Tonight I rushed back from Burlington to see Hattie’s friend Daphne Kalotay’s reading at Brookline Booksmith. I was an idiot and thought my perfect memory served me right by storing the reading as starting at 7:30 but it had started at 7:00. I arrived exactly at 7:30 with Daphne in the middle of reading one of her stories from her first published book – Calamity and Other Stories. If you are nice you might get a signed copy through me.

The story she was reading was a detailed account of a divorced forty year old woman waking-up after having a hook-up with her ex-husband. The story divulges a lot of detail about the lives of the characters in a short sequence of events during the morning after. The woman starts annoyed about the man singing in the shower.

I was standing in the entrance at the bottom of the stairs with my big grey winter gloves as I realized a few moments too late that the loud Velcro strap sealing each of the gloves would make a loud zapping sound that would draw even more attention to my lateness and I couldn’t get my hands out of my gloves. So I stood with my coat on and listened to the story and then snuck my gloves off during the clapping after the story ended. Robert also appeared along beside me during the reading and I could see that Hattie was sitting with Matt and Kate.

Daphne answered the typical writer questions for an event like this like "did you write this with any specific reader in mind?" "who are your influences and do you see them in your work?",
"how did the publishing process differ from your expectations?" She did a great job answering the questions and listed some authors that I forgot to write down that I should read. I’ll ask her later who they are but I am backlogged reading anyways.

The basement of Brookline Booksmith is an interesting place. Someone who works at Booksmith is definitely a fanatic of pug dogs. They have two porcelain pug dogs on top of the cash register, cut-out photos of pugs on a door in the back and behind the counter and if you ask the cashier will show you the cutest picture of a black pug puppy sitting with a white human baby that you have ever seen. On the way up to the top of the stairs you can find a Dancing with cats book that was made by the same people who brought you the famous bestseller Why cats paint. They also have some great art posters for a reading from some guy with a name like Jack Snickers for a reading of a book called I Want Candy. I saw all of this as we headed out to Lucy’s for the reception.

It was awkward at Lucy's at first because we were early and not the hard-core book launch groupies that normally flock to these events. So I wasn’t sure if the mini-tacos, gourmet mushroom pizzas, and giant herd of chicken drumsticks in soy sauce were supposed to be eaten by us. The discomfort would have been fine and I would have refrained from attacking the mini-tacos if I had eaten some dinner or grabbed a bag of chips as I cut through CVS from my parking space in the lot behind the Coolidge Corner theater. But I did put enough food on the mini-plate that had been stolen from some poor child’s doll set and had a wonderful meal surpassing my expectations of Lucy’s. This is good for Lucy’s because my prior experience was when I was served my one and only serving of tofu-bacon. I had thought that I was going to get something interesting like a tofu dish with bacon in it but tofu-bacon is actually synthetic bacon flavored soy product that looks like a fruit roll-up crossed with a dog treat. I don’t recommend it. Since that experience I had avoided Lucy's despite Lucy's being very proximal to my apartment.

At the table I mentioned that there were some rectangular triangle pastries and Matt caught me in a major geometric miscue. That left us in a tailspin leading to discussing inscribing triangles into circles such that when Lisa and Dave arrived I asked Lisa if she could calculate whether an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle takes up more or less than half the area of the circle. Thus our paper tablecloth was covered with obscure sin, cosine, circles, Pi symbols, you name it as folks around us were discussing literary history and other book related topics. Kate mentioned that she was launching her blog officially but I didn’t know how to spell it so she wrote it on the paper tablecloth as well. The first post is now available for viewing. We joked about it but the theme of this blather I spit out should be DanHousman.com - Saving the world one post at a time. A mention of it is already posted on the Katehedgepeth.com site.

