November 19, 2006 – 2:05 pm
I’ve mentioned oysters before in these pages (I should probably give posts about them a separate category by now), but while scooping a few dozen of them out of Wellfleet Harbor this weekend, I noticed something about them that I hadn’t realized before, which is that they seem to exhibit a consistent chirality.
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November 18, 2006 – 2:38 pm
If you enjoy music, and have a broadband Internet connection, then I must recommend an outstandingly clever website, Pandora. The site allows you to create virtual streaming “radio stations” that you seed with music you like — after which the system analyzes your choices and uses its proprietary algorithms to scan its vast collection to find other music that it thinks you will be likely to enjoy as well. It’s a smart idea, and done very well, with a simple and intuitive user interface. Take it for a spin. One caveat: no classical music yet. Apparently the analysis and assortment of classical music is a more difficult problem. They’re working on it.
November 17, 2006 – 1:58 pm
The front page of today’s New York Times features an outstanding photo, a real peach. In the foreground are the presumptive Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and her intraparty foe Steny H. Hoyer. Ms. Pelosi, who has yet even to take up the gavel, has already shown outstanding political ineptitude in her attempt to foist Pennsylvania pork broker and Mideast defeatist John Murtha upon the House as majority leader. The Democratic caucus, in what many see as a telling lack of fealty and a sign of party disunity, decisively rebuffed her, installing Mr. Hoyer, currently the minority whip, instead.
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November 17, 2006 – 12:09 pm
As noted below, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, the Brights, and other godless infidels have been strengthening their insurgency against the Believers. Meanwhile, however, followers of the fourth-largest religious group in Britain are petitioning for official recognition. Story here.
November 16, 2006 – 11:50 pm
There is a gathering groundswell of resistance to the colossal influence exerted on human affairs by organized religion. An increasingly visible and vociferous alliance of scientists, journalists, and philosophers are going on offense — quite justifiably so, given that the world’s intractable conflicts and most deeply seated hatreds seem to be rooted in religious differences, and given, also, the degree to which religious myths are interfering with the teaching of science in our schools, and slowing the pursuit of potentially revolutionary medical research.
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November 15, 2006 – 3:36 pm
Some of you may recall the amazing Honda ad that was making the rounds a couple of years ago; it was a film of an elegant and complex Rube Goldberg device made entirely of car parts, and it was filmed live, with no computer animation. Well, it appears that the Japanese educational-TV program Pitagora Suichi has been collecting viewer-submitted videos of similar homemade constructions, and my colleague Jay Chang informs me that an entertaining and amusing collection of them has been made available on YouTube. Have a look here.
November 14, 2006 – 11:21 pm
This story, one of the enormous body of Mulla Nasrudin folk-stories, is taken from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by the late Sufi writer and teacher Idries Shah.
Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his windowsill. He had never seen a bird of this kind before.
“You poor thing, ” he said, “however were you allowed to get into this state?”
He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers.
“Now you look more like a bird,” said Nasrudin.
November 14, 2006 – 12:49 am
The Earth’s temperature rises. The assignment of blame, one of Man’s most tenderly cherished hobbies, naturally ensues. The usual whipping boys — Western civilization generally, and capitalist America in particular — are piously flagellated by the guardians of “the planet” for the misfortunes we have inflicted upon innocent humankind, such as industry and transportation.
It does indeed seem that there is something happening that we should be concerned about. The evidence is clear enough. Is the answer, though, going to be the wholesale dismantling, as some would have it, of the technological infrastructure that undergirds our advancing civilization? Should we rip up the roadways, outlaw the automobile, and spend our declining years reading Baudrillard by candlelight? Of course not. Doomsayers ever since Malthus have prophesied the collapse of our species, and they have always made the same error, which is to underestimate Man’s technical ingenuity. The answer to the very real problem of global warming is not going to be the abandonment of our technology, but its improvement. It is a matter of engineering.
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November 12, 2006 – 11:53 pm
A savory morsel from Tocqueville:
Foreign policy demands scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; on the contrary it calls for the perfect use of almost all those qualities in which a democracy is deficient. Democracy … can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which are more characteristic of an individual or aristocracy.
