I know, nobody cares.

But dammit, if a man can't complain in his blog, where CAN he complain?

After swearing I'd cut back to two fantasy football leagues this fall, I got suckered into joining a third at my workplace, which has served to further distract me, and that distraction is apparent in my performance.  Here's how things shake out:

The Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen - My first league, formed with a bunch of my old CHHS buddies back in 2001, is really almost as much of a role-playing game or piece of performance art than a fantasy league, but it's a continuing source of entertainment.  This year I've been serving as interim commissioner as well as owner, which has required me to spend a bit more time dealing with the nuts and bolts of the thing than with my usual flights of fancy, but I've still managed to do at least a couple of smart things with my team, the Fighting Coelacanths.  Smart Things no.s 1 and 2 came in the first rounds of the draft, when I picked up Clinton Portis (drafting 9th) and Tony Romo.  Unfortunately, my next smart thing didn't happen until round 8, when I picked up Jay Cutler, and that was after doing several not-so-smart things, the worst of which was tapping Torry Holt in round 3.  With a few judicious moves on the waiver wire (acquiring Kevin Walter and the Titans defense), I've at least kept my squad mediocre, and Cutler's performance enabled me to package Romo in a deal for an elite tight end (Jason Witten).  Thus, the Canths are in the playoffs, but they're 5-7, and they'll face a ten-win team team in the first round.  I've never yet won a FLOGG title, and this year it looks as though I'll continue that streak.

Number Crushers - Each team has twenty-five players, including individual defenders, and must start twenty of them: 2 QB, 3 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 2 RB/WR flex, 1 TE/WR flex, 2 PK, 2 DL, 2 DB, and two flex defenders.  Scores are typically in the 300s, since EVERY statistic counts--yards gained, passes caught, tackles made, fumbles lost, passes tipped, punts returned, etc.  In most years I've wisely picked up an elite QB in the early rounds, but this year I picked 9th, and the best ones were already gone, so I chose to go with an elite WR instead: Randy Moss.  For the fourteen seconds before Tom Brady destroyed his knee, Moss looked like a good pick, but after that, he was just another receiver.  Worse, my 2nd and 3rd-round picks, Joseph Addai and Steven Jackson, have been huge disappointments all season, and other draft picks including Steve Smith and Matt Schaub have missed significant chunks of time due to injury and/or suspension.  Only 4th-round pick Brett Favre has done anything close to what I'd hoped, which is one reason why the Scrub Jays squad is currently 3-9 and languishing in 9th place, having been eliminated from the playoffs last week.  This is especially disappointing given that I've been VERY successful in the NC league recently, winning the title in 2005 and losing the title game in 2006 and 2007.  On the plus side, I get a good draft position for 2009--and you'd better believe I'm grabbing a good QB first thing.

Woodberry Forest - A simple, traditional league thrown together at my workplace because several of my co-workers (including at least one of our football coaches) admitted they'd never played fantasy before.  With only eight teams, we've all got great personnel--well, most of us do--and the games have generally been close, which is why my Green Hornets are 6-6.  They're in fourth place, shooting for the final playoff spot, and with games against the fifth-place team this week and the last-place team next week, it's a shot they can make.  Helped by stellar QB play from Peyton Manning and Kurt Warner, plus strong defense from the Titans and solid RB work from Adrian Peterson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Steve Slaton, they've got a good chance of finishing the season well.  Here's hoping.

Next week: an update on the interesting things I've discovered in my Kleenex after sneezing.  Be here!


8:57 AM

On my classroom wall is a world map, and it's one that has occasioned commentary from a number of viewers because, as they put it, "It looks wrong."  It's this--the Peters Projection World Map:
















And of course, it IS wrong, because it's a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional object: the globe.  You can't turn a curved map into a flat map without distorting something--either the shape of the continents or the size of them.  The most familiar map projection, the Mercator projection, distorts their relative sizes in order to preserve their shapes, which is why the island of Greenland looks far larger than the continent of Australia.  Anything close to the poles looks bigger than it really is, while anything close to the equator looks smaller. 

