Robert Jordan is dead.

Oddly enough, I've never read any of his books. I think I was at the wrong age to get excited about them when I first became aware of them. He was, however, with the exception of a comics writer who lived in my neighborhood when I was growing up, the first pro-level genre writer who I ever actually saw face to face. I don't remember the year, but certainly many years before I strarted writing again, I saw him at the Borders bookstore in Ann Arbor, where he was doing a signing.

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On a more positive note, according to MSNBC, someone just invented a flying car that actually works.

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Last night, Naomi Wolf was on the Colbert Report. She was awesome, as was Colbert's intro..."tonight's guest says the US is sliding into fascism....if so, I call head of secret police!"

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This morning, I finally finished Pullman's "The Subtle Knife," which I'd been reading on and off for a bit now. Most excellent. I can't wait to see how the upcoming movies translate all of this onto the screen, and whether Pat Robertson will actually have a heart attack from sheer rage if they're successful at the box office.

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I found the CV I'd put together when I was applying for the Miami-Dade College job in the spring, and fiddled with it. (I'll probably need one again for something before I know it, so I might as well keep it up to date.) After doing so, I counted and found out that by the end of this semester I'll have actually taught 15 classes in total. (Four sections of "Deductive Logic" and three sections of "Critical Reasoning" for my assistantship when I was getting my MA at Western Michigan University, three sections of "Critical Thinking/Ethics" and three sections of "Introduction to Philosophy" as an adjunct at Miami-Dade College, and one section of "Introduction to Philosophy" for my assistantship at the University of Miami.) This seems very strange to me, both since it hasn't seemed like that many and because, I mean, c'mon, I'm only 27 and by the end of the semester I'll only be halfway into my PhD program.

(For the sake of contrast, someone who comes to the philosophy PhD program at Miami straight out of undergrad, gets out in the standard length of time and doesn't take any external teaching jobs will have taught 8 classes in total by the time they've finished the program.)

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The other weekend I got down to Coconut Grove for the first time in a good long while. Sitting in the warm darkness in the covered semi-outdoor part of Club Vision drinking and talking and watching the thunderstorms was one of those perfect atmospheric moments I could help thinking goddamn, I've really got to remember this in detail so I can use it in a story.

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...and speaking of Miami-ish things, I finally got around to watching Scarface. It's kind of bizarrre that I hadn't, since I've been down here for more than a year, I love gangster movies and its such a classic, but.... Who knows. Anyway, loved it (of course) and particularly enjoyed the fact that Tony's kid sister mentions in dialogue that she's taking classes at Miami-Dade College.

For once, the "making of" bonus stuff on the DVD was almost as good as the movie. I particularly like that they could only film about two weeks of it in Miami (the rest was in California), since they were driven out of town by the violent reaction of elements of the Cuban community who thought they were being unfairly portrayed. (Take a beat to think about the second half of that sentence.) Even funnier since now its hard to find Cuban Americans now who don't like the movie.

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My Clarion classmate Gord's lovely phildickianly paranoid semi-autobiographical sf story The Egan Thief is on-line at Flurb, illustrated by no less than Rudy Rucker. Read it.