– Alexis de Tocqueville; Democracy in America, 1835 ed.; Pt I, Ch. 5
November 11, 2006 – 8:12 pm
I’m back in Cape Cod this weekend, and as always it is restorative to be here. The effect is rather like pulling off at a scenic overlook during a long motor journey to stretch the legs, breathe deeply, and take one’s eyes off the road.
Living and working, as I do, in New York City, is to spend each day in a hyperkinetic environment of entirely human manufacture, wrought at an exclusively human scale. But here in Wellfleet, on this tiny spit of land flung out into the restless Atlantic, one finds oneself in the presence of physical immensities that offer the tightly clenched spirit room to unfurl. To step outside, as I did last night, to stand in silence under a moonlit sky, pine-framed and ablaze with stars, and then to stroll this afternoon along a deserted beach beside the limitless ocean — a scene entirely devoid, in chill November, of even the slightest trace of Man’s teeming presence — is to enjoy a trans-physical unconfinement, a Lebensraum of the soul, that many denizens of the congested antheaps we call cities no longer realize we require for our normal development.
November 10, 2006 – 1:38 pm
We’ll be traveling this weekend, and Internet access will be iffy, so waka waka waka will most likely be off the air until late Sunday, or perhaps even Monday.
You never know, though.
November 10, 2006 – 1:40 am
I call attention to a new link on the waka waka waka sidebar; it is the website of one Gin Foon Mark, one of the greatest living masters of southern Chinese kung fu.
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November 9, 2006 – 12:49 pm
I am reminded again, by a post at a neighboring and frequently visited site, of what an outstanding weblog is maintained by the Englishman “Deogolwulf”, under the banner The Joy of Curmudgeonry. He writes with style, scholarship, piquancy, and wit, and I urge you all to visit. Stay a while. Sample at random from the archives. Absorb a fewtril or two. Here’s a representative, aleatorically selected morsel, from June 1st of last year:
Sir Elton John is quoted in The Guardian today:
“When the Live Aid concert happened 20 years ago I was pretty much a self-obsessed drug addict. Although I was pleased to be part of a great day, I really wasn’t adult enough or mature enough to realise the full consequences of what we were doing.”
Sir Elton, who over the past twenty years has selflessly dedicated himself to a study of political economy, is now well known for his disdain of material comforts and is justly celebrated for his encyclopedic knowledge; nor is there about him a trace of the pleasure-seeking, narcissistic, moral and intellectual cretin who knows no more about politics or economics or history than does a parboiled titmouse.
The erudite Sir Elton, who in the mid-Nineties proved in a brilliant display of statistical mathematics the inefficacy of supply-side theory, is hoping to demonstrate the absurdity of free trade by playing the piano quite badly in front of a crowd of baying morons.
November 9, 2006 – 12:20 pm
Here’s an interesting bit of convergent evolution: I see from an item in today’s PhysOrg newsletter that tarantula venom targets the same pain-inducing capsaicin receptors that plants such as chili peppers have learned to activate to discourage predators. Learn more here.
November 8, 2006 – 5:01 pm
Well, Election Day is over at last. No more infuriating telephone spam, no more of the juvenile taunting and slanderous invective that, as this editorial rightly points out, should be enough to keep any self-respecting adult out of public service, and no more dithering over which of the available roster of egomaniacs are the ones we ought to hold our noses and vote for.
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November 8, 2006 – 11:49 am
From my old PubSub pal and fellow software engineer Mike Zaharee comes a link to a massively depressing story about the next space shuttle mission. It seems that NASA is considering delaying the launch until after the New Year, because — wait for it — they don’t want the ship to be in space when the calendar “rolls over”, because the shuttle’s software can’t handle it.
“The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover,” space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a briefing.
Well, on second thought, I can see his point. I mean, that’s a holiday, for Pete’s sake.
November 7, 2006 – 8:22 pm
My friend and kung-fu “training brother” Dan Betz has sent me a link to a remarkable tale about one Michael Oher, a young man from the most unfortunate circumstances imaginable, who, thanks to the intervention of a series of caring and concerned people, has risen from utter abandonment to become one of college football’s brightest prospects.
