animation means moving! (and Eddy Lamarr?)

It's a geek tragedy when you're late to a festival of this type of Japanese animation.

Manga, says the contestant.

Manga or anime, yes, says Alex Trebek.

But manga are comic books or graphic novels. They're not animation!

Alex has been doing that a lot, lately - giving credit to the wrong answer. (Equating "manager" with "general manager" of a baseball team was another.)

(ps - what's with Alex pronouncing "Hedy Lamarr" as "Eddy"? I've never heard that before. I presume it's the French way, but did she?)

Cultural references that don't quite work

Someone on CNN asked whether ricin was dangerous. The person he was talking to said that, yes, it was dangerous, but only in specific ways. And that unless you were in "a James Bond scenario" in which someone was to put ricin on a sharpened umbrella and stab you with it, you didn't need to worry about contact.

Well, first of all: that happened. Except it was the KGB who did it. (They were so creative ... still are, I guess.)

But second: "a James Bond scenario"? That means insanely complicated fiction. It doesn't mean fact.

(SIC!)

One of my coworkers just reported a quote from CNN, referring to Michael Xue. ABC (er, Australian Broadcasting Company, not the US's ABC) said:

Xue was captured in the town of Chamblee, Georgia this morning after local Chinese-American residents of an apartment block overpowered him and tied him up with his own trousers.

But CNN said "he was found bound and tied."

Jim was fit to be (bound and) tied.

But, unfortunately for Jim, that collocation is all over the Internet, even though if you think about it it doesn't make much sense. Which was Jim's problem. He even looked over at the tv (he was, of course, at the Giant Wall O' TVs) that had the closed captioning running and was disappointed to see "bound and tied" there, too.

Which led us to wonder how long you'd last if you were doing the CC feed and started putting in (sic) as needed?

Well, we laughed like crazy. Maybe you had to be here. Maybe we are. Crazy, I mean.

Now that's a lie-in

It's leap day today. Back when Great Britain and its colonies finally adopted the Gregorian calendar (it was resisted as a papal plot to steal some of people's lives) in 1752, many people lamented the "loss" of eleven days - George Washington certainly did. But Ben Franklin welcomed it: "What an indulgence is here, for those who love their pillow, to lie down in peace on the second of this month and not awake till the morning of the fourteenth."

Skeptics Circle

The Leap Year Skeptics Circle is up at the Conspiracy Factory. The Master is there, and good skeptical blogging. Check it out.

Iraq (remember it?): Expertise and Credibility

In the recent Democratic debate, "moderator" Brian Williams touted McCain's "vast foreign policy expertise and credibility on national security" as compared to Obama's lack thereof. A point to ponder, Mr Williams:

McCain on Iraq:

(11/29/02) "We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we're not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies. ... I don't think it's, quote, 'easy,' but I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time."

(3/24/03) "we will be welcomed as liberators."

Obama on Iraq:

(10/2/02) "But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al-Qaeda."

Two and Traces

Cassini called this one "Pan in the Fast Lane". We see here Pan in the Encke Gap - inside the rings - and Atlas in the broad space between the A ring (which contains the Encke Gap) and the wispy F ring. The F ring looks so ragged because Prometheus has just gone by, leaving turbulence in its wake. Because Pan is around 2500 miles closer (some 4000 km) to Saturn than Atlas, its orbit is shorter and thus it constantly overtakes and passes its slightly larger sibling.

Pan is closest in, so it laps all the moons, not just Atlas. Think of runners on a track - no staggered start or changing lanes here.


As always, see the Cassini-Huygens site for details.

Russ Feingold has a debate - and a request

I'm posting an email I got today from the Progressive Patriot Fund. This stuff's important. Bush doesn't leave for 11 months.

You may have heard that after months of filibustering the Senate agreed yesterday, on a 70-24 vote, to have a debate on the Feingold-Reid bill which uses Congress's "power of the purse" to safely redeploy our troops out of Iraq. Now to be clear, Republicans agreed to have this debate because they're under the false impression that Democrats may be embarrassed to debate the war in Iraq.

I disagree, and so do the vast majority of the American people.


Add your name to thousands of others, and get your friends and family to join us in supporting Feingold-Reid.

I'm pleased the Senate has decided to address Iraq and how our continued military involvement there is distracting us from defeating the global terrorist threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates. But according to at least one news report this morning, some senators, even Democratic senators, don't agree.

According to the story, one senator has called the Iraq debate "a waste of time." Another called the debate a "diversion." Yet another said that Feingold-Reid was "too restrictive." And all of these are quotes from Democratic members.

We must keep up the pressure - help push this issue forward.

The American people demand a debate, and thanks to your support, we've moved the ball a long way since first introducing this legislation last year. We must continue to work together in our combined effort to end one of the biggest mistakes in our country's history.

There will now be up to 30 hours of debate on this bill and it's up to each and every one of us to make sure Republicans and Democrats in the Senate feel the heat.

Add your name to thousands of others, and get your friends and family to join us in supporting Feingold-Reid.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Sincerely,






Russ Feingold
United States Senator
Honorary Chair, Progressive Patriots Fund

Drawing a line

From the BBC's coverage of the debate:

Mr Obama sought to draw a line, however, under the appearance of a controversial photograph of him wearing traditional Somali robes during a visit to Kenya in 2006.

Really? Because I thought he was trying to stop talking about it.

Oh. Wait. So did they:

He said he believed Mrs Clinton when she said she did not know where the photo had come from.

"Draw a line under" must mean something different to them. To me it means "emphasize", and can be collapsed into the verb "underline", as he "he underlined the importance of..."

A little Googling confirms that Brits use this to mean "put an end to" and Americans use it to mean "emphasize". (Occasionally "draw a line in the sand" shoves its way in to confuse everybody, but that's a very different expression.)

Does this Brit use come from book-keeping? Anybody know?

