[NON BLOG] Scattered Notes

[rfmcdonald]

• After making five posts this evening (including this one), I feel decidedly relieved, somehow. I'm still tense about my impending life changes, but I'm good. I'm not yet desperate enough, as one commenter suggested, to begin looking at employment opportunities in male stripper bars, though I do appreciate the implied compliment.


• I've found some old writings that I'd like to link to, just for the hell of it. From January 2003, one brief essay comparing languages and their statuses in the classical and early 21st century worlds, and another detailing a RPG character from a Traveller-like campaign that never got started. And, from 1998, an alternate history of mine from soc.history.what-if describing the consequences of a late-settled Vinland.


• My Living in Europe crosspost of last month's posting on Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide got some heat, as I got a Turkish commenter who accused me of anti-Turkish racism and posted links to a site that, among other things, accused Armenians of being Naziphile in the Second World War. (Presumably said commenter wasn't aware of Turkey's 1942 wealth tax, but I digress.) After some consideration, I deleted that poster's comments as provocative and unlikely to advance the debate productively. Question: What would you have done?


• On my livejournal friends list, london_calling is upset that many Islanders are supporting the American team at the Stanley Cup, since Tampa Bay has an Island-born player (Brad Richards). She's right; but then, she's also from Newfoundland. ;-) (Me? To be honest, I don't really care.)


• Though perhaps I should care about my showing in my Diplomacy game. I'm Italy. Yes, I know that I have Problems.
  
• The NASA-ESA Cassini probe to Saturn, with its accompanying Huygens Titan lander, is approaching its destination. I hope that everything goes well for both orbiter and lander, since the Saturn system looks fascinating. In particularly, I'd like to know whether Titan does, in fact, have a hydrocarbon ocean. evildrganymede must be thrilled.


• I was watching the English graduate students' softball team practice this afternoon--it's a bit of a surprise, incidentally, that I've become interested in spectator sports--when I saw a maple seed settle on the gravel, helicoptering down to a safe landing. A moment later, I realized that the yellow-brown specks I saw all over the field weren't gaps in the gravel, but rather hundreds of maple seeds. That moment was an interesting moment, almost a paradigm shift in its minute way.


• Dragan Antulov, he of Just Another September 1939 ISOT fame, has recently acquired a vast surge of visitors thanks to his commentary on the Severina Vučković scandal. Ms. Vučković, a prominent pop music singer in Croatia, apparently filmed her sexual escapades a couple of years ago. Naturally, it ended up getting released onto the Internet. Dragan's blog has received in excess of ten thousand visits as a result of his commentary. He deserves all of those hits.


• I'll be going to The Toucan, now, ostensibly to celebrate the success of the sole MA student in the Queen's graduate English program in delivering her thesis. It should be fun.