I picked up a pile of closeout-cheap DVDs in a just-before-opening raid on The Best Anime Dealer On The Circuit, dashing in and out quickly during the Con. That best dealer on the circuit? BuyRiteDVD, although they never, ever identify themselves as such. In fact, the only thing I've ever seen them post in the way of signs are these "$5 DVDs!" banners, which I do admit, is pretty nifty advertising, because - hey! $5 DVDs!

This year, they also had el cheapo box-sets. I went to the con looking for cheap Fancy Lala DVDs, after picking up a very cheap first volume of said Fancy Lala at a local Dollar General. BuyRiteDVD was selling the Fancy Lala brick for $15. Dude.

I should be ashamed to admit publicly that I bought & watched this series. For those not up on the details of Japanese girl culture - and I don't claim to be an expert, but - "Fancy Lala" is a sort of Japanese Barbie doll. I'm watching the anime equivalent of Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus. Or more accurately, Barbie Meets Jem. (How is it that they never did any sort of Barbie: Rock Star cartoon? Is it just that Amazon is letting me down, and I really ought to be searching elsewhere for my examples? I don't know, I'm allergic to polyurethane pink. I've spent more time semi-googling for Barbie crap than I wanted to already, give me a break, imaginary audience!)

Right. Back on track. Fancy Lala. It's an exemplar of the "magical idol" sub-sub-genre of mahou shoujo or "magical girl". Instead of prepubescent little girls transforming into various roles of adolescence and adulthood (traditional "magical girl", like Minky Momo) or into a fighting-hero (like Sailor Moon or Wedding Peach or any of dozens of similar bishoujo sentai), "magical idols" are little pre-pubescent girls who use their magery to become disposable entertainment figures, aka, in the Japanese parlance, "idoru". Nobody ever recognizes just how inappropriately childlike and callow these fake idols are, because one of the primary points of idolhood is the coy affection of aspects of childhood by adolescent or just barely post-adolescent girls who are themselves not all that far from the longed-for-state of innocence. If you haven't seen Perfect Blue yet, this is the point at which I urge you to go and see it, because it'll explain more about the "idol" industry than I could in fifteen paragraphs of tedious otaku blather.

Anyways, "magical idols". There are a lot more of these titles than you'd think. Fancy Lala is probably the best of the bunch, if only because it doesn't spend as much time on the main characters dreams and aspirations as is usual. In fact, the protagonist, Miho, never really wanted to be an idol at all. She wanted to be a mangaka, a comic artist. She gets the usual magical-pets and magical-tschoktes, turns into her grown-up self, and goes wandering around one of the trendier sections of Tokyo, where she's scouted as a model by a shoe-string production team who've just lost their model & were in desperate straits. One thing leads to another, and thus the accidental idol star, "Fancy Lala" is born.

But this accidental beginning isn't just contrivance, it is also theme. Miho's story is one of giri, of obligation and acquiescence. She goes through a lot of adventures more because it's what she's expected to do, or because of prior promises, prior obligations, and the natural logic of prior successes.

I suppose I'm making it sound a great deal more dreary and unpleasant than it actually is, so I should row back a few strokes at this point. Only about half the episodes are concerned with ldol-industry romping about. The show finds plenty of time for ghost stories, her school-friends, neighbors, and relatives, and all sorts of goofing around. Combined with the show's retro-Eighties charm - the character designs are by Akemi Takada, who was pretty old-fashioned even by the standards of 1998 - is a solid run of good writing and fine animation, by television standards.

Now that Ag Progress Days are behind us, it's time for Bellefonte's Arts and Crafts Fair, today and tomorrow. Unlike State College's Arts Fest, Bellefonte's emphasis is more on the crafts than the art. It's mostly tschoktes and the sort of pseudo-rural and actual-rural kitsch that some of my female relatives have been fond of.

Not really my thing, although I might toss the old wax-covered pinecone & get a new one.

Back from Ag Progress Days.

Talked to some seed company reps, and it looks like the avalanche of new seed traits may have slowed down - nothing really outrageous or novel in the works for 2007. For the years 1999-2006, it seemed like every year we'd get a new cluster of genetic modifications - first Yieldgard (Bt cornborer insecticidal) & Roundup Ready (herbicide product-specific resistant), then Liberty Link (another class of herbicide resistance), Clearfield (yet another class of herbicide-resistance), then Yieldgard-RW (Bt rootworm insecticidal), Herculex I (the next generation of Bt-like insecticidal, cornborer), Yieldgard Plus (Bt stacked both cornborer & rootworm), Herculex RW (see above, for rootworm), Herculex Extra (Herculex equivalent of Yieldgard Plus), and then more triple- and quadruple-stack varieties than you could keep track of in spreadsheet format.

It's getting increasingly hard to keep track of which varieties are trait-stacked with which varieties, as every company has its own nomenclature. But it seems to definitely be slowing down. No new traits, and the companies with Herculex are starting to retire their Yieldgard varieties. But that barely makes up for the confusion which is Garst. They started out with a slate of generic sort-of traits which mimicked the trademarked, IP-protected traits from Monsanto - Roundup Ready became GT, or Glyphosate Tolerant, Agrisure CB was synonymous with YG1, both of them being Yieldgard (Cornborer), etc. Then a bunch of company mergers brought the two lines of IP into corporate contact, and suddenly Garst is selling seeds for both sets of IP side-by-side. It's enough to give one a headache.

There was a stand selling Ribeye sandwiches and steak-and-egg sandwiches. The steak-and-cheese-and-egg was great, especially after an hour standing under the noon sun in a cornfield listening to a presentation on no-till & methods for measuring crop residue & soil field quality.

The corn and soybeans are doing insanely well here in Pennsylvania. I literally did not recognize the soybean fields at first - I've never seen them this high, this perfect-looking. Not only are the corn stands running between eight and ten feet, they're doing so uniformly. We didn't get all that much rain - Spring Creek is alarmingly low - but it all hit at exactly the right time for really, really pretty fields. Gorgeous.

Oh, great. Some Islamotard fascist hacker cracked the websites for AnimeNEXT and MangaNEXT. Until they get it cleaned up, two of the cons I volunteer for have had their advertising hijacked by semi-literate anti-Semitic agitprop.

Schweinehund scum.

It's Ag Progress Days here in the valley. We're sending people from work in groups today and tomorrow for "educational purposes", which I'm reading as organized tours, which is a bit of a shame, as Ag Progress Days is like a carnival, with tractors. I managed to talk them into letting me go along tomorrow, after promising I'd take it seriously and be a good boy.

[Party!]

They had a German brass band down at the gazebo in Tallyrand on Sunday. Boy, was that annoying. They were actually wearing lederhosen. I could have sworn that most Pennsylvania Dutch were from northwestern and southwestern Germany, not Bavaria or Austria. Lederhosen are an *anachronism* for Pennsylvania Dutch.

You know, Germans have one of the least amusing and most embarrassing agglomerations of low culture in the world. Other cultures might have bagpipes, fiddles, clever oddly-named pipes & quaintly-formed stringed instruments. What do the Germans have? Tubas.

At least we have chocolate.

Good God. I apparently had upwards of thirty heatstroke casualties on my prereg line at the Con on Thursday, which was a hundred-years record day for heat in Baltimore. The line control folks asked me for permission to open the doors early in order to get at least part of the line indoors - I can't fit the whole of a Thursdays' prereg line inside of the lobby we use, because said line might contain as much as four thousand competitive line-squatters, but we can probably get nearly a thousand in there - and I said "yes" as quickly as they would let me. For some reason, that decision didn't make its way back up the line of command particularly quickly, and since I had my own department to get organized and moved forward, I didn't personally move the line inside, as I might have if I'd had time.

But I did know there was some sort of a problem out there - everybody and their brother was talking about the heat wave, and every station on the dial was chattering about the heat advisories on the way down from central PA the previous morning. It couldn't have been any sort of surprise to anyone paying attention. Furthermore, my reg line is not a slow-moving one, nor does the Con have a reputation for slow Thursday preregistration - we have cleared our line by the end of the night every year for the previous three years on Thursday. There was no earthly reason for anybody to be waiting all day out there in the record heat and sun. Thirty-some sunstroke and heatstroke victims, and three who had to be hospitalized. Worse than I thought, but no great surprise. My people processed somewhere just south of nine thousand that night, and cleared the line before 9 PM. No reason whatsoever for people to be waiting on line all day. Good God Almighty.

Fans!

Hey, back from The Con, apparently I worried some folks by not posting. Mostly intact aside from a minor scalp wound. Apparently my poker face doesn't survive exaggerated face-faults into hardwood table-tops after a particularly frustrating bad beat.

I started watching my DVDs of the first season of Ranma 1/2 last night, as sort of a preparation for the Con, which is coming up next week.

I have an attachment to Ranma 1/2 which is oddly disproportionate to my respect (or lack thereof) for the show. I recognize its flaws, and its inherent limit - how it degenerates so quickly, how it operates almost entirely at the surface, how essentially sexist and borderline racist it really is. But it was the first anime I really connected with in an emotional sense. It really blew my mind when I encountered it at the end of my freshman year of college, and it dominated my attention for months afterwards. I went out & rented a VCR before leaving for the summer, copied a new friend's set of episodes, and watched them into oblivion during that summer. I almost have the dialog memorized - and I don't [technically] understand Japanese!

For me, the first season of Ranma is like the nostalgia equivalent of crank. It gives a memory buzz stronger than the remembrances of lost landmarks, first loves, and great accomplishments. I recognize that these emotions are transferences - the associations and displacements of friendships and worlds for which this goofy fighting-harem show is just a sort of signpost and stand-in for the thing itself.