Carnival of the Liberals

The Carnival of the Liberals is up at The Largest Minority. This edition, #59, is called Liberalism at its Liberalist. I'll let Manila Ryce explain it himself:

Before we get started, allow me to briefly explain the content of this particular carnival. As you can imagine, during this election season I received many well-written posts about why Hillary sucks and why Obama sucks. Being the great unifying force that I am, I must insist that we find some common ground in agreeing that they both suck, and that no real liberal is honestly happy with the conservative platform of either senator. This article on election madness is a must read.

Rather than regurgitate the hollow arguments of party leaders and pundits, the posts below focus on real liberal issues. No disrespect is intended towards anyone, but lets remember that this is the “Carnival of the Liberals”, and not simply the “Carnival of the Democrats”.

Good stuff. Check it out - ten excellent liberal (and excellently liberal) posts.

More news should be written like this

Steve Rubenstein at SF Gate has a brilliant article up called "New threat to our way of life: giant pythons":

In addition to everything else to worry about, now comes the Burmese python.

The giant snakes are slithering from Florida toward the Bay Area, very slowly to be sure, but inexorably. And they can strangle and eat an entire alligator.

The U.S. Geological Survey released a map Wednesday showing that the Bay Area has comfortable climatic conditions for the python. It also said the reptile, which prefers to swallow its prey in one gulp, is "highly adaptable to new environments" and cannot be stopped.

The snakes weigh up to 250 pounds and slither at a rate of 20 miles per month, according to USGS zoologist Gordon Rodda. They are not staying put. In fact, one of them has already slithered about 100 miles toward San Francisco.

"We have not yet identified something that would stop their spreading to the Bay Area," Rodda said.

If pet pythons were introduced into the wild in California by irresponsible pet owners, as happened in Florida, they could become established here even faster, without need of a cross-country journey.

At 20 miles a month, a determined Burmese python from Florida could arrive in San Francisco as early as August 2020.

"It would be exceptional for one animal to be that unidirectional in its movement, but it's mathematically possible," Rodda said. ...

The snake's cross-country crawl would be made easier by the large population of beavers along the way, Rodda said.

"Beavers would be a very tasty treat for them," Rodda said. "No beaver would be safe from a python."

The natural enemies of the python are lions, tigers and other large cats. There are few free-roaming African lions and tigers between Florida and San Francisco, the geological survey said. And the absence of alligators outside Florida can only help the snakes on their journey west, although it's a complicated relationship - while pythons eat alligators, alligators also eat pythons.

"A large alligator will eat a small python," Rodda said. "But we are not recommending you import alligators into California. That would not be a good idea."

Seriously. Read the whole article. It's brilliant.

And kudos to Gordon Rodda for answering those questions in the first place.

What's going on in Cleveland? And why should you care?

What's going on in Ohio? Dennis Kucinich was forced to call off his increasingly marginalized (more on that in a minute) presidential campaign to focus on his congressional primary. A heavy-hitting challenger, Councilman Joe Cimperman, showed up and began a serious run, although incumbent congressmen in a "safe district" like the Ohio 10th, rarely lose their seats. Kucinich was being outspent 5-to-1, and it didn't take long for people to start to wonder where Cimperman's support was coming from.

Joe Queenan of the UK newspaper The Guardian wrote a couple of weeks ago:

Be that as it may, his campaign was a source of frustration to at least one of the three high-profile attorneys seeking the nomination, because Kucinich kept pulling the conversation leftwards, a direction Hillary Clinton did not want to go.

And he added:

Some of us who are not men of the left are sorry to see Kucinich throw in the towel. This is not only because we believe that the 12% or so of Americans who consider themselves "very liberal" deserve a champion, but because gadflys such as Kucinich and Al Sharpton prevent presidential campaigns from becoming ideologically monochromatic.

Nor is it healthy for TV networks to stage-manage democracy. The candidate furthest to the left after Kucinich's exit, the man who vowed "to give voice to all those whose voices aren't being heard", is Edwards - a fabulously wealthy trial lawyer and hedge fund alumnus who lives in a mansion Kublai Khan would find roomy. Now he has dropped out too. Viable leftwing candidates in the US are now spotted less often than UFOs. And creatures in UFOs would have a better chance of getting invited to the debates.

Was Clinton glad to see him go? It certainly seems to be true that Kucinich's appearances in the debates - before the giant media companies began not just not asking him questions, but actually not letting him in the room. MSNBC actually went to court to keep him out - did force some leftward motion (though Edwards, right of Kucinich but left of the other two, helped with that). Now Clinton and Obama can "debate" the nuances of their terribly similar positions, while any genuine difference is gone.

It seems very clear to very many people that the DNC is happy to see Cimperman in the race. Certainly, big business - invested in NAFTA and other off-shoring legislation - is. Is there evidence that Pelosi is more than irritated at the gadfly who won't let "off the table" be the last word? Is there evidence she and the DNC aren't?

There are a lot of emails and posts going around flat out accusing Pelosi and the DNC of orchestrating this challenge (Google "Kucinich McKinneyed" and look at the results just for people using that term). It's not hard to understand why.

Let's take a look at a few positions. Kucinich

* Supports withdrawing from NAFTA and the WTO;

* Has no corporate strings - takes money only from individuals;

* Calls for true universal health care - no more big private insurers;

* Voted against the Patriot Act; and (most damningly?)

* Has called for impeachment of the Vice President and the President despite Speaker Pelosi's insistence that impeachment "is off the table."

In other words, Kucinich is an actual progressive, something the ever-right-moving Democratic Party has some trouble getting along with. Are they actually trying to unseat him, to replace him with someone who will be beholden to all the interests Kucinich spurns and who will be too junior to cause problems if by some chance he wanted to? You know, it wouldn't be the first time. (See: McKinney)

Just today, David Swanson of Democratic Underground shows us something about the man - and why it might not be that easy to get rid of him:

This past Tuesday morning, in the rain, in front of the U.S. Capitol, Kucinich took time off from campaigning in Cleveland and from his busy schedule on the Hill to join a handful of New York Congress Members in an event that no other representative from outside New York attended. Gathered on the Capitol lawn were hundreds of 9-11 rescue workers suffering from health problems dating from that toxic day, heroes lacking affordable health care. These people risked their lives for others and suffer every day for having done so.

