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3.51 kg. (That's about 7.7 lbs.) Mommy and baby are doing very well, thank you. Baby is particularly bright-eyed and savvy. Those eyes say: hey, I wasn't born yesterday, you know. Her older sister was bald as a cue, so young Vi is ahead on that score. And hardly a wisp of downy lanugo. Another sign of maturity. (If I ever write a novel with an idiot man-child protagonist - and with luck and a little hard-work I certainly will - I will remember to name him Downy Lanugo.)
You probably won't be hearing much from us for a while...or at least, nothing from me for a while, as tomorrow we are going into the hospital for a scheduled surgical delivery of baby Violet Mai Holbo. Exciting stuff. I have to admit that the prospect of feeling, not pain, but the sensation of being "unzipped" sounds a bit creepy, but that's why a) they put up a screen so you don't see knives and b) they sedate you. Anyway, this has been the longest 8 months of my life and I am very excited to get a baby out of the whole deal. Everybody wish us all luck. I am ready to see some trailing clouds of glory.
This morning I woke up singing a song to myself which my dream had adapted from an irritating Caillou song about "Big Brothers, Big Sisters." Except in my dream it went like this:
PRIME numbers, PRIME numbers--
They come in all sizes!
PRIME numbers, PRIME numbers--
They're full of suprises!
So, so true.
Via BoingBoing, a truly hilarious condensed version of Shakespeare's Pericles (a companion piece for the IM Romeo and Juliet John linked to). Sample:
ACT 2, SCENE 1
Pentapolis
(Enter Pericles, wet.)
(That previous stage direction is verbatim.)
PERICLES: Goddamnit!
(Three fishermen enter.)
FISHERMAN 1: (unintelligible)
FISHERMAN 2: (unintelligible)
FISHERMAN 3: (laughs)
PERICLES: (after five minutes of listening to the fishermen's cryptic babbling) Rustic people certainly are amusing. Hey! Where am I?
FISHERMAN 1: Pentapolis, ruled by King Simonides. He has a daughter --
PERICLES: Who he's having sex with?
FISHERMAN 1: Um, no.
PERICLES: Well...good! Good for him.
FISHERMAN 1: Anyway, he has a daughter, and her birthday is tomorrow, and princes and knights from all over are going to vie for her love.
Really, I'm not sure that it's more ridiculous than Cymbeline, though. Perhaps they are equi-ridiculous.
Via Samizdata, I see that one W. Folsom has written a book entitled The Myth of the Robber Barons (scroll down the Amazon page for some good reviews and a humorously instructive list of what customers who bought this book also purchased). Well, as a direct descendant of the most bastardly of all the robber barons, Jay Gould, I'm not taking this lying down. I'll have you know that he fully deserved his monicker "The Mephistopheles of Wall Street", not to mention the evocative nickname "Robber of Widows and Children." Let's just look at some of the highlights of his career:
In 1867 Daniel Drew, treasurer and longtime director of the Erie Railroad, added Gould and James Fisk to the Erie board of directors. When Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the New York Central, sought to buy control of the Erie a spectacular battle ensued. Gould, Fisk, and Drew promptly issued thousands of shares of new, watered stock. When the angry Vanderbilt obtained an arrest warrant for the three, they ferried company headquarters to Jersey City, and Gould rushed to Albany where a pliable New York legislature authorized the stock issue. Eventually peace was made with Vanderbilt, but that gentleman was reported to have muttered that his trouble with the Erie "has learned me it never pays to kick a skunk." Later in the fall of 1869 Gould and Fisk conspired with the brother-in-law of President Ulysses S. Grant to corner the gold market, causing the panic of "Black Friday," September 24, 1869. Gould continued to loot the Erie until his departure in 1872. His role in the Erie War and the attempted gold corner gave him a reputation as the prime financial predator of the age.Possessing a fortune, Gould turned to western railroads. In the twenty years after 1872 he was a director of seventeen major lines and the president of five. He purchased much Union Pacific stock and controlled that road until 1878. At first Gould improved the management of the Union Pacific but later blackmailed the company by threatening to have the Gould-controlled Kansas Pacific build a nuisance line to Utah. During the 1880s Gould controlled about half the mileage southwest of St. Louis and Kansas City and tried unsuccessfully to expand his western holdings into a transcontinental rail empire to the Atlantic Coast. He also owned the New York World for a time and held major investments in New York City's elevated railways and several large telegraph companies, including Western Union. In his last years Gould suffered from tuberculosis and died of that disease at the age of fifty-seven, leaving a fortune of $77 million to his six children.
Famous quote from old Jay? "I can hire one half the Working Class to kill the other half." Yeah, that's my boy. Well, he built up the nation's infrastructure some, extending rail lines to the west and consolidating Western Union. And, um, robbed people. No, I mean, he was a creative financier. He didn't go in for any of that pussy, reputation-burnishing charity either. Leave that to your guilt-ridden Carnegie and Rockefeller types. Or collecting art; that's for those damn Fricks (I have a personal animus against a certain descendant of Henry Clay Frick who shall remain nameless. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Miss Thing.) You'll be happy to know that his wastrel offspring, after increasing the family fortune to some extent, just pissed the rest away. My own great-grandmother, neé Edith Gould, spent 30 million (depression-era) dollars between about 1925 and 1938 or so. That's commonly regarded as a lot of money. You'd think we'd have all sorts of property and what not left over, but not really. She liked to gamble, and fly all her friends to Paris for parties with champagne fountains, and perishable stuff like that. Anyway, I don't want people blackening the Gould escutcheon with their insinuations. He was a robber baron of the first rank (although, in our NYT wedding announcement, where I had suggested "robber baron" they insisted on calling him "industrialist" Jay Gould. Ha ha.) After squeezing the working class dry, Gould used his money in pointless Gilded-Age extravagances, such as gardening, being the most hated man in America, and dying of tuberculosis. My favorite: playing chess with living people in stupid costumes (including knights on horseback) on a big lawn mown with alternating squares. Well, at least they didn't make the capturing pieces actually kill the captured ones.
I think Europe definitely made the right call, turning down bin Laden's 'if you don't attack me this turn, I won't attack you this turn' offer. Sure, with Europe controlling Europe, Europe is entitled to 5 extra armies a turn. Osama does not control a continent - won't any time soon - so is just looking to pick up a country, probably the Middle East, thereby getting a Risk card. Maybe then he'll turn in cards, if he's got 'em, and attack North America, although he's got to fight all the way to Kamchatka just to have a shot at Alaska. Anyway, in all the confusion Europe might manage to retake Africa for the first time since 1945. But I think Europe is right not to trust this man. Perhaps this is only my painful recent experience talking.
Seriously, wasn't this one of the weirdest diplomatic overtures in a long time? On the other hand, maybe my way of looking at it solves the whole 'why'd we invade if there weren't any WMDs?' puzzle. The neocons were just looking to pick up an easy Risk card right from the start. The Midde-East was not strongly defended, and it's not like you have to hold the thing.
Violet will be here soon, so I thought one last Zoëblog while she's still got the world to herself might be nice:
In hopes of bridging the gap between laa-dee-da, stuck-up sticky-beak high culture and all the simple stuff your average Eddie Action Figure and Suzy Mobile Phone can relate to - I present this and this. (Thanks, Haydon; and Scribbling Woman).
I have been in a lot of pain recently, which tends to give you really bad dreams. Last night I had a doozy in which I was torn limb from limb and eaten raw by maenads. They were sort of modern-day maenads assembled for a wedding in Scotland, but I don't know what that's about. It was terrible enough that I had to wake myself up, so I woke John up too, and said, "I was having the most terrible dream about sparagmos!", and he said, "wha...?" Then I went back to sleep.
Am I the only person who has a kind of perverse urge to go on the National Review cruise sometime?
Mega-influential author and NRO Contributor Victor Davis Hanson, world-renowned Islam authority Bernard Lewis, RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, Club for Growth president Steve Moore, acclaimed author Dinesh D’Souza, NRO favorite John Derbyshire, and NR editorial stars Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jay Nordlinger.And we’ve also just heard from syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, (the author of Invasion, the 2002 blockbuster on U.S. immigration policy)--she’s agreed to join us for our seven days of fun, sun, and conservative shop-talk.
Right, but I'm forgetting how hard it is to get acid nowadays.
This crazy Dutch remix guy kicks ass! His website has severe blinking problems, and the downloads are so slow I feel sure it must be powered by arthritic hamsters, but don't let that put you off. Click on "mash-ups" at the bottom, and go wild. The best is #19, "Stealer's Wheel: Stuck in the Middle With Vanity 6". The first mix, Prince's 1999 + The Hustle, is also good, if meandering.
