Steven Brust's Blog

Those of us who know Emma, or have read her work, or heard her sing, think this is a very, very fine day, because we are all ecstatic to know there is a her in the world.

I can think of many national holidays that could be replaced by a celebration of the existence of Emma Bull.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

It is Emma Bull's birthday

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Not terribly proud of this one, but here it is.  I think the formatting is a bit screwy, so the changes don't actually go where they appear to.

Never Trust A Bureaucrat

E                A
Negotiations broke down over benefits and pay.
B7                 E
We put it to a vote and went out the sixth of May.
F#
On the ninth our union president presented his advice:
B7                      E
He stood before the local, said, "Why can't you guys be nice?
C#m                G#m
I understand your grevances, I s...

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I don't know why I feel like telling this story now, but I do; it's the story of a moment–in instant–in my life that I look back on with intense pleasure.

It was the winter of 1989-90, and I had left the Party some years before, but still considered myself a sympathizer.  In International Falls, there was a wildcat strike against Boise-Cascade, which had brought in non-union workers to build a new paper mill.  For those who don't know, a wildcat strike is one where the officials of the union s...

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You can start your link hunt here if you haven't seen this yet.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

SF writer Peter Watts beaten and arrested at US Border

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Reesa and Nathan have been watching re-runs of the old Addams Family TV show.  I approve of this, in part because it's refreshing to see a 60's sitcom where one can believe the couple actually had sex.  But it produced a question which has been bothering me, lo, these many days, even to interfering with my sleep.  So, weary and desperate, I turn to the internet as my last hope.

Can someone tell me what "ooky" means?

Thank you.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

Word definition question

©2009 Words...

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When Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman both say to sign it, I'm inclined to sign it, so I did.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

©2009 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

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In this chapter Smith gets into restrictions on trade in some detail.  In brief, he argues that restricting trade, while not always a mistake, will never be advantageous economically to society as a whole, but at most to certain small sections of it.  He address balance of trade, and makes some interesting points.  In brief, he claims that it is a mistake for nations to worry about the balance of trade, because even if the balance favors country A over country B, both countries are...

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To all writers, and especially TV writers, just thought you should know that the riff where someone says, "I have something important to tell you," and then gets interrupted before being able to tell it, is now played out.  In fact, it was played out the first time it was used.  If your goal is to make me think, I guess it works; but what I think is, "Geez, what a lousy writer."

Maybe you can come up with some clever twist on it, where that is what happens, but it doesn't seem to be what...

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Thanks to Adam Israel for fixing the problem that was preventing me from crossposting to LJ.  As I was holding off Wealth Of Nations posts until that worked again, you can blame him for their reappearance.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

Crossposting works again

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Here we begin what seems to be Smith's major campaign: to prove that anything that restrains trade (with a very few exceptions) is bad for society as a whole.  The difficulty with this proposition appears in the very formulation: society "as a whole" consists of divisions whose interests are opposed to each other; thus to prove that something is bad for society "as a whole" is, to say the least, ambitious.  Let's see how he does.

This chapter focuses on laws that restrict the importation into ...

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