Every district in this nation would vote to give these people health care for life. Many in Congress cheer for them and support the occupation of foreign nations in their name. But only Dennis Kucinich showed up, spoke, encouraged, and committed to holding the city of New York accountable through committee investigations. The people of Cleveland should be proud. The people of America should be proud. And everyone should give what they can to keep this courageous voice in our government.

This call echoes across the Internet, and it seems to be working. On Feb 22nd, Karen Schaefer of WKSU (NPR at Kent State in Ohio) reported that Kucinich had raised over $700,000 in the last six weeks, though most of his big supporters live outside Ohio, while most of Cimperman's live in the state.

In fact, it looks like he's doing well enough to frighten the admittedly right wing: Clear Channel's radio station WTAM is openly encouraging Republicans to participate in the Democratic primary and vote against Kucinich. (They must figure McCain to be a lock, eh?)

We can hope the professor quoted in RealClearPolitics (22 Feb) is right:

Still, Kucinich is popular in his district, and Cimperman will have to win over a large percentage of the electorate that has voted for the incumbent since he was first elected to the Cleveland City Council in 1970. Kucinich has many loyalists in the district who like his independent style, including local unions, to whom he has endeared himself because of his stance on trade issues.

"Cimperman's chances of beating Kucinich are remote, and, of course, even more remote for the others," said Alec Lamis, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "Obviously, Kucinich has lost support as a result of his presidential bid, but not enough to defeat him."

Losing Kucinich would be more than a blow to the people of Cleveland. It would be a knife to the heart of progressive politics, a sign that the right wing of the Democratic Party won't tolerate dissenting voices - even if (maybe especially if) those voices are on the left.

Happy Birthday, Johnny

	Born today in 1932, one of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century, the Man in Black, Johnny Cash. Grammies crowned his career in its twilight and they were well earned. If you haven't listened to these albums, you must. They're an astounding collection of songs from Gospel to Nine Inch Nails, and they're all Cash. They're all great. Some of them will make you laugh, and some will break your heart.

Happy Birthday (sort of ), Kit!

The 'sort of' is because we don't know what day he was born - but he was christened on this day in 1564, in Canterbury, England. A poet, dramatist, and spy, Marlowe is well-known today, eclipsed by that other author born that year, that William Shakespeare fellow. He died at 29, stabbed through the eye in what might have been a bar-room brawl or might have been a hired killing...

Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler mentioned "that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago" and Shakespeare quoted it in "The Merry Wives of Windsor":

Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber-studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

Find all Marlowe on line at the Perseus Project.

Happy Birthday, George

(I almost forgot!) George Harrison was born today. Post-Beatles, I found him the most engaging, talented, and solid of them all. His later albums are good - his very last one I reviewed like this when it came out

Brainwashed I always liked George best, and this album is probably the best one. It's pure George, the man who couldn't tell the difference between a hit song and a metaphysical speculation. Marwa Blues showcases his guitar playing, and his voice rarely sounded better than it does on Any Road and I'll Never Get Over You. And he and Dhani chanting the Naamah Parvati at the end of the album -- the perfect way to say 'goodbye, George...'

Then there's Concert for George

A wonderful set of some of George's best songs, performed by some marvellous musicians (Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Paul McCartney, Gary Brooker, Joe Brown, Billy Preston), plus a cd of Ravi Shankar's other daughter, Anoushka, playing a sitar solo, accompanying Jeff Lynne on The Inner Light, and a mixed Indian/Western orchestra in a long piece he wrote for George's memory. If you loved George, you'll love this cd.... And though the cd's good, the dvd's better. You get the theatrical release, the complete concert, uncut, and a lot of interviews and rehearsal footage. ... Plus, you get Jools Brown's number, cut from the cd for some reason. Also, you get the talking, by Eric, by Ravi, by the others, which means now you can hear Olivia's observation on seeing Dhani on stage with the others. And you get to see it, so now you'll know (if all you have is the cd) just why the audience clapped and cheered in the middle of I'll See You In My Dreams... plus you get a lot of backstage stuff, and a lot of interviews (the musicians, Dhani and Olivia, producers, Pythons (yes ... two Python numbers not on the cd ...) If you loved George, you'll love these dvds.

I miss him. But thanks to technology, we'll always have his music.

the historical meme

Well, Mike from The Questionable Authority has tagged me with "the historical meme". Simple enough rules (mostly they are):

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

A problem with picking an historical person to do something like this is that you have to get somebody about whom much is known. If you could do one or two things, but seven? So maybe some of my "things" are less factual than they might be... Anyway. I choose Ahhotep I, who lived in the 1500s BCE:

1. She led the effort which united the Upper and Lower Kingdoms, expelling the Hyksos.
2. She lived to be 90.
3. A warrior queen who led troops into battle, she was buried with three medals of honor shaped like huge flies.
4. Her tomb also had ceremonial axes and daggers with battle scenes on them.
5. Her mother Tetisheri was nicknamed "the Small".
6. She founded the Eighteenth Dynasty.
7. She had seven known children, and every one of them was named Ahmose (the pharaoh Ahmose I, the queen Ahmose-Nefertari, the prince Ahmose Sipair, and the princesses Ahmose-Henutemipet, Ahmose-Meritamon, Ahmose-Nebetta, and Ahmose-Tumerisy.

Hmm. Tagging. No one has to do this, of course, but I choose:

Michael of Wishydig, fev of headsup: the blog, the eponymous Mr. Verb, the chaplain from The Apostate's Chapel, the Exterminator from No More Hornets, John Evo from Evolutionary Middleman, and - because I hope he does it in verse - Cuttle from the Digital Cuttlefish.

The Boneyard

The Boneyard is up at Student: Fossil of the undergraduate world... One of the posts is in my Monday Science Links, but the others will be new and exciting. And you must check out Beelzebufo, the "Giant Fossil Frog from Hell"!

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Olivia Judson at The Wild Side on cloud-dwelling microbes: Clouds. It’s been known for ages that microbes — bacteria, algae, fungi, and other tiny organisms — can be found in clouds. This isn’t surprising. Microbes often get airborne. They can be lofted by the wind from the leaves of a plant; or thrown into the air when a bubble of water bursts, and then lofted by the wind.


• Chris at Highly Allocthonous on plate tectonics: This allows you to predict the broad style of deformation before you even look, because you already know whether the plates are moving apart, pushing together or sliding past each other. However, the details of how those relative motions are being accommodated at the boundary is not so easy to predict. Mid-ocean ridges, for example, consist of spreading segments separated by transform segments; two entirely different types of deformation accommodating exactly the same plate motions.


• Mark Liberman at Language Log on English words for physics: More generally, I wondered about the English words for quantities like velocity, distance and time. It seems likely to me that most of them -- maybe all of them - originally meant things having nothing to do with their meanings in Newtonian (or for that matter Aristotelian) physics, or were borrowed recently, or both. In many cases, the physics-related senses are originally extended or metaphorical ones, which were developed during the Enlightenment, when intellectuals focused their attention on such abstract concepts, and began to think and to write about them in the vulgar tongues of Europe.


• Heidi at HeiDeas on agreement on grammatical gender: Last week, Dalila Ayoun of the Department of French and Italian here at the University of Arizona, gave a talk in our linguistics colloquium series in which she dropped a bombshell: native French speakers don't know the genders of French nouns! Ok, that's not quite right. It would be more appropriate to say that native French speakers don't agree on the genders of French nouns. They really don't agree.
  


• Will at The Dragon's Tales on gorgons (the Permian kind, not the Greek) with gorgeous pictures: The remaining therapsids that I find so fascinating, gorgonopsids, are going to be the actual objects of this post's focus of attention. They are equally fascinating and interesting critters. They are not what you would expect at all. They are not reptiles. They are not mammals. They are something, fascinatingly unique. In some ways, it is really too bad that none of them made it past the Permian Extinction. They are a engrossing subject.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: The Tenth Kingdom, which had a bit more dumb humor in it than I like, but was quite enjoyable. And The Singing Detective which is peculiar but mesmerizing. When the consulting physicians on rounds broke into "Dem Bones" it was fantastic - in all senses of the word. And that was just the beginning. If you haven't seen this, you really should. It's the most extraordinary piece of television I've ever seen.

TV: Martian Child - more engaging than I had thought it would be. And (of course!) Torchwood - grr. Those little 'behind the scenes' things they do in the commercial breaks? All that "Adam did a horrible thing to Jack"? Well, yes, he did. But he did worse to Tosh. And much worse to Ianto.

Read: Words and Rules. Excellent look at how the mind works through the lens of irregular word forms in English. Fascinating stuff.

Roger Ackroyd

So I'm listening to the commentary on The Singing Detective and the mysterious men (I'm not going to spoil it) find a page that has written on it "Who killed Roger Ackroyd?"

The director just said, "this was a maddening little joke of Dennis's, 'Who Killed Roger Ackroyd' being a famous detective story by Marjory Allingham from the Thirties".

Dennis Potter (the writer) is dead, but I hope he knew better. Oh, he must have - all things considered, the way he's using it here... it's much more than a "little joke".

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is an enormously famous detective novel by Agatha Christie published in 1926. (I confess to looking up the publication date, but I knew it was the Twenties.) I won't tell you why it's so famous, because that would spoil the book, but it's a ground-breaking novel.

The Carnival of Maryland

The 27th edition of the Carnival of Maryland is up at monoblogue. As always, a potpourri of posts from bloggers united by where they live, not what they blog about. You're sure to find something to like there - check it out.

Carnival of Space

Check out the 42nd Carnival of Space, up at Chris Lintott's Universe. Emily at Planetary Society's post on Saturn's moons is his - and my (surprise!) - favorite. Her photo montages of the eight largest moons are wonderful. And there's much more, of course.

Happy Birthday, Sam!

Today in 1633 Samuel Pepys was born. Well known for his diary, Pepys was a Londoner to the bone, rarely leaving the city, and a civil servant who helped shape England's navy. His diary, covering only six years of his life, was abandoned by him when he began to fear the loss of his sight - the work of keeping it up threatened blindness, and so he stopped and gave it to his college - Magdalen at Cambridge, where it remains to this day (and where I got to see it this past summer!). As the College says,

Pepys's diary is not so much a record of events as a re-creation of them. Not all the passages are as picturesque as the famous set pieces in which he describes Charles II's coronation or the Great Fire of London, but there is no entry which does not, in some degree, display the same power of summoning back to life the events it relates.

Pepys's skill lay in his close observation and total recall of detail. It is the small touches that achieve the effect. Another is the freshness and flexibility of the language. Pepys writes quickly in shorthand and for himself alone. The words, often piled on top of each other without much respect for formal grammar, exactly reflect the impressions of the moment. Yet the most important explanation is, perhaps, that throughout the diary Pepys writes mainly as an observer of people. It is this that makes him the most human and accessible of diarists, and that gives the diary its special quality as a historical record.

