test blog 3

We're seeing Springsteen tonight! As I've mentioned , I swore off arena concerts a long time ago, but for Bruce, the E Street Band and this brilliant new album , I'm thrilled to make an exception. Tonight is also Game 3 of the American League Championship Series; Boston and Cleveland are tied at one game apiece. We're taping the game; when we get home from the show, we'll go straight to bed - no internet! Then tomorrow morning - Allan's birthday - we'll wake up, get our coffee and tea, and watch the game. Game 4 is also tomorrow night, so it will be a double-header for us. So, first bruuuuuuce , then yooooook .

I was very pleased to see that Doris Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature . The Nobel is the highest global literary honour, and Lessing's is richly deserved. Lessing had been short-listed for the Nobel for years, and her many admirers were wondering if the Nobel committee would come to its collective senses while the 88-year-old writer is still on this earth. The descriptions of Lessing's reaction to the news were amusing. From the New York Times : Ms. Lessing learned of the news from a group of reporters camped on her doorstep as she returned from a visit to the hospital with her son. "I was a bit surprised because I had forgotten about it actually," she said. "My name has been on the short list for such a long time." As the persistent sound of her phone ringing came from inside the house, Ms. Lessing said that on second thought, she was not as surprised "because this has been going on for something like 40 years," referring to...

Matthew Shugart, of Fruits and Votes , studies elections for a living. He had this to say after the defeat of the referendum in Ontario. Ontario was never a case I considered ripe for electoral reform of the PR variety. In fact, in my paper on the topic of reform in FPTP systems (forthcoming in an Oxford volume edited by André Blais), I state that Ontario is a surprising case of an electoral reform process. Unlike British Columbia (where an STV proposal won 58% in 2005, though it likewise needed 60%) and New Zealand (where voters adopted MMP in a 1993 referendum) – or even PEI and New Brunswick – Ontario had no record of significant anomalies to put electoral reform on the policy agenda in the first place. There is none of the "inherently" bad performance that we can expect from FPTP systems, whereby they may seriously under-represent the party that gets the second most votes such that the opposition is decimated, or over-represent it such that it, rather than the leading vot...

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some particularly loathsome racism spewed by Bill O'Reilly (scroll down). James , who had alerted me to the incident, recently sent me a video clip, courtesy of Jon Stewart. I find it's good to see this shit with my own eyes. Otherwise it's just too hard to believe.

Q: So apart from getting obscenely rich , what are these private security and other contractor companies doing with this tsunami of public money that is being thrown at them? A: Well, unlike the government, which has allowed the public infrastructure to erode so that we now have collapsing bridges and levees, these guys are making serious and sturdy capital investments. They're planning for the future, building infrastructure -- in Blackwater's case, paramilitary infrastructure. Founded in 1996, the company has used the steady stream of contracts during the Bush years to build up a private army of twenty thousand on-call mercenary soldiers and a massive military base in North Carolina worth between $40 and $50 million. They have armored vehicles, helicopter gunships, manmade lakes, a Boeing 767, a Zeppelin. Q: Like the Hindenburg -- Eric Prince has a lot of toys. The Zeppelin -- that one had to be the fulfillment of a boyhood dream. A: You hear people complain about how Hezboll...

I have tons of stuff to blog about, but no time to blog. Most annoyingly, my weekend job has been massively busy. I used to use my weekend gig to blog, email, and get caught up on friends' blogs. Those days are gone, at least for now, and I'm much too tired - or watching baseball - to write after work. I'll be back as soon as I can.

Tonight the Boston Red Sox begin the American League Championship Series. The victor of this seven-game series - in traditional baseball parlance - wins the pennant, and the right to go to the World Series. The Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks, two recent expansion teams, began the National League Championship Series last night. The Red Sox will face Cleveland. I call the team "Cleveland", because I object to using the name of an ethnic group - in this case "Indians" - as a team nickname. There are several other similarly offensive team names in the US - such as Braves and Redskins - but every one of them denotes Native Americans. The current justification for these names is that they honour native peoples. Which is just a modern way of saying: shut up and go away. As offensive as all these names are, only the Cleveland baseball team uses a hideous racial caricature as their logo. No other ethnic group is "honoured" in this way. But what if ...