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November 6, 2006 – 8:24 pm
My friend Eugene Jen has sent me some links to a lively academic discussion. The topic is one that I am keenly interested in — evolutionary psychology — and the question at hand is what the future of the field might be, both here in the USA and in Asia.
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November 4, 2006 – 10:29 pm
I’m afraid I’m a bit under the weather tonight, and won’t be offering much of interest. I had a session today with my periodontist — Dr. Louis Franzetti, a good man, whom I like very much — that lasted from 10 a.m. until almost 5 o’clock. He addressed the left side, upper and lower: peeled away my gums, scraped and blasted the exposed bone, did some rather extensive bone-grafting, drilled a titanium implant into my lower jaw, and sutured my gums back on. He is a kind man, and a master of his art, but let me tell you, the experience was not entirely pleasant, and were it not for the blessings of organic chemistry I would be contemplating an untimely exit from this world right about now.
We’ll be back on the air again soon, perhaps even tomorrow.
November 3, 2006 – 11:36 pm
Recently I was given a century-old copy of the immense Merriam-Webster International Dictionary of the English Language. This 1906 edition’s title page continues:
BEING THE AUTHENTIC EDITION OF WEBSTER’S
UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, COMPRISING
THE ISSUES OF 1864, 1879, AND 1884
THOROUGHLY REVISED AND
MUCH ENLARGED UNDER
THE SUPERVISION OF
NOAH PORTER, D.D., LL.D.
WITH A VOLUMINOUS APPENDIX
TO WHICH IS NOW ADDED
A SUPPLEMENT
OF TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND WORDS AND PHRASES
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November 3, 2006 – 12:35 am
From Duncan Werner comes a link to an old memory — the story of Jose Feliciano’s performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at a World Series game between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, way back in 1968.
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November 2, 2006 – 1:51 am
In a typically interesting discussion over at the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella says at one point that the “wholly nonlinguistic fact of Santa’s nonexistence cannot depend on a linguistic fact about a word.” Now the subject in question is a rather technical one — it’s about the philosophical difficulties of references and their referents — but it reawakened for me some nagging questions about “facts”, about Platonism, and about the degree to which we are justified in assuming that the categories we impose on the external world are independent of our own minds.
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November 1, 2006 – 11:49 am
The lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent John Kerry, who so loves his own orotund bombast that he simply cannot, even for the sake of his own sallow hide, shut his pie-hole, has made a fool of himself again. This cadaverous windbag just won’t go away, and one of these days some good Democrat is going to find a hammer and a wooden stake and do the right thing.
October 31, 2006 – 10:44 pm
I am glad to see that NASA has decided to send a shuttle mission to service and augment the Hubble Space telescope. A decision had been made to abandon the instrument due to safety concerns in the wake of the 2003 Columbia mishap, with the agency choosing to focus instead on building out the international space station. Like many, many others, I was as mad as a cut snake to hear that the telescope was going to be left to die, and it’s good to see that the timorous administrators at NASA have changed their minds.
In addition to repairing aging gyroscopes, replacing batteries, and other routine maintenance, the shuttle crew — whose mission is scheduled for early 2008 — will add two new imaging devices: the Wide Field Camera 3, and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will allow the telescope to see farther, deeper, and in a broader spectral range than ever.
the Cats’s Eye nebula (photo: NASA/STScI)
I think the Hubble is one of mankind’s most splendid creations, a worthy counterpoise to such embarrassments as processed cheese and the jukebox musical. You can view a stunning gallery of Hubble images here.
October 31, 2006 – 12:53 am
When I wrote a few days ago about a pelican eating a pigeon in a London park, I thought I was picking up an insignificant, out-of the-way item that readers would almost certainly not have heard about otherwise. It seems that I was mistaken; a search on Google a moment ago turned up “about 339,000” results, and the story has reverberated through the blogosphere as well. Think of that: a bird eats another bird somewhere in the world, and within a day hundreds of thousands of people, all around the globe, have published some comment on it, which means that the news itself — a bird ate a bird in a park in England — has probably reached tens of millions. This is such an abrupt discontinuity from the entire social history of the human race that I think it bears noticing.
