I'll probably defend in mid-September, and, having run the numbers, it turns out that I may not be able to afford to simply sit around until then. The new tentative plan is that if the last two sessional gigs here in TO that I'm waiting to hear back on fail to materialize, I'll pull up stakes and relocate to Texas in mid-August. I'll then return to TO to defend in mid-September.

Of course, the great monkey-wrench in all of this will be the question of what happens if I've relocated to TX and one of these late-opening positions I've applied for comes through. If that happens, I'll be needing to relocate twice. But that would be a good sort of problem to have.

If worst comes to worst, I'll look to find some sort of placeholder job in TX and join the ranks of the U6, starting back on the lovely treadmill of job applications, but this time as a PhD rather than ABD.

More often, however, I choose a distraction that lies somewhere in the middle, namely newspapers and magazines. The great triumph of the internet is that now I have ready access to just about every magazine and newspaper out there. Two of my favorites for political news and discussion are The New York Times and The New Republic. In these two publications, I have two favorite journalists. C. J. Chivers of the New York Times is the best war correspondent I've ever read. And he's got more cred than any other reporter ever. He was a Marine Corps infantry officer before leaving the military to be a journalist. As a Times journalist, his reporting from Afghanistan (particularly the Korengal valley) has been outstanding for the vividness of how he describes what the soldiers and Marines there go through and the landscape itself. There are also small tidbits that make his writing a delight, such as Chivers, the former Marine, interviewing a Marine who says of the Taliban, "But they are not very good shots. If these guys knew how to shoot like even the U.S. Army, we would be taking 50 percent casualties on all of our patrols."

One of my other favorite journalists is The New Republic's Michelle Cottle. I can't put my finger why I so appreciate her writing, but this latest entry of hers on the magazine's weblog is a good example of her down-to-earth, absolutely human style of writing. She also mentioned in an article several years ago that she was raised Evangelical Protestant and is still kind of emotionally scarred by it, which is something with which I can sympathize.

I can't believe I'm saying this about a Michael Bay movie, but it could have done with less of the talky bits. There were some sub-plots and minor characters that only made the movie drag. If you're watching the Transformers, you're watching it for one thing and one thing only: to see giant robots fight. Have however much plot you need for giant robots to be fighting, but leave it at that.

What I also loved was that this movie was essentially a three-hour commercial for Hasbro, General Motors, and the U.S. Military. Of course, the military thing is no accident: the Pentagon's standard policy is that in movies that portray the U.S. military well, they supply the studio with military equipment, personnel, footage, etc. This was definitely one of those movies. (After all, one of the ways that the movie showed that the Decepticons are truly evil--aside from their murdering civilians, glowering expressions, glowing red eyes, and sinister voices--was that they desecrated the American flag.)

Back of the gym, where the big men train
'Midst the anguished grunts and the sounds of pain
Where big iron rides high and threatens lives
And the noise is made with the big forty-fives
A very big man with legs like trees,
A great barrel chest, and a monstrous back
Laughed as he pulled a weight from the stack.

He said: "Son, don't try to lie,
And don't say you've forgotten
The trouble with you is
You ain't been SQUATTIN'!"

I am bound and determined to do something about my chicken legs. At the moment, though, I'm actually fairly happy with my upper body: I'm weighing in at a little over 190 lbs., with a height of about 5'10" and a 33" waist. Well, I'm happy with my upper body with the exception of my lats. I'd really, really like for them to be larger, and I don't like that I was kept from lifting for just under a month by a pulled bicep.

I'm up to about a nineteen mile week with running, although this week is a light week to let muscles recover from the damage they take from the repeated pounding of running. Next week, I'll kick things up to twenty-one miles, and I hope to eventually get to 30. Hopefully, having switched to squats will help me with that.

One reason that I didn't squat for the longest time was that I was afraid for what the effect would be on my back. My upper back is a bit f*cked up from an injury I sustained a few years ago when I slightly dislocated one of my ribs. So far, though, I've felt no ill effects. Who knows, perhaps it will actually wind up helping my back, since one thing that the physical therapist so many years ago told me was that the best way to ease the pain in my back would be to strengthen the muscles.

For example, in the article on Opium, in the section describing the history of its use, we have this lovely line: "Opium became stigmatized in Europe during the Inquisition as a Middle Eastern influence and became a taboo subject in Europe from approximately 1300 to 1500 A.D." The above statement is what we academic folk call "not true." It's not true at several levels, but it seems superficially plausible to one who has a superficial knowledge of the history of western Europe. Now then, I would love to put an actual discussion of use of opiate analgesics in late Medieval Europe, and I suspect that some day when I'm in the library and can't bear to do any thesis work, I may take an hour and correct the article (a discussion of Dwale would be a good start).

It's good to be in a counter-cyclical industry.

Let the Right One in is a perfect antidote to this trend. In fact, I'd call it the anti-Twilight. It's set in a Swedish suburb of the early 80's, by which setting alone most of the glamor of the vampire is ruthlessly excised. I don't want to give too much of the film away, but it maintains both the horror of vampires and the horror of being a vampire, while also keeping the vampire at least somewhat sympathetic.