Not much to report

We have four new female rats, who have transformed the Seraglio in the living room from a somewhat-too-large home for 3 into a nicely full den of ratful wacky hijinks.

nellorat has been doing an astonishing job of retting up the house; my participation of late has mostly involved the setup of our new entertainment center(s), two waist-high wooden cabinets holding on the left the stereo system (tape player, cd carousel, receiver, and my college turntable which is still in superb shape), and on the right our tv appliances (Betamax, DVD/VHS, DVR, Wii) and the old television on top. Even though finances are a bit tight right now, we're going to splurge on a sizable LCD TV to replace the 20-year-old CRT and fill the empty space left by removing the old 6' x 6' center.

Work is dull, but I feel like I'm making some progress in getting the process of my job under control. Although I don't have much authority per se, I have a responsibility to track the expenses of my department (which is precisely one person, me) with an eye towards better understanding and controlling them, and I'm setting up a system to do that. I have managed in the last 3 weeks to cut our annual costs by more than my salary, so that's nice.

robin_d_laws pointed out that one of the virtues of HBO's adaptation of A Game of Thrones is that it manages to convey metric buttloads of information very gracefully. (My term, not his.) But there's more. This past week's episode, the sixth ("A Crown of Gold") managed to pull off one of the great moments that any mystery story strives for--the moment when the investigating party figures out something 30 seconds after the reader does, so clearly that the precise what doesn't even have to be said out loud. Since I haven't read the novel yet*, I don't know how Martin staged the scene, but the visual pacing of Ned Stark interrupting himself in mid-sentence, running off to examine the evidence, and reading aloud exactly the facts we needed to know to put the puzzle together--couldn't have been better.

*A Song of Ice and Fire started around the time that I more or less stopped reading incomplete fantasy series. As I noted on Tor.com, I've been waiting 24 years for the conclusion of the Tales of Alvin Maker trilogy; with luck, the seventh and final volume may come out this year or next.

While I'm linking to my comments on Tor.com, here's some musings on how sf exists as a genre. I should probably expand on them at some point, but there's stuff there upon which to chew. I'm coming to believe that the great unappreciated fact of the science fiction field is that in the 1980s, it transformed into several semi-independent genera which barely talk to each other anymore.

A political link to end this entry. Digby had a superb post (as she so often does) about coalitions in Democratic politics:

It's not just that progressive goals are often thwarted --- so are conservatives'. . . It's one thing to feel that you aren't getting what you want, it's quite another to be constantly worried that you will lose what you already have --- and at the hands of your own coalition allies.

This ties neatly back to my post from last year where I noted that "for any given person who might traditionally support the Democrats, there is at least one major issue on which that person feels betrayed." Nice to see other wise thinkers agreeing with me.

Private law

On the "wise people agreeing with me" front, here's a great post from Unqualified Offerings's Thoreau about the word "privilege". The first point in particular is something I've been thinking for a while about the term as it is used:

[it] conflates several concepts: 1) Things that everybody really ought to be able to enjoy (e.g. basic respect) but some people are denied.  For instance, not having one's opinion automatically dismissed because of gender or skin tone.

Most of the things I see discussed as "privilege" are in that category--goods or behaviors that should and could be available to everyone but that because of abuses of power structures have been seized by one group and denied to others. Of course, many are not--assuming that one's needs or opinions are more important than other people's is the prime marker of privilege (in almost every sense), and it cannot be the case that everyone can or should be more important than everyone else.

An important aspect that Thoreau misses is that are earned privileges. A random person talking about evolution has, in my world, the right (not the privilege) to an assumption of good will. PZ Myers (of Pharyngula) has earned the (actual) privilege of the assumption that when he speaks about evolution, he has some idea of what he's talking about. Greg Easterbrooke, on the other hand, has earned the opposite assumption by years of active lying on the topic--the right to be taken seriously, that he would normally exercise, he has forsaken.