Aw, crap.

I did my Statistics final this morning. I'm fairly sure I'll pass the class, but there is leeway for a big fuck-up. Once I know, of course, so will you.

I fixed the error on my orientation form for CSUS, so I'm going to that on June 10. Hopefully it won't be a waste of time.

Got home to a phone call from Karla (my aunt, for those among you who don't know this already) telling me she may have to fly back to LA before her scheduled time tomorrow afternoon; John thinks his mother has less than 24 hours left. So I'm now on-call for the kids.

Both kids broke down at Karla; Blair last night and Brooke this morning. The grief and anger at all this finally broke through.

Heinlein, you rat bastard!

So I'm reading an Early Heinlein work (Starship Troopers), and I'm discovering that the older I get, the less I like his earlier stuff.

I just finished a ten page digression wherein he uses a scene to preach his version of criminal justice theory at the reader. It's dull, it's boring, and it's filled with straw-man arguments, such as the one where he purposely (I have to assume purpose, because the man could not have been this stupid) takes the "unusual" in "cruel and unusual punishment" to mean "rare" instead of "out of the ordinary/beyond reasonable", which is clearly what it's meant to be. So his argument is that punishment must be unusual, because constant punishment would serve no purpose. I'd love to think that he's making a sly joke whereing the people discussing all this are misinformed about what it really meant, but there are no contextual clues to support that, and a ton to support that Bob's preaching. Again.

Buddha on a pogo stick, Bob, what the hell is wrong with you? If I want straw-man arguments to support conservative views on morality, I'll go read CS Lewis!

I find I much prefer his later work, where he focussed less on "Bringing up Citizens" lectures and more on telling a story.

My Mariella Frostrup ...

In the BBC show Coupling, Steve has a fascination with Mariella Frostrup.

I have an equivalent, though it's voice-only. She's not the most beautiful woman on the planet, but I'm in love with Heather Payton's voice. I admit it, she's 90% of why I listen to Outlook on the BBC World Service.

And, despite not finding Sarah Alexander (Susan on Coupling) attractive when I first started watching the show, I'm rather taken by her now.

It occurs to me that the only problem with admitting you have a fetish for British accents is that then your British friends may think you only like them because they're British. So let me just say that I postively detest some Brits, too. Ok?

But, yeah, I love British films, and that's probably about 40% the accents and 60% the stories and storytelling sensibilities.