This is a special shout-out to all my D.C.-area readers. You know about how those 17-year cicadas are coming and everything? I was a young lass when they came last, so let me tell you about it. It does give you a "plague of locusts"/end times frisson, but they're not destructive or anything. They are just loud. It sounds as if someone is hiding on the other side of every tree, revving a chainsaw. But here's the thing. Say you did, somehow, manage to get your hands on some acid. DON'T take it and then go outside at night in early June, when the whole lawn will be alive with thousands upon thousands of cicada larvae wiggling up out of the earth. Because that will seriously freak your shit out. It happened to a friend of mine. Word to the wise.
The most ridiculous thing happened to my sister, which has caused me deep, Kim Du Toit-style angst about men in America today. Check it out. She was at a WWII re-enactment, just hanging out in the evening with a bunch of guys. Keep in mind she was the only girl there, out of twenty people. So, some asshole says to her (no preamble, mind you, and she doesn't know him) "I'd like to put it in your ass." I don't know if it meets the legal definition (help me out here, Jacob Levy), but where I come from, them's fighting words. So, she did what any red-blooded American girl would do, and threw a drink at his head (in the glass) and kicked him a few times in the kneecaps with her combat boots, which are, as I recall, steel-toed. Now he makes his big mistake. He kicks her back, and hard, too.
Getting into fights with women is a losing proposition for guys, all the time. There are only three ways for it to go down. Scenario one: you fall back, avoiding windmilling arms and trying to protect your groin, while mumbling apologies and hoping she's too drunk to hurt you badly. This is the best case. Scenario two, you beat her up. Bad, because only jerks beat up women. This guy went for scenario three: you fight back hard, and then end up on the ground getting the shit kicked out of you. You hit a girl, and you got beat up by a girl. You suck. This guy was 40 years old and six feet tall. My sister (22) is not 123 pounds of ninja assasin or something; she's rather sickly, actually. But, she has the can't lose bar-fight advantage of being crazier than other people. The crazy person always wins the fight.
So, you might think this was enough humiliation for this guy. No. He and his friends decide that they want my sister banned from coming to re-enactments, but they know they don't have a very good case, so they go to the appropriate authorities and claim that she beat up four other guys as well. That's right. They were willing to pretend that a 5'5'' girl took all five of them. Those guys represent all right...represent the fucking lullaby league! Why don't they just all go down to the local tattoo shop and get "pussy" inked on their foreheads, while they're at it? My sister would never beat me up, because we get along great, plus I could totally take her, but anyway, if she did -- I would lie about it! Where is the manly pride of these grown men (all over 30, all big guys) that they would be willing to pretend some chick beat up all five of them at once? Seriously. That's just all kinds of pitiful. Look at this girl, are you scared? Well, you better be. She will come correct on your ass.
OK, this is kinda puerile, but did you guys see that picture of the whale's penis? (via Boing Boing) I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Ay Caramba! And that's just a killer whale. The reproductive organs of the blue or sperm whale must be truly tremendous (huh huh huh, she said sperm.) As far as I know, photos of these true giants of the deep mating are as rare as pictures of them wrestling giant squid in the inky depths, namely, we don't have any. There's always something to look forward to with science.
As per this previous post, we have a little hobby of snarking in with questionable Asian cinema. Last night I was so sure this was going to be a good one: "Killer Tattoo". I quote the back of the VCD case:
Bangkok, 2011 A.D. Pae Puffgun, a seasoned hit man, is released from prison and quickly hired to assassinate the Iron Cop, a ruthless law enforcer. Because the job is too big for one man, he assembles his old team for the hit. Dog Bad Bomb, Err M-16 and Ghost Rifle, old hands in the assassin game, have seen their jobs dwindle of late. Meanwhile, Kit Silencer, an up and coming hit man, is also contracted to kill Iron Cop. Both groups pick the same day for the kit and the end result is complete chaos. Based on his memory of tattoo on the killer's wrist, Kit suspects Pae is the man who murdered his parents when he was a child. As a result, Kit Silencers comes after Pae Buffgun and his gang ...
