0.5 WTCs

From a Globe article:

"Half the World Trade Center casualties are happening every year in our colleges," said one researcher, Mark Goldman, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida.

So yeah, we now have a convenient, higher-resolution unit for measuring people getting killed in amounts smaller than the familiar wartime battles, bombings and atrocities usually cited in such comparisons.@whee

Periodic Table of Science Fiction

This page features one new piece of science nanofiction (short-short stories) every week, each themed around (and hyperlinked from) a different element in the periodic table, all by Michael Swanwick. Just over 40 of them, right now.

Choice

Yargh. Before I could post about receiving Leah and Shawn's wedding invitation (with stickers and everything), my mom called, so I mentioned it to her.

It turns out that their wedding is the same day as Peter and Janice's. Ehn.

I am not sure what to do. Go to the lame wedding of my lame brother and feel lame; or go to my friends' wedding, which will lead to fun and seeing my long-lost friends again?

Boredom and chest-sucking ennui with one choice, guilt plus the unwanted adolescent thrill of "punishing" my family on the other. Wonderful.

Mom wasted no time in setting in with the guiltomatic. Peter has no friends or family to invite besides us (and Aunt Jan, the sole member of the extended McIntosh clan who doesn't loathe my parents). And I wouldn't want Janice's side of the chuch to outnumber ours, would I?

I clammed up and ended the conversation when it was polite to do so, saying that I had a difficult decision ahead of me all of a sudden, and I'd appreciate her letting me think it over. To her credit, she didn't demand that I go to Peter's wedding, though she made her preferences clear.