I agree with you eel. I don't see why this law was necessary, beyond publicity purposes — as you said children are already members of the potentially harmable public.

I didn't see any movies this weekend. I went to a NYE party, worked a little bit (lots of returns at the bookstore, as is customary), and packed to move to Texas.

I have an overdeveloped sense of the uncanny valley (even monkeys creep me out) and I wholeheartedly agree with sentiments above.

I don't really like
the way that motion-capture Tintin image looks. I have really fond memories of the old animated versions - espeically, I think, Tintin In Tibet and The Calculus Affair. I remember watching them at my friend's house when I was like 6 or 7.

Scientology really is totally wack. My dad (who is a research scientist and professor) has one younger sister who's a Scientologist and another who's a professional psychic - and one of the recurring topics of discussion between him and the psychic sister is how totally fucked up Scientology is. Telling, no?

I've never been in AA or NA myself but almost all the accounts that I've read imply extremely strongly that the religious element had little or nothing to do with the ways that AA helped them to quit. Elizabeth Wurtzel's "More Now Again" is the only account I can think of where she felt like a higher power (in…

I meant barely anything having to do with its efficacy, not with the content of what you discuss in an AA meeting or the written material about the program or whatever.

The real benefit of AA is that it provides an intense and self-perpetuating social structure that supplants the motivations and self-reinforcing behaviors surrounding drinking. Religion and the steps have barely anything to do with it, it's the fact that AA provides competing activities and a social network that…

*to

Few things better than having lots of unexpectedly leftover alcohol after a party! Unless it means that nobody came, I guess.

Alcohol calories ARE discounted somewhat though - it's not understood very well, but it is a real thing. I think the degree to which they're discounted is widely variant by person and by how much you drink though.

So what did you guys do for New Year's Eve?
Anyone do something really great? Is everyone hung over?

I love the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations so, so much. I'm not good enough to have read very much of anything by Dostoevsky in Russian, but I still think that they capture the sort of whimsical preciseness of Dostoevsky's writing and of the Russian language in general astoundingly well.

I'm one of those people who loses weight when I'm drinking more, which is really counter-motivational for healthy habits in general.

Oh, and no, I unfortunately haven't read any other Klemperer. I'll make a note of it, though.

Auschwitz was like that too when I went there, blanketed in snow with an elegiac feeling. It was in February.

I'm one of the few people who loves Russian literature but really didn't like Master and Margarita. I just couldn't get into it. I know it has deep meaning about censorship and whatever (I actually read it for a Russian history class not a lit class) but I found the magic realist elements sort of hollow. I know a ton…

That's really interesting. I assume you read LTI: Lingua tertii imperii by Klemperer? We read that in a class I took basically about that very subject, linguistics as a political weapon in the USSR and in WWII. Taught by my favorite professor ever in college so that was great. It was part of a study abroad program in…

Fuck you too, man.

bastian: The Death of Virgil is probably going to be the next thing I read. It sounds totally up my alley — was a HUGE Latin/Roman empire/Virgil fan in earlier years — so thank you very much for the tip. Its description on Wikipedia somehow reminds me of "The Athenian Murders" by Jose Carlos Somoza, which I…