It was four difficult hours, but we accomplished a lot. Also—she charges less than my last clutter lady, and has more experience.

Call me if you want good organizational help in the L.A. area.

I'm exhausted, but I am working from my actual desk, which we dug out from under a pile of papers and books.

I pointed out to her helpfully that you can always recognize those who aren't serious about getting organized, because they only have one file folder for each subject: some of us have two or three or four. We're not like the lightweight psuedo-organized: We're overachievers.

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Just tell me they're going to be making it less ugly.

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. . . sez:

To be sure, when it comes to their area of expertise, elite professors deserve a degree of deference. When it comes to matters outside their area of expertise, such as whether God exists . . . elite faculty deserve no more deference than any other smart people. Indeed, they may deserve less deference than a representative cross section of the general public. University faculties tend to be highly self-selected and appointments tend to be dominated by network effects that produce a remarkable homogeneity of belief . . . . Outside their areas of expertise (and sometimes even inside it), their beliefs tend to be colored by their ideology and by the need to conform to the expectations of their colleagues.

Good point, with all apologies to the academics in my life—Professors Purkinje and Fractal in particular. Because even when they're wrong, they do it in the right way.

Academics are often, in fact, some of the finest moonbats around.

Via another elite professor.

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The Insta-Mom now has a blog devoted to children's books.

Can the Insta-Daughter be far behind? How about the Insta-Brothers?

The family that blogs together eventually develops its own podcasting format, you know.

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A couple of computer crises made the newsletter for my nonprofit group an adventure this week. The beautiful thing is that I do that work as a volunteer, but my responsibilities as a paid employee kick into high gear once we send the beast to the printer. That week of hell each month culminates in two Saturday meetings held in dusty rooms that trigger my allergies. During the 4-5-hour ordeal I'm expected to give four written/oral reports (two as a volunteer, and two as the office manager).

I generally stay at my mother's place those Friday nights, so I can get into the office earlier on meeting mornings. Under the best conditions this means I sleep a bit more than if I had stayed in the Pasadena area. Under the worst conditions it doesn't work because her dog chews up the couch I'm sleeping on, and that disturbs me in the night.

And by the time I leave the Center on those Saturday afternoons my mind has often turned into whatever that stuff is they make Vienna sausages out of.

It's like that now. I'm tired, but content, in that sicko feminine codependent way.

[Yeah. I end sentences with prepositions; ya wanna make something of it? I mean, is there something you would like to make it into?]

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. . . on that silly claim by PEER about how the NPS is carrying water for creationists in the Bush Administration.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has yet to retract its false claim, by the way, even as it waxes hysterical over the sale of an evolutionary account of the Grand Canyon in NPS bookstores. Why not go further?—they should just publicly burn the book. (If you follow the first link, you'll see that the NPS is not responsible for the contents of the bookstores at National Parks and Monuments.)

More: Drunkablog, Tim Blair, and Jim Treacher, who takes the paddle to Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau (who in turn doesn't seem to be aware that he's slowly being supplanted by Chris Muir and Day by Day.)

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. . . when the sectarianism in this country is so pronounced?

Cassandra:

. . . We're not going to find a way to make Iraq work if the Democratic Party has anything to do with it because 49% of the people who put them in office either don't want us to win the war or "aren't sure" yet whether they want us to win.

It's that simple.

Month after month our media ask why we're unable to bring the violence under control in Iraq. The truth is that most of Iraq isn't awash in Sunni/Shia violence we read about every day from Baghdad.

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Unfortunately, it's Harry Reid, and one has to take a shower afterward.

I'm more at the Goldstein end of the spectrum than the Hackbarth end: this blog-registration idea is very troubling to me. It does, indeed, seem like the first step in a massive effort to curtail free speech. So though I'm sure there have been overreactions, the whole proposal makes me queasy.

There's also the idiocy involved: if legislators want to figure out who's getting traffic and buzz, can't they just have their staffers check out Technorati, and monitor the Ecosystem? Why should the onus be on bloggers to get in touch with the government? It's not like buzz is a big secret: by definition, it's pretty easy to figure out where it is.

Oh, but money. Right. We must ferret out where money might be changing hands.

