Pan's Labyrinth (movie review)

The girls and I projected this on our living room wall, using the Toshiba + Optoma. Alexia fell asleep before it was over, Tara pronounced it a good movie and not all that bad, given she empathized so completely with Ofelia. Dawn had wanted to see this movie, given the title and buzz. In retrospect, we think she did fine without it -- but not that it was a bad movie or anything, just very violent (recalling her reaction to Lost City). Plus Dawn didn't much go for subtitles.

The film explores very strongly motivated characters each responding to a different set of cues. The little girl is the most off base, in terms of having a solid enough reality to walk through walls (in a manner of speaking). The military patriarch is self-indulging in some father-son cult that glorifies in death, and he ends up disappointed. In between is the Spanish civil war, more than ugly. The maid's scenario is the most heroic, next to Ofelia's, yet tinged with more realism (more machine world, less Narnia).

Monitored Enrichment

I'm not a huge fan of nuclear energy but recognize the technology is likely to stay with us, and could be less polluting than coal in some ways, once you factor in the scarring, although uranium mines can be ugly too.

Iranian consortia are well positioned to lead in enrichment, a vital step in the commercial supply chain, provided there's sufficient transparency, given their relatively clean track record thus far. Civilian fuel providers will contract with Iranian refineries for ready-to-install non-weapons-grade materials.

Given an historic insistence on secrecy coupled with a policy of first use, LAWCAP is in no position to be lecturing on the need for transparency in monitoring. Likewise, until the Grunch resolves its voting machine problems, it should maybe just shut up (in the Bill O'Reilly sense) about "exporting democracy." There's only so much hypocrisy an intelligent reader can bear.

Those fearing competition in a lucrative sector face an uphill battle keeping the Iranians from breaking in to the business. USA-based flagships could remain competitive however, if complying with the same IAEA-style transparency guidelines as everyone else. Competition will help keep prices down and should be encouraged by the WTO.

Any traffic aimed at nuclear weapons manufacture is equally criminal in every nook and cranny of the globe. That's easy to understand and therefore relatively easy to enforce.

Small Planet

Americans talk about withdrawing from Iraq as if there were some place to go to get away from all mistakes of the past, from any consequences for what's been started. Vietnam to the west plays a role in this thinking, as Asia seems peaceful right now, nonthreatening (except maybe for North Korea). "Will Iraq ever be like Vietnam?" many North Americans ask themselves, scanning the channels for answers.

Although North America pretty much stradles the northern western hemisphere, it's not immune from geopolitics, as our fearless leaders endlessly preach to us. But then do our fearless leaders have enough smarts to use a Fuller Projection, with world game models for winning against death by starvation, from exposure: twin terrors humans are naturally designed to fight.

This karma is not all bad let's remember. Baghdad has a bright future on many a storyboard, Iraq a strong, self-interested economy. Just because we've earned a thousand years of karma doesn't mean we're in hell. We Fuller Schooler geekazoids like having to work it all out on tiny Spaceship Earth, find this a very kwel planet. We want our designs to be dependable, reliable, high quality. Speaking of which, it's time to go get Razz from the shop.

Itineraries

Kudos to Southwest Airlines for juggling Alexia (and to Alexia for being a willing pin). The Chicago connection was about to fall through, and Seattle is too far to taxi, but an alert desk clerk realized a certain aircraft ended the day in Portland, so if Alexia just sat it out, passing through places like San Diego and Phoenix, she'd make it after all, which she did.

No bag though. It came through Chicago, and I picked it up this morning with Larry, blathering in both directions about geeky stuff (they'd've delivered but why not a $50 voucher, a chance to catch up with a friend?). Anyway, great airline work. And kudos to Greg by the way.

The mercy care team is also in high gear, performing its services. I just got off the phone with Ellen where she talked me through resetting the pump. Any TPN during hospice is a matter of landing the craft slowly and comfortably, less of a crash -- a shot of whiskey on the deck of The Titanic is how I put it (except Dawn was more a tequila fan, had given up drinking by the time I met her).

Gayle and Elizabeth were her two pilgrimmage sisters on that trip to Ireland's holy wells that time. She also flew on her own to Glastonbury and those parts, that other time, meeting up with sisters there.