Unfortunately, the practical reason for the Mercator projection--preserving the shapes of the landmasses it delineates--is accompanied by unintended consequences: making certain places on the globe look bigger and more important, while others appear smaller and less significant.  And since the bigger places include northern Europe and North America, while the smaller places include Africa, India, and Latin America, you can sort of understand why a person of African, Asian, or Hispanic origin might view using the Mercator projection as a political decision, not just a cartographic one.

That's one reason I use the Peters projection, which preserves size at the expense of shape.  Anything near the poles is flattened out horizontally, while anything near the equator is stretched vertically, but you can tell at a glance that Australia is a continent and Greenland is only a big island, and that Europe is a tiny place in comparison to the massive expanse of Africa.  The Peters projection forces the viewer to remember that a map is not the territory it shows.  A map is only a human tool for understanding reality, not the reality itself.  The tools we choose to use, however, do have an effect on our understanding; you've all heard about the viewpoint of a carpenter whose only tool is a hammer.

And speaking of hammers, one of them is famously wielded by a guy from northern Europe, the Norse thunder god Thor.  In his comic-book incarnation, the Mighty Thor is a member of the Avengers, Marvel's super-team supreme, alongside Iron Man, Captain America, and dozens of others.  Their compatriots over at DC Comics are of course the Justice League of America, which includes Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and other heroes, and about five years ago, the two rival publishers decided to let the two teams do what fanboys have been praying for since they were tiny little fantoddlers: beat the crap out of each other.

Well, it wasn't quite that blatant.  But the issue of whether Superman could beat up Thor has been a long-standing and insoluble argument in fandom for decades, the four-color equivalent of "Did Adam have a navel?" So long as they appeared in books from different companies, there was no way to settle it, but in 2003, two grown-up fanboys were finally given the task of creating a comic in which the two could meet, along with all their teammates, and see who was stronger than whom.  Writer Kurt Busiek (best known as the creator of Marvels and the PoMo superhero title Astro City) and artist George Perez (the affable fan-favorite penciller of everything from Teen Titans to Wonder Woman to The Avengers) were given this plum assignment, and Busiek cemented his fanboy cred by borrowing the plot of the legendary Steve Englehart Avengers/Defenders crossover from the mid-70s, but that's not important right now.

What's important is what I noticed when looking at the cover of the first issue this morning:



(If you don't know all the characters here, let me help: in the back row is Thor, with Iron Man to his right.  In the middle row is Superman, with Batman to his right and the winsome Wasp hovering between them.  In front of them is Wonder Woman, with Captain America standing at the bottom right and the Atom standing on Cap's shoulder.

The cover wraps around to the back, though you can't see it here, and features JLA members Plastic Man, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter, as well as veteran Avengers the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Yellowjacket, Quicksilver, She-Hulk, and Hawkeye, plus a few also-rans like Warbird and Jack of Hearts.)















What I noticed is that the above cover is in its way a tights-clad version of the Mercator projection.

You may not be able to see it in the above scan, and you certainly can't see it on the back cover unless you buy it, but there's something statistically startling about the assemblage of heroes: of the twenty-two people on the cover, exactly ONE has brown eyes.  He's also the only African-American.  He's the lesser-known Marvel hero Triathlon, who was on the team for a few years, but who's unlikely to appear in the upcoming Avengers movie.

But seriously, think about this:  in both the Marvel and DC universes, the greatest heroes are all blue-eyed.  With most of them it's obvious: Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash and Aquaman all keep their baby-blues visible to the world, as do Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver.  Batman's eyes are usually shown as white slits, but under that cowl, Bruce Wayne is blue-eyed.  Same with the eyes inside Tony Stark's Iron Man helmet.  A few heroes manage to have green eyes--unsurprisingly, Green Lantern and She-Hulk do--and the Scarlet Witch is shown with green eyes on Perez's cover, though her wiki article at Marvel.com lists her eye color as blue.  The only heroes without light eyes on this cover are inhuman--the red-eyed Martian Manhunter and the android Vision, whose eyes are red but usually shown as black--or dark-skinned.

And it's not just the Avengers and the JLA, either.  The Fantastic Four features a pair of blue-eyed blonde siblings and Ben Grimm, a/k/a "the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing."  The Teen Titans are crawling with blue-eyed (Kid Flash, Robin/Nightwing, Wonder Girl, Raven) or green-eyed (Beast Boy/Changeling, Starfire) members.  Daredevil, Elektra, and the Black Widow are all blue-eyed. The X-Men have mutants with eyes of various weird shades (glowing red for Cyclops, glowing yellow for Nightcrawler, frequently white for Colossus and Storm), but the ones with human eyes (Professor X, Wolverine, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, ) almost invariably have blue or green ones.



