(Thanks to everybody who answered my David Paterson question!)

There’s a great podcasting app available for my new phone (an Android Dev Phone, the unlocked version of the T-Mobile G1, about which I could write an awful lot if I had the time and energy), so I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Most often, I’m listening to On Point. (It’s two hours every weekday, so that’s a lot to listen to even if I don’t listen to every show.)

Tonight, I listened to yesterday’s segment “Everything, Incorporated”, in which Douglass Rushkoff talks about the ideas in his new book Life, Inc.. I found it really really interesting. He talks about the origins of the modern corporation and of money, about railroads and corn and hiring a lactation consultant to teach you how to breastfeed so you don’t have to impose on mothers you know to talk to you about it and about being criticised by his neigbours for posting about a mugging because they thought it would hurt their property values. It’s a fascinating scratch-the-surface but very interesting examination of how we ended up with the social and economic structure we live in. It touches (briefly) on an idea I’ve had rolling around in my head for a long time and wanted to post about (but never collected my thoughts enough) about how money distorts our priorities and our notions of sacrifice and benefit, because some kinds of value and importance are much more easily measurable with money than other kinds.

Anyway, if any of that sounds interesting, I would encourage you to listen to it. The page linked above has a big “Listen to This Show” button to stream it, or you can download he mp3 here.

Sorry for my long absence here. I’ve been too busy enjoying life to post about it. In fact, I’ve started to post a couple times recently and not gotten very far. So, since I don’t seem to have the stamina for a long post, here are some bullet items:

• First, the bad news: As plumtreeblossom posted here, her lovely grey Siamese Rowley was diagnosed with kidney disease on Saturday. But evidently it hasn’t gotten too bad yet, and the vet says he’ll definitely get some weight back with a low-protein diet and subcutaneous fluids, and it might even cure him. So we’re very glad we took him in. (He’d been gradually but very steadily been losing weight over six months or so.)
• Everything else is good, starting with a lovely visit to see eisa in New York City a couple weekends ago, which involved good food (as always) and meeting a couple of her friends. It also involved getting introduced to a new TV show (on DVD), whereon more later.
• Mare and I saw Theatre@First’s production of The Winter’s Tale, excellently directed by dietrich. Loved the staging, loved the somewhat quirky play, loved the performance. Congratulations to all!
• The news from the vet was not good, but it was great to be there for plumtreeblossom and Rowley, and I’m really glad we got him to the vet. And that morning plumtreeblossom cooked me banana pancakes and bacon. She must love me!
• Besides The Winter’s Tale, I’ve been enjoying a lot of classic or retro movies and literature:
• On the bus on the way to New York, I finished the utterly bizarre Edison’s Conquest of Mars (Wikipedia; Gutenberg). ( Cut for length. )
• Preparatory to starting Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I read Pride and Prejudice, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The funnier bits reminded me a little of Saki.
• plumtreeblossom and I watched a DVD she bought of a 1964 adaptation of The First Men in the Moon, which we both enjoyed a lot. ( Cut for length. )
• The TV show eisa introduced me to was Mad Men, which is retro in a different sort of way. ( Cut for length: Mad Men vs. Star Trek. )
• And it’s not historical or retro, but I also watched a weird French movie called La Moustache. ( Cut for length. )

OK, that was fairly long after all. Now it’s time for me to go to bed. Good night, all!

Among the highlights of a wonderful weekend (much of it spent with plumtreeblossom) were watching her perform live radio drama at Arisia, watching the entirety of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech on CNN in the hotel (and then listening to parts of it on the radio), and attending ragingamazon’s Third Annual Going-Away Celebration with a bunch of wonderful people.

And today is no longer the weekend, but today is certainly still a celebration. I’ll be going over to plumtreeblossom’s after work to watch post-inauguration coverage on TV (if we can figure out how to work the cable box :-). We might stop in at one of the area celebrations, or we might be so overcome with joy and relief that we can’t move.

Speaking of Martin Luther King day and that speech, damn, was that a good speech! I’m not sure I’d ever heard the whole thing before; I’d certainly never seen the whole thing before. After the speech, CNN had an interview with a civil-rights lawyer who was involved in preparing for the speech and had essentially written it (or I should say, had written the draft). It turns out that the “I have a dream” part and what followed it were not in the prepared speech. King got to that point following the prepared speech, and colleague of his yelled out, “Tell them about your dream, Martin!” and he glanced at her and turned his written speech upside down. The lawyer who had drafted said (to himself or to somebody next to him, I don’t quite remember), “These people don’t know it, but they’re about to be in church.” And Martin did tell them about his dream, and the rest of the speech was extemporized.

Another lovely weekend with my sweetie. Saturday afternoon I got ingredients for crockpot chicken and dumplings (incidentally having to get out and sprinkle kitty litter under my wheels three times to get out of the driveway!) and got that started. Picked up plumtreeblossom in the evening and we came back to Quincy for dinner. After dinner, we had a couple drinks and (as is often the case) ended up link-surfing on Wikipedia, and finally landed on this site of colour photographs of Tsarist Russia by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I forget how we ended up on the topic, but something reminded me of that exhibit and those photos — oh, I remember now! We’d been listening to recordings from old phonograph cylinders on Wikipedia, and plumtreeblossom mentioned how weird it felt to be listening to recordings from the 19th century and how it made that era seem less distant, and that reminded me of how it felt to see colour photographs from before the Russian Revolution, so I googled to find the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit again.

This morning (after shovelling out the car with cathijosephine’s help), I drove cathijosephine and m_c_t to the T station so they could go to the airport for m_c_t’s flight back to the Wrong Left Coast. It was lovely having him here, and I’ll miss him.

When I got back my darling was making me bacon and eggs and we had a lovely breakfast before running out to the store so she could do a shopping run. (It’s handy to do that when I can drive her, so she can get heavy stuff and not have to carry it from the grocery store to the T to her house. And it’s fun to shop together.) I had only been planning on getting a couple things myself, but I failed to exercise any self-restraint and now I have yummy things in the fridge.

Then I drove her home, and came back to Quincy (stopping to get a few things for the house, notably sand, which yesterday’s experience demonstrated I need). I picked up some Chinese food on the way and ate it with cathijosephine and darxus.

I have a large number of things I needed to get done this weekend that I didn’t do, but I don’t particularly care. Life is full, and life is good.

EDIT: I forgot to mention; she gave me a couple more pieces of purple clothing, adding to the sweater she gave me a few weeks ago. ( And she took a picture of me in my new purple hoodie. )

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. )