Electric Josh

Happy birthday, Dad.
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Jay Rosen's back, once again posting to PressThink. Very nice.
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Oooh! A massive rock slide shut down part of Montpelier yesterday. [Update: Dad has pictures.] This is actually the second massive rock slide below Cliff Street in recent memory. The first one was about ten years ago, and it crushed my friend Chris's thankfully former apartment, which was on Elm Street right at the bottom of the cliff. (The lot was just big enough to contain a gravel parking spot last time I looked.) I had spent a decent fraction of the evenings of the Summer of 1992 hanging out with all the old high school friends in that apartment discovering that I'm bad at chess, even when my opponent has had substantially more to drink than me, learning and then forgetting the rules to at least half a dozen card games that I'd be hard pressed even to name correctly, and accidentally memorizing every lyric and note on Primus's Frizzle Fry and Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. We all used to wonder how painfully we would die if the cliff collapsed on us, except for the one guy who lived up on Cliff Street itself (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a real steep street!), who instead wondered if his house were set back sufficiently far from the cliff itself to avoid having to worry. (It has proven to be far enough back.) Good times. At any rate, one of Barb's coworkers sent pictures that she forwarded that I'll post at some point.
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So we're no longer quite so sick. This is good.
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Okay, just this one: Fear destroys what bin Laden could not. It's a late Christmas present: acknowledgement from somewhere in actual printed Press-land that maybe this whole being so afraid of the turrists that we compromise a whole bunch of core national values thing just maybe might not be very good for democracy, nor probably, indeed, even our own self interest. Snap quiz: Which two presidents, facing what seemed at the time to be dire, nation-crushing threats—worldwide economic collapse in the first case and global nuclear war (none of this pansy one-American-city whining) in the other—said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?" So now I'll shut up about politics again for a while.
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Santa brought me a vomit-covered child for Christmas. Eeeew! Everyone in the house has a stomach bug of some form, so Christmas has been delayed until tomorrow. At the moment, the others are sleeping; I slept most of the morning, and feel somewhat better except now for a sore back from lying on beds and couches in strange positions for far longer than usual. To add insult to injury, football doesn't even start until late afternoon. On the other hand, everyone's home safe, and we've got a bunch of presents to open as our rewards for getting better.
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Excellent piece of news: The kid, after refusing for the last several weeks to listen to anything but Live at Leeds (and Tattoo in particular) on the way to daycare, has now been demanding that "Dad music" be played on "Mom's white computer" while dinner is prepared, and that the three of us dance (badly), each on a particular square of kitchen tile. The music she refers to is Wilco's A.M. or pretty much anything by the Black Crowes. Nice. Of course, after hearing it once (yesterday), she started asking this evening for the song about lions, which apparently is No Use Lyin', off their last album, which basically nobody bought. The song's chorus contains the word "bullshit", so this space isn't entirely sure how to deal with that one—excellent precocious musical taste and fun dancing around with the kid on the one hand, acting like goofballs but it's okay cause she's only two, and two-year-old potty mouth on the other. Alas.
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Excellent! Modding old-school telephone handsets for talking on cell phones! They fit between your head and your shoulder and are, unlike the annoying plastic toy that is my cell phone, the same size as my head. I saved the handset from the nasty old rotary phone that was on the wall in our kitchen's previous incarnation exactly so I could do this. I'm terribly, terribly excited.
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Wowie. A practical guide to internet typography. Typography and web pages. Is there anything more nerdly and excellent? No, there is not.
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If you can read this aloud then you've done better than me. Excerpt:

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

For those of you whose first language isn't English, at least know that this is a difficult and annoying feature of the language even for native speakers. I blame the Brits.
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Yay, The Onion! More Americans Falling For 'Get Rich Slowly Over A Lifetime Of Hard Work' Schemes. Fools.
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The worst possible thing to read before getting on a plane. Or maybe the best. One isn't entirely sure.
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Rabbit, rabbit.
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