Here's the entry for 23 Feb in the second year of the diary (a hypertext, annotated version is here) (note on the date - if you follow the link you'll see it says 1660/1661 - this is because until 1752 the new year began on March 25 in England, slow to adopt the new calendar, so for Sam himself it was still 1660):

This my birthday, 28 years. This morning Sir W. Batten, Pen, and I did some business, and then I by water to Whitehall, having met Mr. Hartlibb by the way at Alderman Backwell’s. So he did give me a glass of Rhenish wine at the Steeleyard, and so to Whitehall by water. He continues of the same bold impertinent humour that he was always of and will ever be. He told me how my Lord Chancellor had lately got the Duke of York and Duchess, and her woman, my Lord Ossory’s and a Doctor, to make oath before most of the judges of the kingdom, concerning all the circumstances of their marriage. And in fine, it is confessed that they were not fully married till about a month or two before she was brought to bed; but that they were contracted long before, and time enough for the child to be legitimate.1 But I do not hear that it was put to the judges to determine whether it was so or no. To my Lord and there spoke to him about his opinion of the Light, the sea-mark that Captain Murford is about, and do offer me an eighth part to concern myself with it, and my Lord do give me some encouragement in it, and I shall go on. I dined herewith Mr. Shepley and Howe. After dinner to Whitehall Chappell with Mr. Child, and there did hear Captain Cooke and his boy make a trial of an Anthem against tomorrow, which was brave musique. Then by water to Whitefriars to the Play-house, and there saw “The Changeling,” the first time it hath been acted these twenty years, and it takes exceedingly. Besides, I see the gallants do begin to be tyred with the vanity and pride of the theatre actors who are indeed grown very proud and rich. Then by link home, and there to my book awhile and to bed. I met to-day with Mr. Townsend, who tells me that the old man is yet alive in whose place in the Wardrobe he hopes to get my father, which I do resolve to put for. I also met with the Comptroller, who told me how it was easy for us all, the principal officers, and proper for us, to labour to get into the next Parliament; and would have me to ask the Duke’s letter, but I shall not endeavour it because it will spend much money, though I am sure I could well obtain it. This is now 28 years that I am born. And blessed be God, in a state of full content, and great hopes to be a happy man in all respects, both to myself and friends.

Find the whole of Pepys' diary, day by day with hyperlinked annotations here, and in plain text here at Project Gutenberg (also downloadable).

9/11 profiteering? Maybe somebody should investigate

Did somebody profit from 9/11? Some put options (which allow you to make money on a stock that's falling) were made on United, Morgan Stanley, and others in the days just before the attack - firms whose stocks went through the floor in the days just after. Some ... in quantities out of all proportion to the average number made. So yeah, somebody made money. Who? Well, that's the problem...

So, if he's the Anti-Christ...

So, apparently Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ. (No, I'm not linking to them, just Google "Obama Anti-Christ").

Which means we should "fear him" and certainly not vote for him.

But this is something I don't quite understand. If you're a Christian ... don't you want the Anti-Christ to come? Isn't it like supporting Israel so the preconditions for Armageddon can be met? I mean, doesn't the Anti-Christ have to gain dominion over the world before Jesus can come back?

What am I missing here?

Who wants to be the people who kept Jesus from returning?

Maryland's AG is right

Last year the state supreme court upheld a 34-year-old state statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The attorney general's office defended the law in that case, and he has said the court made the right decision based on the law as it is written: the law should be changed by the legislature. Now a bill, SB290, is in the state legislature, a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in Maryland. Last week, our AG stood up on the right side (as reported by Laura Smitherman in the Sun):

Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler has become the most prominent official in Maryland to endorse gay marriage, telling state legislators yesterday that he believes the current ban on same-sex unions amounts to discrimination.

"It would be hard for me to have this job knowing there is something so wrong in our society," Gansler told the Senate panel considering a bill to legalize gay marriage. "I just think it's wrong to discriminate against any people because they think differently or because of their sexual orientation."

But Gansler also said that lawmakers in Annapolis might not have the "political courage" to legalize gay marriage this year and that the General Assembly will probably "settle" for civil unions, which would confer many of the rights afforded to married heterosexual couples.

Of course, there were a lot of people testifying against SB290. For instance, the perfectly named

Kathleen Crank, who described herself as a stay-at-home mother and wife, said she felt compelled to testify for a constitutional ban because the "homosexual lifestyle" is "devastating." She said: "Redefining marriage is an activity undertaken to the peril of our civilized society."

Yeah, like Canada, Britain, Scandinavia, and Massachusetts have discovered.

And I'm not quite sure what is so "devastating" about getting married. I always thought the "homosexual lifestyle" (as opposed to life) was Fire Island or the Castro. These are just ordinary folks who want a home, a mortgage, and a family. After all, 339 Maryland laws provide for benefits and rights conditioned on marital status. Not all of them can be duplicated by filing powers of attorney and what-not, and all come packaged in with a $55 marriage license.

A license from the state of Maryland, mind you. From the state.

It's axiomatic that the state (any state, this nation in fact) can not and should not be able to force any church to recognize, much less perform, any marriage. But the state nevertheless went against many churches when it permitted divorced people to remarry, Christians to marry Jews, whites to marry blacks, and atheists to marry at all.

I'm proud to have voted for Gansler.

whom is?

A story over at Talking Points Memo contains this:

So McCain, along with his campaign finance lawyer Trevor Potter (whom I've met and is a very sharp guy) came up with a workaround.

Uh... no.

It's too bad, because his first clause, "whom I've met", is completely correct. But then he goes and joins it to the next clause, and "whom is a very sharp guy" is wrong.

He's trying to make the same word be the direct object of one clause and the subject of another.

Funnily, had he gotten the "whom" wrong

So McCain, along with his campaign finance lawyer Trevor Potter (who I've met and is a very sharp guy) came up with a workaround.

it would have sounded fine (though it would still have been a mismatch) and I'd have read right over it, I expect.

Here's one fix:

So McCain, along with his campaign finance lawyer Trevor Potter (whom I've met and found to be a very sharp guy) came up with a workaround.

Of course, that makes his sharpness less a fact and more an opinion, so it might not be acceptable. Making it a non-relative parenthetical is another option:

So McCain, along with his campaign finance lawyer Trevor Potter (I've met him and he is a very sharp guy) came up with a workaround.

and so is mixing the types of clauses

So McCain, along with his campaign finance lawyer Trevor Potter (whom I've met - he's a very sharp guy) came up with a workaround.

