Overcome like a fiend by the urge to link

I will be traveling for a week or so, so posting will be light, although barring emergencies I will get Thursday’s update out on schedule. In the meantime, some links you may enjoy.

Frequent commenter Boris Broadside has escaped from LiveJournal and relaunched his blog, Former Kerensky. I have it on good authority that Broadside has a black belt in Public Policy, and wherever he learned to wield his axe, he certainly didn’t learn it from me. If you disagree with him, prepare to be bisected.

Edward Williams’ Reality, a poem in seven parts: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. As always, Williams is a little nasty, but neither brutish nor short. My feeling is that these can be enjoyed separately and need not be taken as a single horrendous shot. The poet may disagree, but screw him.

(If you are reading this and you think Edward Williams sucks, please be prepared to make your case by sending me a link to your own work. I will post the link if and only if it is as good or better than Edward Williams. Unless it is really, really bad, in which case I will post it anyway, perhaps along with some mocking commentary.)

Michael Blowhard’s infamous interview with Gregory Cochran, part one, part two, in which Cochran comes across as a cross between Richard Feynman and the Soup Nazi—see the comments to part one, in which yours truly straps on the gloves and goes mano a mano with Dr. Cochran. Who in all fairness is playing a sort of sixteen-at-a-time blindfold exhibition match. I think it’s pretty clear that one of us gets pwned. But I will leave it to you, dear reader, to decide who. In all fairness, Cochran is literally my favorite living scientist.

(BTW, I’m not kidding about College Bowl. At age thirteen Mencius’ team won the Baltimore area It’s Academic championship, and as a seventeen-year-old junior he was the anchor of a side that came within thirty points of beating MIT, whose teams were perennially stocked with blatantly-ineligible balding grad students, in the regionals. He has probably lost a step, or even two. He is certainly a lot fatter, and he drinks more. But these victories (we actually beat MIT once, before we lost to them twice) were his great successes in life, and he is prepared to defend them by any means necessary.)