Dawn was first introduced to the Kirby concept in the abstract. She was shown a small closet like room, told it was my office, while meanwhile Kirby himself was in Bhutan. Which was all true. Later, she and Alexia went to Bhutan with me, by way of Chang Mai (Thailand) and Calcutta (India).

As for the Math Wars, they're always ongoing. Our side is winning these days, which hasn't always been the case. I prefer ending careers to real battlefield bloodshed -- more civilized by a long shot.

Wanderers enjoyed some dynamite presentation by a Mercy Corps powerhouse this morning. I missed it, but all reports were positive. Glad to meet over Thai food with "our" Japanese exchange student (just turning 23) and her friend (same age -- I guessed right), bound for San Francisco today.

Rearrangements

I moved our wireless access substation from the bedroom to the living room this morning, so wayfaring guests, like our neighbor, might better access the Internet from Dawn's HQS. We've got a ship's log goin' (Laurie's idea), plus other stuff.

The substation hangs off the house AC, which communicates tcp/ip over these short distances. It's funny to think of my browser frames traveling through the fuse box, but such is the state of the art in these parts.

I told Wanderers I'm fine with like South Park doin' its version of the Al Gore movie or whatever, "because even if the science is right, the fear and/or spin might not be."

The Windows patches worked fine, as did my satellite checked Casio, but for some reason the VCR box hooked to cable didn't update, even after unplugging/replugging during the move. And that clock's what I happened to rely on when I woke up this morning, so Tara was late to school.

Wanderers 2007.03.07

Again, I missed it, needing to catch up on office work, plus feeling feverish a little, having spent the previous night on the river on a stakeout of the moon.

Glenn filled me in over Thai food: an accomplished engineer of vast environmental experience, Charles Lytle talked about how the instrumentation has gotten really good, to parts in a quadrillion sometimes, to where it's getting easier than ever to trace pollutants to their sources.

This level of technical sophistication is a problem for the politically minded, who'd rather not see those detailed maps showing up on flatscreens all over the place. It's harder to just nod nod wink wink in the presence of so much empirical data. Polluting companies therefore can't simply arm twist, hoping their exotic pavement materials, or fireworks fallout, will go undetected and unreported.

Still, despite these advances on the Sherlock Holmes side of the business, law enforcement has a tough job: rains from the other side of the Pacific often have a higher mercury content than local laws permit and overfishing hurts everyone, but how good are those eyes in the sky at really catching those heinous criminals, especially on cloudy days?

Late Night with Dave Koski

Koski is the David Letterman of T-module geometry, where the T-mod is this wedge, both left and right handed, and 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron. A recent investor in ZomeTool, David has been assembling up a storm.

recursive construction of T with "remainder tet"

The other night, he reported finally getting around to the rhombic dodecahedron, the paradigm IVM shape, and finding it easy to build.

rhombic dodeca with embedded cube

Koski goes way back with this stuff, to the life of a scholar in and around Venice and Santa Monica, California, which is when we first met.

Thirsters Again

My borrowed copy of Burden of Dreams coming due, I swung by Thirsters again while in the neighborhood.

I partially caught up on a system for rationalizing English spelling, then tuned in a Reed College professor, ending up talking about R, which he uses to teach statistics, and J, which he hadn't heard of.

The political analyst across the table talked up corruption in Cook County politics, about how they paid people to knock new voters off the roles, other shenanigans, and about how Senator Wu seemed so circumspect (inscrutable?), despite recent press.

Actually, I think Wu was somewhat on target characterizing neocons as Klingons, not Vulcans. Plus I take some credit (not a whole lot) for getting those trekkie monikers applied to brands of Washington insider in the first place.

For example, I used the term "Vulcan" in May of 1999 with reference to the CIA's former executive director Nora Slatkin, her tenure overlapping Deutch's as then DCI:

Nora came from a background in defense, as did DCI Deutch. Some of us called her "the Vulcan Queen" or something like that. She was a tough cookie -- smart too.

But in calling her a Vulcan, I never intended Slatkin to be perceived as a neocon, who are more like Ferengi (I don't really see Condi as a neocon either though).

All this Star Trek talk led a Thirster from LA to talk about being one of the very few privileged enough to get on the Deep Space Nine set. I'd been talking about how Kirk's chair in the Paul Allen museum would never pass muster on HDTV (you only need detail to the limit of scan line or pixel density).

