I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

1. The new US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking feedback on how to make mortgage disclosure forms more understandable. If you have a few minutes, go and vote for the alternative you find easiest to understand.

2. I am seriously amused that Patrick Stump’s song This City, now free on iTunes, includes a lyric using the word “gentrification.”
( Civil War, understanding comics, economics and economic collapse, funky numbers )

Even if you don't usually read book reviews, if you or anyone you love gardens (or eats meat), read this.

Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health: This is possibly the scariest book I've ever read. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which you've probably heard most about in its guise of mad cow disease, is a disease that literally eats holes in the brains of its victims, killing them in a terrible fashion. We know how it spreads: it spreads through cannibalism and through eating animals that have been made into cannibals by modern food production techniques. It gets into the brain and starts converting normal proteins into agents of death, like Vonnegut's ice-9 converting regular water into an unmelting solid, through a process that may be the same as crystallization (which you might have done in high school chemistry, turning a supersaturated solution into a solid by dropping a seed crystal into the liquid). The agents that cause TSE's spread are virtually impervious to heat, radiation, formaldehyde, years of isolation, and freezing. And, even with the example of Britain, which ignored the problem for years until the infection was firmly established – and at what level, we still don't know, because infections began in the early 1980s and the incubation time can be 2-3 decades – America is taking the same ostrich-like stance, refusing to fund testing and even preventing ranchers from testing in some circumstances. Rhodes tells the medical detective story, starting with the epidemic of kuru among New Guinea cannibals in the 1950s and 1960s through modern understandings of TSEs, and along the way delivers a powerful indictment of government unwillingness to act in the face of a profitable production mechanism. I'll leave you with a bit of advice you may want to pass along, a quote from the book:

"You know the bone meal that people use on their roses?" Gajdusek asked me then. "It's made from downer cattle [cattle that sicken and die for no apparent reason, which sometimes are infected with TSE]. Ground extremely fine. The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose."
The Nobel-laureate virologist who knows more than anyone else in the world about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy looked at me meaningfully. "Do you use bone meal on your roses?"
I told him I did.
He nodded. "I wouldn't if I were you."

( other nonfiction )

I had an amazing fannish day, including more promised cliche-fic and a reviewing of Pirates of the Carribean in which the greater-than-average-intelligence of the script was more clear than on first exposure. Unfortunately, I have yet to do anything about my faculty presentation on Tuesday, and I really need to circulate a paper first thing Monday, so it will be a busy Sunday. Of course, that's not going to stop me from writing the truly awful cliche-fic that staggered out from the deepest recesses of my brain like the bastard child of Frankenstein's monster and the Swamp Thing.

But first, a lot of books, most about history:
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What I've been reading, watching and liking.

Book: A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin. The book is about the making of the modern Middle East, mainly from the British perspective. The details are fabulous, and the story itself is so full of tragedy that it's amazing how funny a lot of what happened was, mainly because Europeans thought they knew what was going on in the Ottoman Empire and really had no clue. For example: Britain was building two state-of-the-art battleships for the Ottoman Empire when WWI broke out. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire was secretly negotiating to ally with Germany, but was so weak that Germany planned to refuse unless the Empire could give it something really good. Apparently, the Empire figured out that Britain was going to seize the battleships, still in a British port, and promised Germany the ships in return for alliance. The alliance was signed and the ships were almost immediately seized, and Germany never figured out it had been duped. Then the Empire seized two German battleships that had taken shelter from British ships in an Ottoman port, much against the will of the Germans, but it was widely believed that the Germans were making a magnanimous gesture to show that they'd be better allies than the British, and Winston Churchill's political fortunes suffered because the public believed he'd forced the Ottomans into the arms of the Germans. And it goes on like that, with the Europeans always somewhat misled about what they'd just done. Highly recommended.

Singer/songwriter: Janis Ian, whose website offers several free downloads. She's got a huge back catalog. I like her clever angst and her sense of humor, which includes a heaping helping aimed at herself. Compare "Stolen Fire," a great song about cheating, with "Stolen Tires," a delicious self-parody, both available here. I discovered her through my still-beloved Launch. Another, much more electronic, Launch discovery of mine is Cirrus, whose song "Boomerang" is croony electronica fun. "Half a Cell" is also pretty good.

Also, I just got Peter Gabriel's new CD, Up. It's okay, though not likely to see much commercial airplay, as all the songs except the outro clock in at over 6:30. The songs are less upbeat than the songs on "Us," but the emotional intensity is about the same. "Sky Blue," "More Than This," and "The Barry Williams Show," the last of which is about a skanky talk show host, are my favorites. I ripped about half of the songs to iTunes, but I don't think any will make my iPod. (I have over 3900 songs on the computer, but only a 5 gig iPod, which limits me to about my top 1100.)

Last, television: I loved the Angel season premiere. Wesley scared the bejeezus out of me when he opened the closet on Justine. Has he kept her there all summer? He obviously had her well enough trained that she believed his threat to take away her bucket. His behavior was even more disturbing when you consider that his father used to lock *him* away in a small space as punishment. Wesley's on a dark road, and I for one can't wait to find out what happens next.

I've also finally found a sport: cheerleading. ESPN2 has a bunch of the competitions, and they're fun to watch. The college competitions have incredible throws, and amazing feats of balance. I watched girls do handstands, their palms pressed against the upraised arms of the boys holding them up, and flip in midair so they were standing on the boys' hands, all four of them doing it at the same time. "Bring It On" and a Discovery Channel documentary on cheerleading were my gateway drugs.