It even has Mum Jokmok in it (as Dog Bad Bomb). You know. The guy who played George, the scheming but likeable sidekick in Ong Bak? (Really. Watch the trailer. Thank you Luc Besson for distributing this to the good people of the West. Don't know whether it is stateside yet.) But "Killer Tattoo" wasn't even funny. How sad is life when Thai people attempting to make long, complicated Elvis jokes while driving around in a VW van in the not-so-distant future are not funny in the least. I was decimated with disappointment. But the code of the snarker necessitates the occasion sacrifice of 90 minutes, which will not be gotten back in this life.
There is a weird connection with Belle's previous post. She posted an envy-making pic from the beach on Phuket. (Yeah, our life is pretty good, especially when Belle is feeling well enough to leave the house.) And I sort of think there was one shootout in the movie filmed at a little 'buy your sugar-based coke here' hut on that beach. It really looked like that beach. But there are a lot of nice beaches in Thailand.
The best thing about Thai action movies are the weird portrayals of Westerners as villains. There are some great villains in "Ong Bak" and the possibly Phuket-staged fight scene in "Killer Tattoo" is over-populated with sinister 'ha-ha-ha' laughing Americans wearing tie-dyed clothes, armed with automatic weapons. It really looked like an A-Team episode crossed with a Phish concert. Or something. I realize I'm making it sound interestingly bad. And the thing is. It was really incredibly boring. I actually fell asleep on the big bean bag.
Can I just say, I'm happy that John Derbyshire won the Wonkette/Boi from Troi Honorary Homo Wild Card Poll? He so totally deserves it. Go Derb! Buggery, buggery, buggery!
Sorry for the light posting; John is busy grading and being mean to Slavoj Zizek and I am busy lying in bed. But, I have thought of an important reason to oppose US farm subsidies that some of you might not be aware of. Now, the main reasons are obviously that we have better things to do with those $80 billion, and that subsidies go mainly to big agribusinesses, and they encourage environmental degradation by making farming on marginal lands (cotton in the desert, anyone? Everglades, much?) profitable, and they harm the poorest of the poor in third-world countries by undercutting the meager prices they can charge for their farm products. A case can even be made that agricultural subsidies also contribute to the growing problem of obesity in America, because Archer Daniels Midland is basically giving high-fructose corn syrup away to food manufacturers, and they use it to make Ding Dongs and Super Big Gulps. But let's set all that Brad DeLong-ish stuff aside and consider the real problem: Coke tastes bad when made with high fructose corn syrup.
I think we all know now that the "New Coke" fiasco was just a Trojan horse to get corn-syrup-sweetened Coke in the door. First, they pulled sugar-sweetened Coke off the market, then they introduced New Coke, then they brought back Classic Coke, and oh, we were all so grateful. BUT Classic Coke is not the same as original Coke. No. It has corn syrup. Let us consider the experience of the suffering US Coke drinker. He buys a 16-ounce plastic bottle of high-fructose laden "Coke" from the insufficiently cold mini-mart fridge. Ten minutes later, he is in his car, sipping piss-warm corn syrup. Is this right? Now consider what his experience could be in one of the many countries where Coke is still sweetened with good old white sugar (as it is in Europe and Asia, because ain't nobody giving away corn syrup). He is, say, on an empty beach in Phuket (may I suggest the north end of Kamala Beach?). White sand is dappled with the shade of swaying casuarinas. He approaches the little hut where some ancient Thai Muslim auntie presides over a cooler full of ice. He buys a 6 1/2 ounce GLASS bottle of Coke, sweetened with sugar, practically dry and astringent in comparison with its inferior corny brethren, so bubbly that the straw is in danger of being forcibly ejected. Then, he drinks. Slanting rays of gold shoot down from the sky, the Andaman sea crashes, green and foaming, on the sand. This is what the good chemists at the Coca-Cola factory originally had in mind, people (well, plus cocaine.) And Sprite! The difference is perhaps even more marked with Sprite. When was the last time you actively wanted a Sprite, hmm? Never? I thought so. But a Sprite with sugar is a sparkling, Limony treat, for real. So, in conclusion, stop sucking on the government's tit, farmer boy, and let's buy the world a Coke.
I just want you all to know that I haven't abandoned this good ol' place in favor of good ol' Crooked Timber. Just lots of grading, plus eyestrain - necessitating not too much screen time; plus poor Belle is doing rather badly, so I've been enjoying lots of extra tot time while mommy rests. She only got out of the house twice this week - and once was to go to the Emergency Room, which I think shouldn't count, even in Singapore where the Emergency Room is actually rather nice. And the other was to go to the pool, which almost led to another Emergency Room visit. Yes, I know she always sounds chipper in her posts. We are doing OK.
