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Happy V-Day, those of you who celebrate it! To those who don't, happy Arizona Statehood Day!

A few little tidbits of items washed up on the shores of my consciousness lately:

• Howard Waldrop read 50-100 books (mostly about dodos) over a 3- to 4-month period as research in preparation for writing "The Ugly Chickens." I do not recommend this approach to fledgling authors as an approach to research for a short story. I do, however, think this is one of the few stories where the big infodumps based on the author's research actually contribute to the story.
• Been having more vivid and memorable dreams than usual lately. In this morning's, I backed through someone's fence in my car and when I went to give them my address I found that I couldn't remember my new address and all my ID cards had wrong addresses on them.
• Been getting a lot more sleep lately; averaging between 6 and 7 hours a night for the past week or so, rather than the frequent 4- and 5-hour nights I was getting for a while.
• Character description I'll never use: "He was a firm believer in heterocracy—government by the other party. 'The country is inevitably going to hell,' he liked to say, 'so why not ensure that the other party can be blamed for it?'"
• Some reviews of the much-anticipated Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, a followup to the first Dark Matter volume. Looking forward to reading it.
• Excellent entry from Nick on (among other things) why sexual orientation issues are connected to class and race issues; well worth reading the comments as well as the main entry.
• Cutest. Gay penguin photo. Evar!
• Yet another variant on penguing baseball; this one might perhaps be called penguin target shooting. Frustrating for a while, until I figured out how the aiming system worked. These games would have a very different feel if the penguins didn't seem to be such cheerful participants.
• Dance of the blue-footed boobies! (Thanks to gannet.)
• You know how some music albums contain blank/empty tracks? Well, now you can buy those blank tracks from the iTunes music store for only a dollar apiece!
• I'm very glad that February 12 has passed; the volume of MyDoom-related mail I've been getting has dropped precipitously. However, I'm still getting a copy or two an hour. Is it that people's computer clocks are set two days slow?
• Interesting piece from Businessweek six months ago on The Digital Divide That Wasn't; it makes a bunch of claims, some of them possibly ideologically driven (saying that the divide is going away because there are now more broadband ISPs so competition will eventually drive down prices seems a little weak as an argument against a divide's existence), but among other things says that there's a lot of free or low-cost Internet access available if people were interested in using it. More hearteningly to me, it notes that use of the Net by women and minorities (presumably in the US) continues to grow toward proportions representative of the population at large.
• One of the other condos in my mini-complex (only five units) has just gone on the market. Anyone looking for a condo in Mountain View? Odd: this is the third of the five units to be put up for sale in the last six months (mine was first, and another one was sold between the time I bought mine and the time I moved in).

Think that's enough for now. Time to go read subs.