The Deep Space set was pretty detailed, but did contain Easter Eggs you'd never see on TV, such as Gilligan's Island lyrics on one of the space station's monitors (but "the real" Deep Space might've had those too, having a shared Earthian past).

More remarkable were the garish colors. What you need to do with color, to make stuff look good on television, is kinda odd sometimes.

Back to Thirsters, Lew assured me Gore's global warming road show rivaled the very best of the ISEPP lectures, and received high marks from the public. Lew compares Gore to Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, even if Gore's scientific credentials are more humble than theirs.

Lew himself is way above average, in terms of being scientifically literate, but then he's a Wanderer.

Speaking of Wanderers, Linus Pauling might be another role model, though I was assured yesterday that if you really took as much vitamin C as LP recommends, you'd generate some nasty Fe3+ oxidants, so better not.

Fred was going on about how the Irish really took it in the neck for awhile. Worse than slavery, for awhile. More like The Gangs of New York.

I also chatted with a musicians' union leader who thinks local radio stations should be required to devote at least a percentage of their air time towards advancing the careers of talented locals, i.e. by playing their music. If the airwaves really belong to the public, wouldn't that just go with the territory?

In some parts of the country, finding enough talent to fill the slots might be a problem, but not in Portland certainly.

Why No Cookies in Math Class?

I suppose that's a catchy enough title. Kids don't want to always re-enter the same passwords on a personal computer, a tedious exercise if you're not worried about spying on yourself.

But a browser typically comes with privacy controls, meaning cookies get blocked by default, meaning it's unlikely you'll be rescued from tedium, unless you know how to tell your browser from which domains cookies'll be OK.

It's up to you, the user, to set these policies.

So we throw kids into this virtual "oval office," surrounded with nifty freedoms, and then don't give 'em a clue. You get to be President Klutzo, some superhero Incredible who can't figure out how to work the netmeeting phone, drive the golf cart or whatever. What a wasted opportunity.

So you'd think math teachers, being the numeracy gurus in our culture, for little kids anyway, our having banned real geeks from actually teaching anything so elementary, except maybe on some exotic satellite channels you may be lucky enough to be getting, would be the ones to share this lore -- about how to allow cookies from Google, for example, but not from some fly by night with only a number, not even a DNS sig.

OK, well maybe the language arts teachers then? Actually that sounds about right, as XML and the DOM signify tree structures, like those old Outlines we used to do, with Roman Numeral major sections, like chapters, broken down into maybe a, b, c each with subsections i, ii, iii and so on, however the notation (this was all before those graphical "bullets" became available). Given language teachers already need to cover XML, why not let 'em handle the cookies part too?

Burden of Dreams (movie review)

This is the movie that goes with Werner Herzog's director's commentary track on Fitzcarraldo.

Werner plays himself as a crazed film maker, willing to risk life and limb (others' as much as his own) to get those special effects only obtainable if you do them for real. Tribal politics play a role, as the presence of indigenous Germans leads many to expect the worst and/or want a piece of the action.

Werner monologues about his existential problems with the Jungle's decadent opulence, plus shows a crazed Kinski losing it with the crew (bonus feature). Also in the bonus features, Werner eats his own shoe, for reasons unrelated to the making of this film.

For those skeptics and cynics who don't think this all really happened as portrayed, check out the clip from the first version (before the restart) featuring Robards and Jagger, as the split personality earlier cast for this role, and filled handsomely by Kinski once the film ran into problems (probably mostly around Werner's ego, though no one ever comes right out and say so on the director's cut).

This "making of" spends a lot more time on the rubber making process, rubber barons, and their love of opera, being so pivotal in the more fictive version.

Standards and Ramparts

So the typical scene is a wall (ramparts) with flags flying behind them. Or if behind, then presumably you're on the other side? Would that be outside or in? On a ball, a triangular walled city is really just an interface between two cities, both with three corners and three edges. Remember, Earth is a ball. Tale of two cities.

Anyway, so on my flag is this MITE, for Minimum Tetrahedron, and some initials RBF. We say minimal because tetrahedral but also because not handed: the right handed and left handed, inside out versions of one another, look the same. Then they fill space with no gaps, in terms of Couplers we might cast it, in our model of the IVM (a kind of holodeck for Scenarios Universe, our "show and tells," partially overlapping, eternally regenerative). Handed modules would be like the As and Bs, which comprise the MITEs but, like the left and right handed Ls in Tetris, can't just stand in for one another as substitutes ("some inside-outing required").