OK, here's the thing. Zoë's favorite movie is Kiki's Delivery Service, but until now we only had a Japanese language version with English subtitles. Since Zoë can't read, her ability to read is limited. This has involved much jolly toddled-down exposition of character and motivation over the months. Last week I finally sprung for an English over-dubbed version. And let me tell you: it is very weird to have a Japanese-speaking, wise-cracking sidekick cat whose every gesture and manner you know by heart, for you have seen them all more than fifty times, so you can even mumble along to the Japanese without knowing what you are saying. As I was saying: it is weird to have such a cat suddenly erupt in the voice of Phil Hartmann. Troy McClure. Zoë loves it. She and I bought the DVD together in this little store. She walked up to the counter proudly, carrying the box and the $50 bill I gave her and told the sales auntie: 'It my favowite movie. Kiki Delibry Sahwvice.' This schtick slays sales aunties in the aisles. And then we came home. And then we watched it. And she grinned ear to ear: "I can undawstand what theywre SAYING!' I imagine parents of blind children feel like this when their children undergo operations that allow them to see. It is a good feeling.
And that is my James Lileks moment, Singapore style, this week.
Go listen to the Punky Brewskies song Schwarzkopf. Right now. It has a killer Big Star sample and a killer theme. (Via the hasn't actually quit blogging yet, thank goodness, Jim Treacher.)
This article in the NYT Health section about snus (smokeless Swedish tobacco) reminded me of something funny I had totally forgotten about. When I was 17 and 18 I used to take snuff. Not snus, which is in little packets, but actual snuff, powdered tobacco that you snort up your nose. You can make lines with it in restaurants and freak people out! You can store it in cool little boxes! I think I was influenced by the Scarlet Pimpernel here -- you remember, how when he's totally cornered by the evil French guy, he pretends to graciously give in and offer him some snuff, but it's really pepper, and then the S.P. escapes in the sneezy confusion? No, wait, I think I was just incredibly affected.
I've been waiting a long time to use that Frank Zappa quote as a blog post title, and my moment is here. Canadians have gone back to clubbing on my favorite baby seal with a lead-filled snowshoe.
"This is a wish that's really more of a velleity, but I wish I didn't like ketchup." (Is this not the strangest desire ever expressed on a blog?) Matthew Yglesias chimes in on the "I wish I didn't like so many foods" tip. Obviously, living in power-hungry D.C. has affected his mind, since his desire to not like some foods is just instrumental: he wants the power to veto his friends' restaurant decisions. As one commenter pointed out, lie about it! Any goods which accrue to the ketchup hater can also go to the false-ketchup-hater! MY does hate some weird Asian desserts, though (we'll get back to that). Poor Kevin Drum, on the other hand, doesn't like any vegetables, which is tragic. He is in grave danger of dying from scurvy, and he is missing out on some of life's great pleasures. This whole wanting not to like foods thing is silly. The tastiness and convenience of liking everything far outweighs any meta-utility to be derived from having dislikes to foist on others. In this spirit, I am offering Belle's taxonomy of weird Asian dessert foods. Because some of them are actually good! No, really! Let's break it down:
Choire Sicha, professional homosexual and unlikely breastfeeding expert (and -- in the wrong wrong wrong opinion of the NY Press -- one of the 50 most loathesome New Yorkers), presents us with a foolproof mathematical formula for determining in which restaurants it is acceptable to breastfeed your child. Sample variable:
S = The amount of slurping the child makes during feedingPublic breastfeeding should be nearly silent. While a diner is happily encountering, say, the Savoy’s fantastic octopus appetizer, the soundtrack of an encephalopod-like milk-frenzy is not necessarily a super addition. Please rate your baby’s teat-adherence similarly to the voluptuousness scale: 10 points for ultra-squelchy piggishly loud Veruca Salt-type babies; 20 points for ‘some sucking noise’; 30 for babies who feed as if they were posing in stained glass with the Virgin Mary.