11:36 AM

I saw the new Bond the other day.  Not the worst thing ever committed to film, but a definite come-down from the tense and fascinating Casino Royale.

Also, they made a terrible mistake by not using this as the theme song.


11:30 AM

I am in a really good mood.  The country voted for Obama.  Virginia voted for Obama.  North Carolina voted for Obama.

But I think this anonymously posted series of pictures may sum up my mood better than anything else I've seen:




1:52 PM

This afternoon I volunteered to drive some of our students to our tiny polling place, which is a Methodist church located near... um... not near a doggone thing, honestly.  There's another church--Baptist, I think--and some farmhouses within sight, but otherwise it's just central Virginia farmland.

But out front there was a table with three Obama volunteers, one of them an attorney. He said he was one of the 4000 attorneys who'd volunteered to man Virginia's 2500 polling places in case any voters had trouble getting their ballots cast.  That kind of feet-on-the-ground action is one of the big reasons this campaign has gone so well, and it gives me hope that the next four years can be operated with the same kind of planning and attention to detail.

The best part of the trip: the three students in my car were from New Jersey and California, meaning their votes here in the Virginia battleground will be far more meaningful than in their solid-blue home states.  And one of them was turning eighteen today, inaugurating his franchise in a big way.  I'm stupidly proud of my minor role in getting even one Obama voter to the polling place, but I suppose that's the point: I AM proud of it.  I'm proud of the poll workers, and those volunteers, and those attorneys, and every person in America who's getting up and going to the polls to help get this country back on the rails and moving forward.  I don't look forward to everything that's going to happen in the next few years, but I'm overjoyed to be supporting a candidate who not only believes that we CAN do something about our problems, but actually lays out the groundwork on getting it done.

For most of my life, government has been the problem; today, somewhere on a winding country road under a grey sky and blowing autumn leaves, I started to remember that government can be part of the solution.  If we want it to be.


1:26 PM

I think a lot of people would view the election as a baseball game, with Obama ahead and pitching well to protect his lead, while McCain is desperately swinging at the fences, knowing he's got to hit a homer to win--and swinging so hard that he can't actually put any men on base first.

But I'm not really a baseball geek.  I'm a different kettle of geek altogether, as you may have realized by now, so I think there's a better metaphor for this election.  To wit:

You may have seen this picture of Barack Obama:





















You may also have heard his crack about being sent here by his father Jor-El to save the earth, but that's not the funny bit.  The funny bit is that the right wing of the country, despite all their sarcastic cracks about "Messiah" this and "Chosen One" that, are apparently convinced that he really IS Superman.  It's the only thing that explains their strategy.

Instead of challenging Obama directly, trying to stop him from doing what he's doing, one thing at a time, the right-wing smear machine is spending its time and energy desperately searching for some magical anti-Obama substance that will destroy him altogether.  Sometimes the substance is associated with Obama (Wright, Ayers, Khalidi), or sometimes with a semantic issue ("really proud of America," "spread the wealth," etc.), but it's never an attempt to stop what he's doing--it's just an attempt to say "A man who would associate with/say _____ is unfit for the White House!"  They don't want to BEAT Obama--they don't know how.  They just want to find his kryptonite.

And so far, I've got to say the continuing attempts to find Obama's kryptonite are getting pretty comical. They're SURE that if they can just find that one weakness, the one thing that will show everyone he's not the hero we imagine, he'll turn green and drop down dead in front of everybody.

Problem is, Obama is not the hero THEY imagine.  He's not Superman at all.

Obama is Batman.

Think about it.  He lost a parent early in life... he dedicated himself to serving the community and spent years in training... he relies on detective skills, superior planning, and quick thinking to gain advantage over his foes... and his appearance strikes terror into the hearts of criminals (a superstitious, cowardly lot.)

Oh, and let's not overlook the prominent ears.

Also, I'm pretty sure one classic Batman line applies pretty directly to his relationship with the RWSM:



He's their worst nightmare.


