EGAD

Learning to Read

I was probably six or eight when I picked up Azimov's Foundation trilogy. I spent a few days struggling through the first chapter or two, before putting it down and announcing that it was too hard for me. A year or three passed, and I came back around to it and devoured the whole trilogy in several days. What exactly did I learn in the intervening period that enabled me to read Foundation?

For some reason this is brought to mind by the fact that tomorrow morning is a milestone of sorts -- it's the last day of the (hopefully) last (graded) class of my education. Considering I'm in something like the 22nd grade, it's about time, too.

I've kinda had my fill of classroom desks. Although it's always struck me that if you properly padded one of those suckers with the flip-aside writing table, you'd have an extremely functional piece of TV-room furniture.

In other news:

THE O'BAMA THING. Barack Obama has joked for years that people in Chicago voted for him because they thought his name was "O'Bama." Now comes word in The New York Sun that he does, in fact, have Irish ancestry:

So it turns out, the Daily Telegraph reports from Dublin, that Barack Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather was " Joseph Kearney, a well-to-do shoemaker from Moneygall, County Offaly, Ireland, who lived from 1794 to 1861."

Let's finally get away from letting these elite impeccibly-bred patrician dynasties *cough*House of Bush*cough* run things. They're clearly as inbred as any European royal house by now, as any IQ test would show.

Ice dam! A few days after a March blizzard, my sidewalk offers a short course on the hydrology of glacier collapse.