Well I'm somewhat done with my summer school class (no more assignments, just re-writes which aren't on deadline through the month of July) and I cautiously re-enter the blogosphere.

John Edwards-charming fellow. But is he as charming as the current vice president? From The International Herald Tribune:

By the second rally of his weekend campaign swing, Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to be getting the hang of it, delivering an entire line of his standard stump speech looking at the audience instead of the podium as he usually does.

Then the audience got a little too excited. Their cheers forced him to read the same line twice. The vice president is a man who likes to get on with things.

"You guys want to hear this speech or not?" he asked, not quite kidding.

This weeks issue of THE NEW YORKER has a story about The Lusty Lady, a peep show in San Francisco. My brother was briefly the manager there a few years ago. The article is about how the strippers bought out management and are now running the peep-show as a co-operative venture (they borrowed the set up of a local Natural Foods co-op for part of their operating structure).

The article goes on to confirm what I've always thought which is that collective groups are a gigantic pain in the ass. In theory, I would like for everyone's voice to be heard. But in practice, I'm not that interesting in doing the hearing (such a passive construction "Let every voice be heard" rather than "let me hear every voice"...no, it's somebody else who should be doing the listening whenever the talk turns to letting voices be heard).

Strangely, one employee of the club, a guy who works at the front desk (a job my brother held at the Lusty in Seattle for many years) named Aesop bemoans the fact that so many of the co-op's meetings discuss vaginas. Well duh.