Lamb Shanks — Extra Rare

We'll start and end today with some visual aids.

• I guess I'm old... because I actually remember Yippies.

  

  So, too, does Mr Trudeau. The really sad thing about this strip is that I didn't think of it first... because both the dynamic of the groups' memberships and the dynamic of their respective monologues is virtually identical. Maybe this is just Sarah Palin's college-age rebellion, a quarter of a century late!

• Terrorism: It's not all fundamentalist Muslims. Sometimes it's fundamentalist separatists, like in the North Caucasus region of Russia. I wonder if Sarah Palin looked off her front porch and saw that one? She'll surely have seen — and taken part in instigating — some fundamentalists a little bit closer to home, although since it was the FBI taking precautionary action the Mad Teapartiers will no doubt find a way to blame the liberal elite Obama administration. There's a little problem with that, though: Obama is a centrist, and so is his administration. That may pass for leftist in American politics, but it isn't in reality... although reality orientation isn't exactly the highest priority for any kind of fundamentalists. Think of it as a different kind of color blind: Definitely not Red-Blue colorblind, though.
• But I suppose it beats office parties at strip clubs. Some permanent moral "majority."
• Meet the new publishing paradigm, same as the old publishing paradigm: Yet another rather tepid assertion that things will change in publishing contracts without accepting that a more fundamental change driven by legal requirements, rather than distribution technology, has yet to happen. The author-publisher relationship is now — since 01 January 1978 in the US, and earlier/later than that in the UK (it wasn't entirely clear in the pre-1988 statute) &mdash: a licensing transaction, not a sale... yet the contracts, and practices, continue to pretend that it's a sales transaction.
• Maybe English will become a true global language, but that won't make Americans any better off: It's not just that we (as a group) don't speak foreign languages, it's that we don't speak our own particularly well.
• Last, and probably least:

  

  Consistent with my experience back in the day of suing automobile finance companies, mortgage brokers and financiers, etc.