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Happy Election Day!! Don't forget to vote!!

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So much news

Fortunately, there's some good news amongst everything going on these days, like the Episcopal church making history with their first female presiding bishop and the Army Times calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation right before the mid-term elections.

There's bad news, also, of course. The situation in Oaxaca is awful (an interesting side note: it's amusing that Bush meets with other foreign leaders whose elections were fraught with charges of fraud). Speaking of Bush, his home state has started running webcams trained on the border between Texas and Mexico so that internet users can watch and report any illegal immigrants trying to cross the border. It's reminiscent of Mao's technique of getting people to turn each other in. Perhaps this will backfire though. Anyone who wants to cross has someone send in reports of suspicious activity in other regions to draw the border patrols away.

Yesterday, on my way to the Go club, I walked through a large rally/protest in Trafalgar Square about climate change. There was a reassuringly large number of anti-Bush signs. If you haven't already done so, you should take the time to read the excellent three part article by Elizabeth Kolpert that appeared in the New Yorker last year:
The Climate of Man-I
The Climate of Man-II
The Climate of Man-III

Last night was supposedly Guy Fawkes night here in England, celebrating or condemning (I'm still not sure which--perhaps both) the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. I had been told that there would be bonfires, but I didn't see any. There were some fireworks, but it seems that there are fireworks pretty much every night here in London.

Some song lyrics:

god told the angel "go see about john"
so he flew from the pit with the moon round his waist
gathered wind in his fists and the stars round his wrists
cryin' holy, holy to the lord
--Neko Case, "John Saw that Number"

Basic Corner Shapes

Basic L with a nostril and two hanes. Is it dead or alive or ko? (Evaluate for both Black playing first and White playing first.) What's the difference between a nostril off the long leg and a nostril off the short leg?





OK, so the anatomy is a little strange. But the "legs" just come from the legs of the L and the "nostrils" come from the fact that a basic L with two nostrils is alive (it has two nostrils, so it can breathe). This shape comes up in games quite often, so it's good to know. (By "alive", I mean even if White plays first.)

American Food

Brenda told me today that she was in a shop the other day that had a lot of international food, including a lot of American food. I was immediately suspicious. American food? She said there was a big display of something that she just could not believe: jars of marshmallow stuff that you spread on bread?!? Oh, god. Fluff. Exported. How embarrassing. I confessed that it was real, it was very strange, and yes, people actually eat it on bread. My little sister loves it.

I think she's just trying to get back at me (successfully) for making fun of her Halloween tradition. She said that when they were kids they used to dunk their heads in a pile of flour to try to get a coin buried in the bottom. It's like bobbing for apples, but, well, not quite. I had, of course, never heard of such a thing and doubted the safety of such a practice, and whether anyone other than she and her siblings had ever done this. Another guy (from England) in our office agreed with me. She checked with her boyfriend (also from Ireland, though a different part)--he had never heard of it either.