7:57 AM

Not an entirely accurate title--we're not really on a "break" in any meaningful sense of the word--but it's the title of one of my favorite Beach Boys tunes, an instrumental subtitled "The Woody Woodpecker Symphony" from their notoriously drug-addled follow-up to Pet Sounds, the semi-legendary Smiley Smile.

But it does signify an important moment in our mental calendar: Thing Two has returned from boarding school for the weekend.  Granted, that weekend didn't begin until 1:00 Saturday, after he'd gotten his tie cut off in the annual ceremony of pseudo-circumcision that turns New Boys into ordinary students, and it will end when we drop him off at his play rehearsal at 2:30 this afternoon, but we've had him in the house, with the dog, for the last twenty-odd hours, which has been a big relief to everyone.  WFS likes parents to give their sons a chance to achieve some self-reliance during the early days of Year One, so Kelly and I have tried hard--very hard--to provide him the necessary space.  We've talked with him via email and occasionally dropped off things for him in his room, but for the most part, we've tried to behave as though we weren't living a mere mile and a half from his dorm.

It wasn't terribly easy to do.

But now we don't have to do it any more.  We can take him off campus for a meal once in a while, get his laundry done from time to time, and chat with him in the hallways without embarrassment.  He can come home and visit the dog once in a while, which may keep him (the dog) from being quite so psychotic. Last night we went to Target to buy a new tie, and we ended up getting a new hat and a small stuffed animal "Grue" figure (the clerk called it "Domo," but he's calling it "Grue") as well.  We ate at Chick-Fil-A at his request, then came home and watched several episodes of Veronica Mars.  A nice, normal weekend, the first we've had in six weeks. That was a welcome break.

And today the air is crisp, the sky is a crystalline blue, the Norway maple in the back yard is waving yellow leaves in the breeze, and I've got a large mug of French vanilla coffee beside me as I type.  If it weren't for the enormous pile of papers burning a hole in my backpack, I'd feel almost relaxed again.


8:10 AM

*I've got a real fondness for Philip Glass's soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi, but whenever I play it with someone else in the room, I worry that I'm driving them bats.  To me the interplay of triplets and sixes is hypnotic and fascinating--I could literally listen to it for hours--but I know how bored I sometimes get with long repetitive tunes by other artists (example: Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street," which is a single lovely melodic line driven relentlessly into the ground), so surely there's no way a normal human being could handle all this three-against-two-into-six-against-four organ-choir-brass thing.  Right?

*I remain optimistic about an Obama victory in November.  My main hope, aside from that basic non-negotiable hope, is that the margin of victory is large enough to give the Republicans a Moment of Clarity.  That would force them to acknowledge that the neocons, greedheads, and religious extremists who seized control of the party some years back no longer provide viable options for governing.  I'm also hoping that the Democrats are inspired by this victory to work on governing the country, rather than on simply blaming the Republicans for their failure to do so.  And while I'm at it, I'd like a pony.

*Thing One's fall whirl continues unabated, much like my own.  Marching band is eating his afternoons and weekends, calculus is eating his brain, and he's left with little more to do than issue occasional book reviews (on Wuthering Heights: "It was really interesting, but really boring at the same time.") and power down frightening amounts of cereal.  (The current favorite: Honey Bunches of Oats Just Bunches!, which he seems unwilling to admit is really just granola.)

*The big dogwood in our back yard is kicking ASS in the berry production department this fall; yes, the leaves are turning red, but the majority of the scarlet out back is coming from berries.  If the damn things were edible, we'd be set for the entire winter.

*Word is that Berke Breathed is retiring his third and latest vehicle for his favorite penguin, the Sunday-only strip Opus.  I can't say I'll miss it, though it does appear in the WashPost.  But I'm sad to say that I'm not really following ANY comic strip in the newspaper at the moment--I'm not reading the newspaper.  I flirted with it for a while over the summer, but now that we've got broadband at the house, I'm back to getting most of my news online, and there are only three strips I feel the need to download regularly: Doonesbury, which I check out just about daily at www.slate.com ; This Modern World, created by the brilliantly snarky Tom Tomorrow, every week; and Tim Kreider's hilarious and inimitable weekly strip The Pain--When Will It End?, which is like a bracing dip in the river of pure bile spewing from the zombie-gnawed corpse of Jonathan Swift.  All in all, though, I don't really miss the gag-a-day strips on which I cut my cultural teeth.  Maybe it's age.  Maybe it's the general decline of the newspaper strip.  Maybe it's the fact that most papers print them at roughly the size of a fortune cookie slip.  But wherever Breathed goes with Opus now, I can't help but wish he'd been satisfied with the first ending he wrote for his strip: the lovely, haunting image of Opus walking into the emptiness of the comics page with the colors of Bloom County fading into nothingness.

