Many years ago, in a previous life, some friends and I drove to Portland. The long way.

Along the road, we passed a sign:

SCENIC
ALTERNATE
PHILLIPSVILLE

I wondered why Phillipsville needed a scenic alternate. Everyone laughed, and we moved on.

The California Assembly is considering a bill to make it a crime for registered sex offenders to use any social networking site. It's almost certain to pass; no legislator is going to stand up for the rights of sex offenders, particularly when children might be involved.

The law defines "social network Web site" as "any Internet Web site designed with the intent of allowing users to build networks or connect with other people and that provides means for users to interact over the Internet."

This definition is, unfortunately, completely unworkable.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday that, shockingly, when a state prison responds to an assault on a prison guard by locking down every prisoner who is of the same race as the inmate who did the assault, that decision is racially motivated, and that this could be a violation of equal protection.

[Some background: the case came to the Ninth Circuit as an appeal from a summary judgment - the district court had ruled that the prisoner simply had no case and that there was no need for a trial. The Ninth Circuit isn't saying that the prisoner wins and that the lockdowns are per se unconstitutional, it's just saying there's enough of a controversy to warrant a trial.]

"The issue of influence in cultural history is also skewed by its being understood in terms of a sexual act conceived as an unequal relationship. The influencer is like the one wh penetrates and is proud, and the influenced is like the one who is penetrated and thus put to shame. A superior culture is naturally one that has more to be proud of in this manner. If 'we' were the first ones to come up with the discovery of this (say, the dessert called baklava) and the invention of that (say, the shadow puppet theatre called Karagoz), and 'our' cultural possessions then influenced other cultures and gave birth to offspring, then 'our' culture must have been superior and dominant the way a male is over a female. If you have been influenced by others, on the other hand, you have acted like a 'passive' partner in intercourse; you have been 'inseminated'."

I don't remember why The Devil's Alphabet ended up on my Amazon wish list, but two different people picked it up and gave it to me as a birthday present (oops). It's a shame, too, as the book was ... ok. It wasn't a bad book, but neither was it great or particularly memorable; it was an ok story about human growth and coming to terms with one's relationship to the surrounding community, set in a (poorly explained) science fictiony setting. [The explanation was not necessary to the story and in fact didn't add anything; the book would have been better off without it.]

A light read, perhaps, a diversion for bathtime, but nothing more.

Under the rules in place in the 1970s, when someone overstayed their visa and was to be deported, the attorney general, or his minion, could suspend that deportation and keep the person in the country, if they met certain criteria.

So far so good.

Congress had reserved to itself, however, the right to overturn that suspension. By a bill passed by a bare majority of a single house, without presidential signature, it could direct the AG to undo the suspension of deportation of particular individuals.

How was that not a bill of attainder?

J hinted at me working on a year-in-review post, and that'st rue; i've got one partly worked out. But years-in-review are hard; I have a compulsion to try to cover everything, and a resistance because there are some things i'm not quite ready to talk about, and a general feeling that there's too much and not enough time to formulate it.

Oddly, though, a look back at a decade ago is easier.

In recent years my reading has drifted more towards fantasy - China Mieville, Brandon Sanderson, etc - than science fiction; I can't be bothered to do the work to wrap my head around a science fiction setting, most times, and the work of separating the wheat from the chaff is too much when I have so much else going on ... so unless there's a recommendation, I shy away from science fiction. (Much of fantasy is formulaic dreck, but at least it's a formula that's pleasant and reassuring. Sort of like romance novels for boys.)

I was therefore floored by The Windup Girl. It has joined Earth Abides and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind as one of my favorite post-apocalyptic novels.

R343l is leaving for the great rainy north, where she will be reunited with her boyfriend and pursue a job with a giant domestic software company. (No, not THAT one).

MH is coming down from even further north, to let her show him San Francisco before she leaves.

Such events require a husimeet, to bid him hello, and her farewell.

for next week as a periodic lunch item: homemade cranberry sauce (cranberries, apples, pears, raisins, sugar, honey, orange zest, limeade, boiled down; add grand marnier).

for dinner tonight: garlic mashed potatos, fried kielbasa.