Sorry, guys: that's also pretty easy to figure out. When someone is taking dough and doesn't disclose it, he/she always gets caught—generally by fellow bloggers. And there's something worse than government fines involved: his/her reputation always takes a hit for that sort of conduct.

The whole thing is patently ridiculous.

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Is that, like, a hotel lobby, or one at a doctor's office? And is it decorated in an early 20th Century style, or is it more Middle Eastern?

Just curious.

Via Insty, who remarks that "you're supposed to call them 'New York Money People.'"

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These might be the last ones we can afford for a while. Please keep the farm workers and farmers of California in your prayers. Three-quarters of the citrus crop lost, and nearly every crop affected. Shit.

I hope one of the trees in our yard decides to produce this year: the lemon tree is reliable, and the orange tree usually produces, but the tangerine tree is flakey in the best of times, and it's tangerines that we like the most.

Perhaps I can find someone who likes grapefruit, and work out an exchange.

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1 "tangerine tree is flakey in the best of times" Like a certain weblogger? I couldn't resist. It was a gigantic softball floating toward me, and I was Mark McGuire right after an injection.

Posted by: Sean Hackbarth at January 19, 2007 06:24 PM (QJ5cf)

2 The lady who runs the cafeteria at the school at which I work purchased ten times the usual amount of OJ this week because she suspects that prices are about to go up.

Posted by: John at January 19, 2007 07:26 PM (hJMG8)

3 Gee, Sean--if I meet anyone to whom that description applies, I'll be sure to pass that along! Yeah, John. I keep telling myself that if I overbuy on citrus, I'm part of the problem, because I'm creating an artificial shortage--a "run" on fruit in the stores. But I'm mired, oddly enough, in human nature. BTW, I'm not sure the price increases will extend to juice; a lot of the citrus that isn't pretty enough to be sold as whole fruit gets used for juice--that's why FL oranges are used more for this purpose than CA ones. But some of the CA crop was rescued, and will be diverted for use in OJ. Of course, I have no idea how much sort-of-damaged fruit was salvaged in the storm front, so I can't be sure. If they grabbed enough oranges as the frost was hitting, the fruit could, theoretically, flood the juice market and hurt FL farmers by creating an imbalance.

Posted by: Attila Girl at January 21, 2007 12:04 AM (0CbUL)

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"The Eighteenth Amendment proves that the Constitution once meant what it said."

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. . . to do to the Iraqis and the Iranians what we did to the Vietnamese and the Cambodians?

Do we really want to write the invasion off as a "disaster," pretend the Iraqi people would have been better off getting fed into plastic shredders?

Think about the killing fields. And choose carefully.

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. . . the birth of conservatism? Here you go.

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. . . is back.

For good, I hope.

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It feels so good to write this all out. It's clarified my thoughts tremendously, and made me see that my problems aren't insurmountable.

Now—how do I post this?

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If you didn't read his op-ed in The New York Times, go take a peek.

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I'm reading America Alone. Demographics, Mark Steyn argues, are destiny—and America is way ahead of Europe and Japan in terms of replacing its citizenry with another generation that shares the same cultural imprint.

He continually concedes that most Muslims are not terrorists, but reminds us that the vast majority of them do want to live under Sharia law, and points out that Europe's future is likely to be a sort of "good cop/bad cop" routine between the jihadis and their more moderate fellow travellers.

He points to the U.S. as the only place where we are reproducing and continuing to assert a national identity. We require some assimilation on the part of our immigrants, and Steyn sees this as a healthy thing.

Very provocative, and mostly correct. More later on the divine Mr. Steyn.

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. . . from AP.

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"What?" Attila the Hub is concerned.

"They made my martini with vodka, rather than gin. Do you know why?"

He appears to sigh, just a little. "Why?"

"Because of the patriarchy, silly. It's the same reason I have dry skin."

He raises an eyebrow. "Dry skin is caused by patriarchy?"

I take a sip of my thoroughly inadequate drink. "Absolutely. The Man is keeping me from getting my share of emollients. And gin. Just like in the Third World: not enough hand lotion, and too much vodka. And women bearing the brunt of it."

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. . . on timetables and renewable energy.

Thanks.

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