As the evening ended and we all thanked and congratulated Daphne, (and she deserves as much congratulation as we can give her being a published author among amateurs like myself) we got to chatting about mega-trends. We were talking about how if Hattie may have a secret site at HattieSchroeder.com but she was just hiding it. Web development isn’t cool these days but knitting is. So I thought it would be good to have a piece of software that scans someone’s web site and knits it into a sweater. Daphne thought it was pretty funny that you can just connect any two mega-trends to make an even bigger but probably stupid trend. The two trends we came up with as we were rushing out were Pilates poker – an exercise poker game at night where you stretch to put bets on the table and possibly make some bets on how far you can stretch. It is best seen with mime. We also worked on the popularity of people knitting cozies for their Hummers.

I promised Daphne I would see if Jenny Lawton, who I had found is running a bookstore earlier in the day would be able to host a reading. I dropped her a line. I’d love to reconnect with Jen Lawton. It’s been so long.

Other incidents of note today:

Robert used the google video search tool to count how often the f word appears in movies. That is the rough equivalent of looking-up dirty words in the big dictionary in the school library in fourth grade. But for now the results are:

1. Tigerland- 527 times
2. Another Day in Paradise- 327 times
3. Sweet Sixteen- 313 times
4. Narc- 298 times
5. The Big Lewbowski- 281 times
6. Fubar + Made- 274 times
7. Pulp Fiction- 271 times
8. Resevior Dogs- 252 times
9. Dead Presidents- 247 times
10. The Boondock Saints + Goodfellas#- 246 times

There was an interesting Seinfeld reality check when Aaron came back from the doctors and he had a five minute appointment only to make another appointment. The same thing happened to George in the Seinfeld first season episode Sarah and I were watching on the DVD last night. It must happen all the time.

I head a very interesting speech about religion and democracy on NPR The basic premise was that priests aren’t politicians and priests don’t believe that the republicans have it totally right about religion. The bible has a lot of content about charity, freedom, love that you wouldn’t find leading to tax cuts for the rich, cutting of social programs, and war. So a large part of the republican agenda is mis-aligned with the church. What has happened is that the republicans are much better at using the language and two big issues (because they are politicians) to make religion and a political party into a binary debate. The democrats should have just as much of a right to connect with the church and resonate with religious people but they have taken a stance of secularism and alienated religious people by not appealing to them. So the church is stuck with a need and a desire for a new way to approach politics.

In the Sharansky Case for Democracy book I so far have learned a bunch. I wish there was a diagram people could see about his main point. It is quite a simple one but even Bush and Rice aren’t latching on to it. It actually is the point which makes me think that going to Iraq was a right thing to do but for the wrong reason. Unfortunately you should fail the test when you get the answer right but you can’t show your work because there is no reason to believe you actually understand how to solve the problem. But Sharansky points to an interesting shift that if adopted could put a lot of pressure to lead towards world peace. The person he gives credit for it is Ronald Reagan. The idea is that any society that is run through tyranny is inherently unstable, it is like a soldier maintaining control by holding a gun at a person. Sooner or later the soldier will tire and the person will be free. In order to free the people in countries run by tyrants is to put direct pressure on the tyrants to respect human rights. In the case of the soviets trade sanctions and economic pressure was tied directly to the freeing of political prisoners and opening-up of human rights. This pressure rapidly cracked the entire wall of tyranny and put the soldier to sleep in a hurry. That is because without the human rights restrictions the tyranny can’t sustain it’s power by fear but without the help of the outside world they will fall apart from within. But this philosophy means moving away from a philosophy where a tyranny is ok provided the tyrant is our friend. This will be the hardest part for us to overcome since we have tyrants like the Saudis at the top of the tree who are powerful and necessary friends. We also can't push them around with sanctions since they can push us around with oil. Why do we need peace and freedom? Because that is what is right for all people and that is the dream.

Beauty king contestant number 3, Dan Housman, what is your wish?

Dan (blushing): World Peace.

Elections in Iraq have begun tonight in Australia for remote ballots. The live election begins on Sunday and it is bigger than the Superbowl even for me.