Electric Josh

Sign
One last thing before bed: the church sign generator. For your entertainment convenience, I reproduced a mildly baffling (but probably pretty funny) bumper sticker I see sometimes.
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McJobs
This paranoid-sounding yelling from a week or two ago about sinister forces at work behind Merriam-Webster's removal of the word McJob from the dictionary turns out to have been true. Weird. One can't help but quote Gravity's Rainbow: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
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0-3
We've already begun the purge of the baby's size "0-3 month" clothes; they no longer fit. Hmmm.
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Moyers
Bill Moyer's keynote address to the National Conference on Media Reform is, among other things, the type of thing that causes me to realize that it kind of stinks to have had so little interest in history as a kid. Who'd have figured that history is just politics shifted in time?
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Southern Man
So we've heard from Dad again via email; he claims that the network connections down there are slow, which makes sense since the only way for information to get in or out down there is electronically via satellite or in hardcopy via plane. But he sounds like he's having an excellent time.

Since I'm assuming that most of you, like me, had only a kind of vague notion of how big Antarctica is, how it's shaped, and so forth, and since the vast majority of people I've spoken to recently have no idea where one would stay while down there, I've been trying to find information and, most importantly, decent maps of Antarctica online. It turns out that the CIA has a nice pile of information, although the PDF map they have is kind of light on detail. The highlight of the CIA's datasheet is the following Land Use chart:

arable land:	0%
permanent crops:	0%
other:	100% (ice 98%, barren rock 2%) (1998 est.)

So, maps. The USGS has a nice zoomable map that may or may not work with your browser. I selected "Rock Outcrops", "Latitude/Longitude Grid", and "Permanent Overwinter Research Stations", then zoomed in on the area just "above" the Ross Ice Shelf (at the "bottom" of the map' 180 degrees longitude). This was the result. The red dot just to the east of the Ross Ice Shelf is McMurdo, where dad is right now.

More later.
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War
Those of you in the Boston area should note that David Rees, the author of the Get Your War On series, is going to be in Newton and then in Harvard Square the week after Thanksgiving. I might just have to go.
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