I mentioned that Kenny Byerly has a piece in the new Mad. He's also been gracious and self-aggrandizing enough to let us in on links to all the articles he's written for the Heuristic Squelch …

Jon Carroll: Taste defensiveness hidden in a meandering, self-indulgent column: ...we ate at Grasshopper in Oakland, one of those chi-chi places featuring Asian tapas served on square plates and looking like miniature sculptures. It was …

Yesterday I played a fifteen-minute game of chess, losing to a friendly street player named Walter. I actually like chess when I can play a friendly stranger and not be ashamed of losing. It develops …

Kenny Byerly has alerted me that he has a piece out in the new, Star Wars-themed Mad Magazine, illustrated by none other than Mort Drucker!

Thank goodness that Italy is out of the World Cup. Now that France, Italy, and Mexico are all out of contention, maybe people in my house will go to sleep at a decent hour.

I wondered whether The Daily Show would hire me, and visited their jobs listings. Probably not. Paulina: "You could go to New York and try to make it big." Me: "Oh, that's so twentieth-century."

The Daily Show replied to my fan letter! They sent me a package with a Daily Show pen and pencil and keychain and stress toy and hat! I'm wearing my Daily Show hat right now, …

Done with the midterm. A guy named Richard D. Anderson wrote an article about "The Discursive Origins of Russian Democratic Politics." It's full of discourse this and game theory that. It's so 90s. Leonard suggested …

I've decided that totalitarianism, being a form of security, is a process, not a product. As such, "Is This System Totalitarian Or Not" is a question that sort of misses the point. Did this system …

Done with Democracy From Scratch, which was the big hurdle because it's a book, not a bunch of easy-to-skim articles that basically give you the gist in the first page. In Democracy From Scratch, Fish …