But even signposts have a sort of value for those who find themselves in strange and lonesome places, mindful of the distant roads that lead us, someday, home.

Have you ever heard of the Buckshot War? This came up in the course of a discussion over whether an incumbent governor of Pennsylvania had ever been voted out of office. In short, yes, such an event took place, in the election of 1838, when the Whig-Anti-Mason Governor Ritner was defeated by his Democratic rival Porter, and the lame-duck governor tried to seize the arsenal in Harrisburg, made faces at crowds of Democratic activists, and tried to talk Captain E.V. Sumner of the Carlisle Barracks into calling out the Dragoons in support of his version of the new State House of Representatives. (Yes, that Sumner.) For an alternate version of the Buckshot War, see here.

I had no idea that the commonwealth came that close to an armed outbreak. It seems, if less violent than the periodic outbreaks of public disorder in Allegheny County (IE, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Battle of Homestead, etc), somehow more alarming in that it was the sitting governor attempting to overthrow the duly-elected legislature by resort to force of arms in the capital. Indeed, the second account almost reads like an alternate-history version of the pre-war machinations in the spring of 1861 in Missouri and Kentucky, with Sumner standing in for Lyons and - hrm, who was the officer in place in Kentucky?

Which really sends me off on another wild-goose-chase, because I just don't know much about Kentucky's early-Civil-War history. I can find an equivalent of Jim Lane or Sigel - that would be Lovell Rousseau. Hrm, this suggests it would have been William "Bull" Nelson, although I don't quite see how a naval officer had control over state arsenals - he wasn't commissioned in the Union Army until September according to Wikipedia.

It's the week of the San Diego Comic Con, and thus new-license time. A lot of the CMX releases sound promising, especially Canon and Variante. But you know what gets my goat? Del Rey went and grabbed up Parasyte/Kiseiju after TokyoPop lost the license. Damnit, I spent a ton of money last year picking up the crummy half-arsed flopped versions. Don't make me go and spend a similar wad of cash to get 'em done right *now*. Well, I never did get the first volume...

Just as a by the by, Skip Beat is just as nifty as I was promised by Big Dave. For all those who've been grousing about the anti-feminist tendencies of shoujo heroines, I offer you Skip Beat's Kyoko.

Kyoko starts out as a sweet-tempered milquetoast worker-bee doormat for her would-be pop-star drone of a boyfriend, Sho. He essentially ran away from home & his parents' attempts to get him to marry some dull girl & take over the family inn. His purpose in doing this was to become a "celebrity" (damnit, I can give you odds that this term was almost certainly "idol" before the translator got a hold of it). As he left his hick town, he idly managed to talk childhood friend Kyoko into running away to Tokyo with him, inspiring her to drop out of school and work multiple jobs in support of his pretty, indolent, rather insolent self. She's his biggest supporter, and aside from a certain manic intensity, is your basic self-sacrificing shoujo heroine.

That is, until she overhears him bragging to his manager how he basically considers her a "servant", is kind of contemptuous about how little effort it took to talk her into leaving with him, and drops the news in passing that he's getting the education she's denied herself & that *she* was the "dull girl" his parents were trying to get him to marry. At this point our heroine kind of suffers a full-on psychotic break, and transforms into a *much* more interesting character, one organized around rage, vengeance, and irritability. All while striving to become an idol/celebrity herself, mostly just to spite her ex.

It's a ball, and I can only hope the mangaka doesn't let her revert *too* much to her original self-denying sweetness, although there is some suggestion that this will be the essential thematic conflict. That is, our heroine is a bitter, enraged, alarming personage attempting to make it in a career which rewards sweetness, inoffensiveness, and lovability. The people at the talent agency find themselves stampeded a little bit by the sheer intensity of her new-lit bonfire of a personality, but at the same time quite professionally certain that she'll never make it, because she refuses to be "loved". It's a promising train-wreck, if the author can pull it off.

OK, I admit it, I mostly posted this just to get that new Greg Mankiw blog link up on the blogroll. But Skip Beat is pretty keen.

I'm reading the Hagerman book, which isn't as revolutionary as I had heard, but then, older books of analysis can be somewhat underwhelming if you've read the works written since then in reaction. You're getting the points already processed & denigrated or taken into account by those who've followed in the writer's foot-steps.

More striking is the significant number of minor errors of fact, the text often mistaking one river for another - saying so-and-so discussed a 1863 campaign from the Rappahannock to the James, where I'm pretty sure the author meant Rappahannock to the Potomac, or talking about Lee planning a move from Gettysburg to the Rappahannock, where the logic and the actual planning was for a movement behind the Potomac & into the Valley, confusing references to a "Fourth Corps" at a time when there was no such organization with the Army of the Potomac, floating discussions of a "Second Division" without indication of which corps said division belonged to, etc etc. Well, that and all of the nonsense on stilts about Chancellorsville demonstrating the inability of offensive tactical use of artillery & Buford's delaying action before Gettysburg demonstrating the fading of cavalry notions of shock tactics, but those are matters of analysis and not fact.

The reason I bring this up is that Hagerman mentions in passing that Lee was a member of Mahan's Napoleon Club, and this challenged my notions of Lee & my understanding of the events of Lee's life and career. So I went looking online, and the most authoritative online reference I can find is this passage from Freeman's Lee biography. All the other online references are brief notes airily asserting Lee's membership or "sponsorship" in his capacity as West Point commandant. Since those references also erroneously assert that the Napoleon Club was founded several years after McClellan graduated from the Academy, I think I can safely discard them as less than authoritative.

Freeman essentially says that he doesn't know that Lee attended meetings, although he believes that it occurred - the records had been destroyed in a fire, and he spends most of his discussion of the period listing the books Lee took out of the West Point library on military history, instead of on Mahan or the Napoleon Club.

I don't know - the Freeman biography is very old at this point, and perhaps somebody somewhere has done some more work on the subject, but if so, it doesn't show itself online in a quick google. Are there any monographs on the Club, particularly on this alleged sponsorship by Lee as commandant?

Sorry about the radio silence. All of the work I wasn't getting last week due to the holiday doldrums came crashing down on my head like the much-recently-threatened-hereabouts flash-flood of legend.

In other news, the landlady's contractor[s] have started working on my roof, in a peculiar and drawn-out fashion, which seems to feature a scrawny guy in a mustache and no shirt climbing around the outside of my apartment & asking me questions through the open windows, and randomly tearing off strips of the roof in no particular order, in obedience to no particular scheme that I can detect or deduce. I'd complain about it choosing to rain just as they started this process, except it's been raining every other day regardless of what we mere mortals have been choosing to do with our time, so it was going to happen whenever the process started, regardless of timing.

Went off to go swimming last Sunday. The pool at Governors' Park is $4 per day for adults, $3 for children, and is open, theoretically, noon to 8 PM. Dunno if that's just the weekend, or weekdays as well. So, I swam. Not as much fun as I remember it being from my childhood, but then, I think it had something to do with socializing and goofing around, and I'm a bit old for that sort of thing, given the age of the crowd, such as it was.

This article in the New Scientist seems to argue that the North Atlantic Conveyer Belt is *not* the primary driver of northwestern European climatic mildness, but is rather dwarfed by atmospheric warming (having to do with patterns driven by the Rockies) and northwestern Europe's natural enjoyment of a "maritime climate". In other words, western Europe has mild weather because the wind comes from the west, over the massive heat sink of the Atlantic, and from the south, due to the atmosphere rebounding from its prior subarctic swing over southeastern North America.

The *logic* seems solid, although I naturally know next to nothing about the model-work, nor do they really offer any details. But essentially, they're arguing against the idea that a sort of Young Dryas redux is anywhere in the cards, and seem to suggest that any modern shut-down of the North Atlantic Conveyer by global warming will be swamped by the accompanying warming itself, leaving western Europe pretty much at scratch.

Link via Jonah Goldberg at the Corner.

Here's the AoD blog round-up on licenses. What's that Honneamise thing? Bandai Visual? Whoever they are, they're idiots if they think that anyone will find Wings of Rean interesting. It's been a really long time since the original Gunbuster was available, though. That might be a good 'un, although perhaps it's the sepiatones of nostalgia speaking, there.

Hmm. I really liked what I've seen of Black Lagoon, not sure what I think of Geneon licensing it. They have a nasty habit of refusing to release bricks & thin-paks until their stock ends up in the hands of liquidators. Eh, we'll see. Maybe ADV and Bandai'll chase 'em onto the thin-pak bandwagon.

I had been thinking when I heard that Right Stuf snabbed the second season of SuperGALS out from under ADV, that it was a show made for rental, but then I noticed that they're releasing it sub-only, in a single brick for under $50. Maybe I can talk Big Dave into buying it, since he picked up the first season on the cheap way back when... y'know, to complete his collection. I mean, I'd like to see the rest of it...

Yeah, if you're finding subversion in Aishiteruze Baby, you're looking too hard. I won't say it's all surface, but that mangaka isn't really one for deep thoughts or elaborate games. She's set out to draw out a triangle where the essential emotional arc isn't romantic, but rather parental. Kippei demonstrates his worthiness by being a good mother to poor abandoned Yuzuru, and thus attracts Kokoro, whose traumatic childhood loss of her mother couldn't be more obviously Grown Up Metaphorical Yuzuru if the mangaka had hung a sign to that effect around her neck. It's about as family-values as shoujo comics get.

Well, ok, maybe it's a little subversive. But only if what is being subverted is the notion of romantic love as the be-all, end-all of narrative. And really, that's a pretty abstract sort of subversion.

