You would have prefered a tornado? / My, aren't we the busy one!

I have spent time in California, and can sympathize with the poor WTFers. The thing about an earthquake, which natives take for granted, is how weird it is. The house is not supposed to shake. Your seat is not supposed to move. Random crockery is not supposed to jump off the mantelpiece. Curiously enough, back in the 80s there was a small quake in NY. I don’t recall where it was located, but in the land of the Sailors it sounded to everyone as if someone had picked up and dropped their basement furnace; the thing took place at about four in the morning, and it was subterranean noise more than movement. As you know, Manhattan is slowly working its way up to Albany; the bad news is that California will be long gone by the time the governor of the Empire State is able to live in Gracie Mansion and not have to commute to work. (FYI: Gracie Mansion is where the NYC mayor lives. Gracey Mansion is where 999 ghosts live. I did have to look up the spelling.)

Anyhow, Earth is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. You just can’t count on it to stay put. I do understand, however, that the Old Baudleroo has written a critique of earthquakes, demonstrating that they do not exist. No doubt the WTFers will be running this for Jan-Feb. Again.

I worked on some novice intro material last night, and ended up with a web page that would tell them what to do and link them to what they need to be linked to. The hardest thing was coming up with a tone that wouldn’t scare them away, as in, read this, read that, sign here, print that, watch your brain evaporate, mes etoiles, what have I gotten into? It is difficult for some poor barely pubescent schmegeggie to appear on the team in September fresh from middle school and all of a sudden have to learn everything in about three weeks because your first tournament is coming up so stand up straight and buy a suit and could you get your mother to judge for us? One of the items I’ll be requiring is familiarity with the Feed, which I was poring over last night. I’ve come to realize that it’s rather silly to repost this blog there, so I’ll stop that, although I will keep cross-posting things like CP’s blog, which should get a lot of readership (although for all I know, he’s more popular than I am, in which case, the hell with him, why doesn’t he repost my stuff?). (And I’m sorry, but for the life of me I can’t come up with a good enough juxtaposition of repost and riposte to even marginally get a laugh out of it, so I won’t even bother.) I’ll get to a more detailed discussion of my continuing bout with news and news-reading here shortly. Suffice it to say for now that I’ve given in completely.

In terms of debate, this has been one of my most productive summers, but I have no idea why. It’s been productive in other ways, too. I’ve seen all kinds of art, made all kinds of day trips, learned how to make a perfect caffe con leche, and found a way to keep Tik (pronounced teek) from biting me too often. A year that will go down in history, I’d say. All that’s left is some David Hume, who seems to be way more important than I knew till now, and whom I’ve only dabbled in. Unfortunately I just started The First Word two nights ago, and so far I’m loving it, so it may take a while to get to the Sage of Edinburgh, given that I read books at the rate of about 3 pages a day (except for the Day Job, when I read at about 100 pages an hour). Fortunately I won’t have Scrabulous to distract me anymore, so my productivity should increase threefold.