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October 29, 2006 – 2:54 pm
Last night we added an extra hour in our return to Standard Time. Like most people, I heartily approve; I enjoy the notion, however illusory, of gaining a line on the moving finger. Now if we could just persuade Congress to “fall back” three hours a night in perpetuity, I might even get rid of these bags under my eyes.
October 28, 2006 – 11:06 pm
Feeling a bit cooped up earlier today, I took myself for a longish walk in Prospect Park, which begins right at the end of my block here in Brooklyn. It was was just what the doctor ordered; few prescriptions can rival in therapeutic value the simple act of getting outside.
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October 27, 2006 – 8:17 pm
I’m sure that almost all of you, by now, are familiar with Google Earth. This fantastic tool, which requires nothing more than a good Internet connection and a free software download, allows the user to zoom in on high-resolution satellite images of any location on the Earth’s surface. The resolution varies from place to place, but will only get better with time, and already there are large patches of the planet that are represented in astonishing detail. The pictures aren’t live, of course, but are snapshots taken on clear days over the past three years or so.
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October 26, 2006 – 2:00 pm
Here’s a heartwarming little story, and a brief diversion from weightier matters: according to an item in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, visitors to London’s St. James Park were witnesses to an epic struggle as a pelican grappled with a pigeon. According to the report, it took the venturesome waterfowl — pelicans customarily dine exclusively on fish — fully twenty minutes to engulf its peristeronic snack. The enpouched pigeon (with worried look in image below) fought vigorously, but vainly, to escape, and ended up, apparently still alive, in the larger bird’s belly.
worth two in the bush (photo: Cathal McNaughton)
Read all about it here.
October 25, 2006 – 10:49 pm
James Taranto, in today’s Best of the Web newsletter, has published a letter he received from a U.S. army sergeant stationed northwest of Baghdad as part of an intelligence-gathering team. This sergeant, whose daily job is to interact with Iraqis and his fellow soldiers in order to “help put together the intel picture”, is in a better position than most people, including President Bush and his inner circle, to have a clear idea of what’s really going on over there, and what approach we ought to be taking in order to mitigate this worsening disaster.
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October 24, 2006 – 2:16 pm
If you’ve been wondering how folks in South Korea feel about their bouffanted and bellicose neighbor to the north, the irrepressible Kevin Kim has captured the nation’s sentiment in a touching little verse. Do take a look.
October 23, 2006 – 9:47 pm
Yesterday’s post was about “ring species”, both as interesting natural phenomena in themselves, and as a reminder that the persistent human tendency to impose discrete categories on continuous phenomena can lead us, if not to outright error, at least to an inaccurate model of the world. Keeping in mind that we are all inclined toward this prejudice — Richard Dawkins calls it the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — can help us to avoid not only taxonomic pitfalls, but philosophical ones as well.
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October 22, 2006 – 10:51 pm
One of the obstacles that some people face in understanding evolutionary theory is the natural tendency to think in excessively discrete terms, insisting on parsing the continuity of the world into distinct categories. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, addresses this problem — which he calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind’ — and offers some examples of how the categories we see in the natural world are often not sharply bounded, but merge seamlessly into one another. I have promised to write about some of the fascinating ideas in this book, and this topic seems a good one to begin with.
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October 21, 2006 – 11:55 pm
Well, we finally made it to Michigan. We caught an 11:45 flight out of Gotham, and got to Ann Arbor in time to join the procession of the faithful down State Street to the Big House, which, just for the record, really is big — it is the largest American-football stadium anywhere, and, according to this Wikipedia article, is the 29th-largest sports venue in the world (the larger ones are mostly racetracks). For today’s contest we were joined by 110,923 other spectators, and let me tell you, that’s a fair-sized crowd — numbering only slightly fewer than the population of Ann Arbor itself. And we were not disappointed; Michigan triumphed as expected, 20-6, even without the services of star wide receiver Mario Manningham, who is nursing a banged-up knee.
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October 20, 2006 – 11:48 pm
Old Rabbie Burns was right: things never turn out quite as planned. After spending many hours at LaGuardia Airport this evening, we were sent home, our flight to Motown canceled due to high winds. We will try again early tomorrow; our goal is to be there watch the Maize and Blue trounce the Iowa Hawkeyes at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor at 3:30 p.m. tomorrow.
