Fiat Lux

His post tonight may not be the Best. Post. Ever. but it's right up there with the classics.

Go, read, and enjoy.

As for me, I have 2 projects due this week and 2 finals next week. I'm tired.

If you're still looking for a holiday gift for a history fan, you might want to consider a little novel that an old friend of mine back home has just published: Die Fasting.

Here's the blurb from his site:

The year is 1758, and though the locale is workaday New York, the landscape is wildly exotic. Our fresh-faced hero is Thomas Dordrecht, raised on a remote farm—in the heart of modern Brooklyn—speaking both Dutch and English. Though he thinks himself unusually worldly, he has no idea what he’ll face when he agrees to defend the claims of King George II in the brutal French and Indian War. In six exciting months, he gains a lifetime’s education not only in honor, courage, and tenacity, but in rashness, cowardice, falsehood … and murder!

Congratulations, Jon. May this be the first of many!

From yesterday, but still worth quoting:

With the minimum wage in the air, I see the Econ 101 trolls are out in force. Look, unless you believe that the labor market is accurately characterized as perfectly competitive then not only is it the case that the minimum wage doesn't necessarily, reduce employment, it's actually quite possible that small increases in the minimum wage will increase it. To the extent that firms have market power, and there's plenty of reason do think they do, the impact of small minimum wage increases can potentially be either "paradoxically" to increase employment or to just basically be a wash. You can read Alan Manning's book if you're interested in more, or if I'm extra inspired later I'll given you the Econ101 version of monopsony (sadly, not always actually taught in Econ101) so that even smart Ph.D economists can understand.

The real point is that if the minimum wage has small or negligible employment effects, and there is both theoretical and empirical support for this idea, then it's a pretty effective and inexpensive poverty reduction program. Obviously if poverty reduction programs for poor people interest you less than, say, poverty reduction programs for oil executives then you don't much care about that.

Perhaps the reason so many people end up either shuttering their blogs or becoming part of group efforts is the simple fact that there are times when daily blogging is just too hard. Lately, I've had to really force myself to blog, and both the quality and quantity of posts here has been declining, as I'm sure my few remaining readers have noticed.

It's not that there's nothing going on, either in the world or in my own personal life. The problem is, most of what's going on in my own life I'm finding it hard to write about -- for example, Scott's health issues are his, not mine, and it's not really my place to talk about them here. Another big issue is that I don't know what's going to happen with my internship after I graduate. I'm so stressed out that it's a conversation that I just don't want to have with my boss, yet it's one that I really need to have: knowing whether I still have a job, and if it is a part-time or full-time gig, and at what rate of pay, is not unimportant information! I have 2 challenging finals standing between me and graduation, and my parents are coming to visit on Thursday which means I need to clean the hell out of my house. And I have no clue what I am going to wear for Graduation under the cap and gown. (Please no dirty jokes)

Dealing with all of that has pushed my ability or desire to pay attention to the rest of the stuff that is going on in the world to the back burner. All in all, I'm feeling overwhelmed, and the more overwhelmed I feel, the less I feel like blogging. It would be nice to have a few co-bloggers to fall back on in times like this. But for better or for worse, Fiat Lux is a solo effort, so as I go, so goes the blog.

This isn't a "Goodbye Cruel World" post. I'm not shutting down for good. But I suspect that light blogging will be the rule of the day for the next few weeks.

It's things like this that really make you wonder about the laws of probability. What are the odds that two massively unusual events would happen to the exact same person?

A woman whose apartment was burned in the high-rise crash of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle’s plane was the victim of another frightening, bizarre and high-profile Manhattan accident years earlier, when a lamppost knocked over by a parade float seriously injured her.

Kathleen Caronna and her family were unhurt in the crash, which killed Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger. But the engine of the Cirrus SR20 landed in her bedroom, which went up in flames minutes before she would arrived home.

Caronna was critically injured during the 1997 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when the mammoth Cat in the Hat balloon went out of control and knocked part of a lamppost onto her head. The then-33-year-old investment analyst lay in a coma for nearly a month.

