We don't care if you didn't know Take Back The Night was occurring. Is this routine behavior for Delta Sigma Phi? Do you regularly embarrass yourselves by running through campus half naked with a Delta Sig flag?

Still, the show must go on.

Police investigating the Virginia Tech killings are looking at whether Cho Seung-Hui was copying parts of a violent film when he murdered 32 people.

Park Chan-wook's Oldboy has the misfortune of being the most prominent Korean film to be released in the US in the last five years (or perhaps ever). Literally the only connection between the Virginia Tech killings and the film Oldboy is that both can be ascribed to people with Korean citizenship - although notice that the Sky News story does not mention that Oldboy was the work of a Korean director. It's a very, very good thriller which has nothing to do with a crazy person killing thirty-two people in Virginia.

And to think that this took three whole days. At this rate, the first lawsuit against Trent Reznor should be filed by the end of next week.

(But will my attendant sense of shame and inadequacy at having let this space fall into disrepair prompt me to update as regularly as I should? Almost certainly not. And yet, living as close to Cleveland as I do, I am also aware that one must never underestimate the power of shame and inadequacy...)

The only "problem" with major-league baseball as a consumer product is that, with the exception of the Detroit franchise, most of these guys actually know how to play the game, and now and then you want to see some Keystone Kops action in the field. Happily, the problem has a simple solution: get in the car and proceed to the nearest minor-league venue. It looks enough like baseball to count as going to a game, but it's much cheaper than going to a big-league game (especially the parking), and a grown man is going to step on his own foot and fall down. No, listen to me -- it is going to happen.

I was afraid that Vollmann ran out of tricks about ten years ago, but (happily) he seems to have entered some kind of career renaissance, one in which he no longer feels compelled to write quite so many gigantic books about whores. Meanwhile, professional reviewers of novels seem to have come to terms with the fact that no matter what they say, basically nobody is going to read him, which gives them license to throw their hands up and start saying things like:

I've reviewed nearly all of Vollmann's books over the years and am running out of superlatives...

So, then: after much pain and many deaths, I am back in the US. Elvis Costello once wrote an entire song about how much the city I'm sitting in sucks, but that's neither here nor there. Nothing is moving on the street except for the great North American flannel-shirted cicada, or whatever the hell those things are.

On another note, the subhead at the March Together for Life blog is

We will end abortion through our unity and the monthly call for life.

UPDATE: A thousand and forty three people. I'm amazed that folks are still coming up with points that hadn't already been made in the first thousand comments, but there it is.

The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn't a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.

(Ah, good times:

Dean tries to spin his outburst as evidence of his being "willing to say things that are not popular." But the problem wasn't that Dean said something unpopular. The content of what he said was fine--"EEEEEEYYYYAAAHHHH!!!!" is not, per se, an unpopular sentiment--but the form was problematic.

I think it's a mistake to write off any group. I was in Romania, they're having elections in four weeks, and I was organizing the non-communists. And I had them write on a blackboard Who's Voting for Us, Who's Voting for Them. And they had to list ... understand why everybody was. They had the gypsies voting for the communists, and I said, "OK, I get why the Communists are voting for the Communists, and the Army and the police and the guys with government jobs, but why the gypsies?" If I were a gypsy I'd want to live outside touchy-feely U.S. law, much less harsher communist law. And they said, "Well, the communists buy them liquor and then they vote for them." And I said, "We can do this; George Washington did this, it's OK." And they said, "No, the gypsies are scum and we won't talk to them." And I said, "OK, I guess you're not getting the gypsy vote then."

Anyway, that's off the point. The reason I'm typing this is to say that, no matter how you feel about anonymity, avoiding your students in bars, and so forth, one thing's for sure: doing this is a really, really terrible idea.

UPDATE: In response, a constructive outlook on the world is proposed:

Deb, these right-wing terrorists will never, ever stop attacking you; you don't talk nicely to rabid animals or ask them to please stop biting you, you execute the damned things.

They're hate junkies, and the best way to deal with them -- other than taking a baseball bat to their heads -- is to overdose them with hate.

(Incidentally, the folks who are determined to interpret Frisch's original comments as a serious threat against the life of Goldstein's kid are milking this one way too hard. "Gotcha" doesn't take long to become a fairly tedious game, especially when you're playing it with someone who clearly has very serious problems interacting with other people. The woman is deranged: how much outrage is it really possible to feel about this fact?)

Meanwhile, though, I'm stuck in Sydney, which might be one of the best places in the world in which to be stuck.

To pass the time, I've become obsessed with sites like this. I've learned that, when it comes to moving to the US, there's a very fine line between being a unskilled immigrant who's going to laze around and be a burden on the state, and being a skilled immigrant who's going to steal jobs from red-blooded Americans. The trick is to have just the right amount of skills.

UPDATE: However, the folks behind H1-B Visa Sucks! should certainly be apprehensive about competition from foreign website designers. I mean, damn.

More substantial news to come soon, as there's a line of people waiting to use this computer. In the meantime, though, here are three important positional truths: