Friday, February 29, 2008

Knitting: One Skein Handspun Scarf


I finally finished my Malabrigo scarf. It turned out to be a little short, but so am I. I am learning so much as I knit more and more. For example, Malabrigo is a kettle-dyed 100% wool yarn, but it's very springy and soft. It runs through your hands nicely and has subtle but interesting variations in color. (It is a little split-prone, being single ply.) I recently ordered some Rio de la Plata, another kettle-dyed 100% wool from South America. It, however, is pretty disappointing:
riodelaplata
The color is nowhere near as hypersaturated as it appeared online. Much of the hank was more lavender than iris and there is a wider range of tones than I was expecting (wider than the Malabrigo and the website image). I wanted to make a deeply colored beret, but this yarn just isn't right for that. It's more of a thick-and-thin than a worsted, but the variations aren't dramatic enough to show off in something like an Urchin hat. What's more, the yarn is sort of sticky. It adheres to itself and is more scratchy than the Malabrigo. I don't know what I'll do with it now. I guess this is how stashes start.

The universe is humbling.

Chris Blattman on this image of the blogosphere:


Look at the bottom, at the tiny little white thingy just outside the circle. That, I believe, is probably me. And the giant ball of white fire in the middle? Tragically, it is pictures of cats.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Credit where credit is due!

I'm a little disgruntled that this piece on bookshelves and the self refers to "[t]he online conversation generated by Seligman’s and Klein’s remarks" when I have been harping on this for four years. Some further points:

1. The shelf is not necessarily a performance of self for someone else. Can we not perform our selves for ourselves? Is the validation of a perceived identity not also a form of performance? That a shelf can be a mode of social interaction does not invalidate the idea that it can also be an inwardly directed exploration of self.

2. Aspirational taste implies that one intends to read the book, not that one wishes to have a Gatsbyesque wall of decorative volumes with uncut pages. *cough Klein cough*

3. I don't know who said that shelved books must be read in their entirety, but that's bollocks. If this were the standard, no proponent of the theory would be able to keep things like college texts, which are often read in part. Is there anyone out there who actually made this claim and has purged his shelves of anything for which he read only the assigned or pertinent chapters?

4. McLemee thinks his books talk to him and tell him what to read. I view my books as something like friends or family members who share my living space. My shelving scheme is less related to genre or subject than it is a separation of cliques. Let's not get into a nerd-off, okay?

5. Perhaps Nick is correct and this all stems from a Shintoist orientation that rejects the collection of unused material objects when they are not being used to the full extent possible. (Note that this is not inconsistent with Point 3; if I own a book because it has several chapters on an issue relevant to my interests or studies, I am using the book qua book to the extent I can. On the other hand, a totally unread book is being used for nothing except display, for which its contents are irrelevant and wallpaper would serve just as well, unless some deception is intended.) This also explains why I hate the very idea of students setting bags of money on fire going to law school for no good reason. Waste is a sin, even for an atheist like me. Peter Singer and the environmentalist movement would probably agree.

Everyone needs a nemesis.

Worst co-worker ever?

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Proposals



Megan McArdle comments: "You'd think she'd say yes, and then tell him later . . . ."

Apropos of the earlier discussion on this blog about being left at the altar versus being asked for an immediate annulment: would you rather be left on the court or have the ring returned the next day?

(I know the video's not real, but that's not relevant for purposes of the hypo.)

Turkey Trolls the Entire Islamic World?

Turkey has decided to revise the hadith.

This is not going to end well, but good on them for trying.

First you get the money, then you get the power

Why students choose law school.

I'd like to see the results for a survey with a broader swath of potential responses:
...
C) Parents pressured me into it
D) Didn't know what to do with a comparative literature degree
E) Business school has too many numbers
F) Desperate to defer engagement with the real world and rejected from PhD programs

Monday, February 25, 2008

50 Book Challenge #13: World War Z

The zombie film renaissance has resulted in a fad for zombie books as well. World War Z is an entertaining and sometimes chilling set of interviews with survivors of the twelve year Zombie War. The political critiques are somewhat clumsy and obvious (all of the standard villains are present: Big Pharma, Republicans, the American bourgeoisie), but these are relatively small quibbles compared with the gripping nature of the first-person narratives. If you liked the recent crop of zombie movies, you'll like this book. I spent the day after finishing it fretting about our lack of potential anti-zombie weaponry. Recommended.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Makeup

Some thoughts on makeup, women who wear it, and men who hate it:

- There are people, including men, who can tell if you are wearing any makeup, even if it is skillfully applied.

- It is quite possible to apply makeup such that almost anyone, even another woman, will think you're not wearing any. This happened to me multiple times, and my (female!) friend once insisted for a few moments that I do not, in fact, wear foundation. This flip side to this is that when you actually don't wear any, people think you're ill.

- For every man who hates the way lipstick tastes, there is a woman who thinks oily skin, pimples, and chapped lips are gross.

- Everyone looks better with a little eyeliner. Even boys. Also, cream eyeliners are awesome.

- There are not enough beauty choices for people at the ends of the skin tone spectrum. This is largely but not entirely a product of market forces.

- Kevyn Aucoin's books are a great way to learn about applying makeup.

- There is an inverse relationship between the staying power of a lipstick and its effect on your lips.

50 Book Challenge #12: Tracing the Shadow

I only read this book a few days ago but I've already forgotten most of it, which is a blessing. It's just a bunch of cardboard characters doing completely irrational things for the sake of a nonsensical and boring plot. The dialog consists of strings of clichés and uninspired descriptions. Developments are telegraphed chapters in advance, making further reading dispensable.

The only moderately interesting thing about this book was how its poor character development was highlighted by my heterosexist assumptions. When a thinly-drawn male character inexplicably hops in bed with an incredibly flat female character just to move the plot in an improbable but necessary direction, it registers as being clumsy but doesn't bring my reading to a halt. When one of the male characters in this book, who has not been previously indicated to be gay, suddenly begins a torrid sexual affair with a strange man* , it comes off as very disruptive. I thought more about my reaction to this than I did about the book itself. Not recommended, even for long flights.

* A spy out to seduce him into joining a group that's a cross between the Dark Side and the Hashshashin, and let's not even get into how easily this is done, thanks to the instantaneous bond of luuurve between Stupid Magic Student and Spy Guy . . . .

Book Storage, cont.

I always thought dust ruffles were stupid but with a little sewing they could be quite functional.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Little Spartas?

Miss Self-Important meditates on the potential for improving outcomes for students in struggling schools:
The apparently successful school models like KIPP seem to be countering the chaos of children's lives by literally removing them from their families and neighborhoods through long school days and summer classes, and a policy of sending graduates on to elite high schools so far away from their homes that either they become boarding students, or the daily commute ensures that they spend little time at home. Practically, this in tandem with serious discipline might be effective, but how is it going to work in the long-term and on a broader scale? Are we going to turn the inner cities into little Spartas, where children are removed from their families and sent to live in communal military training camps? How is this education, effective as it may be in countering some of the worst tendencies of public schools, going to lead to the re-creation of functioning families and livable neighborhoods?

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Regulating Student Speech

Students in a Southern California high school embraced the Eve Ensler "V Day" concept and devoted last week's issue of the school newspaper to vaginas. School officials reacted by confiscating the papers.
[T]he labeled diagram of a vagina splashed across the front page of the student newspaper's Valentine's Day issue . . . ran under the hot-pink headline "Have a happy Vagina Day!" and the four-page edition included stories titled "Ending shame for nature's gift" and "Rejected!!!!!!!"
...
California students are some of the only in the country with special state laws protecting their rights to free expression in school, said Mike Hiestand, attorney and legal consultant to the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. Six other states have similar laws, he said. Typically, Hiestand said, students can publish whatever they like, as long as the speech is not unlawful or "seriously disruptive."
...
After a flurry of overnight MySpace bulletins, [Edmond, a student editor] and other students showed up at school Friday wearing homemade white, black and pink T-shirts reading "My vagina is obscene."

