Monday Miscellany

Ordinarily I don't bother with those silly online quizzes ("Which Beverly Hillbilly are you?"), but Teresa Nielsen Hayden points us to one that even I can't pass up: Which Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics are you? It turns out that I am Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups by Frank Warner. I find this oddly comforting.

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David Scott Marley calls attention to an article by Joshua Green in the Washington Monthly about sometime drug and morality czar William Bennet's high-rolling gambling habit. It seems that the author of The Book of Virtues has a jones for $500-a-pull slot machines. "'There's a term in the trade for this kind of gambler,' says a casino source who has witnessed Bennett at the high-limit slots in the wee hours. 'We call them losers.'"

Other people care about the seeming hypocrisy of a morality monger blowing millions of dollars on slot machines. There's quite a large piece of me that's saying, "Slot machines?? What a mug! What a live one! I wonder if there's any way of luring him out of Bellagio's salon privé and into the poker room?"

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Avedon Carol has recovered from her eye surgery sufficiently that she is posting again to The Sideshow instead of that ghastly substitute on blogspot.com.

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If you are interested in generating hits on your blog, I commend to you the practice of going to live theater performances and posting reviews. My mentions of Berkeley Rep's productions of Suddenly Last Summer and Fraulein Else have garnered more search queries from Google and other search engines than anything else I've posted here.