Zoë was definitely a 30 on this scale, but let me take this opportunity to pass along my biggest piece of breastfeeding advice. At some point (say, 7 months) your baby will start to think its funny to twiddle the nipple on the other side while feedng. DON"T LET HER. She will become convinced it's a necessary part of nursing. If you think regular old breastfeeding is hard to pull off with nonchalance in public, you don't want to be wrestling with someone trying to open your shirt and play with your other boob in a dramatic fashion.
I'm not usually the sensitive one, but - following up Belle's post - isn't this sort of funny?
Sometime toward the middle of your pregnancy (or even earlier), you may notice the muscles of your uterus tightening for anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds. Not all women feel these random, usually painless contractions, which get their quirky name from John Braxton Hicks, an English doctor who first described them in 1872.
What are the odds that an extremely noticeable phenomenon - something that (oh, let's say) half of all women who have reached childbearing age have felt - was first described by some English guy in 1872? Yes, no doubt medically valuable for someone to get it down in writing at long last. But surely you don't get to name such a thing after yourself - as its discoverer - if you are that lucky guy who had a pen handy. (What are the odds that Hicks didn't have a wife who beat him to at least a couple descriptive syllables?)
By the by, I actually let Columbus clean off the hook on the old 'Indians there first, so he didn't discover' charge. Clear enough to me you can discover without actually being first to know. (Even possible to be last to know. I can discover that everyone is engaging in an elaborate plot to kill me, when I notice the knife in my chest.) But I don't think it is at all likely that Hicks was the first to describe the entities more primordially denoted as the 'it's coming, it's coming, wait it's not' contractions, familiar to midwives around the globe since time immemorial.
OK, so Columbus got to name large parts of it after himself, even though millions got there first. But that's just politics. The body should be different. What's the name for the space between your big and second toes? Doesn't have one, does it? I am first to describe the (ahem) Holbonic greater interpedodigital cavity (or region, if you prefer).
I know it's boring to hear about how efficiently Singapore is run. Matthew Yglesias got accused of being soft on authoritarianism for this just the other day (read the comments). But, I really have to tell you something amazing. The other night I went to the hospital at 4 am for monitoring, after many hours of irregular contractions. Long story short, Braxton-Hicks, and they sent me home just as pregnant as when I came, baby is fine. But here's the thing. I was in the hospital for about five hours, on a fetal monitor, being checked on by nice nurses who brought me tea. I saw a doctor for a few minutes, and got a big shot of steroids (to help Violet's lungs develop). The doctor was nice and knew what he was talking about. Now, in November, I spent about 7 hours in a US hospital, getting monitored periodically. I got no medicine but an IV drip that they inserted just for the fun of it. I saw a doctor with possibly the worst bedside manner I have ever experienced (and I've been to some crappy doctors), one who was totally ignorant about how a normal placenta could look on an ultrasound (i.e., it could have little "lakes" or open spaces in it, but that's not bad.) He also mumbled something alarming about baby's heart and then didn't explain it (I really can't express to you what a bad idea it is to say something like that to a nervous, bleeding pregnant woman.) In both cases, I was paying out of pocket. Total cost in the US: $1,800. Total cost in Singapore: Sing$125 (US $ 75). Look at those numbers again. Now, I don't know what the Singapore government is up to here, but it's working. Part of it is that you can't sue for massive amounts in cases of malpractice, so insurance is cheap. Singaporeans also have individual Medisave accounts, which are tax-free. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I think some money is withheld from your paycheck and depostited into your individual account, and that you can also top it up with more of your own money up to a certain amount. From what I know, there isn't the link between employment and insurance that we have in the States; everyone just buys their own insurance (we do). This means that some types of coverage are hard to get or expensive, while something covering only catastrophic care is cheap, so many people just pay out of pocket for routine medical care. Which is cheap cheap cheap! The hospitals are nice, and even if you go to the emergency room you get seen quickly, and it's cheap. I got a doctor's visit, X-ray and some meds when Zoë broke my nose (oh, don't ask) for Sing $50. I think the US should really look into whatever they're doing here, and maybe we should do that thing, too. Hey, and they're repealing the gum ban as part of the US/Singapore FTA!
Just in case we have any readers who aren't also Crooked Timber readers, Belle and I have signed on to be permanent contributors over there. We haven't really decided how to divide our time. We don't want this nice old place to dry up and blow away. On the other hand, we couldn't say no to the six-figure salaries, corner office and CT company car, so there you have it. We'll see how it goes.
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