*Speaking of Tim Kreider, I should note that, in addition to being a mean cross-hatching fool when it comes to the pen-and-ink marvels of his strip, he's also a ridiculously nice guy.  Last January, longtime fan Thing Two decided to write him an email praising his work, admitting in it that he was only fourteen, but that he still enjoyed Kreider's black humor and choice use of profanity; I believe his exact words were "You have fucked up my life in the greatest way possible." Kreider responded not only with a gracious note of encouragement (you can see it in the January letters archive at www.thepaincomics.com ) but with an original drawing--which I promise I will someday scan, once I learn how to use a scanner, so that the world can enjoy the hilarity.  Regardless, Tim K is proven thrice over to be one of the good ones.  Buy his stuff.

*We're going to a concert!  At least we're PLANNING to go to one, assuming we can get tickets to Billy Bragg's upcoming Charlottesville show.  I haven't seen BB since the Worker's Playtime tour back in '89, and it was a delightful experience.  The three highlights:  1) Billy calling his cohort Wiggy onto the stage by bashing out a huge G-major power chord and intoning a la Bowie: "Wiggy plaaaaaaayed... guiiiiiiii-taaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!" 2) Billy demonstrating how much wasteful packaging there was in the then-relatively-new CD longbox package by tearing one apart (first shrink wrap, then cardboard longbox, then shrink wrap around the jewel box, then the jewel box itself, and finally the actual disc on which the music was recorded) and leaving a small mountain of consumer waste at his feet, and 3) Billy reminiscing about a recent gig in West Virginia, when he'd played with Robyn Hitchcock and R.E.M. on the state's official "R.E.M. Day"; said Billy, "It's a good thing it wasn't Robyn Hitchcock Day, or there would probably have been a rain of lobsters or something."

*North Carolina's football team is ranked #22 and plays Notre Dame on Saturday.  I simply don't know how to handle these concepts.  Are the end times upon us?

*On Saturday morning, well before the crack of dawn, Thing Two will make his way south along with his entire high-school class for a four-day Outward Bound course in North Carolina's Linville Gorge.  He's got gloves, long underwear, a woolly hat, and a fleece jacket if the weather's cold, as well as a non-cotton t-shirt and shorts if the weather's warm.  And boots--broken in by hiking around campus and up Old Rag. I had a blast on my OB course back in the summer of '05--here's hoping his is half as good for him.


8:02 PM

OK, it was more like "When well-known people in suits recite talking points that vaguely disagree," but even so, I couldn't NOT watch the Biden vs. Palin debate tonight.  I'm a speech teacher, for pete's sake.

Palin did very well, I thought.  She looked composed and attractive, but the slightly severe black suit kept her from appearing too much like the "Caribou Barbie" she's been accused of being.  She looked at the camera a lot, which I would expect a former sports anchor to do. (I liked the shout-out to the third-grade class back home, but couldn't she have updated us on the score of the Phillies game?)

Somewhat disappointingly, there were none of the disastrous failures she's shown in her interviews--no awful admissions of ignorance, no problems with going blank on questions.  Of course, she didn't bother answering several questions, preferring instead to launch into comments about subjects she'd obviously prepared for, such as energy policy.  She did mangle a few lines:  "There's a toxic mess on Main Street affecting Wall Street," for example, or "I'm not one to attribute every man-made activity to climate change," which is almost exactly what she told Katie Couric, and it didn't make sense the first time, either.

Oh, and while "McLellan" is indeed the name of a general in the United States Army, as Palin noted, he is no longer on active dity, as he was fired by Abraham Lincoln for failing to assault the Confederate Army with sufficient vigor.  His statements on the current situation in Afghanistan (once they arrive via Ouija Board) should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

Especially in the early going, Palin looked almost unwilling to answer a question directly.  Later she was better about that, but her chirpy folksiness got a little twee at times; I was halfway expecting her to invite Biden over for some rhubarb pie and a tall glass of lemonade after he and the rest of the menfolk finished raising the barn.

