SHAKE THE MANY HANDS: So I was superlame and didn’t mention Sunday’s blog get-together. (I missed the Saturday comics-ish blogfest because of a minor intrusion: the wedding of two of my closest friends! This is the first time, by the way, that I’d ever seen a married couple both before and the day after the ceremony, and I was kind of tripped out at how completely normal they seemed. I guess I expected them to grow horns, or to be purple, or something.)

Anyway, the Sunday brunch featured Mr. and Mrs. Unqualified Offerings (with Mrs. UO playing her usual valued role of deflater of pretensions), Polytropos, Mr. Lite and Mrs. Light, Glen Engel-Cox, and a person named Jen whose URL I too have forgotten because I am lamer than lame.

Of what did the octumvirate (?) deliberate during their itinerary? The book industry; the fact that I would help the Hulk in a battle against the nonexistent and generally annoying Thor; the deeply unnecessary quality of journalism schools; the necessity and benefits of translation (look, call me a philistine, but I think the Inferno sounds better in thorny spiky English pentameter than in overly-liquid, overly-symmetric Italian terza rima); and the nature of loyalty to America. More on that last item presently, since I don’t think anyone there quite got it right, and I am all about esprit d’escalier. (“The spirit of the staircase”–the deal where you think of the right thing to say several hours after it would have been relevant, a.k.a. the origin of blogging.)