I took Carla and Scott on a mostly driving tour while Dawn underwent alternative therapies today. We left the GPS in the other car (their rental), so driving by feel, I approached Council Crest, only to veer around behind to Scholls Ferry (a road I'd haunted the day before, in service of my alma mater), winding to Hwy 24, into town via Rose Garden (made two passes at Portlandia), back under the cable car on I-5 to Humdinger on Barbur (near Dawn) thence to Grand Central Bakery in Multnomah Village, by way of old haunts (this was Matt's and my early boyhood neighborhood, pre Rome, my Markham Annex now a corporate campus, Piggly Wiggly gone too).

Cool interlude: we parked Razz at the Oregon Zoo lot and rode the Max elevator down to the station, hundreds of feet below through layers of sediment. Set into stone in this station is one vertical core sample, laid horizontally in a tube, with engravings suggestive of the millions of years that have elapsed, over the time of this core deposit's aggregating. Two trains arrived while we inspected the exhibit, one bound for Gresham (to the east) the other for Hillsboro (to the west).

Once Dawn rejoined us (chauffered by Peg), we proceeded to the Chinese Garden, which the three enjoyed, as I took Razz over the Steel for some gas. Scott and Carla fly home tomorrow. She works in an Italian restaurant. Her boy Steve wants to pit for NASCAR and like that (a worthy goal I'd hazard).

Yesterday was OMSI, fruit smoothies.

Control Room Collection

Mercator Projection

So given the name of this blog, which got started looking in on Al Jazeerah's (which has since come a long way), I feel it appropriate to mention others I come across, both fictive and for real.

In the fictive category, I just saw The War of the Worlds (1953 edition) last evening, and noted the huge Mercator they were trying to win their war with.

What I hadn't quite realized about the plot, was the good professors had the right idea, about using some biochemical counter, but succumbed to the generalized panic attack, ending up in church and without any laboratory solution.

While the idea from the pulpit may have been that prayers were what saved them, I think H. G. Wells was inspiring an even deeper faith in our Earth's design: it has an immune system (so best to stay on its good side (we've had some experience...)).

Fuller Projection

Corporate Screencasting

I've been graced with a new VFP 9.0 Professional, completely legit, thanks to connections and UPS Ground, and last night polished off a demo screencast of inhouse academic assets, stuff we use to harvest clinical data for outcomes research, in support of the hospital's teaching functions ("what works for how long" is, after all, critical clinical information).

Meanwhile, on edu-sig, we're on the subject of teaching Python to non-CS majors, people with only a casual need to code, as a part of some humanities major for example.

"Do we share about OOP (our so-called object oriented paradigm) with the tourists?" might be a good way of capturing a key question.

I say that we should, but leveraging recog over recall skills, i.e. we make it look easy, with cartoons and such, without putting lots of pressure on students to cough up or regurgitate, i.e. you don't have to try this at home (but feel free if you want to, not a dangerous activity (though frustrating and tedious at times)).

I still have a high opinion of Visual FoxPro as a development environment by the way. Xbase was never a stupid language (though it may be used stupidly), with its procedural pointers to tabular data, combined with fast relational indexing, exposed in control structures. Best of all, it has an interactive command line (the infamous "dot prompt" in dBase), like Python does.

Then came the OO revolution, with Microsoft buying Fox as a dBase killer, once Borland's plans, to stick with the brand "dBase" (Ashton-Tate's) became clear.

Did the language die an ugly death at Microsoft's hands? No, I don't think so. The product remains an elegant solution in many situations and I'm glad Redmond keeps putting muscle behind it, despite end users going gaga for Microsoft Access (a part of Office no less). VFP wasn't just about using objects from other languages (more the VB model), had its own class defining syntax, more like in "VB#" (i.e. VB .NET).

What's great about xBase is you have this procedural way of stepping through tables and you have embedded SQL.

Sure, I can see why we'd use Oracle, Postgres or MySQL as a back end, but when it comes to creating a usable user interface, I still think the "thick client" has a future.

Making everything work in a browser "just because we can" isn't a deep enough philosophy to persuade me otherwise -- not yet anyway, XUL notwithstanding.

