O'Hare 2006-06-14

You are typing this while waiting for your transit flight to Tokyo-Narita. Chicago-O'Hare offers a $6.95 per day wireless service. But you were mistakenly charged $2.35 for three sausage, egg, and cheese muffins, so you saved on a second round at the food court. Then you remember that C2 wants you to buy her copies of Glamour and Marie Claire. Oh well, hell hath no fury like a women's-magazine-collector-sibling scorned.

States of mind: anxious, excited, guilty (you have not been back for five years, and you certainly are not Superman).

Caught highlights of Spain vs. Ukraine while seated at the sports bar. Disbelief over the scoreline. Xabi!

they are back too!

You are happy to discover that two of your favorite pop singer-songwriters, Joshua Kadison ("Jessie", "Beautiful in My Eyes") and Conner Reeves ("Earthbound", "My Father's Son"), have released new material.

Kadison's two new EPs are The Venice Beach Sessions, Parts 1 and 2; Reeves' EP is titled Welcome to the Future. Sample tracks are available either as downloads or streaming audio.

"Earthbound" in particular brings back lots of memories.

at long last

You will be back from June 15 to Aug 21.

what talking you?

"The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability: it is, finally, the very concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something--of a center starting from which an observer could master the field--but the very concept of the game."

---Derrida, cited by Alan Sokal

"I have no idea what this is intended to mean."

---Steven Weinberg, excerpt from "Sokal's Hoax", in Science and its Cultural Adversaries

"... but while poor [Jean] Hyppolite was willing to admit that he did not understand what Derrida meant by a center, Derrida just started talking about the Einsteinian constant, without letting on that (as seems evident) he had no idea of what Hyppolite was talking about. It seems to me that Derrida in context is even worse than Derrida out of context."

---Steven Weinberg, excerpt from "Science and Sokal's Hoax: An Exchange", also in Science and its Cultural Adversaries