At any rate, something needs to be done here.

Happy Birthday, Vincent!

In 1911 a slim, red-headed 19-year-old Maine girl got up and read her contest-winning poem, Renasence (find it here), in Camden, Maine. She couldn't afford college, but the poem inspired a woman in the audience to pay her way to Vassar. That girl was Edna St Vincent Millay, born this day in 1892. An icon of the Jazz Age and a rock-star poet, Vincent (as she preferred to be called, hating the name 'Edna' - she was named for the hospital where her uncle escaped death just before her birth) lived in Greenwich Village and Paris, and revelled in the Bohemian life style (perhaps you could say she truly was a Mainiac). After her marriage she lived in Austerlitz, New York, until her death in 1950; the farm, Steepletop, is now a writers colony. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer, and the second to win the Frost prize.

Probably her best known poem is "First Fig", not least because it's short enough to memorize easily:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

And here are a few more:

Love is not all

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power
I might be driven to sell your love for peace
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.


Three Songs of Shattering

I

THE first rose on my rose-tree

Budded, bloomed, and shattered,

During sad days when to me

Nothing mattered.

Grief of grief has drained me clean;

Still it seems a pity

No one saw, -- it must have been

Very pretty.

II

Let the little birds sing;

Let the little lambs play;

Spring is here; and so 'tis spring; --

But not in the old way!

I recall a place

Where a plum-tree grew;

There you lifted up your face,

And blossoms covered you.

If the little birds sing,

And the little lambs play,

Spring is here; and so 'tis spring --

But not in the old way!

III

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!

Ere spring was going -- ah, spring is gone!

And there comes no summer to the like of you and me, --

Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,

Browned at the edges, turned in a day;

And I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,

And weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!

Happy Birthday, Edward!

Born today in 1925, in Chicago, Edward Gorey, master of the disturbingly macabre illustration and story.
I definitely recommend you read his three Amphigorey collections.



The "life is sweet" sweatshirt gets a lot of grins and compliments.


And by all means, take this quiz: Which Horrible (Edward) Gorey Death will you die?

not frightened by her ability to change her mind

Daniel at Herman's Honeytown caucused in Nebraska Saturday. He makes a comment I like:

CNN also had a handy issues drop down that had a short bit for each candidate's stance. It revealed more mind-changing from Hillary, particularly on Iraq and outsourcing, but I'm not frightened by her ability to change her mind when she has more information. However, I'm more confident in Obama, who seems to form the right decision the first time, not having to change his mind.

I like this for several reasons (and I have to point out the Dennis was right the first time, too) not just because I've decided to back Obama and it's nice to see other people agreeing.

No, I like it because of this: I'm not frightened by her ability to change her mind when she has more information.

Sometimes there's flip-flopping. Sometimes there's pandering. And sometimes there's learning.

The trick, of course, is being able to tell the difference.

art shot at Saturn

Although this resembles those geometric modern art paintings, it's actually Saturn's rings and the moon Dione.

As always, check the Cassini-Huygens site for details.

Eclipse at APOD

There's a stunningly beautiful picture of this week's lunar eclipse at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

"Catching eclipsed moonlight, astroimager Jerry Lodriguss offers this view of the inspiring celestial event with the shadowed Moon accompanied by wandering planet Saturn at the left, and bright Regulus, alpha star of the constellation Leo, above."

Drop over and take a look; you won't be sorry.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

A friend sent me this, with the subject line "plus ça change..."* (from the French saying which means "The more things change, the more they remain the same"):

Even Feisal [first king of Iraq] acknowledged that "there is still - and I say this with a heart of sorrow - no Iraqi people, but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea ... prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever."

from a book review by Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun

The idea that someone could come in and draw lines on a map, with no regard for the natural divisions among the peoples living in the actual places, and so create "nations" (as opposed to political entities needing to be held together either by outside threat or inside tyranny) has failed spectacularly all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. And yet we - the line drawers, all of us - continue to be startled when its failure is demonstrated one more time.

Plus ça change, indeed.

February

This week in pictures:

first a spectacular dawn over College Park on Wednesday:
A tree of blackbirds (okay, grackles and starlings)
Blackbirds (grackles) at dusk
a house finch (top) and a junco
a junco
(I knew what this was when I took the picture, but I've forgotten, and I can't recognize it!) Mystery bird in early dawn
a house sparrow
a mockingbird
Gwen enjoying the unseasonably warm Presidents Day
and then ice on the little runoff from the pond to the creek on Washington's actual birthday four days later
dusting of snow in the park Thursday
ice on branches Friday

I and the Bird 69

I and the Bird is up at Living the Scientific Life and GrrlScientist has done great job! My own Visitors from North and South made it, and so did many others - and there's a contest. For books! w00t!

Head on over and check it out.

Box full

I live in an apartment complex that has small mailboxes. Last Monday I came home from work to one of those peach-orange delivery notices. On it was written "Box full." Checked off was "mail will be available for pickup at post office after" 9 am on Tuesday.

Okay. Tuesday of course was the ice storm. But we battled our way back to Laurel and got to the post office at 6 (should have been there about 5...) only to discover that my mail was not there; it was at the Carrier Annex and I had to make a written request that it be brought to the main office.

Apropos of that, I do not say that they built that annex to provide themselves with a foolproof excuse, but they sure as hell use it for one. "Oh, the carrier never brought it over." "Oh, the main office didn't give it to the carrier." The number of times I've had to go back to the post office twice is huge, and I have had to go back three times at least twice.