Going to a game at the Big House is quite an experience; I hope to have a report to file later this weekend.
October 20, 2006 – 3:05 pm
We’ll be traveling to Ann Arbor, Michigan this evening, and waka waka waka may have to lie fallow for a day or two. Visitors are encouraged to browse our archives in the meanwhile, and we’ll be back as soon as we can.
October 19, 2006 – 11:47 pm
This past Friday, President Bush signed into law H.R. 4411, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, which prevents U.S. financial institutions from transferring money to online gambling services. For the Senate vote, the bill was sneaked, in typical sausage-and-legislation fashion, into the SAFE Ports Act (H.R. 4954 As Amended), where it passed 98-0, with two abstaining (Sens. Chafee and Akaka).
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October 18, 2006 – 11:36 pm
At the apex of the southern Chinese Hung Ga system of kung fu is the Iron Wire form, sometimes referred to as the Iron Thread. It was created by Tit Kiu Sam, one of the legendary Ten Tigers of Canton, and its main purpose is to cultivate internal power.
The Iron Wire is practiced under controlled tension; it derives its name from the feeling one has during many sections of the form that one is stretching an imaginary cord between the hands. Each movement is carefully synchronized with the breath, and at many points in the form there are particular sounds that the practitioner must utter. These sounds are intended to direct the breath (or “chi”) to various organs and muscles. If performed incorrectly or without understanding, this combination of moving tension and controlled breathing can, in fact, cause serious harm, and as a result the form is taught only to advanced students.
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October 17, 2006 – 11:03 pm
In a recent post, I recommended that readers with an interest in biology pay a visit to the Tree of Life Web Project, an interactive display of the taxonomic relationships linking all life on Earth. Upon seeing the post, one of our commenters, microbiologist Andrew Staroscik, mentioned that he had rather a low opinion of the ToL website, and, when I asked him if he would explain in more detail, offered a detailed and piquant critique of the way the tree is organized and presented. We are fortunate to have experts such as Andrew among our readership, and rather than let his response languish in the comment thread, where many of you might not have seen it, I am republishing it here.
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October 16, 2006 – 2:41 pm
As readers will recall, this past weekend was the occasion of Wellfleet’s annual Oysterfest. It was a splendid event, as always. The weather was just beautiful – cool and crisp, with a deep blue sky and golden autumnal sunshine, and thousands of visitors were on hand, drawn to our charming seacoast village by the promise of happy company, good food, rivers of beer, amusing special events, local arts & crafts, and of course a limitless supply of sweet and succulent Wellfleet oysters, served up in every imaginable configuration.
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October 14, 2006 – 12:01 pm
As I mentioned a while back, one item getting frequent play in my rotating reading stack is the hefty volume The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, and as I expected, it is hugely engaging and informative. I’m about halfway done with it – the backwards pilgrimage is currently marching through the latter Carboniferous period, where we mammals have just been joined by the Sauropsids (including all reptiles and birds). I’ve already learned a great many interesting things, and will be sprinkling some of them about these pages in days and weeks to come. For today, however, I’ll call the attention of any of you who have an interest in natural history to a marvelous website, the Tree of Life Web Project. Onto the waka waka waka sidebar it goes.
October 13, 2006 – 5:52 pm
Our post a couple of days ago about the ruthless Kim Jong Il drew a visitor who left a link to a dramatic image, reproduced below:
Presumably this is a nighttime sattelite photo, showing the luminous metropolis of Seoul and the prosperous, well-lit Republic of Korea to the south, and the veiled, darkling, and preposterously named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north. The emotional power of this image is immediate, and tragic.
The picture comes from the UK paper the Daily Mail, so I assume it is genuine. The person who left it signed in only as Kim, which narrows things down in Korea about as much as if he had announced himself as “Jim” over here. The current waka waka waka WordPress settings require commenters to leave an email address, and the comment form also offers them the option to submit a link to their own websites; the email address left by Kim was from the gov.kp domain, and the website linked to was the official DPRK government website (which is well worth a look, by the way).
I rather doubt that our visitor is actually a member of the government of that enslaved nation, nor even a resident; I’d be curious to know more, Kim, if you’d care to drop me a line.
