And now, a brief conversation regarding Eli’s reading.

“Eli, let me see what the sticker says. Okay, you can read that one by yourself.”

“Wait, what does the sticker say? Library books have stickers for Eli?”

“It says level 1.8.”

“Level 1.8? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Eli’s reading roughly level 2 books on his own.”

“What is this scale? Is 1 ‘Dick and Jane’ and 10 Thomas Pynchon?”

Our trip to the beach.

Stay tuned! I might accidentally post something else next week.

I’ve mentioned my love of Matt Fraction’s comics before, what with Casanova and Five Fists of Science and his run on Iron Fist. You want to know why I love his work?

I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t at least point out that in this issue, Matt Fraction and Terry Dodson deliver what is unquestionably the Sensational Character Rediscovery of 2008 with the addition of Dr. Nemesis, a Golden Age character who co-created the Human Torch, fought the Invaders, and then spent the intervening time building new eyes and then using them to hunt down cloned Nazi super-soldiers and shoot them in the face with his guns made of science. And really, I don’t think I’m overstating matters when I say that a crotchety old super-genius hitman is exactly what the franchise has been lacking all these years.
–Chris Sims, about Uncanny X-Men #504

Oh, did I mention that he has a picture of his son in a dog cage? Strega pointed that out to me. Clearly Matt Fraction and I are somehow related.

Actually, it turns out it’s not the turkey meat responsible for tryptophan and subsequent postprandial napping, it’s the carbohydrates. Still, we’re going to take the weekend off.

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow USians. As is customary on this day, I will pause and consider what I’m thankful for.

I know: I’m thankful I don’t have any of the turkey fryers that the Underwriters Laboratories got to burst into flames.

Have a safe and non-fire-filled Thanksgiving, everyone.

I was surfing randomly through Wikipedia, which is something I do because shut up, I just do, and discovered that it has a list of harvest festivals, the US Thanksgiving included. I’m extremely pleased that in the UK it’s just called a Harvest Festival. No Solung or Chuseok for them.

I wonder what a rebranding of Harvest Festival would be. “Harvest Festival Sponsored by Weetabix Ltd”?

Since we have family in the Florida panhandle, we’ve spent Thanksgiving week at the beach for years now. Eli’s been coming since before he was born, and in the past he’s not thought much of the beach. When he was a year old, he didn’t like how the sand felt under his feet. When he was two years old, he would dig in the sand, but he preferred more interesting hobbies like playing indoors and pestering his grandparents. Last year the water scared him, and that was before I told him about sharks and jellyfish and the Undertoad that was waiting to drag him to a watery grave — you know, the kind of thing all responsible parents tell their kids. I figured this year would be the same.

It’s been around 65 degrees F (18 degrees C), but the Gulf of Mexico waters have been around 50 degrees F (OH GOD THE COLD IT BURNS degrees C). That doesn’t deter Eli. He dashes in, splashes around, and runs back out before doing it all again. Worse, he demands that we all come in with him. We can tell when he’s been in there too long because his chattering blue lips are covered in snot. See? The beach is healthy!

I’m excited that Eli has learned to love the beach. I’ve been coming down here for over 25 years, and the smell of salt water, the sound of the surf, the feel of the sand beneath my feet, all relax me. I had worried that Eli wouldn’t enjoy it at all.

I’m so glad I was wrong.

Pushing Daisies has been canceled. Meanwhile, the Knight Rider relaunch has managed to shed nearly half of its cast and keep on goin’.

If I ever teach a class that covers theodicy, I’m using this as an example.

For anyone else having to use a hex string to access their encrypted wifi network over an iPhone or iPod Touch: put a dollar sign in front of the string. Instead of, say 2DBA7C, enter $2DBA7C. It looks like Apple used to let you choose between a passphrase or a hex key in version 1 of the software, but has since removed that option.

Hey, guess what I got today?

It looked a lot smaller in all of the commercials. And less glowing.

At any rate, now the inevitable question: what apps should I put on this thing?