This and That

• Talk at dinner last night largely revolved around the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind drug that was featured on 60 minutes the night before. Interesting ethics issues. (Ellis blogged about it back in January.) More on the idea (from 2004) here.
• This blog was Michael May’s link du jour yesterday. Sweet.
• More on my work plate than I can handle right now, especially with the holidays ramping up. It’s my own fault, but that doesn’t mean I can’t freak out a little. So I’m freaking out. A little.
• Looks like they got the whole Peace Wreath fiasco worked out. Free speech, anyone? Jesus.
• Kinkless caused — may have caused? I was never able to determine what happened exactly but my system went boom in a big bad way that involved iCal, and Kinkless is our best guess even though Fraction’s not had any problems with it — Kinkless may have caused me some problems a while back that almost ended poorly, so I switched to Thinking Rock while I wait for OmniFocus. It’s been… maybe three weeks? I’m loving TR thus far.
• Bethany Padron wrote me a while back to take me up on a discussion offer I made in Sensual Phrase Vol. 9. She’s taking a Japanese Pop Culture class and wanted my thoughts for her term paper. My reply went as follows:

Oh, no! Bethany, how could you?! You’re calling my bluff.

Le sigh.

You’re a peach to think of me, but alas, I’m not qualified to have a truly academic conversation on the topic as I can’t back up my opinions with… oh, say, facts. Or research. Who has the time?

Hm. Well, perhaps you do? If you’d like to have a conversation on the topic, let me spew my half-baked ideas, then run off to do actual research on the topic, by all means, let’s set up a call. But Kitten, I beg you not to confuse my opinions with expertise.

I am not worthy.

…We didn’t end up having a call, but she did send me a bunch of questions that I think you might find as interesting as I did. I’ve asked her permission to repost them (and my responses, which I don’t suppose I need her permission to repost, but they won’t make much sense without the questions now, will they?) here and I await word. Keep your eyes peeled, I guess.