Wow. Writer's block is bad enough, but when you can't even come up with inane entries into a blog that no one reads, you know you've sunk to new depths. So some scattered thoughts while I try to come up with something (marginally) more cogent and interesting:

- The war. I'm against it, because I see nothing good that can come from the whole enterprise. (Yes, getting rid of Saddam is good, but we'll just install some weak pro-U.S. Shah type who'll be overthrown by militants after our national attention span moves to the next great evil.) I keep trying to find a positive spin (maybe it won't last too long, maybe the American Empire supporters in the White House will be thwarted, etc.) with no success. And the insufferable "you support this war or you're a baby murderer" line of propaganda is being pushed by the usual suspects on the right. At least I live in a somewhat more liberal part of the country now. If I still lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the sheer weight of all that flag-wavin' and God Bless the USA-singin' would probably send me into the welcoming embrace of Noam Chomsky.

- Music. Haven't bought or listened to much new stuff. Maybe it's just me, but this seems to be a particularly weak year for new music so far in the genres I like these days. Plus, I'm perennially six to eight months behind the times when it comes to music buying. In any case, there's so much good stuff from the last three decades alone that I'm unfamiliar with. I've listened to a lot of Stereolab and the Go-Betweens lately - critic's favorites that I had never really paid much attention to until recently. I've also been playing Morphine's "Cure for Pain" a lot - true, they only wrote one song, but it was a pretty good one, and they nailed that urban lowlife/boozehouse/depressive genre as well as anyone since Tom Waits' early albums.

- Books. Mostly reading up to take the CPA exam in May (which I will fail, and fail hard). Also reading William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which I'm appreciating more now than when I read it in college. There's something about forced reading (and, even worse, forced discussion) that always sucked the life out of reading for me. Now I don't have to worry about what line of bullshit I'm going to spew out for my next paper or class presentation, so I can just enjoy the material on its own merits.