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I am a HUGE fan of The Ghost Map. I'm an epidemiology nerd, and I think it's such a great story, combining social issues, politics, science. Plus, you can impress your friends* by telling them you know where this blog gets its title: http://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/ *This only applies if your friends are as off-the-charts geeky as mine, and are impressed by this kind of incredibly dorky trivia. Actually, even my geeky friends were probably only pretending to be at all impressed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/opinion/mitt-romneys-search-for-simple-answers.html?_r=1 The author of Guns, Germs & Steel in the NY Times this morning, stating his belief that Romney misrepresented/misunderstood his thesis. Doesn't necessarily shed any new light on this discussion, but an interesting read, anyway.

For anyone who missed this in the Announcements thread:

And I love to show people around my magic city! Anytime, brother, anytime.

Tonight is a special Jerry Garcia's birthday party at the SF Giants game. For those folks who bought tickets to sit in the special GD section tonight, they'll also receive this: My sisters will be at the game, but not in that section.

I believe it's a mirror site, it'll just re-direct you to viachicago.org. I just tried it: forums.viachicago.org or porchlight.viachicago.org will get you to the same home page, but click on any thread and you're taken to viachicago.org. Just an admin/tech thing, I know Solace runs a couple of different web sites, I think he's got some tricks for keeping them all straight on the server.

I would love for San Francisco to host an Olympics, even though pretty much every event would probably have to be out of town. I'm excited for the Americas Cup to be here next year, and I certainly don't give a shit about sailing! Yeah, the badminton scandal is crazy. Most people are going to find it funny, just because, well, it's badminton. But it was a major blunder on the part of the sport's federation, that they didn't see this coming. And apparently at least one soccer team has done the same thing, played for a draw rather than a win, because the draw would get them through to the

Yeah, I type in forums.viachicago.org, and it gets me here. Looks like we were down, but we're back? I'm hoping that was it, but I'll keep you posted if I get further updates.

Thank you, Mr. Solace!

Just a bump and a reminder that VC is scheduled go down tonight. If you try to log on and see we're down, please check back tomorrow, or maybe the day after.

Never too much! I wish more people were as enthusiastic!

Cross-posted from Just A Fan: The forum is back! There was a little fix that needed to be done, but we're in the process of transferring control of the tech side of things, and this fell through the cracks. I've been told that our current techie guru is going to "do a full backup today and probably do an OS restore/upgrade on Tue evening, with the site being down for possibly up to 24-48 hours (hopefully much much less than that if all goes well, but just giving worst case scenario)." Then things should be transferred over to the new tech person, and we'll go on from there. I'll keep yo

The forum is back! There was a little fix that needed to be done, but we're in the process of transferring control of the tech side of things, and this fell through the cracks. I've been told that our current techie guru is going to "do a full backup today and probably do an OS restore/upgrade on Tue evening, with the site being down for possibly up to 24-48 hours (hopefully much much less than that if all goes well, but just giving worst case scenario)." Then things should be transferred over to the new tech person, and we'll go on from there. I'll keep you posted if anything changes, bu

Politics aside, Mitt's statements in London make me think he sounds like kind of a dick. Yeah, he's supposed to know when NOT to say what he's thinking. That's diplomacy, but it's also kind of just good manners.

No, that one is a web extra.

That's why I'm only going to consider it.

But what if the ounce of prevention is a leech, sucking the life force out of our democracy? (How's that for a bit of hyperbole?? ) I still feel that these bills are a "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist on any real scale, and they're far more likely to result in disenfranchising legitimate voters. It's a tiny bug, and they're going after it with a really big stick. Show me a bill that makes IDs more accessible, and goes after voter fraud with some kind of precision, and I'll consider it.

The Roots are also fans. Questlove was tweeting yesterday about how cool it was to get to listen to Wilco on his lunch hour.

Yeah, going back to the days of Reagan's "welfare queens", the right has tried to convince the middle (and working) class that they should see themselves as separate, better, just different from the poor. It's all about which party can grab the biggest portion of that large group of voters, the ones that every party claims to best represent. I think the right tends to be more effective at it, just because everyone wants to believe that they're just one lucky break or brilliant idea away from being rich. But I'm guessing far more Americans are one missed paycheck away from poverty, than one

Promise to myself: this is the last Olympics I'm going to work through. From here on out, I take two weeks off work every two years (I'm in for Winter, too!), and watch the whole thing, start to finish. Sure, I'll probably spend the whole two weeks on my couch, eating crap, and I'll be Rulon Gardner-sized by the time it's over, but it'll be worth it!!

Merged.

Aside from the very obvious victims in this case, I think one of the groups that is going to take this the hardest will be the players whose college playing careers are now wiped out. Assuming that none of them knew anything about the ongoing abuse, they were kids who, as far as they knew, were playing for a team that had a history of dignity and integrity. Now their wins don't officially exist anymore, and you have to wonder what it's doing to them, knowing that this was happening while they were a part of that program. The player quoted in that ESPN article sounds pretty bitter (about the

I'm going to sound very contrary today! He's funny, but his book felt a bit padded (there's a framing device that he pretty much comes out and admits is padding), and it lacked a lot in the "tell-all" category. It's one of those sweet happy memoirs where the worst thing that happens to him is that his parents split up, but even that's OK because he gets the best step-dad ever out of the deal! Not that I need a ton of drama or anything, it's just very very light, with some odd bits of serious film criticism thrown in. You could do worse, but don't be expecting anything too wild or juicy.

It was amusing, for sure. But it was a little too in love with the idea of itself, if that makes any sense. Hard to talk about why I wasn't crazy about it, without getting too spoiler-y. He's very readable, but overall I wanted more from the characters and the story.

As discussed here previously, I have some problems with Dave Eggers but I like when he gets out of the way of the people he's writing about. Zeitoun is an excellent example of that.