Anyway, I put in the request, and we slogged on home. Where I found a form letter from the carrier explaining that I "need to empty the box regularly so we can deliver your mail" - which, considering that one day's worth can fill the box, is annoying as hell. It also had the phone number to call to arrange a pickup, because they won't come back with the next day's mail until you've shown up and collected the stuff that was filling up the box. Okay, fine, but why wasn't that in the box in the first place, instead of that lying slip that said I could collect my mail on Tuesday? Lying, I say, because everybody to whom I spoke about this assured me (as did the form letter) that making arrangements was absolute policy.

Well, okay, two trips and I got my mail. Then yesterday, I came home to an empty box. I checked this morning (in case the carrier was just running very late): still empty. Empty again today. Now, nothing at all in two days? Unlikely. So I called the annex.

Yeah. Box full yesterday. And this time - no note of any kind. If I hadn't called, who knows how long it would have taken them to tell me what was happening?

The post office needs something. Real competition, oversight, lessons in how to run a government monopoly - something.

The book meme

The Chaplain passes on the book meme, so here you go:

The rules are simple:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Well, the closest two books (Topsy Turvey by AP Herbert and Col. RG Ingersoll's 44 Lectures Complete didn't work - Topsy didn't have enough pages and Ingersoll isn't numbered (I could have counted out 123 but I didn't feel like it) so you get Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works:

Not only can a proposition be about an individual, it must be treated as a kind of individual itself, and that gives rise to a new problem. Connectoplasm gets its power by superimposing patterns in a single set of units. Unfortunately, that can breed bizarre chimeras or make a network fall between two stools.

I'm not sure what he's talking about; I have started it yet!

the album meme

Making albums...










This is actually a lot of fun ... a real time-waster. Try it:

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that's your album.

This is what it's about: remember that

Here are the presidential low points of public approval, as reflected by the poll numbers from Roper:

Clinton low: 36 percent, May 1993 (early missteps like Zoe Baird)

George H.W. Bush low: 29 percent, August 1992 (recession)

Reagan low: 35 percent, January 1983 (recession)

Carter low: 28 percent, July 1979 (high gas prices)

Ford low: 37 percent, January 1975 (economy, Nixon pardon)

Nixon low: 23 percent, January 1974 (Watergate)

Johnson low: 35 percent, August 1968 (Vietnam)

Lowest ever? Harry Truman during the Korean War, in February 1952, at 22 percent.

Oh. Wait. Lowest ever now? That would be the current president:

Among all Americans, 19% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 77% disapprove. When it comes to Bush's handling of the economy, 14% approve and 79% disapprove.

Among Americans registered to vote, 18% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 78% disapprove.

Most unpopular president ever.

Change? You damn well better believe we want change. Let's stay focused on that over the next eight months, okay? John McCain is essentially Bush's third term. Obama's inexperienced? Clinton's manipulative? So [insert your favorite expletive here] what.

(tip o' the hat to Attytood)

Josh Marshall and TPM: the George Polk award

Will Bunch at Attytood tells it well in A landmark day for bloggers:

The George Polk Awards are kind of like the Golden Globes of American journalism . Not as well known as those Oscars of the news business, the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Awards are nevertheless probably a close second in terms of prestige, and this year I am especially blown away by the quality of the work they honor....

But I want to highlight one Polk Award that shows there are emerging models for using the very tool at the root of the turmoil of the news business -- the Internet -- as a newfangled way to re-invent investigative reporting -- by using new techniques that emphasize collaboration over competition and by working with readers and through collective weight of many news sources to expose government misconduct.

It would have seemed incredible a couple of years ago, but a George Polk Award was given this morning to a blogger.

Not just any blogger, of course. Josh Marshall (top, with his son Sam) of Talking Points Memo may have started back in 2000 as a kind of blogging stereotype, posting late at night from his small D.C. apartment and from the corner Starbucks and -- in just two years -- shining a light on the remarks that cost Sen. Trent Lott his GOP Senate leadership post, but he's turned his operation into much, much more.

Since 2002 Marshall has moved to New York and -- thanks to increasing ad revenue -- made Talking Points Memo into a new kind of journalistic enterprise for the 21st Century, hiring a staff of a half dozen talented young journalists and rewriting the rules with a mix of commentary and original muckraking while highlighting the work of other to focus like a laser on the big political questions.

Here's how and why Marshall and Talking Points Memo won a Polk Award today:

"His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

Hopefully, this acknowledgment of what one savvy blogger and his team have accomplished is a milestone that will speed the day when mainstream journalists realize that the best kind of blogger like Marshall is truly one of our own kind, using new tools and a new way of thinking to break a news story that otherwise might have not been discovered.

What follows is a beautiful tribute to and analysis of TPM's award-winning story, written last year. It concludes:

The beautiful thing about investigative reporting on blogs is narrowcasting, because a site like TalkingPointsMemo isn’t expected to be all-inclusive like the Washington Post or Time magazine. In the spring of 2007, Josh Marshall and Justin Rood and Paul Kiel and David Kurtz weren’t under any kind of moral obligation to cover all the news that’s fit to print about the French elections, the Virginia Tech massacre or even the mounting death toll in Iraq. Such issues were mentioned in short posts on occasion, but the bloggers knew that their readers -- and, frankly, the public record and ensuing debates -- were better served by running with the U.S. attorney’s scandal 24 hours a day. And why not? In a world of search engines and infinite cyberspace, any interested Web surfer can find the latest news from Paris or Blacksburg or Ramadi within a matter of seconds.

The award is great (TPM is a daily must-read) and this piece is a fitting tribute. Check it out

Yeah

Over at Thoughts from Kansas Josh quotes from a Michael Berubé post:

Failing that, Mark Penn can lament that no one anticipated the breach of Super Tuesday, and that the campaign has actually been doing a heckuva job.

It’s sad, really. As I’ve said before, I have no animus against Hillary Clinton, and I don’t believe that Barack Obama is the chosen one who can bring balance to the Force, end the war with the machines, and destroy all of Voldemort’s horcruxes. But Hillary really is surrounded by the gang that can’t shoot straight, and for some reason I’ve grown leery of politicians who don’t fire incompetents.

and then says, "Yeah."

