The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dave MB:

Here's another article on this issue from the Boston Globe, which is not dead yet:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2009/05/21/town_rises_up_for_bakery/

Nenya at #38: Wikipedia is your friend:

Those Who Trespass, a novel by that Bill O'Reilly.

Here is Barack Obama's own response, via Ezra Klein:

Look — I would argue that doing work in the community to try to create jobs, to bring people together, to rejuvenate communities that have fallen on hard times, to set up job training programs in areas that had been hard-hit when the steel plants close, that is relevant only in understanding where I’m coming from. Who I believe in. Who I am fighting for, and why I’m in this race.

The question I have for them is — why would that kind of work be ridiculous? Who are they fighting for? What are they advocating for? Do they think that the lives of those folks who are struggling each and every day, that working with them to try to improve their lives is somehow not relevant to the Presidency? I think that as part of problem, may be why they are out of touch and do not get it, because they haven’t spent a lot of time working on behalf of those folks.

I'm a regular listener of WFUV in New York, which has mostly a combination of the "folk" that WUMB has and a more sophisticated selection of classic rock than any classic rock station. They also have several Irish music shows and 20's-30's pop and jazz on Sunday nights. And there are NYC traffic reports -- very amusing to listen to in rural New England.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings was the first person I heard to speculate that Rep. Fossella is retiring to spend more time with his families...

Jim at #17: I have not been to Chicago in many years but the Seminary Coop seems to still exist (www.semcoop.com). It had the entire Loeb classical collection on the shelf, which must be pretty rare. In the mid-90's, at least, there were also excellent mustier used bookstores right next to it. (I mean the Hyde Park location -- they appear to now have others.)

The link to the obit does not seem to work.

The Democratic activist blog Blue Hampshire has a thread on this calls and whether they might be illegal (they have discovered this thread):

http://www.bluehampshire.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2785

I was born in 1959, and I remember the time when I couldn't watch Bozo the Clown because there was news on the TV all the time. I also remember watching the 1964 election. An interesting question about this sort of thing is the difference between a memory and a memory of a memory. I think I still remember the 1964 election, but it's possible that I'm remembering that I used to remember the non-Bozo period of November 1963.

I definitely don't remember the Glenn flight or the Cuban Missile Crisis.

To be fair, there are two books on medicine. I consider medicine to be a branch of engineering (the application of scientific knowledge to useful results) rather than of science (the search for truth), but others might disagree.

Is the Hardy/Ramanujan novel any good?

Spenser For Hire, the Robert Urich series based on the Robert Parker novels, had a habit of teleporting across Boston and Cambridge during its car chases -- Spenser would drive into a tunnel on Mem drive and drive out in South Boston someplace.

Cheers, on the other hand, got a lot of the local color correct.

Here is an interesting instance of plagiarism involving my academic community:

Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell copiers

In this case the plagiarist is an ad agency who claims that the commercial use of Prof. Aaronson's words without attribution constitutes Fair Use. The comment thread is about evenly divided between "sue the scoundrels" and "you Americans are so litigious".

Colebrook is "lying in the shadow of Mt. Monadnock"?

It is not quite true that someone impeached and removed from federal office is ineligible for future federal office. The voters retain their sovereignty for elective offices.

Christine #475 -- it hadn't occurred to me that Victoire might be in part named after Victor, but it makes some sense. What I thought was the obvious source of the name was that she was born soon after the final victory over Voldemort.

Wasn't this same Charles McGrath the guy who said that we know so much more about Shakespeare's life than we do about Austen's? Jeez, what a maroon.

[a former president has written an historical novel]

While I yield to few in my admiration for Jimmy Carter, I have read his novel and it is unfortunately very bad. The research and setting are very interesting, but essentially it reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself -- the characters are very dull and the writing clunky. Carter says he began writing books because he found himself broke after leaving office due to his blind trust being mismanaged -- I can recommend Turning Point, his autobiographical story of his first state senate campaign in 1962.

The novel Dragon Fire by William Cohen, SecDef under Clinton in his second term, is also very bad. It is a present-day thriller where several individually-plausible threats to US interests unite in a single conspiracy, which is eventually foiled personally by the US SecDef and a beautiful Mossad assassin. Again, miserable characterization and clunky writing, without Carter's advantage of a plausible story. The main interest is whether the figure of a waffley US president manipulated by his National Security Advisor owes anything to Cohen's personal experience.

It is possible that this particular recess appointment is illegal -- Kos says that it's headed for the courts.

Wow, imagine Dubya saying that today.

Although about the one positive thing you can say about the scoundrel is that he did his bit to dampen anti-Muslim hysteria in the immediate wake of 9/11. (Probably a legacy of Rove's and Norquist's outreach to Arab-Americans as an electoral bloc, but whatever.)

What would it have taken to form a coalition to go after Osama and the Taliban as desecrators of Islam? The Iranians and Saudis were both rather negative on the Taliban -- could that have led to fatwas? Not in this timeline, I suppose, and even President Gore probably couldn't have pulled it off.

Cool! So the diaresis wasn't a misprint or mistake. Thanks!

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