The "Surge"

I haven't seen many journalists linking this verb "surge" to its ironic appearance in the CIA's literature, namely in Lindsay Moran's little book Blowing My Cover (ISBN 0-399-15239-3). I include this quote in my book review (January, 2005):

Ironically, in early 2003, not long after my return from Macedonia, I was "surged" to the Near East (NE) Division in order to help gear up for the invasion of Iraq. During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States.

Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I'd solicited about the connection between Al Qa'ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said "They both have the letter q?" And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, "Let's face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."

Like former CIAer Robert Baer of Syriania fame (haven't seen it yet), Lindsay registers little beyond disrespect for the neocon ideology that resulted in America's biggest blunder. Baer: "I think the neocons have done more damage to the United States’ reputation and foreign policy than anybody since—I don’t know when. They’ve opened Pandora’s box in Iraq." (MotherJones, July 5, 2006).

The sad part was how these wackos, many of them "government insiders" (i.e. nut jobs in many cases), managed to infect the mass media pundits, by riding the post-911 wave of panic and hysteria.

Journalists are easy prey for cynical spin doctors in times of national distress. Let's remember that lesson and not repeat these same mistakes.

I applaud the CIA's decision to move some of its most important (mostly training) facilities far beyond the beltway, in part just to get away from all the corruption and crummy intelligence that goes with living around Washington, DC. Presidents have long sought similar getaway havens, even if only 60 miles away at Camp David. DC just gets too oppressive at times.

Followup (related news stories):
Pre-War Intelligence Acts 'Inappropriate,' U.S. Finds, Feb. 9 (Bloomberg).
Pentagon Watchdog Slams Prewar Intel, Feb. 9 (CBS News).

Synergeo #32395

In my first storyboard, I paid some attention to social service and academic achievement i.e. a design scientist is someone willing to mix it up in the real world, not just push for Ivory Tower credentials, as the latter without the former may be quite meaningless.

However, the main thrust of my storyboard was to find a bridge, starting in the known and moving towards the unknown (assuming a demographic still somewhat unfamiliar with even the basics of Fuller's metaphysics).

I start with the Qyoob (Cube) and use it to establish the 3D-hood of ordinary space. A 3-vector zig-zag on the corresponding simplex also combines these notions of "3" and "spanning basis vectors" but of course when the zig-zag is bent that way, you're thinking "spatial" the whole time, which is more the Synergetics mindset (we don't believe in Flatland per se -- a rickety old Victorian belief system, ala Abbott's scifi by that name).

Over on wittgenstein-dialognet, I'm chatting with philosophers about this namespace thing some more. coxeter.d and fuller.d aren't synonymous. That doesn't mean we put these two scorpions in a bottle and make 'em fight it out. On the contrary, both steam engines and diesel engines create torque from liquid fuels. The goal is to investigate the mechanisms, to reach an understanding of inner workings, not to prove one or the other "can't work" (as if there weren't ample evidence that they both do).

So in moving from coxeter.3d (Euclidean 3dness) to fuller.4d, I'm not trying to "make Coxeter wrong" in any important dimension. Rather, I'm juxtaposing two "ways of looking" with a nomenclature (a namespace) to suit in each case.

I think one of the gross errors in some of the secondary literature to date is this idea that "if Synergetics is right, then XYZ goes out the window". On the contrary, Synergetics is not about pushing any math to the back of the bus. Synergetics isn't going to stay at the back of the bus either though -- that's what academia is still trying to wrap its mind around (slowly, very slowly).

Anyway, I want to get more technical with the Coupler on a second pass, making this the bridge from XYZ thinking to IVM thinking. It's very easy to place 8 MITEs around (0,0,0), one per octant, and to see this as an entry point into IVM style cogitation, wherein two of the Coupler's equators become the "fish lip" rhombics connecting IVM (= CCP) balls, with the K-points as "tongues touching" perhaps.

I've segued from stickworks.py to coupler.py for the benefit of my Pythonic math teacher squadron. They'll be the first on the block to have a VPython view.

