The new Lego sets seem to be trading in the "able to be taken apart and made into new things" aspect for the "media tie-in" aspect. Soon they'll be just glorified Happy Meal toys.

The bike guy that's painted in the bike lane on Connecticut Ave. has a head shaped like a mushroom. I assume that's meant to indicate that he's wearing a helmet (a subtle safety message from our city authorities), which in some way is almost as weird.

More proof that the people who write the CNN ticker need more sleep: Today we learned that the Afghan poppy crop is recovering after being "Tali-banned" last year.

In the interests of enlightening the public and using up my webspace, I'm HTML-ing some papers and essays from the past four years. So far, I've finished the two papers I wrote for my Australian history class:

Why Did The British Found A Colony At Botany Bay? In which I argue that the traditional "they needed a place to dump their convicts" explanation is the correct one.

Why Did Australia Build The "Great White Walls" To Bar Chinese Immigration? In which I argue that, given their racist assumptions, Australians saw the Chinese as a barrier to their struggle to found a liberal, democratic state.

The links to the index page of papers and essays (found at the bottom) may not work yet.