I read that $.25 copy of Forrest Gump I picked up in a bag-sale at the Bellefonte library a while back. The first page reminded me of something I had read once, but had forgotten until now: the book and the movie are wildly divergent works of pop art. The only appearance of the "box of chocolates" metaphor in the book is on that first page, where Forrest informs the reader that "Bein' an idiot is no box of chocolates". It's really quite amusing for the first third of the novel, like a smartass fanfic version of the movie, full of snark and meanspiritedness and general ill will.

Winston Groom's original Forrest Gump is a polar opposite of the dunce-saint I remembered from the movie. He's faintly bigoted, has actual political views (everytime someone asks him about Vietnam, he says "it's a lot of shit"), smokes so much pot that he gets addicted to the stuff, is enough of an idiot-savant to play chess grandmasters, screws around, and in general behaves like a regular, fallen member of mankind. In many ways, this alternative Gump is barely any kind of idiot at all, which I suppose is where Groom was going with the final message-line of the book, having Jenny say something about everyone being some kind of idiot or another.

The Gump of the novel gets around a lot more than the movie-Gump, pelting the Clerk of the Senate with his Metal of Honor, saving Chairman Mao from drowning, becoming an astronaut, and spending four years as the slave of a tribe of cannibals in New Guinea, picking cotton. Did I mention the racism? Groom seems to be a real piece of work, and I swear this novel set back my opinion of the "New South" at least fifteen years.

At first I was delighted with the differences from the movie. The book reads like a meanspirited *satire* of the movie. However, by the time this Gump had gotten back from Vietnam and was auditing a Harvard literature class on "Idiots in World Literature" I was kind of pining for the Tom Hanks fool-saint and his passion-play decency. The difference between the movie-version and the book-version of Lieutenant Dan really brought home the difference, illustrated the *value* of Hollywood moralities. All of the pathos, the moral stature of the Lieutenant Dan arc had been an invention of the screen-writers, and the original Dan, stripped of all of that inventive family history and sense of destiny denied, turned out to be nothing more than a legless, drunken scumbag. There's no redemption in Groom's Gump, and that kind of sucks.

Wow, Drifting Classroom dates to 1972-74? I had been going back and forth on whether to go for this one, but that sells me on it, at least for Viz's first volume. We don't get nearly enough old-school manga over here. Who knows, maybe they'll finally give us some Rose of Versailles some day!

Um, it is back to Zombie Powder again? I thought it had gotten goofily re-named "Zombie Power"?

Maybe it was a leftover title ganked from TokyoPop's ashbin from when they retitled Power! to Girl Got Game?

Oh, well. Regardless, I don't know that I'm willing to spend time and money on a series which got cancelled mid-run. BTW, is there a link out there to the AICN story from which the Zombie Power renaming thing came? It *is* AICN, after all. Wait, here it is. Along with the image of the first volume with the original title right there on the cover. Um, how confident are we of anything in this article? Seriously?

At least the bit about it being four-volumes-then-cancellation seems to be on the up-and-up, according to the current version of the Wikipedia article.

Verdict? "Zombie Power" was an artifact of an AICN writer being full of it.

Wow. You know the wave of bankruptcies and near-misses in the anime industry is really cutting deep when three-dollar DVDs start showing up at the local Dollar General - and you end up spending significant sums of unbudgeted money on 'em. Now, admittedly, I'd not normally bother with Fancy Lala or Spirit of Wonder - while they're probably worth $3/disc, I don't think I'd spend $5 - but I've now seen multiple discs which I've paid, if not full price, then a significant fraction thereof, languishing in the three-dollar-cutout bins. Good shows, too, like Cowboy Bebop and Vandread. Meanwhile, I *almost* coughed up for a box set of Angelic Layer I saw at Best Buy the other day for south of $35, and cringed to see a modified brick of Escaflowne for $33, brand new.

It's brilliant times for the penurious and miserly, but are all the companies going to scrape their way out of the other side of the bog? CPM seems to be trembling on the brink, for one.

Reading Simpson's Grant biography, just finished the section on Vicksburg and the immediate aftermath. One of the things that comes out crystal-clear in Simpson's account is Grant's proclivity for recruiting stalwarts among those set to spy & monitor him. One after another - McPherson for Halleck, James Wilson for McClernand, Olmstead for the Sanitary Commission, Dana and Thomas for Lincoln & Stanton - those sent to spy on Grant, check up on him, or possibly relieve him outright in Lorenzo Thomas's case, became instead advocates, cronies, or supporters once they came into Grant's presence.

Grant showed no sign of any personal charisma or magnetism prior to the war. Where and when did he develop this ability to corrupt and convert his would-be minders to his cause? Why didn't it work on newspaper writers?

All joking aside, this is quite clever, and exactly what I used to expect from the gentleman who used to call himself Tacitus. Good to see him back on RedState.

A riot is an ungly thing... undt, I tink, that it is chust about time ve had vun.

Who's up for a little ceremonial sacking of the New York Times printing presses? You know, no bodily injury, no tarring-and-feathering, just demonstrate a little disregard for editorial capital equipment, remind them that if they want to revert to antebellum journalistic standards we as the general public can always respond in the manner of Lincoln's Wide Awakes.

Huh. ING finally de-inverted their CD ladder curve. Oh, well, no real incentive for me to get anything over a 12-month. Done and done.

One-quarter of the way through Project Down Payment. So far so good.

I lost power on Saturday morning. As I was getting out of the shower, I heard this loud detonation and all the lights went out except for the emergency pack left over from when my apartment was a doctor's office. I went out looking for the exploded transformer, but none were obviously out. The whole block lost its cable, but only a few buildings around me actually lost power. When the cable guys came, they immediately spotted the problem - a big ceramic breaker hanging from the transformer behind the crematorium, and a very fried, very dead squirrel lying on the other side of the brick wall behind the library on the other side of the alley. Suicide squirrel. The one guy said they do this occasionally, "but usually only once". I said I hoped so, and pictured electrified, zombie squirrels vengefully waging war on humanity via the electrical grid, one little squirrelly shahid at a time.

Finished reading Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men yesterday. Not much to say about it - I had encountered Foner's notions of the centrality of free labor ideology in the early Republican Party before, in his book on Reconstruction. This book is more of a useful taxonomy of early Republicanism than a comprehensive history of the party like Holt's Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, but as a taxonomy it is fairly engaging. His section on what he called "Democratic-Republicans" was particularly informative, and his description of the geographic organization of the various strains of Republicanism was interesting, and I could wish for more on the subject.

The more I read about antebellum politics, the more I see the familial patterns, and the more striking how important certain clans were. Most striking has been the Washburnes, the Blairs, and the Sherman/Ewings. I wonder if this is just an artifact of my reading, or possibly emergent from scholars using the surviving archives of certain prominent families? Would we care as much about John Sherman if his brother hadn't been the mad general? Would I have ever have heard of Elihu Washhburne if he hadn't been Grant's patron? Dimitri Rotov & the political-military school would have it that I've only heard of the generals *because* of their political sponsors.

While we're on the subject of sponsorship, the more I hear of Dennison & Chase, the less I understand how it is that the Whiggish-conservative McClellan got his leg up by their backing. Chase especially seems to be the exact sort of political animal which the Webster-worshipping McClellan would just as soon see drowned like a cat in a sack.

Saw a new biography of Chase on the shelf at Websters along with the rest of that ACW collection. Maybe I'll stop by next month & see if it's still there. Meanwhile, on to the Simpson biography of Grant.

&#%$! The dropped ceiling in my spare room collapsed *again*. I'm getting so that anything stored in there is pretty much written-off & half-way out the door to the trash pile. Oh, well, at least it isn't the bed room or the living room.

And the cocoa shell manure the landlady used to landscape the property has sprouted orange mold. It better not spread to my apartment interior.

Bah. I got spoiled by the dry spring. Summer seems determined to make up for lost time & moisture.

Fred gave me a heads-up the other day that Websters had bought a collection from a local Civil War buff, so I dropped by yesterday on my bi-weekly trip through State College. The history section had burst loose from its usual back-corridor location to take over two additional bookcases by the cash register, the operator of which was clearly not thrilled with the situation as such, although she was more disparaging of the apparent excess of WWII carnography than the more elderly, and thus more respectable, ACW material. I relieved their crowding situation a tad by picking up second-hand copies of Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, that book of Hagerman's that Dimitri is always on about, and Brook Simpson's biography of Grant up through the end of the war.

In Foner & Hagerman's cases, I'm not going to fret about buying used, because they're both tenured professors whose opinions I could give a pinch of owl dung - especially since Foner started acting the ass in public on current affairs, and Hagerman got into the business of retailing Korean-era ChiCom propaganda to trash on the US military. I'm a little more ambivalent about buying Simpson used, though. On the one hand, nobody gets royalties from used sales. On the other hand, I wasn't about to buy the book new regardless of where I might pick it up royalty-free.

I started in on the Foner book on the way into work this morning. Interesting so far - a little alarming how much I find myself in agreement with that Stalinist SOB when it comes to discussing the sociology of ideology.

How exactly do fundamentalist pro-lifers square Exodus 21:22 with their view that a fetus is indistinguishable from a child in Christian moral terms? I can see how non-fundamentalists can square it - the laws of the Torah are historical and the moralities revealed in the Bible advance with time, from old to new testiment - and I can see how Catholics can square it - the laws of the Church supercede those of the Torah via the Patrimony, etc - but I'm not really clear on how the hard-core by-scripture-alone folks can get away from this:

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

as an establishment of the fetus as an entity of lesser value than a child, implicitly taken under the following "life for life, eye for eye" passage.