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/stickworks.html

Synergetics Storyboard

:: a short ego trip ::

I propose an order for topics, throwing in side lights along the way. Start with the cube and really talk up its heritage, the genesis of xyz.3D for example, then move on through the MITE and concentric hierarchy to elucidate our alternative ivm.4D-based namespace. However, in dwelling on the lattice (IVM), don't neglect to (a) spin stuff, talk about arcs, circles and spheres and (b) keep a focus on the aperiodic shapes.

Wanderers 2007.1.31

I actually missed most of Bill Sheppard's Wanderers presentation, as Tara and I were accompanying Dawn to the hospital for another scan.

Here's from #1298 in our eGroup:

Bio from Bill:
Born: Yes. Sometime in the last century.
Relatively normal K-12 schooling.
Correspondence course in electronics during senior year of high school.
US navy for 4 years as electronics technician.
BSEE U of Denver, last century.
Worked for a few companies.
Clinical engineer at OHSU.
A year and a half with Project Hope in Grenada (after our glorious invasion).
Was registered professional engineer, State of Oregon.
Nothing else notable.

I've been an admirer of Bill's minimalist factals and stereographic polyhedra, all generated from custom assembler on an old dot matrix printer, written at so low a level Windows can't handle it (but comes close -- might be an issue with video RAM), so he boots into DOS.

Then he has this instrument called Not-a-Theramin, with a very simple circuit wired to two sensors. Gordon Hoffman was by and admired the elegance of Bill's circuit's design, thought he could use it in future Saturday Academy classes.

I'll check with Bill to find out if he'd like to open source these resources and add links here accordingly.

Later, Glenn showed us some of the fine handicrafts he's done, including a handmade letter opener with a tropical wood sheath, an antler handle, and a stingray's stinger for a blade.

Sims

So it's a First Day, Sunday in layspeak, and I'm keeping it holy by goofing off, as our Lord said we should, not working, at least one day a week (the "virtual Sunday" concept -- keeps supermarkets open 24/7/365).

So that was to mean letting Tara install Sims 2 on KTU3, so I could test Camtasia Studio against Sim University. Ah, but Disc 2 has gone missing. In scrounging for it, I found Quake 4.

Given my Quakers Play Quake bumper sticker, I should install that, and show how I suck at playing it (but I do play it, from time to time, mostly just against myself, losing often).

Some of my detractors decry the fact of avowed pacifists indulging in stylized violence of any kind, but the whole point of pacifism is to style how we might wage war nonviolently (they say that's a contradiction, I say it's the Lamb's War (Jihad)).

Nope, Quake 4 is short one disc as well. Some other time then.

I still like Jevetta Steele's rendition of Bagdad Café, from the original soundtrack, the best of all the renditions I've heard.

Python for Math Teachers

Python for Math Teachers: Getting Started from Kirby Urner on Vimeo 
getting started



Python for Math Teachers: Looking Ahead from Kirby Urner on Vimeo  
looking ahead


Python for Math Teachers: Subclassing for Beginners from Kirby Urner on Vimeo 
classes and subclasses
(click here for high resolution version)

[erratum on this 3rd clip, classes and subclasses: parentheses "()" -- not curly braces "{}" -- trigger the Dog constructor __init__, as well as the __call__ method on our callable dog objects]

My blurb in the Math Forum pointing to these shorts. Where to go from here? How about Working with Stickworks? Or maybe read more about __rib__ syntax.

Presidential Races

OK, I'm glad Hillary Clinton is in the running, as that'll give us a chance to refocus on the bombing of Belgrade.

Starting a hot war in the Balkans seemed the height of reckless stupidity to me, but I'm not sure the national security team of that era takes any responsibility for letting that situation get so out of hand.

I ate at lunch at Toney Bento's today, in honor of the Kosovar Relief Effort (Mercy Corps et al, likewise on the front line in Beirut).

With deepest thanks... Mercy Corps

Almost as reckless as another hot war in the Middle East, but I'm not sure George Bush could've stopped it, given Unconscious America, so best to put a bright face on it then. Either way, it's a referendum on war, and political dabblers therein.

And besides, I've already announced my bias against anyone with 109th Congress experience, so I'm not expecting any overtures. I'm glad to see Richardson entering the fray. Governors seem more even keeled to me. Congress has been quite "special" of late (Church Lady allusion).

I noticed the surface of Surface has this geek chic looking guy with some mutant tetrahedrons, a sign of the times. Prepare for another invasion of Beautiful People™.

issue 63