October 13, 2006 – 5:50 pm
Today is Friday the 13th, always a good day for me, as I was born on one, back in 1956. And this year is no exception; my lovely wife Nina and I are back in Wellfleet this weekend, and as always it is balm to the spirit to be here. And as if the cool sea breezes, lovely autumnal light, and serene natural beauty of this New England coastal village weren’t enough, tomorrow is the 2006 Wellfleet Oysterfest, a gustatory extravaganza that draws lovers of our renowned and eponymous mollusc from all over the Northeast. Expect another favorable review.
October 11, 2006 – 11:39 pm
There was a tragic and shocking event here in New York today, as most of you have probably heard by now. Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, acquired just this summer by the Bombers in the trade with the Phillies that also brought Bobby Abreu to the Bronx, was killed, along with his passenger, when the small plane he was piloting flew into a high-rise apartment tower on East 72nd Street.
I don’t really know what to say about this sad, strange story; I just thought it would be remiss of me not to make note of it. It is always so unsettling to see how some lives end while the rest of us go on, at least for now.
October 10, 2006 – 11:02 pm
One of the least palatable aspects of the situation in North Korea is the humanitarian quandary created by Kim Jong Il’s ruthless game, in which he relies on the misery of his enslaved people for his own protection. North Korea depends for its very survival on foreign aid; the United States and China are the principal benefactors. It is only this largesse that makes it possible for Kim to maintain an enormous standing army, and to play with nuclear weapons; had the Chinese seriously pressured him, he would have had to stand down. They didn’t, though, partly because they are concerned that any further instability, such as might be caused by even deeper poverty and famine, would drive hordes of refugees across their border, but also, I think in large part, because they enjoy the discomfiture that the obstreperous Kim causes the Western bloc.
The US, too, has been reluctant to cut back on the millions of tons of food we send to North Korea, but for quite different reasons — we are well aware that to do so would sentence a great many people to starvation. Kim knows that this leaves us in a difficult position: by refusing to provide any more foreign aid, we could press China to do more about the rogue state that it helps to support, but only at the cost of our conscience. Lacking one of his own, I am sure he is laughing up his sleeve at ours.
October 10, 2006 – 9:59 am
It’ll be lighter fare this week, as I am working rather long hours and will be traveling on Thursday evening. For the moment, two pointed little jokes:
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October 9, 2006 – 9:25 am
With characteristic bluster, the insane despot Kim Jong Il has defied the will of the international community generally, and the United Nations Security Council in particular, by conducting an underground nuclear test, of yet-indeterminate magnitude. He’ll soon wish he hadn’t, because there will be swift and certain retribution from the UN – perhaps even a stern finger-wagging. And if that isn’t enough to teach the impudent little rascal some manners, you can be sure he won’t be spared some severe tut-tutting as well.
He’ll think twice before he tries that again.
October 8, 2006 – 7:00 pm
Thanks to commenter Kevin Kim, I’ve been spending some time poking around in Korean blogs. All cultures, of course, have their odd little quirks and idiosyncracies (the United States is no exception, of course, what with our drive-thru wedding chapels, monster truck pulls, and our penchant for Mespotamian nation-building), and I’ve run across one that seems to be unique to Korea. No, it isn’t kimchi. I’m referring, of course, to fan death.
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October 7, 2006 – 11:12 pm
My old pal, the guitarist Steve Khan, has many friends in Venezuela, and has spent a lot of time down there in recent years. This has given him an opportunity for a first-hand look at the enlightened presidency of Hugo ChÁ¡vez, and unsurprisingly, he is not impressed. Steve sent me, yesterday, links to three items by New York Post columnist Douglas Montero that show some of what life is like in that beautiful Caribbean country under this egomaniacal popinjay. Read them here, here, and here.
October 5, 2006 – 11:51 pm
Another long day today – work followed by a long evening of teaching and training down at the kwoon, and here it is pushing midnight and no post written yet. So rather than bloviate into the wee hours, I think I will offer you all instead a glimpse of New York City life, in the form of a conductor’s announcement that I heard on the F train as I was making my weary way home this past Saturday.
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