Right as I got to Samira to meet lyceum, I got a mystery call. Turned out to be from some Comcast employee (exec?) in Pennsylvania, who'd seen my earlier LJ complaint, and was calling to see if he could help. That's kind of neat. Not as neat as an actually smooth changeover system, but still.

Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.

Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.

Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?

Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.

Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.

There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.

Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.

59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.

I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.

A one-way mirrored public toilet

Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.

I had cablemodem with Insight. Something corporate happened, and now it's Comcast. My Internet just stopped working half an hour ago, and I decided to call rather than wait. Didn't have a Comcast number... but my old Insight number apparently feeds right in. It took a lot longer than usual to get a tech support person, who sounded a bit less friendly than usual, and had a different script, involving taking my router out, and obviously being skeptical of anything I said. Oh, and "I can't support non-Windows" like that should even matter to my computer dropping off the Internet. My rebooting the cablemodem and router didn't work. Eventually he did a remote reset of the modem, which worked while my computer was plugged directly into it, and he got sanctimonious about how if only I'd done it it would have worked. Hung up, and natually I put the wireless router back in. Whoops, not working again! I'm currently leaching off someone's unsecured wireless, I don't have the time to deal with this more.

Maybe it's time to try out AT&T.

Mary being the lesbian daughter of VP Dick Cheney, of course, Mary who helped is campaign but advocates gay marriage.

Freepers respond. More reactions here.