None of which gets away from my increasing suspicion that abortion is a worldly evil on a strictly policy level, issues of religion and belief notwithstanding.

Thought encountered via David Plotz's fascinating Blogging the Bible column.

Back from New Jersey. Got talked into helping with their MangaNext project, which is coming up quick in October. Dave & Eugene Cheng were trying to talk each other into being con chair, which is more common on the scene than you'd normally think - people who are good con chairs are rarely eager to take on the job, and people who are eager to be con chairs are rarely good at it if they talk their way in.

MangaNext is a side-project of the non-profit that runs AnimeNext, set up as a "light" or "relaxicon" event in a smaller venue with less intensive programming and, of course, a manga orientation. The big convention has been talking about doing a minicon like this for years out of mind, but it never really got off the ground aside from the comcon, which isn't really open to the public. I think it was because the big honking convention absorbs every resource it can get its tentacles upon, and is more prone to burn out staffers than inspire them to run little versions of the big show. I also sort-of agreed to help with another con down in northern Virginia the month after that, although it isn't certain & set as of yet.

I was working registration like usual, and a girl came up with a copy of her birth certificate as a form of ID. I looked at it, and exclaimed in outrage when I realized that she had been born about three weeks after my first initiation into anime fandom, the end of my freshman year. She was literally younger than my otakudom. An entire generation of cosplaying teenyboppers has spawned since I first had my tiny little mind warped by Ranma 1/2 and Laputa at a PSSFS party.

Ha! American Pie was the only rock album other than Jesus Christ Superstar my parents owned, and I must have listened to that record a hundred times or more growing up. If you get all of the gags in the parody, you badly need to get a life.

Hee hee hee...

Oh, h/t spacemonkey at IMAO.

Really good month for Del Rey manga, BTW. The second volume of School Rumble has made me a real fan of the manga. I mean, I kind of liked the anime, but the material which was just generally OK as animation really shines in the original manga. Jin Koboyashi's art is at the same time cheerfully old-fashioned and highly polished, and the style parodies are broad enough that I can get most of the aesthetic jokes, while still marvelling at the crisp shounen and sports-manga action. It's both a parody and a pitch-perfect exemplar of the styles at the same time. I'm now really looking forward to all of Harima's mangaka scenes in future volumes, now.

While we're on the subject of crackerjack Del Rey manga, ES (Eternal Sabbath) is pretty damned exciting in its own right. I really, really liked mangaka Fuyumi Soryo's melodramatic Mars, but to a certain extent I have written off that enjoyment as an artifact of it being the second shoujo relationship-comic I had read after the extremely ordinary Peach Girl. But ES (Eternal Sabbath) has that same crystalline, chilly high-drama harshness that made Mars so striking, so entertaining, so... brisk. Soryo has a bitter, Puritan sensibility, an alienation and skepticism about human motivations which flirts with Hitoshi Iwaaki's open sociopathy if never actually embracing the darkness of Iwaaki's Parasyte.

ES is technically science-fiction, about a young man (variably named, and I'm not sure which name they're going to settle on past the first volume...) who can read and "hack" human psyches. He uses this talent to slip through society, inserting himself into the lives of people, and living parasitically off of their ideas of who he is. At the same time, he does indulge in mostly-benevolent manipulation of those around him, and Soryo quickly introduces a "moral centre" character in brain physiology researcher Mine Kujyou. But even Kujyou is presented as an alienated individual, one of those borderline-Asberger types who often gravitate towards the hard sciences. Not so much unsympathetic, as half-clueless and totally lacking in social skills - the type who's prone to cheerfully rattle on about reproductive strategies in lions (IE, males killing their young) at an omiai.

The art is striking - especially the pages dealing with "ES"'s perceptions and manipulations of the minds of those he interacts with - but not particularly brilliant or outstanding. Exactly what was required for the subject-matter. A lot more interesting-looking than Mars, but then, Mars was a romance manga with the occasional knife-fight or motorcycle accident thrown in for spice. Apparently Soryo has the chops for ES's more-challenging material. I'm really looking forward to the next volume.

Between a busy work season and a general re-direction of my energy towards small ends, I've been kind of slacking around here, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Sorry about that.

I got talked into going to that charity poker tournament at the State College Knights of Columbus yesterday. I ended up doing really, really poorly - went out inside of the first half-hour with an all-in on "Broadway" - a 10-J-Q-K-A straight. Wouldn't you know that those two kings that came out on the flop matched the two "cowboys" in the other guy's hand, meaning that I had been betting into a perfect four-of-a-kind. Gotta love that "walk of shame", when you're one of the first three or four to walk out of a room of ninety, complete with running camera from one of the local TV stations recording it all for posterity. Oh, well. It was "charity". Although I was told that the Knights do this every month. Dunno what their legal excuse is when they don't have a kid who fell off a balcony as cover.

No, I'm not bitter. A little rueful, maybe. But not bitter.

The Bellefonte Cruise is coming into town this weekend, which means that I'm leaving town. One of Bellefonte's relative virtues is that it's usually a quiet town, aside from the occasional aging biker gang's funereal roar. The Cruise is a definite exception to that general rule. Racing engines, loud PAs, Fifties-revival bands playing in front of the courthouse, and... the stereo contests. The stereo contests right across the street from my apartment. My thin-walled apartment.

See y'all. I'm going to Jersey to staff a convention in Secausus. Don't bother breaking in, I doubt you could get a fence to buy anything in my apartment, unless your fence is a thrift store with a side-line in anime DVDs, SF novels, manga, and Civil War history.

Jason & Dan Wolfe talked me into going along on a caving trip last night, to a place called Tytoona Cave down southeast of Tyrone in Sinking Valley. It's a pretty wet cave in a part of the state which has been honeycombed by quarries & open-pit mines. For some reason I expected it to be slap up against a mountain, but instead we ended up down a nondescript back country road, and a bit of a steep walk down a deep, fairly scenic sinkhole facing a limestone rockface.

You can see the pictures on that website, Tytoona is a flat, horizontal cave of about six hundred feet on a single level, before it "sumps out" and turns into a water-cave where the cave divers *used* to go diving before a woman got turned around & drowned a number of years ago. We were not, of course, cave diving, but rather just splashing around in the safe section of the upper cave.

We were promised "stooped-over" wetness, but it turned out that the last few years of deluges - Ivan among others - had changed the cave a bit, and it turned into a stomach-crawl through chest-deep water about a hundred feet in. I kind of freaked out the first try through, mostly due to Dan's remarkably gonzo approach to the challenge - he porpoised right on through. The prospect of having to do that, in the chilly shock of actually getting down into the water, was a bit much. After I calmed down a bit & followed directly behind him along the sharp pebbly shallow section instead of trying to swim around the other way, I got into the spirit of thing.

There aren't any really grand stalactites, but there was some "flows" that Jason was excited about. There were a number of side-holes going off the main chamber which we passed by on the way in to the back of the cave, the "sump". This is where the air pockets run out, and all the floating crud caught in the cave's creek floats along the surface in a mildly nasty agglomeration of scum. Since we were relying on headlamps, it wasn't too foul, but the scum kept us out of the sump-water, even though Jason and Dan thought that there was a couple dozen more feet to the cave further on, due to slight changes in the lay of the rock.

We found a lost, miserable toad and a bullfrog in this last sumpside gallery, washed downstream along with the rest of the rubbish. We supposed they were surviving on the random bugs also washed into the cave. Other than those, the only living things we encountered were good-sized brown and orange salamanders, which weren't afraid of us. Too blind to see our lights? I didn't bump into any fish, although they must have been in the water.

On the way back, people went crawling into the side-holes, one of which featured a tiny little stream, a remarkably long run of at least fifty feet, and more mud than I had really counted upon. I didn't get all the way back - by the time Dan went in, we realized that it was past sunset & was getting dark outside, and we broke for the exit. At first we forgot about Dan, and I had to turn around & yell that we were leaving. There's a section in this side-hole where the person climbing through either dams up, or pushes forward, the flow of the stream in a quite striking fashion - the first time it happened, I mistook it for the sudden onset of a rainstorm upstream, until someone reminded me of Archimedes' Law.

All in all, a lot of fun, but massive, massive amounts of dirt. Not a clean hobby, spelunking.

[Some history on the cave here.}

No great depression of the 1870s? That's mindwarping. Where's the link, damnit! I want to read more about this, but Google is being obstinant. Here's a review of the most recent book by the author, Charles R. Morris, apparently a financial expert of some repute. He's clearly talking about something which isn't great news to someone literate in economic history, but it isn't something I'm too familiar with, and everywhere I look, people talk about the great depression of the 1870s - even "The Long Depression of 1873-1896"!

Link via the Corner.

The North Aral Sea is coming back, in spite of all predictions. Apparently a reasonably rational government & some well-thought-out engineering work still can work miracles, given a bit of grace. On the other hand, the much larger southern half of the Aral has the misfortune of lying within the bounds of Uzbekistan, and has little to no prospect of returning.

Via Lawrence at the Argus.

This report on the National Guard side of Katrina unexpectedly makes Gov. Blanco sound much, much more competent and sensible than she appeared at the time, or afterwards, for that matter. It's testimony against interest, since RCP is kind of right-of-centre. Basically, the argument is that Blanco was inclined to resist federalization because she was tied into the state National Guard communications network, and was aware that they had things under control, no matter what fantasies the national press and Mayor Nagin were feeding us & the federals here in the outside world. She sounded incompetent, because our view of the disaster and the response was catastrophically inaccurate.