Yeah. Me, too.

Happy Birthday, Ansel

Ansel Adams was born today in San Francisco in 1902. This photograph, The Tetons and the Snake River, is one of the 116 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. These images were selected to convey information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth to a possible alien civilization.

One Hundred Dollars

Yep. The price of oil hit the magic number yesterday: $100.01 a barrel.

Maybe things will change now. Maybe not.

Is this possible?

I find this incredibly disturbing. In today's NY Times, Elizabeth Bumiller writes an article that is, on the front page, teased thus:

John McCain must decide how best to use President Bush to win over conservatives without driving away independents and moderate Democrats.

It's one thing if the McCain campaign thinks they can win over "moderate" Democrats (meaning conservative Democrats of the Heath Shuler ilk, since the actual moderates are running for president).

But is it actually possible that even "moderate" Democrats think another four years of what we've gone through is a good idea? Is it actually possible that some Democrats really, truly think that McCain would be better than Obama or Clinton? If you are one of those folks, I encourage you to go to McCain's website and read his actual positions, and consider carefully how close he is to Bush, the religious right, and the neo-cons and their aggressive, war-mongering politics. Look at his recent votes, on the "Protect America Act" and allowing the CIA to torture people. And then, please, either vote for the Democratic candidate - whoever he or she might be - or change parties.

Happy Birthday, Nikolaus

Born today in 1473, the originator of the theory which bears his name - the Copernican, or heliocentric, system, which challenged and then (for most people) replaced the geocentric system, which held that the earth was the center and everything revolves around it. Nicolaus Copernicus was a brilliant polymath who merely dabbled in astronomy, and yet he removed the geocentered (and anthrocentered) universe from the realm of science.

He died in 1543, apparently, of a stroke, and legend has it that he regained consciousness in time for the first printed copy of his, if you'll pardon the pun, revolutionary work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) to be placed into his hands, allowing him to see his life's work before he died. It's only a legend, but it's a nice one, isn't it?

(painting by Jan Matejko, displayed in the Nicholaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork)

Monday Science Links

This week's Science:

• Chris at Developing Intelligence on how to use coffee optimally (and no - the answer isn't to stop drinking it)


• David at Irregular Webcomic on Gödel's incompleteness theorem (yes, math from a comic).


• Phil at Bad Astronomy on finding a Jupiter-like planet in another solar system (and why it matters).


• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life on ocean dead zones are the new normal (and that is not good news even if you don't like to eat seafood).


• PZ at Pharyngula on what's the same and what's different in plants and animals (and how much different even the same is).

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Savages. "Do you know where he's been living? In some place called Sun City! In Arizona! In the middle of the desert! We have to go find him!" "We do not have to find him. We're not living in a Sam Shephard play." Except maybe they are ... This movie has genuine laugh-out-loud moments, as well as tearful ones. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is ably matched by Laura Linney and Philip Bosco, and this movie is damned good. Highly recommended.

DVD: The Cobbler and the Thief - visually interesting, with a fairly predictable story line. I suppose setting it in a Baghdad (even one set "in the middle of the Arabian Desert", for crying out loud) "dedicated to reason and light" made it a hard sell - I don't remember it ever being in the theaters.

TV: Torchwood. So. Rhys knows. That's going to be interesting. (Particularly as it reverberates into Jack and Ianto's relationship...) And my my, Ianto can be cold when he's angry. Woof. And both Jack and Owen, so sad over the beast's death... Good episode. Deep Impact - it didn't really move me. The Towering Inferno (the thing is morbidly fascinating). Casino Royale - I keep watching this, but I can never quite decide if it's extremely funny or not funny at all...

Read: Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee, which is brilliant. Unlike his other books, though equally good as the best of those, with an odd narrative technique and a very engaging storyline. Really excellent. And back to Stephen Pinker's Words and Rules, which is fascinating in a good way.

The Boneyard

The Boneyard is up at Greg Laden's Blog. Paleoblogging. Yumm.

The Boneyard. This is approximately the 13th installment of The Boneyard Web Carnival, dated February 9th, plus or minus a week or so. In paleontology, we do not concern ourselves with trifles such as exact dates.

The Boneyard web carnival is about fossils, and bones, paleontology and taphonomy. It is about anything boney except actual boneyards, although actual boneyards would be of interest as well because we are a morbid, bone loving bunch.

Carnival of the Godless

The Carnival of the Godless is up - and it's at Greta Christina's Blog, so it's a dirty one. No, really:

in an attempt to be only marginally inappropriate instead of wildly inappropriate, I have taken the regular Carnival... and lovingly and painstakingly illustrated it with raunchy pulp fiction cover art. I have, in fact, made every effort to make the illustrations relevant to the posts, or at least not glaringly irrelevant. (And if you think it's easy finding a vintage pulp fiction cover to illustrate a blog post about Tacitus, you've got another think coming.) Enjoy!

But, have no fear. She's thoughtful. "But for those of you who prefer your atheist ranting unadulterated by vintage pulp fiction cover art, I'm also offering this non-dirty version of the Carnival."

So take your pick and enjoy the godless blogging over this long weekend (well, long for some of us). Too many to pick out a couple - read 'em all.

Happy Birthday, Andre

And one more birthday: Alice Mary Norton, who wrote as Andre Norton and also Andrew North, was born today in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1912. Norton wrote more than 130 novels (and I think I've read them all) in her 70 years as a writer, as well as nearly a hundred short stories. She was the first woman to receive the Grand Master Award from the World Science Fiction Society. A month before her death in March 2005 at age 93, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America created the Andre Norton Award for an outstanding work of science fiction or fantasy for young adults. Her books were among the first science fiction I ever read as child, and I still like them - especially the Solar Queen novels and the Beast Master books (no real relation to the movies no matter what they say). Her books were the first ones I remember featuring non-white and non-male protagonists, too.