Some pithy end of year sentiments only now put to paper

Never enough time, but a few points need to be said.

First of all, Obama is our first African-American president, but also among African American politicians, he traces his ancestry to the twentieth century wave of African immigrants, whose number — I believe I remember I.B. telling me this — have now peaked above the sum total in numbers of slaves imported.

In other words, Obama is our first African-American president and our first president descended from twentieth century immigrant people, a sign of the new world.

The Republicans are going to blame the entire bailout and stimulus package together on the Obama administration. In hindsight, it will all look like Obama's thing, not Bush's. Bush will be associated with Iraq, not the housing bubble burnout.

Thought experiment: Imagine the situation with Gaza and Israel were reversed. Imagine the folks living on the great land and well run coast line were really whites, or at least the majority of them, the ones who ran things; and the Gaza fighters and the dense Gaza population living in that concentrated space were all Semites, and — oops, that's actually the case.

I and my family are staying home for the Inauguration. Who wants to be in the middle of a million hollering people?

The definition of a good library has changed to mean, "institution (which pays for) having the highest clearance to view textual information."

Nexus/Lexus, journal runs, foreign e-books, old newspapers digitized, databases, unpublished papers, current studies, access to all these things "cost money." Widener and Sterling will maintain the highest clearance levers as they have had the biggest collections previously.

Face facts. The destruction of civil society in Zimbabwe has been a deliberate ploy to force the people to wean themselves from any state-supplied infrastructure, from water to the marketing of food. The only possible reason for that is, the military is commanding a bunker-style state to run down the clock til one old man drops dead.

I'm not ambitious. I just want a moment of silence every Leap Year after my death. I'd like my face on a postage stamp before I'm sixty. I'd prefer a United Nations initiative over a medical procedure, to be named after me or my daughters. When intelligent life contacts us, my name will become their new species-name, with "-adiots" added as a suffix.