Bounded in a Nutshell

The root of the word happy is hap, also found in happenstance and haphazard; the original meaning is something like "chance" or "fortune".

To be happy, hence, is to be lucky.

There's all kinds of sites that offer driving directions, but fairly few that give walking directions. Since when walking one often prefers to avoid multi-lane highways with no sidewalks, the two are not always isomorphic.

(Of course, even if such a site existed it would pretty much be restricted to a subset of urban areas. It's pretty unlikely that my current city --- even if it is one of the hundred largest in the country --- would make the cut.)

clvrmnky reports that switching from Blogger Classic to New Blogger broke the RSS feed for the Nutshell. If the problem persists, then I'll see about doing something about it.

This is post #222 for me, which means headache, which means alcohol. Yay for reasoning by association! Here's an obvious sort of drink recipe I came up with last night.

Lemonderry Air
In an old-fashioned glass combine 1 oz London dry gin with 1 oz limoncello. Top with tonic water and an ice cube or two.

If I had it around the house, I'd probably garnish with lime. Since I generally don't, I can't really add it to the "official" recipe in good faith.

Just upgraded to the new version of Blogger, which presumably shouldn't change much except that I know better. We'll see how this goes.

For those of you who live in Ontario, there's a series of Citizen's Assemblies regarding electoral reform at the provincial level. The goal is to discuss moving away from the plurality (aka first-past-the-post) system currently used for provincial Parliament towards something a little more proportional, or at least something that sucks less. (If people are curious, I'd be glad to discourse on what's so bad about plurality, but I imagine you can find plenty of information about that if you're interested.) As I understand it, the goal of the Assemblies is to hash out a proposal for an alternative system, which is then put up for referendum this fall. Here's the list of dates for Assemblies; K/W folks, take note that you've got one in town tonight if you're interested.

In other news, the new school term has started, and so I'm fairly busy with all that goes along with that (together with all that goes along with returning from nearly three weeks of vacation). I'm going to try to post here more often, though much of that is likely to be observations about a methodology in the social sciences called Social Network Analysis because I'm going to be doing a lot of reading in that over the next couple of months. I'll try to balance that with the kind of randomness that I'm sure my readers have come to expect. Or something.