Green Tee Readings

The following is only funny because I’m a huge nerd:

That may have been the wrong choice, since there were those who seemed aghast that I couldn’t remember if Lan rescuing Nynaeve happened in book six or book seven. (Reference my general absent mindedness from the previous question.)

Well, you can rest assured that I’m now very aware that it happened in book six, right after the cleansing of Saidar and right before Perrin blew the Horn of Valere. Sorry for getting that wrong.

(taken from Brandon Sanderson’s revisit to last year’s interview about taking over The Wheel of Time series from the then recently deceased Robert Jordan. Again, I’m a huge nerd.)

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The physics blogger with a dog dances like a monkey:

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An Andrew Sullivan post about this Slate article about pundit failures in this campaign reminded me of a quick conversation I had with my boss this morning.

We’d talked briefly about the stories of Palin’s wardrobe expenditures, and my boss segued into complaining that the Obama campaign is spending too much money on advertising. He thought that the Obama campaign should give some of that money to charity, and while I agree that would be a noble thing to do, I disagree that it’s some sort if moral imperative. As a donor and supporter of his campaign, I’m completely comfortable with him spending every bit that’s been donated. I looked at my bank balances and decided what I could give to see Obama in office, a decision based much on what I think about Obama’s goals and policies. I assume that his other donors did the same.

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Today after having a quick dinner with Jon and hearing his amusing anecdotes about the campaign he’s currently working for, and after going to Trader Joe’s and deciding not to get the chocolate covered chili spiced mango because it’s twice as much as the plain chili spiced mango, I sat for a bit at the College Avenue station reading Paul Krugman’s An Accidental Theorist under the eaves. I really didn’t want to get rained on.

As the train was approaching, I overhead a bit of conversation between a dad and daughter waiting for someone. He was excitedly pointing out ways she could tell that the coming train was a passenger train, and saying how he loved how the rotating light on top light the whole sky. It was a great bit of parenting, showing things to be excited about, to be aware of, on a cold, rainy October night. It reminded me of the stories Richard Feynman told about his father always explaining things, always making the world around him engaging and interesting.

I was also reminded, although indirectly, of Atticus Finch. Had I not just read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time, the connection probably wouldn’t have occurred, it really is kind of a stretch, but his thorough understanding of the world and people around him seems deeply rooted in the same curiosity that Feynman’s father and the father I overhead tonight displayed. There’s no possibility of Atticus being able to put himself, as he often told Scout, in the other person’s shoes if he wasn’t interested in how and why the other person behaved. There’s an exceedingly dim possibility of his raising two curious children in 1930’s Alabama if he wasn’t a spectacular parent who led and trusted and explained and generally put significant amounts of time and effort into raising Scout and Jem.

It was a “the world would be a better place” kind of night.

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Just noted in a brief tweet, I love Fafblog:

FACT! Barack Obama was a community organizer. ACORN is made of community organizers. Acorns come from oak trees. Oak trees belong to the genus Quercus, which includes Quercus faginea, the Portuguese oak. The prime minister of Portugal is José Sócrates, whose last name looks like Socrates, who lived in Athens, which is also a city in Georgia, whose state fruit is the peach, which is native to China, which is exactly what Osama bin Laden was eating off of while he was plotting to destroy the Twin Towers. It’s all connected, people - they just don’t want you to know! And they could be black.

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As usual, Xkcd hits center mass:

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Way back when I first posted a link to an article about vegetarians, I meant to come back to where the author notes that if you sit next to him and have a pork tenderloin, he’s not judging you for it, and neither is any other garden variety* vegetarian you meet, and that the person who’s going to give you a hassle for having some hamburger is probably a jackass in ways totally separate from vegetarianism.

This dovetails neatly into a theory that Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light has that literary genres are tags, not containers.

What brought those things together again for me so late on a Friday night was this quote in a Washing Times story** about a pair of nuns recently added to a terrorist watch list:

“There is no way that we ever want to be identified as terrorists. We are nonviolent. We are faith-based,” she said.

I’m willing to accept an argument that a completely nonviolent stance precludes any ability to terrorize, but I don’t accept that faith-based is equivalent to nonviolent in that construction. Faith-based, if I may expand on PNH’s idea, is a tag that explains motivations, justifications or worldview; it isn’t container confining a person’s actions in a zone of harmlessness. I’d even argue that faith-based is too vague a tag to really have any descriptive power, but it’s late and clear thought isn’t really with me. Plus, I think that’s an argument more thought-provoking than decidable (that’s not really the word I want to use, but again, late, no clear thought).

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*Pun intended. Sorry.
** There are larger, probably more important issues in that story, like government surveillance and the usefulness of terrorist watch lists, but I’m not even slightly prepared to write about them tonight.

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There are really two things I took away from the Vice Presidential debate tonight: that there seem to be a number of companies or countries that have profited from the US to such a degree that they could finance Paulson’s $700 billion bailout, and that my “Gotta hold the high ground” reference had more in line with reality than what Governor Palin said about McClellan’s McKiernan’s thoughts in a surge in Afghanistan. Not much more in line with reality, but at least I had the right decade.

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Young’s Double Chocolate Stout: because some days nothing tastes better.

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The number is spelled “forty.”

The Postmarks By The Numbers free tracks on eMusic are good.

If it looks like I might have not given you your money back or a receipt, please check your car, especially your lap and the floor for the missing items. Also, please don’t angrily accuse me of not doing my job unless you’ve checked these places.

The Real Tuesday Weld’s free sampler on eMusic is really good.

Thanks.

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