And I'm Back

Ahhh....

Back from T.O, had a wonderful time all. Thanks to those who I saw, apologies to those who I missed (cough cough Adam cough.)

Will get back in to the blogging swing of things soon, but Vicki and I still have a few days together, so I'll be paying attention to her mostly. She's so greedy....

We did just finish watching The Day After Tomorrow, which I still think if a fun movie, Andre. So what if it has no artistic or scientific value? It's FUN. Nyahh.

I'll be back with more interesting things to say sunday. I know I don't have to bring this to anybody's attention, but the latest update from Google News says that the death toll in the Indian Ocean is approaching 150,000 people. The mind truly boggles at this number. People probably haven't died in such number so quickly since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China, which killed a quarter million people. This disaster might have been mitigated if there had been a warning system, but for that, we would have had to be talking about nations that weren't among the poorer nations of the world (India and Indonesia are growing, but Sri Lanka ain't hot shit, as far as I know.)

In that vein, I'll be reading Ha-Joon Chang's Reclaiming Development, a book about how the IMF and World Bank aren't simply stupid, they're actually evil. Basically, Chang has argued forcefully in other books of his I've read that the so-called "Washington Consensus" policies of liberalization and privatisation not only haven't worked in the developing world, they've never worked ever, and we maintain those policies for our benefit, not those of the developing world. It should be said that this guy is an economist at either Oxford or Cambridge, not the Comintern. I imagine I'll have a lot to write about after reading this.

In any case, I started writing this post in 2004, and have finished at 12:11 AM, January 1st 2005. Happy New Year everyone. Meanwhile, I have to research the difference between perihelion, aphelion, and solstices. I'll explain on the 2nd.