Similar fliers were taped to backpacks and posted around school. When Edmond, who describes himself as a community activist, and two other protesters refused to change their clothes, school officials sent them home.
Lots of great issues here: Was the paper seriously disruptive? Should it have been (presumably these kids have had sex ed)? Is a shirt with the word "vagina" seriously disruptive? Is it more so than a shirt proclaiming "Abortion is Murder" or emblazoned with a slogan insulting the president? I am on the kids' side but skeptical of their intentions.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Ideological highlighting

I always fixate on the weirdest things, like in this story about a Canadian woman who, after discovering there were no 38J bras available, was told by a sales clerk to get a breast reduction. What sticks out to me?
I have been on a waiting list since my now 5 and a half year old son was 10 months old. I was told that I would have to wait half a year or more after my children finally stop nursing before I could have a reduction. My youngest is 16 months and won't be giving up nursing anytime soon. This is entirely besides the point anyway, what she said was offensive and insulting to say the least.
That's a long wait with painfully enormous breasts!

My Life

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

"Do I listen to pop music because I’m depressed, or am I depressed because I listen to pop music?"

From a Bookslut post that veers in a slightly different direction, which you are also welcome to discuss:
So who’s my one writer? Who’s the one whose books I crack open when I need to seduce some unwitting pawn in the grand game that is my life? Who do I turn to when I need to remember that love is crushing and heartbreaking and that it’s totally normal to be lying in bed wiping tears from my eyes with bunched up toilet paper because the world is just that cruel that as a writer, my budget is limited to toilet paper and not tissue, especially not aloe-laced Kleenex brand tissue. I want to lie in bed and mourn the loss of my high school boyfriend because it feels good to be 32 years old and do this, you know?

So whose books do I open to validate this behavior?
This is what poetry (for me, H.D., or maybe Neruda) is for. You?

Monday, February 18, 2008

50 Book Challenge #11: Winterbirth

Aaaaand . . . back to the poorly written fantasy. That's not fair, really; the writing here is serviceable. The trouble with this book, which is essentially a Norse-inflected Game of Thrones crossed with the Halfblood Chronicles, is that it starts too slowly. The title is the name of a holiday. We see the characters preparing for the festivities. We see the family of northern lords rejoicing in the birth of an heir, complete with anachronistic dialog about how great it is to have grandchildren. The first 100-200 pages of this are the literary equivalent of watching the redshirts in a war movie pull out pictures of their sweethearts before going on patrol. Gee, I wonder if this peaceful idyll will be shattered?

Once the killing finally starts (guess when!), courtesy of your friendly neighborhood religious fanatics and their elven woodwight allies, things pick up, but Ruckley doesn't take enough pages from the Martin playbook and it's obvious after a while that some of the characters will survive, regardless of how implausible that survival may become. It's all setup for future books, of course, but unlike The Name of the Wind, the structure is fairly obvious and therefore it's difficult to lose one's self in the story. By the end, however, things became less predictable and the device of ending with an assassination cliffhanger worked just as it was intended: I was drawn in.

I snark a bit on the "woodwights," but the allusions to other races, one of which was exterminated by two others in a genocide that supposedly drove the gods away from their creations, lend a depth to what would otherwise be a fairly banal setting. Ruckley actually does a good job of making the elf-like race genuinely inhuman, with a generous dollop of the savagery most fantasy authors channel solely to their orc analogues. Their motivations for allying with one human faction are not clear, though, and there'd better be more explanation coming. I also hope that in future books we learn more about other races and that one or two of the Whreinin survived and make an appearance. Recommended for fantasy junkies.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Knitting: Urchin Hat

I've knit three of these Urchin hats so far. The first two were from Twirl (cream and cranberry) in sizes medium and small. The medium turned out enormous (platter-sized) but was liked by its recipient regardless. The small turned out very nicely, if slightly fuller than pictured in the pattern. It takes a little more than one skein of Twirl for the small hat, and the spiral pattern doesn't really come through with the boucle yarn, but it's very cute.

I also bought two skeins of the Cadena in Neptune to make the plain-yarn variant for myself, but I'm very underwhelmed by how it turned out. It used less than a whole skein for the medium size, but I'm not sure that a large size would be better. Maybe this yarn is just mediocre.

