I don’t have it in me to finish reading this article, but it looks like Schwarzenegger proposed closing 80 percent of California state parks to help with the budget.

Here’s a site with a bunch of free economics lectures by famous folks.

Emily pointed me to Michele Norris’s excellent recommendation.

The new issue of SCR is out. That’s Ron Rash there on the cover, and online you can read one of his stories and a new essay about his poetry.

This biography of Flannery O’Connor is great so far. Gooch makes good use of her fiction – for instance, he’ll mention two cousins visiting, and then he’ll say something like, “They bear a strong resemblance to the cousins in ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost,’” and then he’ll quote from the fiction. A must-read for O’Connor fans, and if you don’t like O’Connor, what are you doing reading this blog? Get out.

Incidentally, if you do a Google image search for “Flannery,” this is the first page that pops up – anime, a mugshot, and a hooker.

It’s been mapped out by “democratic spies” (WSJ):

Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world’s most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

“It’s democratized intelligence,” says Mr. Melvin.

More than 35,000 people have downloaded Mr. Melvin’s file, North Korea Uncovered. It has grown to include thousands of tags in categories such as “nuclear issues” (alleged reactors, missile storage), dams (more than 1,200 countrywide) and restaurants (47). Its Wikipedia approach to spying shows how Soviet-style secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet’s power to unite a disparate community of busybodies.

I got the following comment on every post I’ve written since late October:

. said…
禮服店 ,酒店小姐 ,酒店經紀 ,酒店兼差,酒店打工, 酒店上班,酒店經紀PRETTY GIRL 台北酒店經紀人 ,酒店經紀 酒店兼差PRETTY GIRL酒店公關 酒店小姐 彩色爆米花酒店兼職,酒店工作 彩色爆米花禮服店, 酒店上班,酒店工作 PRETTY GIRL酒店喝酒酒店上班 彩色爆米花台北酒店酒店小姐 PRETTY GIRL酒店上班酒店打工PRETTY GIRL酒店打工酒店經紀 彩色爆米花酒店兼差,酒店,酒店經紀,酒店經紀,經紀公司,經紀公司,經紀公司,經紀公司,經紀公司,經紀公司,童裝批發,童裝GAP,酒店經紀,酒店,

A free online translator said this meant:

and at and PRETTY GIRL people and PRETTY GIRL public colors, colors at colors at and PRETTY GIRL PRETTY GIRL Upper PRETTY GIRL colors, and, public affairs and public affairs and public affairs and public affairs and public affairs and public affairs and GAP and

I just don’t understand. Maybe I should never have mentioned the Korean War. Maybe I’ll switch from blogger over to wordpress.

UPDATE: The spam spread to all of my blog entries ever (before this one).