Lazy Links

I've seen a bunch of interesting stuff on the net in the last few days, so rather than come up with a semi-coherent mini-essay about one or two of them, I'm just going to put them all up so you can decide what to do with them.

Morton Mintz, of The Nation, offers 10 questions for the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask of Harriet ("Cool!") Miers. (I'll have more to say about her later.)

Have you ever had a really lousy literature professor who managed to cobble together great reading lists for her classes? That's how I was initially introduced to Harold Pinter. The class I took from said professor was completely miserable, and managed to turn me off of Pinter for several years afterward. Only when the bad taste of the class was rinsed away (about three weeks into an even more miserable class on film theory taught by a similarly miserable professor in my PhD program) did I manage to reconsider Pinter's work. Just in time, too, it seems, for he is the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

In other book award news, one of my favorite writers, a completely mad, prolific bloke named William Vollmann (who, among other accomplishments, has written a 7-volume history of violence) is on the short list for the National Book Award.

China's version of the Gemini Program seems to be well underway, and the folks back on the ground seem pretty enthused about the whole we're-now-a-spacefaring-nation thing. I say good luck to them. If NASA is indeed intent on reaching the moon again, the best thing that could happen would be to have a threatening Communist nation trying to do the exact same thing. Although such shameless competition might put off the development of StarFleet for another decade or two, at least we'll have an active program again (provided, of course, that NASA stops acting like a bunch of pussies).

There are some hopeful signs. NASA has begun to address just how and why we'll be returning to the moon, and how long we might be staying. We could've done this 20 years ago if Nixon had had any balls.

Speaking of space, turns out the latest addition to the solar system has a little buddy. And since there's a growing campaign to name this new planet Xena, I'll bet you can guess which name has been thrown around for the newly discovered moon.

(One of) my Australian reader(s) [heh], Bruce, has posted some pretty awesome pictures of the Mt. Pleasant radio observatory in Tasmania. This observatory, among other things, has been used to help track the space shuttle and, back in '75, the Apollo-Soyuz mission. The antennas look massive.

And finally, from what looks to be my new favorite blog, a list of Doctor Doom's top 10 euphemisms for sex.

I'm gearing up for a big new entry based on another old family photo. Get yer hankies ready. Maybe by then I'll have remembered how to transition between my paragraphs.