50 Book Challenge #10: Caracole

A new blogfriend recommended Caracole, a fantasy novel without dragons, quests, magic, or bad writing. That's something I can get behind. Since they're probably going to burn The Original of Laura, this may be the best you can hope for if you're in search of Nabokovian prose. It starts off with the appearance of being a conventional narrative but eventually lapses into a series of character studies--not that this is a problem. The book has a strong erotic current, but in the final analysis is more about atmospherics and psychology than sex.

The only issues I had with the book were that Gabriel, the teenage boy who is rescued from a backwater upbringing and spirited away to the sophisticated and decadent capital of his conquered nation, is fundamentally stupid and uninteresting. Part of this is a lack of education, but by nature or nurture, Gabriel has been flattened, and he is only useful as a device to introduce us to the more multifaceted populace of the capital. There's also some exoticizing of the dark-skinned characters; I couldn't decide if it was over-the-top and discomfiting because it was parodic, or if it was merely an embrace of the tropes prevalent in fiction of the period in which the story is set (which is emphatically not today, although it does come off as a fantastic turn on alternate history in some ways). Recommended.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Bad for the bank account

Jezebel's Fine Lines feature. Discussions of childhood favorites inevitably lead to purchases of omnibus editions.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Genre Ghettoization

Isaac at Throwing Things asks:
[W]hat is it that consigns a book to the genre-fiction ghetto?

I bought Jonathan Strange and Darkmans out of the General Fiction/Literature section ... but I picked up The Prestige and The Baroque Cycle in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I got World War Z in Horror, but A Brief History of the Dead in General Fiction/Literature. Yiddish Policemen's Union and Casual Rex/Anonymous Rex: GenFic/Lit; L.A. Confidential/Black Dahlia: Mystery. A Good and Happy Child: GenFic/Lit; The Terror: Horror.

I can't see anything that justifies this weird classification. ... There isn't any legitimate stylistic basis for the distinction, I think (though one could argue the point with certain books). And yet one group gets to call itself highbrow; the other is stuck with the lowbrow tag (and often, but not always, the genre packaging, with the geeky graphics and the garish colors and the embarassing title font). Who makes these decisions, and why?
I blame marketing.

Stuff I Hate, Episode 5893

Reading a blog, getting to the end of the page, and seeing these link options:
  • Previous Page

  • Next Page
Now does this mean "next page" as in deeper into the archive or as in forward in time? What is the chronological significance of "previous"? Let me suggest instead:
  • Older Posts

  • Newer Posts
Thank you.

La Wurtzel, Eternal Student

Steve sent this to me as an example of Erfolgtraurigkeit, but I'm less concerned with the justice or injustice of Elizabeth Wurtzel's return to the Op-Ed pages than I am with her bio:
Miss Wurtzel, a student at Yale Law School, is the author of "Prozac Nation" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
She was admitted to Yale Law in 2004 and was scheduled to graduate in January of this year. What gives? Did she flunk Civ Pro again?

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Things to be grateful for

Lily and Snape aren't like any of these cats.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Curricula

GMU Law School now requires two semesters of constitutional law, including a class focusing on "important original legal sources familiar to the founding generation, ranging from Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights to the Federalist (and Anti-Federalist) Papers, along with constitutional debates at the Philadelphia Convention and in the First Congress." Meanwhile, Harvard Law School requires zero courses in constitutional law.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Rational Basis Review and You

Jacob Levy's employer is having a "cut the red tape" contest: people who identify "a policy or process at McGill that has, or appears to have, no sound academic or administrative justification and that impairs service to current or prospective students" may win $100 (that's $99.45 for us Americans). How many other universities and institutions would benefit from similar contests?

Also Levy-related: I attended a roundtable discussion on his recent federalism scholarship and the subject of whether Americans feel strong loyalty to their states came up. Most people seemed to think that such affiliations were somewhat uncommon, although still prevalent in a few states (cough Texas cough). Megan's recent post questioning whether America should be one nation seems like a good example of the sentiments we were discussing.

UPDATE: For those of you interested in the federalism papers, they can be found here (marked "recent").

"[T]he public has a right to every man's evidence."

