I am excited to announce that guest poster B will occasionally be posting commentaries on education. She’s a former school teacher who worked in the Oakland school district, and she actually has her very own site at Being Light Skinded. I think that her perspective on education issues will be interesting to a lot of …
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Meringue
It’s my father’s birthday today. I made him a lemon meringue pie. Actually I made the pie last weekend, because we both tend to be busy during the week, so I thought I would have a better chance of luring him over for pie if I did it on the weekend. He suggested chess pie, …
Slick Postage
The Periodic Table Printmaking Project is exactly what it sounds like. It is also awesome, so go look. Systems biology is the new big thing, apparently. It involves creating simulations of the complex systems in the human body; of course, it’s going to be limited by computer power, but it still sounds pretty neat. The …
January Book Project Report
If you’re new to the Book Project and wondering what the heck this is all about, I am writing about every book I read in 2008. Here are details from my post announcing the Book Project: Within reason, I will also try to read every book you folks recommend to me. I tend to hit …
I Need a Bigger Chair
But to explain why, you need to see the following chronicle of my workday yesterday. I started out in The Chair with Mr. Bell. We have a good working relationship; he curls up in the front, I rest my keyboard on him, and we call it good. Then he got up, and Loki came over. …
Ruffled Baskets
Treatment of fat people in the doctor’s office is finally making national news, with a pretty well balanced article in the Washington Post. The situation in Kenya is getting intense; an independent journalist is photographing it and writing about it. This site is really amazing, and if you only want to click on one thing …
Look Into the Mirror
I don’t know how closely you have been following the national ID issue in Britain, gentle readers, but a leaked document from the British government has recently surfaced, and in this document, the option of “coercion” to force people into getting government IDs is discussed. Needless to say, I don’t think this is a good …
Bacon
“She looks just like a big slab of bacon,” one of them was saying as I took out the garbage on my way into town to pay the rent, and a gale of deep throated male laughter arose, the kind of laughter that makes me nervous. I nodded genially as I dropped the recycling in, …
Book Twenty-One: The Prince of the Marshes
The Prince of the Marshes is about a year in Iraq. But it’s a pretty extraordinary year; Rory Stewart, the author, worked with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in an attempt to rebuild Iraq, establish some sort of government, and prepare the country so that it could be handed back to the Iraqis. It was …
Spammed Voters
Seriously. I am getting so much spam from political organizations, it’s insane. And apparently I can’t complain because political groups are “protected organizations.” I swear to God, if I hadn’t already voted, I would be automatically not voting for every candidate who sent me unsolicited mail or email. Especially the ones that say they “care …