2008 in review - fourth quarter. Better late than never. OCTOBER started with the usual job-related pains in the ass. I did manage to get to the last day of the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, where I met beatonna , David Malki of wondermark , and Ben Katchor. Then I had a birthday. I managed to catch banzchan at Anime Expo, helped them pack up on Sunday, and made tentative...

Boy Meets Suit, Boy Repairs Suit, Boy Loses Suit Over on James Nicoll's blog , a comment thread went off on two successive tangents, first into books that are "responses" to other books-- in which (of course) Starship Troopers and The Forever War came up-- and then into Heinlein's talent for making the reader sit still for lengthy expository material. joelrosenberg , himself a prolific...

Joel Rosenberg explains it all . "Some years ago, I was asked by Judy's second-grade teacher to come in and explain Chanukah to her class. I resisted, at first -- I find the public school emphasis on Chanukah as a way of allowing Christmas celebrations there to be offensive tokenism -- but I did finally relent. The only condition I insisted on was that I'd tell the truth about Chanukah, in a way...

So, yeah...not really much to say except that between all the antibiotics and Mepilex foam dressings, my leg wounds may be closer to being healed than at any time since I was swimming 2-3x a week before coming down here. The doctor this morning was saying they're going to turn me loose Monday with a new & deadly oral antibiotic, of which great things are expected. I think it's not the wi-fi that's...

A few surprises, as the list seems to go back to The Beginning (it includes people who are long gone from LJ). And I've deleted quite a few Anonymous posts as spam (or worse). But for your egoscanning pleasure: Total comments: 2840 1 barondave 823 2 asimovberlioz 224 3 minnehaha 128 4 skylarker 124 5 calimac 78...

This is going my my friends-list again. I admit to some surprises. Total comments: 4062 1 sraun 691 2 gomeza 96 3 skylarker 86 4 filkferengi 78 5 minnehaha 74 6 cakmpls 72 7 allyra 70 8 adina_atl 67 9 davidwilford 64 10 azurelunatic ...

Sweet. This meme comes with its own built-in cut tag! It sure is nice staying in touch with all of you. Total comments: 4331 1 gerisullivan 748 2 mjlayman 177 3 minnehaha 165 4 kip_w 105 5 debgeisler 92 6 Anonymous 85 7 maruad 81 8 lsanderson 67 9 jbru ...