Maybe Vice President of the Wasilla Lake Christian School PTA. No sooner had McCain announced his “bold” and mavericky choice for VP did the resume of Sarah Palin hit–or perhaps more appropriate is lightly touched–the media. Except for the wingnuts like Ralph Reed and other conservative evangelical blowhards who are “ecstatic” (probably literally ecstatic) by this choice, [...]

I now want all pundits and McCainites to shut up about Barack Obama’s supposed unspecificity of policies and unreadiness to serve as President. His acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last night was a model of presidential leadership, vision, and fresh thinking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZCrIeRkMhA

Yes, it also recycled predictable platitudes, but even those were done convincingly. After watching [...]

Good wine. Good music. Good company (wife at my side). The calm before the storm…
Tomorrow the fall semester begins, and everything else.
Sara and I are going over notes for the week, dotting i’s and crossing t’s on syllabi, uploading PDF readings, printing out class rolls, etc. Generally pretending not to panic.
It’s weird to think the [...]

If you haven’t heard the latest McCain stupidity about not knowing how many houses he and his wife owns, you obviously don’t watch TV or listen to the radio or surf the web. So, for your convenience (and mine), a YouTuber collected the news coverage of it in one nice neat package:
 
Now, answering the question [...]

Sara and I are both participating as “Faculty VUceptors” in the Vanderbilt Visions program, which is designed for incoming students to become acclimated to social, cultural, academic life on Vanderbilt. This week the first-years are all moving in and being introduced to the place. As a part of that program, we all had service in [...]

I now own the officially coolest shoes in the world. Outside of replacing my Limber Up Asians for racquetball, I haven’t indulged in any new Onitsuka Tigers in some time. Well, the email alert for the Zappos Tigers Boutique came a couple days ago and I was all over it. A new old model is [...]

Well, at least this year the Japanese Prime Minister (Fukuda) had sense enough not to worship at Yasukuni Shrine on this the anniversary of the end of the Asia Pacific War. However, three ministers and two former PMs did. Sara and I visited Yasukuni for the first time just a couple weeks ago and went [...]

One excuse I have for not being as productive as I would have liked over the past year (and I might as well add, the reason for less goyaposts) is that I don’t have a very good study space at home. Sara and I split a side of our bedroom for desks and bookshelves and [...]