"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

The Romance Report

As you may be aware, I have been spending more and more time with a certain special lady, including travels to London and Brazil. Things have been going really well, I think. Since one of the purposes of ye olde blog is informing people in my weakly-tied circle of cohorts of life-update kind of information, this warrants a long-overdue post. Read on for the romance report.

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What Are Your Real Political Values?

I've been doing the politics thing in a mostly mainstream way since 2003, following the action, participating heavily at times, trying to steer the Big Spaceship a little more to my liking. Following the horserace (or sometimes bloodsport, or sometimes commedia) in DC can leave one detached from the original motivation. One of my cousins asked me recently what my "real political values" are, I'm guessing because I tweet about class war and sound generally agitated. It actually made me stop and think, and that was nice. Here's what I came up with...

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Do Unto / "Cognitive Surplus", "The New Capitalist Manifesto" and "Cloud Atlas"

I took a bunch of books with me on vacation — facilitated while traveling light thanks to the Kindle (that's my one and only plug; I'm aware opinions are mixed) — and over the past three weeks I managed to get through five volumes. Today I'm going to write a little about the two non-fiction works, Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus), Umair Haque's New Capitalist Manifesto and David Mitchell's novelly-structured novel, Cloud Atlas.

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Jets to Brazil

I'm off to Brazil! A new nation, a new language, sweet escape from the Northern Hemisphere. It's been a nice stay in NYC. Snowpocalypse meant more quality time with my mom and my sister vs. socializing with friends, but that's not really a bad thing. I'll be offline for the trip; books but no laptop; looking forward to the recharging mental space that brings. I'll be back at it in SF come Sunday the 9th, so watch out then!

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