silveradept | Well, here we go.

Tomorrow, rather early in the morning, I get to go out to the airport and board a flight to go out to Washington, where I will pursue a couple of job prospects. No guarantees they will turn out to be job offers, but if I don’t follow the leads I have, I won’t be able to get a job. I’ll be out there for five days. Most likely, there will not be link-frenzies, so horde what you have, or something. I will probably be able to keep e-mail contact, simply because I’m interviewing at libraries, so there should be sufficient access to let me wade through the spam that will try to accumulate. If you’re in the area, or what you would consider a short drive away from either the Seattle or Yakima areas, let me know and I’ll see if there’s some time we could meet and have fun. After Friday, I’m basically free, so there’s a lot of time to kill there. If you can’t make it, but you know the area fairly well, some pointers on what to go see and do in one’s free time would also be useful.

My literary self tingles at the idea of book leaf bedsheets.

If I were of the inflating-claims sort, I’d say that this article about how the brain forgets things to reduce cognitive load means that my absentmindedness has a purpose and that it should be revered. Of course, it could be sent back my way that this means that my brain is simple. So nothing gained on that front.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby gets 2.5 years in prison for obstruction and perjury. The statements issued by the officials in the Bush Administration would make you think that Mr. Libby was being sentenced to death. I certainly don’t see 2.5 years in prison as a tragedy. A tragedy is losing a transplant team, a pilot, and the donor organs in a crash in Lake Michigan. Tragedies are what happened to the people found in a mass grave in the Ukraine.

Two trials in Guantanamo were thrown out by a military court, claiming they could not try the two men because they were not designated "unlawful" enemy combatants. The rule of law still holds, at least in this particular case. Might just end up being a setback rather than a dismissal, though.

Elected to do a task, the Cognressional Democrats have had their approval slide to a similar level of approval as Mr. Bush by not doing that task. Funny how that works - if people expect you to do things and then you don’t, their approval of you drops. So now it looks like the country is going to disapprove of all of the officials that they have supposedly elected. I don’t think it’ll actually stop anything or reverse the trends, but everyone can say they don’t approve. The OpinionJournal offers Dan Senor’s take on withdrawal - plenty of diverse groups say that things will get worse if the Untied States goes away, possibly requiring a return for America into a much worse region. As things are, college graduates in Iraq are looking to flee the country so that they can try to recapture their futures.

Denialism reminds people on the left that being smug about the war doesn’t let you off the hook on other things. According to Denialism, the Huffington Post publishes and promotes plenty of non-science nonsense, and the left-wing people who read it gobble it up. Agreement on one issue does not necessarily an ally make. Blues-Tea-Cha would also like the human race to voluntarily reduce its birth rate below 2 children per family in an effort to make the world's population return toward a sustainable amount - I assume that he’s willing to provide and co-ordinate the required economic development in places so that they are able to reduce their birth rates to his optimal amount.

Medical science is taking a look at one of the most basic procedures of emergency medical technique after it appears that flooding cells with oxygen in attempting to revive someone might cause those cells to die rather than revive. To counteract this problem, techniques of chilling and slowly warming and reintroducing the oxygen into the body might be better suited to the emergency room.

Reason magazine has a review of Off the Grid, a documentary that discovered a community that lives by its own rules, without official government, in a TAZ of their own making. There are cracks, where if you know who to talk to and where to go, that will let you slip away. It’s probably not the life of ease, but it is preferable for some. Corporations, however, want to tap the purchasing power of the poor, offering goods and services at a much cheaper price. Which helps the economic development, no doubt, and probably offers a little profit to the corporation. Of course, if all they’re doing is selling kitsch, rather than necessities and useful things, then they’re not going to be doing anyone a service at all.

The Tokyo Tower, emblem of many an animation, especially in its misfortunes, is likely to be replaced by an even taller tower by 2011. Perhaps they’ll keep the name. It would certainly be easier on all the “Tokyo Tower is having a bad day” jokes.

Anyway, in a few hours, I board the plane and go to Washington. Those that are there, look me up. Hopefully I’ll be able to snag a job out of this trip.