Link via the Instapundit.

Huh. The anime club at Penn State is talking anime convention. I've never been very involved with any of the incarnations of PSAO - I seem to remember that there was an organization of that name in the late Nineties, but the current one suggests that it was founded in September of 2001(!) on its website.

The various conservancies held their annual "Big Spring Festival" yesterday down at Tallyrand Park in Bellefonte. Attendance was kind of low, probably due to the miserable rainy morning and the many recent firehouse carnivals, but the afternoon was a bright, blustery blue-skied wonderland, so it was nice for the few of us who came by. They had a band - a pretty good one, too, a blues-rock quintet whose drummer kept crediting the sound folks, but never mentioned the name of the band. They had a young, tiny little frontwoman with an enormous, bluesy voice - I ran into her proud father afterwards. Even he didn't know the band's name.

About four o'clock they held a semi-ceremonial restocking affair on the High Street bridge over Spring Creek, one guy dipping trout and other big fish out of a truck into buckets, and a line of guys through the bushes down to the wall to hand them down to a guy who was showing them to the kids before emptying the buckets into a temporary sluiceway the last twenty feet into the creek. I kept expecting one of the kids or a member of the bucket brigade to overbalance and fall into the creek, but luck was with them, and the only victim was an especially large rainbow trout who was too big to fit into a bucket, and got handed down in the net, bounding out of the sluiceway before he got a foot and a half down, thus plummeting over a dozen feet into the water. Nobody saw the trout float to the surface, so the assumption was that he survived his plunge.

Later that evening I walked to Milesburg along the railroad. It runs along the far side of the water gap from Rt. 150/144, and I had never gone down that side of the creek before. Turns out there's a surprisingly large switchyard down there, with about a half-dozen sidings and thirty or forty empty cars sitting on one track or another. The fishermen were plentiful as well, no doubt getting their first crack at the newly released fish, although the one man I talked to, walking along the track towards his favorite spot, hadn't heard about the restocking when I asked. There were at least a dozen flyfishermen enjoying the early evening weather, in the creek between the mouths of Buffalo Run and Bald Eagle Creek. Not a bad walk, if a trifle uneven in places. Railbed gravel can be a little on the rockish side of big for walking.

Dimitri wonders in a comment on David Woodsbury's post on the Sultana why so many men who survived the initial explosion failed to find the river-bank and drowned in the Mississippi. Dimitri allows as how Andersonville survivors might have been physically weakened. I would add on top of that the fact that the explosion occurred in the darkness of early morning, and that many no doubt couldn't even find the river-bank. Additionally, we're talking about the middle river in the late Civil War, in a period of civic neglect, even by the 19th century's less-than-rigorous standards of civil engineering. It was no doubt a riverine wilderness, and in the middle of the spring flood at that! What's amazing is that they pulled as many living men from the river as they did.

On the other hand, I don't quite see what's obscure about the Sultana disaster at this point. To put it in Dimitri's terms, the Sultana is the last stop on the Centennial Andersonville narrative, and almost no modern writer who writes anywhere *near* the subject can resist throwing in something about the last, final act of the tragedy, where those who survived battle, capture, captivity, privation, and the many indignities of Andersonville, were killed by such an ugly and massive and stupid accident on the way home.

Huh. That's unexpected. The Crowbar is gone. It was a dive, and other than going to see a Pink Floyd cover band with Ben Hauger a few years ago & playing poker last fall, I never went there. But it was the kind of dive which I would have expected to have made money hand over fist - I wonder if live music for the kids is doing poorly with the university crowd?

Woohoo! Jubelirer is out on his can! Good job, Jessica!

There was somebody at our ward trying to get Democrats to write in Benninghoff. I still don't quite get why this was a worthwhile use of that somebody's time.

We were given a choice between the computer poll & an optiscan system, both of them new to this district. I went with the optiscan, since there were four booths, and just one computer. I managed to mess things up two different ways - by handing the ballot to the lady without the stub sticking out, and inserted upside-down such that you could see how I voted if you really cared, but neither was a vote-wrecking sort of error.

But dang, I miss the old needle-punch and card.

For the Fallen

What need of hope when on two proud feet
We stand safely on home ground?
What need of wealth has the solvent
Whose well-financed business thrives?
What need of might has the strong
Health for the hale, the rested for rest,
The clear-eyed for clarity, the clever for wits,
The knowing for knowledge, the wise for wisdom?

Seeing far with clear-sighted eyes
None blink away tears of regret or pain or sadness.

It is only after a fall,
Having stumbled,
Having been pushed,
Having fallen
By malice or illness or ill wind
Or sickness or the chill hand of death near at hand
That frustration, tears, fear and prayer
Come as the answers to our need

These are the children of pain and need
Of that lineage of age and misfortune
Whose ancestors were locked beyond the gates
From which, with our ancestors naked and shivering
Were expelled, were flung upon the world,
Who peered one last time
Beyond the flaming blade
That barred the way.

That blade comes again with every misfortune
As a memory of the fall
As a fall in itself
And like each fall,
It comes as pain and anguish
And a rush of naked need:

Clothe us,
Who having been warm, are naked
Feed us,
Who having known plenty, are starving
Heal us
Who having been whole are now hurt!

But while there is life
Man is more than his earth
More than the dust
More than that which rests in the grave
And even before the grave itself
Is hope
And man is a beast that
Having fallen but still having hope
Will rise again
Having tripped, will find his stride
Having found his knees
Will try to gain his feet

Having fallen,
Being now, as we are,
Fallen
In this time that has been given to us
In the hope that we might
Stand on our feet again
In whatever time we have remaining
Let us then put our faith
In the rising.

5/17/06

I picked up the first paperback volume of Tezuka's Buddha last week at the 'Swap. While I like Tezuka well enough, I don't like him enough to pay hardback prices for his stuff. I hadn't realized that the US version of Buddha had been flopped Studio Proteus-style until I cracked it open the other night. One character lost a couple of limbs, and *which* limbs kept varying from page to page, and even panel to panel, as the retouching crew were selectively flopping on a panel-by-panel manner in an attempt to match flow & layout, instead of just mirror-flopping everything regardless.

It's really kind of disconcerting. Fans have refused to put up with this sort of thing on doofy junk titles like Naruto or Sgt. Frog for years, but the hoity-toity art-comix and academic crowd which snabbles up high-tone projects like Buddha are apparently cool with the American publisher diddling the artwork on one of the God of Manga's flagship projects. I mean, Buddha is regularly recommended to the non-fan market in mainstream publications like Entertainment Weekly. The story and the background art manages to mostly overwhelm the flopped artwork mess, and I'm even kind of cool with the bambi-and-thumper-get-disemboweled cognitive dissonance of the cartoony art style and the gloomy-religious subject matter. I wasn't ashamed to be seen reading it while sitting around waiting for things to start up at the History Day festivities.

What I was ashamed of was the computer-marketing-sales-professional office dropping who decided to plug in his earpiece right there in Finlay Commons & loudly conduct his business in public, like he was doing high-pressure sales out of office at home or something. I don't think he was a judge - probably some poor kid's workaholic father. Jerk.

Oof. I love Penn State dorm food, but I think I'm too old for such shenanigans. They fed the run-off judges for the History Day thing out of the Finlay Commons for lunch. Two cheeseburgers, some fries, juice & milk, way too many chocolate-chip cookies. Now I can barely move, I feel like a rattlesnake on a chilly, overcast October afternoon.

Things went about as well as such things do these days. There seems to be fewer and fewer actual educational professionals judging at these things - last year there weren't many in the papers judging panels, and this year, I didn't work with a single teacher in either one of my panels. Yesterday was Judge Brown, me, and a lady from the documents section of the PSU main campus library - all of us from Bellefonte, BTW, we got into a big gossip section about my one-time landlord & all the fires we've been getting in town. Today was Bruce Teeple, the guy who's working on the Prince Farrington history, and a lawyer from Southeast PA who does a history column on the side. We seem to be doing OK, but where are all the folks with pedagogical training? Off doing the "fun" subjects like performances & documentaries?

Jim Cleaveland, a PSSFS alum from the mid-Nineties, used to do a comic for the weekly newsletters that Bernhard Warg put out for the club, the Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!. Jim's starting up Bob again as a webcomic, here, starting with the original run of comics from the newsletter, which was called, er... You know, I don't remember what the newsletter was called when Bernhard was editing. It was Dangerous Advice when I took it over, but that was my name. Anybody remember?

Finally got around to reading that copy of Sterling's The Zenith Angle that I bought back before Christmas. It was a lot better than I had feared - funny and strange in that late-Bruce-Sterling sort of fashion. Sterling always has been the starry-eyed optimist of the cyberpunk set. He really believes in the innate decency of mankind. Of course, the cyber-war global-dot-com plot of the book was a complete and total misreading of what was going on in 2001 and 2002, and the book's constant administration name-dropping was rendered even more peculiar by Sterling's failure to mention Dick Clarke, the actual, goofy-ass proponent of cyber-terrorism and computer security who turned into such a walking embarrassment during the 2004 elections.

I kept expecting something horrible to come of the dropped thread mid-book about the elk with Mad Cow Disease, and the fact that they were feeding them to the astronomers. It seemed like the sort of thing which would have fed into the whole isolated-hiding-from-the-big-bad-world academics-unable-to-deal-and-hiding thing that Sterling was flirting with mid-book. Especially given the 2003-2004 vogue for "BDS" - Bush Derangement Syndrome. But, since the book reads as if it was mostly composed in mid-late 2002, I suppose that's a little ahead of the political curve, chronologically speaking. Although Sterling throws in a bit about "web logs" as the wave of the future in the last few pages.

Anyways, definitely better than Heavy Weather or Holy Fire, not quite as good as Zeitgeist. About on the level of Distraction.

Walked up to the mall to watch United 93 at the multiplex on Saturday. Not much to say about the movie - it was worth the twelve-mile round-trip - but I did spend a good chunk of the "there" part of the walk wondering if I was trespassing on State Penn land by walking along the side of the Benner Pike past all the "No Trespassing - Violators Will Be Prosecuted" signs. I had forgotten about all of the no trespassing signs - they go by pretty fast when you're driving past them at 55 MPH - but walking along the pike gave me lots of time to ponder the legalities. On the one side, there's the whole "public thoroughfare" thing - if it's legal to drive along the Pike, why the hell couldn't I walk blameless? - on the other side, there's that whole "this means you" every-two-hundred-yards thing shouting in my face in all-caps institutional-green lettering. Saw nothing but road traffic, distant cows, and Rockview's horse herd, so it didn't come to cases as I half-feared. On the way back, I walked along I-99 instead - louder, but probably safer & definitely not trespassing by any interpretation I'm aware of.

I spent the trip reading a Rosemary Edghill Regency romance in the style of Georgette Heyer, Turkish Delight, which really was a quite excellent pastiche. The one complaint I had about the novel was that the heroine, who supposedly spent her late childhood and adolescence in the harem of the Ottoman Sultan, speaks exactly like every other Regency romance heroine who isn't a French guttersnipe (These Old Shades) or Spanish newlywed (An Infamous Army). That is to say, full of early-19th-century slang and dialect, of a certain class and sophistication. If you're going to make your heroine a Turk who occasionally communicates in Turkish or swears by Allah & the Prophet, be so good as to actually use the language. It adds a bit of color, you see. And no, the occasional use of "hareem" and "houri" doesn't count. For one thing, I'm pretty sure both are Arabic, not Turkish.

Oh, and don't have your heroine dis on Mansfield Park until you have more than one book under your belt. You have to earn that sort of snark.

Yikes.

Er, to unpack that a bit, the link leads to an alleged description of Elvis's allegedly lethal diet. I don't believe he actually ate it, at least not more than once. The "Fool's Gold" sandwiches in particular strike me as gastonomically impossible. No human being could successfully eat entire jars of peanut butter and jelly spread on a full baguette, let alone two instances of such a concoction, let alone as part of a daily diet.

We went hiking yesterday afternoon trying to find the burnt section of Bald Eagle Mountain over west of Milesburg. We failed. We did, however, manage to scrabble up to the top of the ridge via a gas-line firebreak. Bald Eagle Valley looks positively bucolic from a thousand feet up. At close range, it's another story. Nittany Valley, on the other hand, looks like what it is - an enormous construction site. Progress ain't pretty at a distance, but it is progress. I'm much happier living on *this* side of the mountain.

Comment from other office worker: "this has enough salt to kill a horse!" Also much discussion of tofu's amazing ability to soak up flavor - being a sort of flavor vacuum itself, and bearing in mind nature's well-known abhorence of vacuums, it makes a certain sort of metaphoric sense.

Tofu jerky, by the way, bears a strong visual resemblance to chocolate wafers, or "one of those bricks of pioneer chewing tobacco".

Officemate brought in his tofu jerky. It isn't half-bad, but salty as all get out. Not the sort of thing you'd want to make a full meal out of, I think. The office vegetarian was delighted. Yet again with the vegetarians delighting in fake meats... if you want to eat meat, eat meat. If you don't, don't play foolie-foolie games with your palate. Not that I'd turn away the tofu jerky. In suitably small quantities with lots of soda-pop to wash it down.

And speaking of pop, Diet Dr. Pepper Berries 'n Cream is a trainwreck of a soda. Cream flavor does not belong in a carbonated drink. Oh, well. I can deal with anything for a two-liters-worth of time.

Saw my first tentworm nest on Sunday behind the Willowbank building. Now there's nests scattered up Valentine Hill & every other tree along the upper reaches of Valentine Hill Road. The entomologists say they're just nuisances, but they're ugly as sin. Hope the dry weather keeps 'em under control.

My officemate just announced that he makes tofu jerky. I inquired whether this was tofu & jerky or jerked tofu, and he admitted to the latter. Thus followed a conversation on the subject of what exactly was the process for jerking tofu, and what was added to make it taste like anything at all - a marination of soy sauce, honey, and garlic being key, apparently. It still sounds like a punchline waiting on a nonexistent joke.

These are the days I'm proud of not tolerating a stove or other cooking implements in my apartment. They almost always lead one into all sorts of culinary abominations, kitchens. Leave the cooking to the professionals, says I.

I was looking at John Scalzi's Whatever blog while pondering placing him on my blogroll as a replacement for some others whom I've stopped reading with any degree of interest or enthusiasm. Then I came across this post. You see, the thing I dislike the most about fandom - and I dislike it quite strongly - is the uncomfortable and overly close relationship it breeds between artists and their audience. I'm a strong advocate of the fourth wall being, if not impenetrable, then at least a functional one-way mirror for most of its operational lifetime. I don't want writers to be my friends, or mentors, or, heaven forbid, siblings parents or spouses. I don't want to consider their feelings when reading their output, and in fact, as I read an awful lot of fiction, oftentimes I don't want to think about them at all, if at all possible.

The internet & blogs in particular have done a lot to break down these barriers between the artist and the audience, and I can't say I'm too happy about it. I'm a nasty piece of work, to be honest, and it freaks me out when I say something about a writer out of the blue and he replies in email. It's all a bit "Kent, this is God" for my tastes. It's even worse when a writer I sort-of know & otherwise respect lays a massive turd of a book, and then I find myself tip-toeing around the subject. I *like* there to be a distance between me & my writers.

So I may or may not go back to Scalzi's blog. He's an amusing guy. But I've got this issue to work out on the subject.

Huh. There's another fire in the valley, or more strictly speaking, over in Penn's Valley. You can see a big honking column of smoke rising over Centre Hall Mountain, although I was just informed that it's Tussey Mountain on the other side of the valley that's on fire. Must be a heck of a fire if you can see it from over here. Nothing in the CDT as of this moment.

Our representative in Congress here in Bellefonte, John Peterson, is generally a colorless sort of fellow, neither warm nor cool. There seems to be one thing that gets him going, and that's drilling for American oil. He is pissed about Castro opening up potential offshore oil resources for exploration when Florida politicians refuse to allow the US to do likewise. Sen. Nelson of Florida was likewise pissed, so he's trying to get Castro to stop. Peterson, surprisingly for a politician, showed a great deal of common sense and inquired if we were going to stop the Canadians from doing the same thing. I think I'm proud of Peterson this week.

The cool thing? Central Pennsylvania has almost no direct economic interest in the oil industry. Our gas prices aren't even particularly high by national standards, although we're not an island of cheapness, either. Peterson isn't playing to the home folks, far as I can tell. He doesn't even have a serious challenge to his seat.

Well, Big Dave is moved down to Philadelphia, we finished clearing out his storage locker on Saturday, and he drove his belongings down Sunday morning. Gonna miss having him around town. We both got invited to a friend's wedding in November. I realized yesterday looking at my suit that I've shrunk right out of it. Wonder if you can get a suit re-sized downwards like that? A rented tux would be, hrm, a bit much, and I only wear that suit for weddings - the last time I had it on was for the Nadzams' wedding several years ago. They've got two kids now! It's definitely been a while.

The National History Day (or "NHS" as they're now referring to themselves in the documentation, sounds much less geeky, doesn't it?) materials arrived yesterday. A bit more than a dozen senior-level papers I have to read & critique before next month's judging. I need to get myself an eraser that *doesn't* leave a filthy red smear on paper when I try to clean off an ill-advised or unintelligible comment.

This year's subject theme, in case you missed it when I first heard about it late last fall, is "Taking a Stand in History". What do you think the chances are that one of the papers would be about William F. Buckley standing athwart history? Yeah, me neither.

[Pre-judging snark deleted in case the kids or their parents are googling]

I suppose I shouldn't be too loose about the papers before the kids have their say in defense of their work. But people! Don't quote from Encarta! Please! Especially when you've real secondary sources listed in your bibliography!

What a beautiful morning. It's nice enough I'm halfway tempted to walk down to Bellefonte for lunch, just for the sheer hell of it.

It's getting into the busy part of the spring here at work, so chances are I'll be kind of quiet unless something really gets me going. Sorry?

Jason Gullickson of MyLens went over to Bald Eagle Valley to get some photos of the wildfire on the north side of Bald Eagle Mountain: here, here, and here. Striking - the mountain is glowing in the dark, a little like that festival near Nara, whose ceremonial centre-piece is the controlled burn-off of brush on Mt. Wakakusa at night.

I finally stopped getting ShojoBeat a couple months ago, and picked up the back-issue graphic novel collections of Nana when I noticed that the 'Swap had them on the shelf this week past. I had only really been reading Nana, Crimson Hero, and Absolute Boyfriend in the monthly magazine, and the latter two only because they were *in* the magazine - nearly seven bucks to read a single chapter of Nana felt like a waste of money, and I needed to justify the expense *somehow*.

The magazine was an interesting experiment for a while, but the problem was that they are running the same six manga they started with, and I'm bored with half of them, and not particularly enthusiastic about two of the other three. It might have worked better as a "first one or two or three chapters of each new manga in the line" sampler, at least in my case. Certainly, the most interesting aspect of ShojoBeat, aside from Nana, was the preview chapters. The first chapter of Beauty is the Beast warned me off of that title, and I bought the Kamikaze Girls GN based on that preview. But most months, it was just the six stand-bys and a lot of articles aimed at the sixteen-year-old female audience which I, if you haven't noticed previously, am not a representative sample thereof.