Or does it? Should the government be able to stop you from dampening or erasing traumatic memories? Should you be obligated to mitigate the damages flowing from a tort by doing so? I'm very interested to see where this is going.

Monday, February 11, 2008

50 Book Challenge #9: Because They Wanted To

Another volume of Gaitskill short stories. Several of them are about the same character, though, which I find annoying. When I get a collection of a dozen short stories I expect a dozen different tales. The writing is just as good as in her previous book, but the characters are a little stale. Recommended, but not fervently.

Visit Dubai!

Just make sure you don't have invisible quantities of marijuana on your clothing or person. The article also talks about one guy who was arrested for three seeds from a poppyseed roll he ate at Heathrow.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Comment Feed

There's been a lot of activity in the comments section lately. If you are interested in keeping tabs on PTN comments, you can subscribe to this feed:

http://haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=bamber

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Whatever happened to writing bad poetry and then burning it?

Words to strike fear into the stoutest heart: Modern Love College Essay Contest.

50 Book Challenge #8: The Accidental

The Accidental is one of the those "good for you" books that I've been meaning to read for a while. One of the main characters has my name, which was a little off-putting, but the second time I checked it out from the library I actually got around to reading it.

The writing is masterful. Smith alternates between characters, focusing on a different member of the family in every chapter, and exploring their relationship to Amber, a youngish woman who walks into their holiday rental one day and makes herself at home. At first, everyone thinks she's the guest of someone else; eventually, they find out she isn't but let her stay anyway. She seduces the son, breaks the daughter's obsessive connection with interposing her camcorder between herself and life, stymies the academic lothario father by ignoring him completely, and subtly provokes the mother until she's finally thrown out. But even after she leaves, she turns their life upside down one last time.

The characters are incredibly, even annoyingly realistic; the daughter is insufferable, the son a perfectly ignored and perfectly self-obsessed teenager, the father an exceptionally well-drawn exemplar of homo academicus lotharius, and the mother an aloof hack haunted by her hackdom. The writing style changes with each chapter, and the sonnet sequence in the middle of the book documenting the father's fixation on Amber is one of the best uses of poetry-as-prose I've seen since Darlington's Fall. There are many virtues to this novel. If, however, you allow silly questions like "why would anyone let a total stranger remain in their home?" to niggle at you, the book may prove somewhat unsatisfying. Recommended to lovers of fine writing.

Friday, February 08, 2008

Buying Books for Retirement

I don't understand people who stockpile books for retirement. This would only make sense if the following were true:

  • The book will not be available in the future (out of print, etc.). Fair point, but uncommon.

  • You think acquiring and storing unread books during your working life is more convenient than acquiring books on an as-needed basis in retirement. This is unlikely, since (1) you will be home all day for the UPS guy then and have unlimited time to potter in book shops; (2) you may also be paying higher rents now than you will then, if you currently live in someplace that's pricey due to good schools/proximity to the workplace. Storing stuff has costs.

  • You think the future value of the money you spend on books today is less than the cost of those books in the future. I don't anticipate book price increases beating market returns.

  • You like having lots of stuff.

To disabuse some mistaken visitors: I don't think that unread or bad books cannot touch a shelf and must be hidden in boxes under the bed. I just don't find it desirable to display them on more prominent shelves. I also don't have a problem with having a few unread books in the queue; I do think it is a waste of space and money to buy so many books that you will definitely not read them all. My scorn and distaste really are only aimed at people who buy books because they like to be perceived as the sort of person who has a lot of books.

This reminds me: I need to put up or shut up re: that D.H. Lawrence and the biography of Learned Hand.

Not quite book review: For Us, The Living

I read a lot of Heinlein as a teen, like many SF/F nerdlings. He was entertaining, but the creepy sexual stereotypes eventually got to me and I moved on to better things. I was, however, curious about the "lost Heinlein novel" that was published a couple of years ago and checked it out of the library* and gave it a go.