I'm also still trying to figure out how the McCain-Palin ticket will be about change and reform without looking at the past.  Especially when she said several times that there have been blunders in the past and that they will learn from those blunders.  Especially when she kept referring to McCain's track record, which was established, I'm pretty sure, in the past.

Most alarming answer: that Palin would seek to expand the VP's power.  I think we're far enough down Dick Cheney Boulevard already, thanks.

Most pleasantly surprising answer: that Palin supports allowing equal visitation rights and contract protection for same-sex partners as well as opposite-sex partners.  It's not full recognition of gay marriage, but for someone on the religious right, it's at least a start.

Biden, meanwhile, was almost entirely playing defense here, trying to respond only to the more egregious falsehoods, otherwise sticking to the talking points.  He wouldn't let Palin out-middle-class him, that's for sure.  He got in one good dig--"the ultimate bridge to nowhere"--but was for the most part thinking strategically: it's our election to lose, he seemed to be repeating to himself, so let's not lose it tonight.

He didn't rise to the bait when Palin said the Obama plan for Iraq was "a white flag."  He rebutted the claim that Obama voted against funding the troops, but Biden showed admirable discipline on several occasions when I can only imagine a lot of pols--John McCain, for one--meeting perceived insults with anger or sarcasm.

As a result, he came off as a bit dull.  Interested in the details, professional, confident, and calm, but dull.  Then again, calm, confident detail-oriented professionalism has worked well for his running mate, so maybe it'll work for Biden, too.

He also carefully referred to Palin as "Governor" wherever possible, while calling McCain "John" wherever possible, avoiding the trap of seeming condescending to her, but also giving himself the appearance of having a strong disagreement with a dear friend on most policy.

All in all, I'd rate it as a solid base hit for Palin, as I thought last week's presidential debate was a hit for McCain.  Unfortunately, their campaign right now needs more than just hits--they need home runs, or egregious errors on the part of Obama and Biden, and so far, they're not getting what they need.  I'm satisfied with Biden's performance tonight; he did a very good job of maintaining plate discipline, and that may be what wins the game in the long run.

Final thoughts:

1) On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan said he thought Palin had "mopped the floor" with Biden, and that she was an exciting and attractive" candidate.  Rachel Maddows deadpanned, "So we have boring and right versus exciting and wrong."

2) Palin said "Ahmadenijad" repeatedly without any of the trouble her running mate had; is it so bad for me to want her to stop saying "nucular"?

8:57 PM

I think this may be the longest blank spot between posts ever recorded in this journal.  Six and a half years, and I think I've managed to post at least once a fortnight.  What caused this incredible outage?

Well, I won't deny that the opening of school was a big part of the issue, not to mention Thing Two's massive birthday party and ensuing packing up to go to school at Woodberry.  Yes, he's a New Boy now, and our lives haven't quite settled into a recognizable pattern with him gone, but at least we see him occasionally.  (We're trying not to hover, especially since new boys aren't supposed to come home with their folks until Parents' Weekend in October.)

And I've had a significant change in my duties, which has kept me busy: I'm no longer assisting the Rapidan program with hiking, kayaking, and rock climbing, but have instead been assigned to help coach the Junior Orange soccer team, a group of 16 freshmen and sophomores, four or five of whom are injured on any given day.  We had our first game today--a 5-1 loss to Blue Ridge School--but showed some promise against a superior (and bigger and older) team.

But I suppose the big reason is the simplest: lousy internet connections.  We got through July and August with no net access at home, period, by heading into town to use the coffee shop's wi-fi, or by heading to campus to use the T-1 line there.  We got a dial-up connection at the house just as school started, but of course that happened right when I suddenly became too busy to post, and with a 28.8 kps connection rate, I wasn't getting much of anything posted... at least not very quickly.

Today, however, we have cause to celebrate: the school has given us.... BROADBAND!

Yes, we have 54 megs per second, and we're not afraid to use it!  MWOO HOO HA HA HA HA HA!

So: expect some posting again.  When I have news.  And probably when I don't.

7:58 PM