Recent Reading

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.

This is what I’m reading right now:

  • The Iced Out Gear affiliate marketing newsletter, which instructs me to tell you that you can, and I quote, “”
  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which tells me that bumper crops of corn in the early 19th century led to a lot of cheap corn whiskey: “we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch and dinner, before work and after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called ‘the elevenses.'”
  • An early draft of the next edition of the The Linux Administration Handbook, in which I have learned that “Mail servers should relay mail for third parties only on behalf of trusted clients. If a mail server forwards mail from unknown clients to other servers, it is a so-called open relay, which is bad.”

My Cousins

Cousins
Posing for an illustration about women, family, and technology, my cousin Rebecca Blasenheim (right) with the youngest Khoury daughter, whose name I’ve forgotten (Update 12:31: it’s Daisy. She and her equally cute older brother know some funny magic tricks.)

It’s not a family event without an argument about the middle east

Went to the family reunion this weekend. Thirty-some-odd folks, including several I hadn’t known about: Dennis Skinner, Labor MP for Bolsover, UK, and a couple who descended from one of my great-grandfather’s brothers.

The whole weekend was filled with insistent voices. My clan is stubborn and well-read, and that means there was a lot of declaiming about Thomas Friedman, Hezbollah, Israel, and Iraq, in addition to the standard gossip about whose kids are being raised wrong, or who ran off with someone Poppa didn’t approve of back in ’36, and how many years they went without speaking to each other. Breakfast with my grandmother included a ninety-minute lecture on terrorism, the clash of civilizations, and how Arabs treat their women, plus a twenty minute lesson on what constitutes proper yogurt and how Americans all oversweeten all their food. Good breakfast, though.