We have discussed, at various times, raising our children in ignorance of certain things about entertainment or life in general. Or, more to the point, defining how much of something to watch for the partner who has not seen the series yet. For instance:

1. There is only one Matrix movie.
2. There is only one Star Wars trilogy.
3. The Simpsons was cancelled after season 9.
4. LoTR was never made into a movie.
5. There are no Narnia movies, only those BBC adaptations.
6. Maybe only three or four seasons of the American version of The Office. It's still fine to watch when it's on, but somebody taking the time to go back over them won't really feel compelled to watch much after Jim and Pam become an "item".
7. Only the first season of Dexter. The others are okay, but not really worth it, in retrospect.
8. Most sequels, of course, never occurred. Most remakes of classic films never occurred, either.

I will be quite glad when I am done with classes. I'm taking two next semester and the semester starts early, but a few free weeks will be good. I can take the time to teach the wifing unit some card games.

I am now on boat book #16, The Wine-Dark Sea, which was apparently the first of the series to make the bestseller list in The America. Still shows no signs of slowing down in quality. I will be quite glad to finish the series and am also quite glad that Aubrey does, in the last completed book, hoist his flag.

Bears are awesome: http://www.wimp.com/curiousbear/

We had a bit of a disaster on Saturday while gaming. We had a new game, Loyang, which looked interesting, but we couldn't quite make sense of one part of the rules on our own. We had Mare Nostrum, but we had four people (not ideal) and we had spent enough time fiddling with Loyang that we would not want to play an entire game of that. I thought I had a deck of cards, but we didn't. Solution: break out an iPad and play Catan on it. Not ideal, but pretty okay. A good time was had by all. Catan doesn't play well on an iPad. We also played Carcassonne on an iPhone, which works a lot better because there is no need to hold cards. It also makes keeping score a lot easier.

I've been playing Schnapsen and piquet against the computer. I'm okay at Schnapsen and good at piquet, at least, compared to the computer. To truly be good at piquet, I would have to be a lot better at counting cards. Same at Schnapsen, since, if the deck doesn't close, you should know precisely what your opponent has. The trick is to explicitly practice it. Or, at least, that was the trick in chess. How do you play blindfold chess? You try to do it. Play a few moves, then name aloud the positions of all the pieces. Answer questions (like: what diagonals is the white bishop on? what pieces can the knight on d4 capture?). I presume if you practice the same with cards, you'll get pretty good at it.

Derivatives clearinghouse controlled by banking cabal: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/business/12advantage.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general Plus ca change...

I'm still sick as a dog.

Awesome idea for pie crust: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2007/11/cooks-illustrated-foolproof-pie-dough-recipe.html The secret: VODKA. Not sure whether it's a gimmick or the secret to its success, but it's worth bookmarking.

Blah blah blah work work work. Work keeps on going on, but things aren't so bad as they seemed at first with the new announcements because more announcements have been made. That's all I will say in google-able public.

We were going to go hang out with somebody and watch a movie last night, but a few hours of watching the snow go by horizontally and considering waiting for the bus made us decide to postpone. Then we realized that we did not have much food, so we decided to order pizza instead of going to the store and making anything. A good time was had by all.

Anyway. I'd better get work done, because I'm planning on skipping out a little early to get some studying done before the final. They let us have one notecard filled with formulae for this test, so I have to fill that out.

I found out who discovered that bloodletting was not effective. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, the founder of the "numerical method" of epidemiology, did so by tracking outcomes of bloodletting in cases of fever. The wikipedia has information about the sometimes alarming amount of blood 19th century physicians would let, even when they were being treated for, say, a battlefield wound which caused them to faint from loss of blood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

An amusing link stolen from BO that the wifing unit might like: http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6979.full Alternative medicine (reflexology)! http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/sokaling_integrative_medicine.php I wonder whether the alternative medicine folks have thought of reviving the practice of bloodletting. It's a traditional medical practice practiced in nearly all cultures.