Anyways, this way I get the omake chapters at the end of each volume, which I had been missing out on. Now when is someone going to publish Neighborhood Story in the States?

There's a forest fire over in Bald Eagle Valley, reportedly on the other side of Rt.220 , which is kicking up enough smoke to be seen from the office, here south of Bellefonte. No sign of it in the news-sites yet. They're still concentrating on the Centre Hall elementary school evacuation which caused our front-office secretary to have to go & pick up her son.

Whoops, never mind, there it is. They say it's actually on this side of Rt. 220, on the side of Bald Eagle Mountain opposite the Bald Eagle High School campus.

Huh. One of the farmhouse families on upper Valentine Hill have hired a Mennonite or Amish (or possibly Brethren) work crew to repair their roof. Bunch of unmarried young Pennsylvania Dutch were swarming over the roof, tossing shingles into a large dumpster as I walked up this morning. They get to work early, the Dutch do.

Still not sure how to identify which sect is which just by looking at 'em. I'd have guessed Amish from the straw hats & industriousness. The secretary up front corrected my misapprehension that Amish can't get around like I thought - apparently there's a significant business to be done in ferrying Amish folk around by willing English. They apparently will pay 81 cents a mile for this service. She has a relative who bought a big van to move Amish work crews around from job to job, or just out to things like doctor's appointments.

I saw that the Wide-Awakes were getting ready to do one of their semi-regular Torchlight Parades to "Take Back the Night", while walking on campus yesterday afternoon. I was dropping in on the kids at PSSFS, since they were holding their meetings the same night I swing by State College to pick up my comics from the 'Swap. As usual, they're having membership quorum problems. I ended up talking politics with some of them. One kid was a RA, and had to leave partway through the meeting to go along with the parade & track down people shouting from dorm windows at the paraders. He wasn't thrilled with the prospect, but stoutly defended the university policy of punishing morons for their exercise of free speech. The opinion that morons have first amendment rights like any other member of society seems to be the minority view on campus anymore.

Apparently the College Republicans are poking the left with sticks again, this time on the subject of illegal immigration. They *were* going to do some damnfool provocative stunt involving "catching an illegal immigrant", with CR types dressed in orange to signify their illegality, and rewarding folks for turning them in. This thankfully went by the wayside, and they got together with the Latino Caucus to do something more reasonable and college-boring, like holding a community meeting. In the meantime, their pointy-stick-poking had provoked some lefty types into getting together a direct-action group called, creepily, "True Voices" or something like that, which was indulging in minor illegalities of their own, like stealing shirts from USG. This is why poking people with pointy sticks is never a good idea. Even the YAF guy at the meeting was irked enough to be labeling the people nominally on his side "nativist" and conceding the "True Voices" point that there were "racists" among the College Republicans. Well, I haven't talked to the CR folks since the presidential election, so maybe things have changed over there, but they weren't, as a group, racist the last time I talked with them. Bah.

But hey! Won last night's tournament at HiWay. Pizza *and* victory. A good night.

Steve Sailer posted a link in a comment at Albion's Seedlings to this review in which he talks about why crime families are *families* - the lowered transaction costs allowed by familial ties in an extra-legal environment like the criminal underground - and how this operates in other, less criminal environments like the diamond trade, & explains why endogamous minorities tend to dominate certain subeconomies where high levels of trust are beneficial. Very interesting.

Important post on the virtues of hanging around with happy people. Especially important given that historically I've been a pretty angry, hostile, mean-spirited sort of wight. I was a real ball of rage throughout my early twenties, to be honest. But I'm trying to do better these days.

Via the Instapundit, who is pretty much the online embodiment of the "happy-people makes for happiness" principle. Reading his blog leaves me feeling almost... pleasant.

I had to go down into town early yesterday, so I had more time in the evening than is usual on a weekday. Discovered that they have evening games at the little league park up on the other side of 5th Avenue on weeknights. Watched about five innings instead of going on the walk I had planned. I had thought that co-ed little league teams was a hollywood invention - but sure enough, the announcer introduced "Brittany" and "Dakota" along with "Chandler" and at least three "Tyler"s. Doesn't anyone name their kids "Mary" or "Dave" or "Bill" anymore? I thought one kid had a normal "Steven", until he came around again in the batting rotation & I realized I was just mis-hearing "Evan". Sigh.

The little league park has two small fields, which is about all they need when it comes to little league. They try hard, but the parents' cars, trucks and minivans, pulled up almost to the fence in lieu of bleachers, were in no danger of getting dinged by a home run. You couldn't say the same about the cars in the parking lot proper, which were menaced by three wild fouls while I was watching. Luckily, a row of ball-eating poplars were planted along the verge, and mostly caught said pop fouls before hitting the properly parked vehicles.

It really is a nice location, especially the upper field, which commands a royal view of the Spring Creek water gap, the Bald Eagles rising closely on either side like the high walls of a vaster baseball stadium. The view from home plate must be spectacular in high summer. The fence surrounding the field obscures the rather grotty extension of the park, which is built on landfill, and pretty rubbled and low-quality landfill at that. At some point they're going to be able to put a third field in as the landfill advances the hillside over the ravine to the north, but until then it isn't the sort of space that delights the eye.

Walking home later that evening, I noticed that town was full of motorcycles roaring by in formation, getting more and more numerous as I got closer to home. Yep, it was what I thought - a biker had passed to the great highway beyond, and his or her compadres were holding a viewing at Wetzels' at the front of the block. There were Harleys parked en enchelon along every street, and on the sidewalk in front of the Presbyterian church across the way. Bikers in full traditional costume were waiting in line outside of the funeral home, mixed in with folks in more standard mourning gear, suits and ties and the like. Luckily, they weren't as loud as the bikers can sometimes get - I only heard the roar of an overrevved engine once or twice the rest of the evening. Not nearly as bad as the Cruise, really.

I present to you the Citrus connoisseur. I used to love Mello Yello, in the sense of "I used to love staying awake late into the night and shaking like a hypercaffienated leaf on a sugar bender". I once drank four cans of that foul, astringent yellow-green stuff & spent the next hour-and-a-half jogging through East Campus until I burned off my overdose.

I was walking around Parkview Heights Sunday morning when a retired gentleman in his pajamas out collecting his newspaper inquired of me whether I had brought the good weather with me. I replied that rather, the good weather had brought me in its train. I hadn't been out that far towards Zion in a good many years - usually I act as if Bellefonte comes to a hard stop at the Lutheran Church & the Junior High campus.

That end of town has grown greatly, if not quite as wildly as the construction along Blanchard and upper Valentine Hill Road. There's an entire neighborhood of McMansions going up about three-fourths of the way out to the Rt 26/I-99 highway, and I had fun wandering around, playing "spot the architectural reference".

The designs were very pseudo-Victorian, with a lot of obvious references to various buildings in town. The wooden gables'-eave-guards I mentioned before were present in a number of these brand-new buildings. None of them had the "spar-pointed-down" design, but since that can easily be confused for something blasphemous when looked at in the wrong light, I can see what this would be the case. Far more popular are the "captain's wheel" section, with two or three examples scattered around the front end of the development. One building had the "organic wooden vine" eaves-guard design, but it wasn't a particularly well-executed version, being rather brutish and fat-fingered.

There were a lot of large gables, and a good deal of cleverness exercised in the service of said gables. I think I rather saw more full-size gabling going on than dormers, which I suppose makes sense. Dormers are either extensions of old buildings - not to be expected in new construction - or constructs designed to let light into garrets & other servants'-quarters, which shouldn't be expected in McMansions, which aren't designed in the expectation of the need to house large platoons of live-in servantry.

One building was pretty much perfect - fine colors, good use of materials, well-balanced proportions, fine details - except for the fact that the architect or construction-company had put in many strong, balanced, large gables, and then left their interiors blank and unadorned. The architectural equivalent of whitespace. I found myself wishing for it those scale-tiles you see on a certain class of wooden-construction Victorian. Oh, well. I'm sure the inhabitants will spot the need in a year or two - the one thing you can rely on is the occupants' need for decoration & adornment. An excess of asceticism is a rare fault indeed.

Not so rare, however, are the obscenities inflicted upon an innocent world by the architects of the Long Sixties. On the road I followed into the new neighborhood was a massive construct which could have been confused for some institutional monstrosity like a bureaucrats' hive or an office hovel for pyschiatrists were it not for its location in the heart of a residential zone and its total lack of professional signage. It had the oversize, overlong institutional windows with their excess of viewage from the exterior - no privacy for *that* family, no indeed! It also had the brick-and-concreted Mondarian-style walkway-screen which reminded me so forcefully of the ugliness the late Sixties inflicted upon the educational landscape in junior high schools and dorm-building complexes like East Halls throughout this afflicted commonwealth.

Speaking of large, inexplicable homes along Summit Drive, the vast ranch at the top of the hill is for sale - a property so large they had to put *two* signs in to clarify what all was up for sale. Whoa! That's a lot of money for a ranch! But it really is a vast ranch. I've always referred to it as more of a "compound" than a "home". I pictured the inhabitants as one of those sprawling extended-family patriarchies, like a clan of Mormons. Huh, there *is* a basement. I had been wondering...

Ow. I did something to my neck yesterday evening. Ow.