Caronna had been watching the parade with her husband and infant son at 72nd Street and Central Park West. The plane crash occurred at 72nd and York Avenue, several blocks east.

Emphasis added. Hat tip, Discourse.net.

Because who wouldn't want to avoid studying for finals with these two kitties on your desk?

That was not a fun final.

I teared up a little at the end, though, because that was officially it.

I'm done.

Unless something goes badly awry, I'm getting my diploma on Friday.

There's a lot more I could say, and I probably will soon enough, but right now I'm beat. I'm going to cuddle with the kitties & go to sleep early.

On Friday afternoon, the final class of 2006 robed up, walked across the stage to the applause of our families, and got our diploma holders.
Afterwards, we had a yummy dinner down at Boulevard, and then hightailed it up to the Sonoma Mission Inn for a round of winery visits, some more great food, a little relaxation, and some precious time with Scott and my parents.
I'm very tired, but I had a fantastic weekend.
Dad shot a brief video of me, which I need to upload somewhere. It's very short (13 seconds) and not all that thrilling but still, I'm glad he took it.

UPDATE 12/18: OK, I tried to put the video on GooTube. Let's see if it worked.

I was going to post the lyrics to "The Shortest Day of the Year" from The Boys from Syracuse in honor of this day, but I couldn't find them online, and I also can't find my cassette with the soundtrack.

So, no Rodgers & Hart for you all. Sorry.

From the archives.... Enjoy!

Lighting the candles on the last night is always a little bittersweet.

In the last 24 hours, I've noticed something new for the holidays -- I've gotten three SMS messages from various friends wishing me a Merry Xmas. Either my friends have gotten younger or SMS is getting more mainstream; not sure which.

We're having an extremely quiet weekend at home. Even though we don't celebrate Chirstmas, over the years I find that most of the time, we end up spending the day with either family or friends. After all, there's no much else you can do. Pretty much everything is closed. So being totally on our own for Xmas is a little unusual, and kind of lonely. It doesn't much feel like a holiday.

However. with Scott on a restricted diet until January, it didn't seem like a good idea to try to inflict his dietary limitations on any of our friends. So yesterday Scott roasted up a turkey (omitting his usual butter enrichment) & we had a nice dinner of turkey, gravy, potatos, and asparagus -- all made with as little fat as possible. It was pretty tasty, too. We'll be working our way through the leftovers today, and I'm going to make stock out of the carcas.

If the local movie theater is open and playing something worth seeing, maybe we'll walk on down & see a show. If not, I've got DVDs to watch, and a big pile of leftover turkey to eat.

So things are quiet around here, but that's not necessarily bad. It's been a really crazy month. Some rest and time to recharge is a good thing.

Today worked out very well. It was nice and warm this morning, so I braved the Hillsdale Mall for an hour or so. There were lines at both Macy's and the Gap, but all in all it was a pretty painless experience, and I got what I was looking for without too much stress. About an hour after I got home, the rain started to fall, making me feel very good about my sense of timing.

My other project for the day was making a batch of stock from the turkey carcass and the collection of chicken wing tips that's been gathering in our freezer since the last time I made stock. We had so much base, I ended up making two pots' worth. The house smelled wonderful as the pots simmered away.

As I was straining out the flotsam, I found myself channeling my long-since-deceased grandmother. Grandma Bernice, an immigrant child of the Depression, didn't let much go to waste on a chicken. She would even crack chicken bones in her teeth to suck out the marrow. So as I ladled out bones, mirepoix, and chunks of turkey flesh, I found myself setting the larger pieces aside in a little dish -- after all, why throw out perfectly good meat?

Of course, after simmering in the stock pot for 3 hours, the meat was dry and flavorless, which I discovered after it had cooled off. If Scott weren't on his diet, I could have goosed the turkey up with some cheese and turned it into a casserole, but that's out for a few more weeks. So into the bin it went. Still, I had a hard time forcing myself to throw it away, and even now, I feel a little guilty for wasting all that meat.

