After a brief consultation with Married Brother (who gets consulted because he actually reads this blog from time to time), I have decided to rename Radio Brother. My parents -- fresh from a visit to South Dakota to make sure their baby's not living in a hovel -- let slip the wording of one of the tags that plays when RB is doing his DJ stint -- a tag that he particularly dislikes. So henceforth, at least for the extent of his South Dakota DJing, Radio Brother shall be known as The Music Machine. Married Brother better hope I never find out what any of his work nicknames are.

Yan and I took a walking tour of the neighborhood around Washington Square yesterday. It was pretty interesting; we learned where Louisa May Alcott lived when she was writing Little Women (I read that book four or five times in junior high, and all the others that came after it), about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (the building in which it occurred is now full of NYU classrooms), and a bunch of other interesting facts about the evolution of the neighborhood (the land which makes up the park was first used as a graveyard for the indigent and people who died of infectious diseases). Since several of the main characters of the Novel-Type Project (which I'm actually working on! Actively!) live in one of the row houses on Washington Square I even picked up information that will allow me to ground the fictional house in historical fact. It was really nice to have an excuse to be outside all day -- even if it was a bit cooler than promised by the forecast.