I expected to be able to get home yesterday afternoon in the void behind the first big cloudburst that took out our power at work for a good hour or so, leaving us on the generator & our guests from John Deere in the dark in the conference room. (Oops.)

Then I saw that there was a secondary knock-on storm coming on fast behind the first squall line, about two and half to three hours behind and closing. Talked with someone in support, we estimated that I had maybe about forty-five minutes, which was just enough time to get down to town if I booked & made good time. Well, I made it in under forty-five minutes, but it seems that storms can hurry too, and the rain-front caught me about a block and a half from my front door. Didn't get too soaked, and managed to spare my copy of Dies the Fire from any water-damage, so no harm no foul.

I drove in to work this morning. Cloudbursts are one thing, but they're threatening hail & high winds today.

When I went out front of my building to put out the trash & grab my mail, there was a cop there talking to the lady from upstairs & the other tenant. Asked what was wrong, and they said that the upstairs lady's kid had "run away". Since I had just yelled at said kid on Tuesday for throwing his smoked-out butts off the upstairs balcony onto my front stoop, and he didn't look any too disgruntled at the time, I have no idea what's up with that. The other woman commented about how she never sees me but it's late at night. Yes, dear, I have a job, this means I'm not about in daylight on weekdays.

I don't know why I care, the tenants in the other part of the building come and go often enough that I never bother to learn their names.

Nice morning, much more clear than the weather-reports had led me to expect. Mountains are still that beaten red-bronze color that comes right before the greening, and with the slight morning mist, I fancied the Bald Eagles were a new-forged blade steaming from the quenching-bucket. Helped me feel warmer - I had foregone the jacket, and it was just a hair too cool on the walk up Valentine Hill. I'll be wishing for this early-morning coolness come July, mark my words.

Valentine Hill Road runs through an odd patch of land down at the base of the hill, in the little canyon that Logan Run drains. Between the hillside and the industrial strip are a bunch of nice little houses and a generous scatter of small ponds, streams, and springs in a watery tangle which manages to be neither polluted, nor stagnant, nor noxious. Quite pleasant in a noisy industrial-clanging sort of way, with a passel of white ducks in residence and all sorts of greenery. Almost English-garden in its charm.

The guys at work are big-time spelunkers, and have been buzzing about a sinkhole dig over by Penn's Cave east of Centre Hall. They almost talked me into going along last weekend, until I remembered that what we were talking about was heavy labour in a muddy hole in early spring and decided to do, er, something else. Anything else. They came back on Monday very proud of their progress in cleaning out the big muddy hole. They have great hopes of it becoming a proper cave.

Did you know that many caves get that way by human intervention? Apparently it's a thing with spelunkers. They find likely sinkholes, and do a lot of digging & clearing & hauling to get the trash & rubbish out, & let the water flow through cleanly. The hope is that there are voids behind or below said clogged sinkholes, which once exposed could be explored by eager, very, very muddy spelunkers.

Well, it's a hobby. My comment was that mucking about in a cave with an active stream pouring into it sounded like a recipe for an underground drowning, and they assured me that this was what they had weather reports for. After all, we work with meteorologists, don't we?

Ran into a retired lady walking on North Ridge on Saturday, and we had a talk about houses and property taxes. Little old ladies vote, people. They vote in battalions, regiments, brigades - little old ladies vote. And from conversations in Centre County over the last three years, I think I can safely conclude, sweet little old ladies are mightily, mightily pissed about property taxes. This particular sweet little old lady was pretty close to demanding the lynching of State Rep. Herman, and he isn't even her representative. She just saw him on public-access television, obstructing the passage of a property tax bill, and blew her top at it.

Lynn Swann, are you listening? Property taxes. Property taxes. Property taxes. It's the golden wedge issue this year, if you ask me.

Seeing as it's starting to get into walking weather, I was getting into parts of Bellefonte & environs I don't usually go, this weekend past. For one thing, they've put in a bike path out along Airport Road towards a park I hadn't been out to before, yclept "Governors' Park". Nice little public sort of place, plenty of pavilions for office parties & the like, a couple soccer fields & a softball field, & most importantly, a public swimming pool with no posted rates. Will have to find out if it's a free pool, or if not, how much. I really ought to take up swimming now that I'm not quite as much of a whale as I used to be.

There's another park on the other end of town, far side of Spring Creek, tucked in between the stream and Porter Street where no-one but maniacs and trout fishermen would ever go. As such, it's not exactly a family-friendly or foot-friendly sort of place, just three acres of woodlot & a half-dozen preachy, faded placards about stream environmental recovery & the evils of old industrial dams.

Lastly, I went wandering down the very far end of Half Moon Hill, got directions from the guy at the end of the road about how to get across Buffalo Run to Coleville, and then proceeded to bugger up following the directions to the extent that I had to bushwhack my way up a steep near-cliff-like hill because it was either that or slide into Buffalo Run, which had come slap square up against the north face of Half Moon. Once I finished hauling my carcass up the hill by pulling on small trees & rocks, I found myself in the guy's back yard. Ran into him again on my way back into town, and he laughed at me & told me to check for ticks when I got home, as the brush I had been through was allegedly full of 'em. No need for suspense - I was tick-free - but geez, I think I can skip any return visits to that particular part of God's Green Paradise.

Oh, yes. I've started walking to work, those days it isn't like to rain. I can use the exercise, and would prefer to not waste the ready, given how stratospheric-bound the gas prices seem bent.

Perhaps I don't know Dan Simmons like I ought to - I've never been fond of his fiction, though I have read some of his books - but I didn't expect something like this from him. It's a pretty hard short-story-cum-essay, with a point-of-view straight out of the little green footballs Jacksonian end of the political field. Is this another symptom of what Jim Geraghty called the Tipping Point?

I don't know, tell me Simmons is actually a centre-right type like Orson Scott Card or a libertarian-right type like Steve Stirling.

H/T Vodkapundit.

The original manga version of Aishiteruze Baby is considerably better than the average anime version, which ran last year on Japanese television. Having read the first volume from Viz, I can see why the anime was so - hrm, underwhelming?

The story - a high school lothario with an emotionally underequipped family & no particular motivation to do much of anything gets saddled with the care of a cute five-year-old cousin abandoned by her runaway mother - had potential, and some of that potential shone through the poor art and under-nourished dialog which otherwise tarnished and diminished its execution in the TV series. This is because the manga clearly would make a poor storyboard set for a television production, and a worse script.

The mangaka, Youko Maki, clearly prefers to write via layout and composition rather than dialog and plotting. All of the emotional beats are carried by panel-work and page composition rather than dialog and conversation, with the usual shoujo-style use of ziptone and abstraction to give the art flavor & some visual flair. Don't get me wrong - the art is fairly high-quality, and the way it's deployed maximizes the impact of Maki's technical skill.

It's a very impressive first volume, but it also shows clear signs of improvement which suggests that it was an early work. For one thing, Maki's ambitious use of paneling for emotional impact over-stretches her compositional skills several times in the first chapter; some of the panel flow can be a little hard to follow, even for someone who's been reading unflipped for a number of years. This isn't Fruits Basket, at least in the first few chapters. But Maki clearly has Takaya-esque ambitions.

Strangely enough, Fruits Basket, which similarly relies on layout and composition for emotional resonance, didn't have this problem when it was adapted for a TV series. Perhaps this is the result of director Akitaro Daichi's hack brilliance? I keep calling him a hack, but his body of work suggests otherwise... Maybe I'm just confusing lack of ego for lack of genius? Possibly it's that Fruits Basket is brimming over with enough plot and dialog for three other stories, and doesn't need the compositional assist to keep it interesting and engaging.

What has happened to all the genius directors and writers in the last few years, anyways? The only working in TV that I can think of is batty old Shoji Kawamori & his tinsel-trash Sousei no Aquarion. What's Konaka up to these days? Air Gear? Oh, for the love of god...

Bruce Sterling really is an exhausting kind of guy. If I understand his current drift, CafePress is a sort of version 0.01 factory for the production of "spimes", which he defines as "manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system". The t-shirts and mugs and mousepads produced by CafePress would be fully-fledged spimes if they came with RFIDs and were engineered to self-destruct on command like that bizarre polymer which biodegrades into fertilizer & viable sunflower seed.

Not that this whole "Internet of Things"/"Spime" thing is a *new* thing from Sterling. The construction-materials-with-built-in-directions which his protagonists use to build their research labs in Distraction strike me as an early version of the spime, if an unnamed version thereof.

I really ought to blogroll Mely, from whom I ganked this. Next time I remember to open the templates before starting a post, I promise...

I was visiting a friend down in Gaithersburg who gets the Washington Times deadtree, and there was this article in the Sunday paper. We checked twice to make sure it wasn't the April 1st edition. A bunch of "explorers" with GPS packs & a low sense for high drama decided to make like Stanley & go off on a dangerous, romantic, and violent trip to find the source of the Nile, as if it hasn't been known for over a hundred years now. The group of folk visiting around said friend's dining room table got into an argument over what the proper definition of a river-source ought to be, as the intrepid explorers had apparently made their "find" by re-defining the source to be the most distant point of the Nile watershed.

It all seemed as silly as the Pluto "Planet/Kuiper object" argument, I said, which sent us barking off on another goofy argument. Fanboys - what can you do? Play Puerto Rico, I guess - with the new expansion rules! Now even more dodgy about the whole slave-economy thing! I won by making my very own triangular trade between a hospice & the expansion set's black market and church, thus allowing me to generate extra "colonists", sell them on the black market for buildings, and use the church to launder kickbacks in the building process. I kicked much ass, being as evil as the game allowed.