Which is ridiculous, because the turkey wasn't wasted at all. I have at least a gallon of yummy stock cooling in a water bath right now, and that stock will go into making a bunch of great dinners in days to come.

I promised Scott a Nintendo Wii for his birthday, but it took a little time to actually track one down and get it here (thank you, eBay!). And yes, I am probably a fool for overpaying on eBay rather than camping a line for one, but I'm too damn old to sit out in the cold all night for a game console.

So far, we've set the console up, gotten it connected to the Internet, downloaded all the upates, and created two Mii avatars. After dinner, we'll creack open the games (it came with Wii Sports, plus we bought Zelda and the Marvel game) and see how we do with those.

Apparently you can add Wii-owning friends to your Address Book and then their avatars will wander across your screen along with your own. If you've got a Wii and want to friend up, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail and we can exchange numbers. I'd rather not post our console number in public.

Yep, it's our 10th wedding anniversary.

In this day & age, a decade of marriage is quite an achievement. And marriage is not always easy. But the rough spots are completely outweighed by the day to day joys of getting to live my life with my best friend and dearest love.

How are we celebrating? Wii Bowling, to start. A nice piece of ahi is sitting in the fridge, and we'll have that for dinner. After that, maybe some more Wii, or maybe a movie. In short, a quiet date night at home.

In January, after Scott's surgery is past, we'll go out for the really nice dinner at a restaurant, and hopefully sometime a bit later this spring, we'll get away for a mini-vacation to properly celebrate 10 years of wedlock.

But even a comfortable night home with my honey is just fine by me.

I love you, Scott. As long as we're together, that's all that matters.

Here's to the next few decades.

Americablog's Chris in Paris has this to say about Saddam Hussein's apparently immanent execution:

I have little sympathy for Saddam but I still struggle with the fact that he is being executed for killing 148 people considering the hundreds of thousands who have been killed since the invasion.

He's got a point. I don't think Saddam should be allowed to go off and live a comfortable retirement in some South American country, but I'm also not terribly happy at the thought of hanging him, especially considering his somewhat bizzare trial and the ongoing slaughter zone that is Iraq since we took him out of power. I'm not a person who feels that the death penalty is immoral and should never be used, by a long shot, but this makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Something is not right about this end to Saddam Hussein's story.

There's another quote that's been hanging around in my mind since reports started to circulate that Saddam's death was nearing (reports currently circulating seem to indicate that he will be dead before the New Year):

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

That's JRR Tolkien (Gandalf speaking to Frodo), if you don't recognize it.

Update 12:20PM: Just wanted to add: why is is that Osama Bin Laden is still at large but we're hanging Hussein?

Oh right, that's a 'Success that hasn't occurred yet'.

Amazing.

Update #2 6:15PM: Everyone else seems to be linking to Josh Marhsall's post on this topic, so why not me too.

I feel like a ghoul -- I want to turn the TV on, and I don't, both at the same time. I'm also tempted to have a good stiff drink, but I don't want to seem like I'm even remotely celebrating, becasue I am not.

I ran across a group on Flickr called "What's In Your Bag" and decided to play along.

This being the last day of 2006, and in keeping with the "out with the old, in with the new" theme of New Year's, here is a shot of everything that was in my day to day handbag today.

I didn't realize that big a pile of receipts and shopping lists had accumulated in there. They have since been tossed into the trash bin. So much for the old!

I'll figure out the new later. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions.

To wrap up the year and kick off the New Year fesitivites, here's a gala iTunes Random 10:

1) Tubthumping - Chumbawamba
2) Another Day In Paradise - Phil Collins
3) I Love Paris - Les Negresses Vertes
4) Let's Get It Started (Spike Mix) - Black Eyed Peas
5) I Feel Lucky - Mary Chapin Carpenter
6) Trapped - Bruce Springsteen
7) Looking for a New Love - Jody Watley
8) Nights in White Satin - The Moody Blues
9) The Revolution Starts Now - Steve Earle
10) I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones

Cheers all!

And best wishes from me, Scott, and all the kitties to all our friends and family for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2007. Catch you all on the flip side.