South America: Where Are You?

A quick look at the map to the right shows that among the habitable continents, South America is the only one to date where I've not had someone blip in. Then again, whether or not North America is habitable these days, at least the biggest chunk of it, is in question. I was doing some work a few weeks back for a professor from the U. of Alberta, and I intimated that a move north of the border could be a positive step. He agreed, but said that perhaps I hadn't figured in January and February. Point well taken.

Since most of my clients -- the scholarly and university ones anyway -- would probably be considered left of center, I'm probably not going to lose any business with the following little anecdote: we have some Obama signs in our yard, one of which I noticed was bent over and sliced through today. Perhaps it's a result of a sudden storm we had here yesterday with high winds, but given that in the last few years we've had a Hanukkah flag burned in our yard and a burning flare left on top of one of our cars, I think that the destruction was likely intentional. Dare I think what would actually happen here if I ever ventured out of the house? As a friend once said, "It is a wise man who every day learns something new to fear." Uh-huh. Since I've been pictured twice on the front page of the local paper in my eight years in Bristol, maybe I'm a public figure after all. Maybe it's just bad luck.


Nothing really much of interest on the work front to report. Reading a book about translating Christianity into the world's languages, working on an index about weapons of mass destruction, and then next up is memoirs from a New Left pioneer of the early 1960s. Speaking of the New Left (or the Old Left) reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from Saul Alinsky, a Chicago organizer in whose wake Obama follows: "Don't worry, boys. We'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever."