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25 Jan 2011 — A fun fact that I learned today from my podiatrist: Fingernails and toenails are vestigial organs, like the appendix. You can live perfectly well without them.
18 Jan 2011 — The emo threesome: After watching Buffy on DVD, years after all of my friends had seen it on the network, and watching Babylon 5 on tape, and watching Big Love on DVD, and watching Firefly on DVD, and… well, every once in a while I hear that some new show is going to be premiered, and I think, aha, this one I will see from the beginning, so I can be a first-class member of its fan community.
11 Jan 2011 — Why American newspapers are inferior: Amy Chua’s paean to academic stage-motherhood, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”, has been making the rounds on teh intarwebs. I can’t add much to the commentary surrounding the op-ed itself (there’s a lot of interesting discussion on MetaFilter), but I do want to follow up on a follow-up, as it were.
03 Jan 2011 — World without suits: When I finally got around to reading Anathem, my wife told me she was uninterested in reading it after me, because she thought Neil Stephenson did a mediocre job at character development.
02 Jan 2011 — Timeless wankery: Sometimes, when technology marches on, it tramples popular culture under its jackboots. For example, I often wonder what people who grew up with e-mail and cellular phones make of Diva, a film in which half the cast chases the other half around looking for surreptitious tape recordings.
29 Dec 2010 — The mathematics of leaks: DEAR MISS MANNERS: I told my closest friend a deep dark secret that I didn’t want anyone else in the world to know, and she went around blabbing it to everyone. Don’t you think that’s disgusting and wrong? I don’t feel I can trust anybody now.

GENTLE READER: One can never learn to trust others until one has learned to trust oneself. Who blabbed first, you or she?

—Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
29 Dec 2010 — Oy gevalt! Foiled again!: I regret to inform you, comrades, that this year’s War on Christmas is over, and Christmas won.
24 Dec 2010 — Dept. of “we should be so lucky”: Bryan Fischer, Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, writes: “President Obama wants to give the entire land mass of the United States of America back to the Indians. He wants Indian tribes to be our new overlords.”
23 Dec 2010 — The young and meaningful earth: Matthew Yglesias proposes that we “assume that God created the universe—fossils and all—to look exactly like that 4,000 years ago. That’s obviously a religious hypothesis rather than a scientific one, but it’s consistent with the evidence and doesn’t anyone to believe in a scientists’ conspiracy or anything.”
20 Dec 2010 — Calibrating my disappointment: Like many other progressives, I’ve been disappointed by the many instances of Obama seeming too eager to compromise with Republicans, more eager to appease his right flank than his left. One of the ways I temper my feelings is by remembering how disappointed I had been with Clinton.
15 Dec 2010 — “...and I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.”: Dear Corporate Training Consultant Person:
23 Nov 2010 — Informado neniam malutilas: If I were an Esperantist (instead of a guy who just happens to have an Esperanto-English dictionary lying around the house), I would kvell (how do you say kvell in Esperanto?) to hear that a nationally famous cable-TV host, even a frenezulaĉo, considered the language worth denouncing.
17 Nov 2010 — Know when to walk away: One of the most important things I learned, reading about negotiation theory, is the acronym “BATNA”.
15 Nov 2010 — Infosec: the early years: As part of my wife’s heroic renovation of our basement, she provided each one of our children with a little cabinet to keep their Lego creations and similar valuables. She screwed a hasp onto each cabinet and gave each child a padlock with a four-letter combination, so that each could secure his valuables against nosy brothers.
11 Nov 2010 — In honor of National Novelette Writing Month: One reason I haven’t been blogging much recently is that I’ve been trying to spend more time working on my fiction writing. I got so many helpful comments on my last submission that not only am I prepared to revise it and look for a publisher, but I wrote something else, and I am ready to share a draft of that something else with whoever is willing to send back a critique within a month or so.

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