevolution between distilling and mixology.) Though my generation does the Jägermeister shots too.

From the Country that Brought You the Katipunan

The city of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, commissioned a great deal of public art.  The sculptures are more-or-less abstract, quite playful, and rather weird.

When I was last there, after a very luxurious trip across the country, I was thoroughly sick of being wined-and-dined.  Since Jeddah is one of the few places where a vaguely Arab-looking man in Western clothes can walk around unnoticed, that's what I proceeded to do.  That led to an impromptu basketball game with a group of Filipino expats. I automatically blurted out "Kumusta-ka!" when their car pulled up in front of me as I watched other people toss a ball around on some public courts, and an invitation to play naturally followed.

So when they told me that the below sculpture had, in fact, been designed by a Filipino, I was not surprised.  I have also been unable to stop laughing.

And a close up:

Brought to you by the country that named its first independence movement the "KKK."  I am not surprised, and I am still laughing. 

Poetry interlude: Starved Rock

For our foreign readers: "Starved Rock" is a poem by American poet Edgar Lee Masters.  I guess you'd call it a minor classic.  Like many classics, it's not much read any more.

The "Starved Rock" of the title is in the Illinois river, south of Chicago.  Once an Indian tribe called the Potawotamies lived along the river.  They were attacked by another tribe, the Illini.  Greatly outnumbered, they retreated to the top of the rock.  For a time the Potawotamies endured a siege by lowering a bucket on a rope into the river; but eventually the Illini cut the rope, and the Potawotamies had to choose between death by thirst or death in hopeless battle.

I've always liked this poem.  But since moving to Armenia... well, read it for yourself.

I'm off to bed.  Good night.

Day 8: Target demographic

La Loca got me a gift subscription to Esquire magazine, and the first issue arrived yesterday. Thank you! Esquire is apparently MAXIM for men who can read. It also features a regular column by Chuck Klosterman, who unsettles me, since we seem to share many neural pathways (we both use the word 'anyway' in exactly the same way, for instance).

Anyway. Turning past the article on Mrs. Kucinich, and facing the pinup of Scarlett Johansson, I find the statistical breakdown of Esquire's "Women We Love":

The prototypical woman we love is a thirty-six-year-old brown-haired actress from New York. She is 5' 6" and her name is Jennifer. She might have a small, unobtrusive tattoo.

... you know, there are saner professions.

The Pure Product of America: Ha!

Hush, you. And what's with the anti-tattoo bias? Come on, Esquire. Close doesn't count.

Mm, a recipe for short ribs. I may have to try that.

Day 7: The Scrapening

There's a reason I don't post every day.

Hm. I could talk about my new light therapy lamp! which I love. Even though I've only used it for a few days, I don't feel like I just got off the red-eye from Anchorage. The user guide warns, "Overuse may cause irritability, excessive energy, or difficulty falling asleep at bedtime." That second point reminds me of the phrase, "lasts longer than four hours," you know? As for the other two points, how could anyone ever tell.

Anyway. I do have some thoughts on NBER Working Paper 13550, Measuring Ancient Inequality, by Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert, and Jeffrey Williamson, but I need to write it up more coherently. I also send Doug a cool recent molecular biology paper every week or so just so I have someone to talk to about this stuff. If Doug has a preference?

I also have a Caucasus story. A friend of mine is of Bakuvian descent. During one of the back-and-forth massacres early last century, a gang of armed thugs broke into her great-grandfather's home. A short conversation followed: "Dude. We're Jewish." The thugs: "Oops. Sorry about that."

Day 2: Carlos reluctantly steps in

Looks like Doug's Internet connection might be out. Okay, for the honor of HDTD.

It's Day 2 because the blog is on Yerevan time. Sometimes. I don't understand it myself. I suspect post-Soviet Schlamperei, because I usually do, but it's probably Bay Area server weirdness.

Let's see. I could talk about John Cole's apostasy from the Party, which you can watch unfold at Balloon Juice. Doug can sense me biting my tongue right now! And again! and a third time, and you know where too. But Johnny Pez comments there, so how can you go wrong.

The blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money mentioned Gail Bederman's book Manliness and Civilization in passing. I'm going to have to track it down. You know, it used to be that men worried about their masculinity would overcompensate by dint of physical and mental effort, like Teddy Roosevelt or Flex Mentallo. In this brave new millennium, it seems, they add another roll of fat, grow a neckbeard, pontificate about violence online, and in extreme cases write science fiction. I have no idea how this comicbookguyification of the American male came about.

Kung Fu Monkey guy talks about how a Irish bar in Chicago became an underground bar in Belgrade. Really? Where are the sponsor girls? why are they starting with beer (dark beer yet), and not crno vino? why are they playing the Clancy Brothers and not turbofolk? (You can tell.) But you could probably leave up the Chicago Bulls stuff -- or, given the Bulls' record in recent years, put it back up.

Okay, this is painful. twenty-eight more days.

Halloween night thoughts

I need one of those high-intensity light therapy lamps. No, it's not for my home advanced interrogation techniques kit. I have my kitchen for that. But I feel crazy jet-lagged -- I haven't been on a plane in months -- and I have this urge to roll a stick of butter in sugar and eat it. It's pretty clearly Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I just don't have the time for.

For Halloween this year I'm going to re-read James Merrill's The Book of Ephraim, which is creepy for multiple reasons. No one reads poetry anymore. (Me, La Loca, and Alice Notley, who has a new collection out.) It's by the son of the Merrill who founded Merrill Lynch, talking with spirits through a Ouija board. Not many Pulitzers are won via the planchette. Someday I should read Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits, her memoir about its composition.

Also I should read Anna Kavan. A recent Doris Lessing retrospective reminded me of that. A friend of mine once told me to read Kavan, years ago, back when the authors we read had symbolic meanings for us. In hindsight, I suppose she would have chosen Ann Quin, had Quin been better known then. Anyway. I feel like I owe it to her, or to me, or maybe to Kavan? I don't know. But someone is owed something, I feel sure.

Boo.

Happy Monday links!

Long-time HDTD commenter and old friend Bad Mama gave birth to Pistachio! Both are still tired from the move. Reports from Bad Mama's Mama and Big Daddy here. No pictures yet.

Also, future brother-in-law Booster Gold has asked me to be his groomsman.

These things make me happier than I can really say.

Anyway, to bring this blog back into karmic balance, I will have to post Psychotically Angry Grumpy Tuesday Links tomorrow.

Update: Packers 19, Broncos 13 in OT, overtime in this case lasting about three seconds. Perhaps the Grumpy Links will have to wait.

Directed Monday links

So the Mattavilasa is a one-act Sanskrit comedy...

The Pure Product of America: BO-RING!

... but as Manson and the Suicide Girl head off to the liquor store, they discover their skull (which they use as a drinking cup as well as a begging bowl) is missing.

The Pure Product of America: Wait, what? Did I miss something?

Did you? Anyway, here's a link to a bullet I've dodged on this whole Internet dating thing.

The Pure Product of America: Dude. Pennsic or WorldCon?

The somatotype is rather striking, isn't it. Even creepier stuff below the fold.

Names are for tombstones, baby

In honor of the recent Caribbean theme, I spent way too much time on YouTube looking for a clip of Jane Seymour reading the Tarot over a funkified 007 theme.* Dear sweet merciful heaven, Live and Let Die is such an appalling movie (which I loved when I was eight), and Ian Fleming? a racist putz. On the other hand, Geoffrey Holder rules:

You know the Wachowski brothers rewound this scene over and over and over until the munchies hit.

If this is Wednesday, this must be Metropolis

Because you asked for it, true believers: the realistically rivetin' return of MONTENEGRO!

(You know, it was either this, or blog about the Mattavilasa. Otherwise, I got nothin'.)

Both Doug and long-time commenter LL (Lana Lang? Lori Lemaris? Letitia Lerner?) will know I cracked up at this recent panel:

But for two entirely separate reasons.