Thanks to larksdream for pointing me at Wikihistory, a very very short story by Desmond Warzel.

Having a wonderful time in DC with plumtreeblossom — and bcat1 and spacechicken for much of the time! Yesterday we all went to the zoo, and then to Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Today we had brunch with bcat1 and spacechicken before they took off for Raleigh, and then plumtreeblossom and I wandered down the Mall and spent a couple nifty hours in the National Air and Space museum (which has the Apollo 11 CSM, the Friendship 7, and the Gemini capsule from the mission with the first US spacewalk, among lots of other impressive stuff). Then we headed for Dupont Circle, but decided to check out Chinatown on the way and ended up at a Burmese restaurant for dinner. (Neither of us had had Burmese food before. It’s yummy!) Then we went to Dupont Circle and had a lovely time wandering around. We ended up at Afterwords, a cafe connected to a bookstore, for very inexpensive and yummy dessert and coffee. The bookstore was neat, too.

Pictures will follow; we got some great ones at the zoo, and I think some of the ones from the Mall and the Air and Space museum came out well, although I haven’t had a chance to look at them. (I also owe y’all some pictures from Topsfield Fair.)

Happy birthday to the delightful, fun, smart, and sexy dan4th!

(Also, because I have been grotesquely neglectful of my duties lately, happy belated birthday, in increasing order of belatedness, to pyrobaka, majes, aibyou_canti, onemintjulep, onemintjulep, queue, and a very late May Day happy birthday to my brother-in-law spacechicken and his brother bobtshirt. (Hey, are you guys twins, or did you just happen to be born on the same day in different years?) And to many other people, as well.

Oh, and happy Bunker Hill Day! (That article mentions this historical flag of New England, which is pretty nifty. I think we should revive it.)

[EDIT: Oh, and dan4th also writes differenceblog, on research into gender differences. Definitely worth a read. (dan4th, you know where to send the check... :-)]

If you are in San Francisco on the 26th or 27th of January, you should go see Monday Night in Westerbork. bearsir is an awesome writer and performer.

Well, I’ve taken a brief break from my usual all-Pratchett 24/7 diet to read Mary Roach’s book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I’m almost done, and I loved it. It’s tremendously entertaining as well as informative, and I love her very funny writing style. It reminds me a lot of the sort of humour that’s popular in my tribe, but I don’t see a lot of it in the U.S. mainstream. (Actually, her writing style reminds me a lot of dry British humour.)

I also just finally got around to watching The Assassination of Richard Nixon, which I’ve had out from GreenCine for ages. Getting inside the head of a main character who is awkward and depressed and just a bit off and feels like the world is stacked against him is kind of a creepy feeling. Definitely a good movie, though. Sean Penn did a fabulous job of getting me into that head.

And finally, bon voyage to ragingamazon! I look forward to all the pictures from Thailand.

One of the side benefits of dating plumtreeblossom is that she lives so close to Somerville’s Powderhouse Park, site of the only known surviving Civil-War era ballistic missile, a remnant of President Lincoln’s Strategick Defence Initiative, or SDI.

( A photo, and an historical essay. )

Slept really late yesterday, and was conscious today. (Er, by “today” I mean “Sunday”.)

Got to go to King Richard’s Faire today with the wonderful eisa, who’s up from New York City for the weekend. We got to see [person who’s LJ name I don’t know, if he has one], who works there. They had tigers, leopards, and a stunningly huge liger, a falconry exhibition, an albino Burmese python, and oh, I think there were also some people walking around in funny clothes. It was quite fun. Afterwards we watched Grave of the Fireflies, an amazingly well done and amazingly depressing animated Japanese film about a young brother and sister orphaned towards the end of the war. It also presented a rather, um, simple picture of the war, but I wasn’t too surprised at that. Very good movie, but I’m glad I wasn’t alone when I saw it. Oh, and we got to play a couple games of Chez Geek, which neither of us had played in years. And on my way home from dropping her off to meet jadasc, I got to spend a little time with cathijosephine’s cat Chickenfinger.

Still wish I could have made it to BiCamp, but today still made for a good weekend. Now I must sleep. Actually, a long time ago I must sleep, but now I’m going to.

PS — Eventually I will post photos of the cats and raptors.

So yesterday after work cathijosephine and I saw S. Bear Bergman’s performance Monday Night in Westerbork in a preview performance (announced here. It was amazing. I’m too sleepy to do any more justice to the experience than that; I just want to second desiringsubject’s exhortation that you should all see it when it premieres. (The preview we saw was sort of a late rehearsal; Bear is still working on the show.)

Today’s essay question, slightly inspired by a recent foray into the high-stakes world of internet domain speculation:

Will there be a United States of America in 50 years? In 100? In 500? In a thousand? Why or why not?

If your answer is “it depends”, what does it depend on?

ragingamazon points out that GLBT Pride parades have had worse problems than the weather. I highly recommend reading that short post.

D.C. Simpson, author of Ozy and Millie has some thoughts on the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi at the site of his political cartoon, I Drew This. (Scroll past the cartoon, and be aware that that post will be replaced in a few days; there’s a link to archives, but no permanent link to the current post.) Simpson links to this much more in-depth article by journalist Nir Rosen. Coincidentally, I heard an interview with Rosen on the radio today, which was interesting and depressing. I want to buy Rosen’s book on Iraq.