Recent randomness...

1. For the last thirty years or so, I have been an sf fan. Part of that is going to sf cons and the moveable feast is Worldcon. This year it will be in Australia and I'm afraid that we won't be able to make it. However, a few years ago, John Scalzi and some others decided to put together a reading package of all the works (where made available by publishers)that we had nominated for the Hugo. This year, all the graphic art nominations were also available and I have been sucked into Girl Genius. What a rocking strip! I'm pretty sure it's got my vote, I have now read through inception, and I plan on buying the books (because reading comics on line rots compared to having the book). How late I am to this show: it won the Hugo last year, but I've just ignored comics since I went cold turkey in 1990. Now, this is the type of comic I want my daughters to grow up reading.
2. After surviving my own mini-flame war, it seems that a lot of the blogs I have been reading have their own. Some are even related to the topic I was embroiled in: misogyny and sexism. See Racefail (on cultural appropriation), Mansplainin, How difficult life is for the Menz, the craziness on fanfic, which started with a reasonable post on Diana Gabaldon's blog (in a post which has now disappeared- and I don't blame her- the vitriol was amazing and the vitriolic made ad hominem attacks), but exploded through Boingboing and GRRMartin and ever outward. Watching how these things degenerated into insanity and how trolls took over was illuminating and shows the difference between an editorial page and the internets in all their glory.
3. We caught up with Lost. The last episodes are coming this month and we want to watch them semi-real time. And Fringe is getting better and better. As for Castle, what is not to like about a mystery writer as the hero of a series, with a kick toosh woman Police detective in charge. Nathan Fillion (from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog) is fab.
4. Working on math... the way it's taught here is so non-intuitive that my husband can't understand it. I can, but I understand the issues. It's rote utilization of certain table formats and we just need to get Thing1 understanding that when there are lank boxes, a null is a perfectly correct way of filling them.
5. Same with reading. We are getting there, but the way that the German system (here at least) utilized the whole word method at the beginning, then moves to phonetics, makes it hard. There are far more "letters" here, though, so I understand why they operate the way they do. They didn't finish learning all the different vowels and consonants until after the winter holidays (there's a whole separate section to learn with the umlauted and conjoined vowels). And they don't sing the alphabet song, they learn "A wie Affe, Ei wie Eis... usw.) Fascinating to get a look into the basic culture and how it is indoctrinated.