First things: the foreword. It's by Spider Robinson, and is one of the most fawning pieces of hagiography I've ever read. We are told that the ideas within are "profound" and that the piece has a romantic air of saudade. Robert A. Heinlein is referred to as "RAH," which isn't new but never fails to weird me out; "-rah" is Lapine for "Lord," and seeing RAH on the page comes off as a particularly nerdy form of "YHWH." I was cringing by the end of the foreword. Nothing, not least a first novel by a genre author, could live up to that sell.

And, of course, it doesn't. Did you find Ayn Rand insufficiently didactic? Do you enjoy reading completely illiterate economic theories spouted from the mouths of cardboard cutouts? Does the idea of reading alternate history by someone with no sense of history appeal? Then this book is for you. As a novel, it fails on every level: it has no real characters, almost no plot, and a completely unconvincing setting. The writing is pedestrian and consists mostly of monologues. The future society described is completely implausible to anyone with the least knowledge of economics, physics, or psychology.

I can't count this for the 50 Book Challenge because I didn't finish it. I do, however, wish to warn others.

* Because I suspected it might not be very good, being an unpublished SF manuscript by someone who published a lot of stuff, some of it dreck. Not shelfworthy!

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Ezra Klein, Shameless Poseur.

Aspirational bookshelves are the devil's work. This is just wrong:
Bookshelves are not for displaying books you've read -- those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I'm pretty sure that's what a bookshelf is there to prove.
Prove to whom? People you want to delude into thinking you are well-read instead of merely glib? At least put a copy of this out to inoculate yourself from charges of deceit and pretention. I tend to agree with the commenter who inquires:
Who has sufficient disposable income to buy significant numbers of books and not read them? Me, I only ever buy books I'm pretty sure I'm going to read.
They must be paying liberal journalist/bloggers better than I thought. A few years down the line, we'll have a Sex & the City: Beltway Edition scene, in which the wonkish blogger realizes that he doesn't have money for a down payment on one of those trendy Green Line condos because he has sunk thousands of dollars into books he's never even read. At least Carrie got some wear out of her Manolos.

I stand by my shelfworthiness theory.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Erfolgtraurigkeit Again

Modern Love columnists get book deals.

Gadget paralysis

My cell phone, iPod, and laptop are almost five years old. They still function (the phone less well; if you call me and don't hear back, it's because my phone sometimes sits on voicemails for a couple of days before telling me about them). At some point I'm going to need replacements for them. But what to buy? There are so many combinations of items that could provide the desired voice/photo/music/web browsing functions. Should I buy another large laptop and get a small device for mobile web browsing or go for an ultraportable laptop? Is Vista that evil? Should I buck the lessons of Steve's experience and buy an Apple? When is Spore coming out and what are the hardware specs? Do I want an iPhone (would necessitate switching providers, and probably be a giant hassle if I wanted to keep my 617 number) or another Verizon phone? What about a Kindle? An iPod Touch, although its browsing is limited to WiFi? Should I carry my new camera around everywhere and risk breakage or get a cell phone with a decent camera? I am waiting for second generation versions of so many products that it's making me antsy.

Super Duper Tuesday

Observation from Steve: Doesn't McCain's victory over Romney indicate that the justifications for McCain-Feingold were wrong?

Or does it, per cd's theory, just show that McCain's not a preppy?

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Everybody panic!

Lady lawyers: beware of stressorexia.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Who gets busted by public nudity laws?

A friend sent me this link, which was almost disgusting enough to make me change my mind about certain regulations. Most of the extremely objectionable posts actually describe battery, however, which would still be illegal even if the strict Millian line were made law.

The link is not safe for work, or, really, anywhere.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Summer Associate Email Drama

Which firm hired this dork?

50 Book Challenge #7: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

This is a frivolous book strewn with failed attempts at pathos. In a proactive bit of metacriticism, one character intones that our protagonist sounds less like a real person than a cheap trick of fiction. He is, unfortunately, correct. The book is most amusing when it mocks actual writers or literary phenomena through thinly veiled caricature and least successful in its attempts to involve us in the emotional lives of the protagonist and his family. Perfect for airplanes or other time-killing intervals but not shelfworthy.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Medical note

The curative powers of chicken noodle soup are seriously undermined if you slosh boiling hot broth all over your hand.