Bounded in a Nutshell

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Mongol Rally: an 8000 miles from London, England to Ulan Bator, Mongolia. In cars with 1L engines or worse. (Although to be fair, the rules say that you have to start out in such a car; if you can arrange a trade-up somewhere in Kyrgyzstan, so much the better for you.) With absolutely no guarantees of arrival, or support services of any kind from the organizers. All in the name of charity.

See, if I'd known about this before getting rid of the Flaming Datsun of Doom...

A conversation at dinner last night had someone comment about one of my recent posts; this led to a bunch of confused looks around the table and remarks like, "wait, you blogged something?" In resposne to this --- well, really in response to my own apathy about posting --- I've set up an Atom feed for this site. My browser auto-detects it as RSS so yours probably will as well; if not, the relevant link is http://matt.goldenempires.com/atomblog.xml.

For my next trick, I'll probably be updating the sidebar someday soon.

March 2003:

The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.

February 2006:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but now when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they have to ask for ``Roses of the Prophet Muhammad."

Dude. It's been, like, a month since I wrote anything here.

I'd like to be able to tell you that I've been off saving the world and stuff, or building geometrical shapes in Siberia so that aliens will know that there's intelligent life on Earth, or something like that. And while I could --- the blog here is billed as fiction, after all --- well, there's not a whole lot of point, really. So forget what I just said about Siberia.

What have I been doing? Living the life, such as it is. I've got a firm handle on my classes this semester, which means it's time to start thinking about my summer class. (Another new course for me, another class I've technically never taken myself, another grad-level course... should be a gas.) Intermittently working on one project or another; this is meant to be the semester for clearing the decks, and getting all of the mostly-finished papers out of the metaphorical drawer and into the world. That'll give me a chance to get some work done on the half-finished papers this summer, and then the fall can be devoted to the barely-started papers. With, since I have no self-control in this regard, a bunch of incidental ideas for new projects sparking off every now and again. (If that sounds at all impressive, it's probably because you're unfamiliar with the ideas in question: trust me, they're not all that.)

If you don't mind reading long-ish essays online, a couple of weeks ago Michael Bérubé (a professor of English and Cultural Studies at Penn State) wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about academic freedom which is definitely worth a perusal. His site in general is one of the more engaging acadmic-type blogs I've run across, which makes it a minor mystery that I've not yet bookmarked it.

Anyhow, I'll try to lead a more anecdotable life in the future to try and provide you the readers with more frequent updates.