Okay, here’s my first nutbag post of the year. Let me start by saying that I still have hope for Clark, if not for President then for VP. As for Dean, I’ve always thought that he might stand a chance against Bush as long as a third-party spoiler doesn’t step in and help Bush to […]

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Julien is going to be ecstatic when he hears this news (via Matt). I’ve recently turned him into a hardcore Dio fan. He’s now pretty well recovered from the trauma of having to listen to me sing Dio songs when he was little, thank goodness. Much to mom’s chagrin. Like Matt said, “[T]he next four […]

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Gail explores the evolution of love songs sung by women. Absolutely fascinating.

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Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the year of the monkey. I’m a monkey, what about you?

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I’ve just finished Terence Ward’s Seaching for Hassan. It was a very good book. It had a nice balance, being part travel diary and part history of Iran. A couple of things, among many, that I learned are that Iranians are not Arab (I’d always ignorantly assumed that everyone in the middle east was Arab […]

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For Christmas this year, I got some money. I wanted to spend it on something fun, like a new saw, but ultimately I was convinced that my wardrobe was in serious need of updating. We’re not talking $5,000 to blow in New York, so my spending spree had to be be conservative. I had to […]

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I want to learn to sew. I don’t know why, I just do. Maybe it’s like the time I decided to build an electric guitar: I wanted a new electric guitar and it seemed like the easiest way to get one. Right now, I want a very simple courier bag and a very simple Kofi […]

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It was still dark. I laid there in bed, warm and cozy and feeling mostly well-rested but by no means ready to move a single muscle, when Ari’s alarm went off. The dee-jay was giving a weather report - the words “mostly rainy all day” made me want to burrow even deeper into bed - […]

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I think the Brooklyn Public Library website is one of the cleanest and best-designed library websites I’ve seen in a long time. In the menubar at left, they use the hover trick of bolding the link, but unlike that trick’s poor usage in regular sentences (which causes the newly-bolded word to knock the rest of […]

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Here’s an interesting passage from the book I’m reading, Searching for Hassan by Terence Ward:
“Mrs. Ward,” [Akbar] asked, “why do Americans keep mistaking [Iranians] with Arabs? When will they understand we are not the same people?”
She sighed. “Akbar, America is like an island, cut off from the world,” she replied. “Most don’t know any better.”
I […]

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