My brain is fried and this is only the beginning

The Borat movie was terribly hard to watch. In retrospect, it's funny. But I have so much difficulty with that kind of humor, where unsuspecting people are made into fools. According to an article in one of the free daily tabloids (sterling reputation) handed out in London, most of the scenes in Borat featured actors (in other words, they weren't all unsuspecting people).

It's reading week, and if you're one of the lucky UCL students whose department takes part in such a thing, then you have the entire week free of classes. What does that mean? You are 1) assigned shit tons of reading for each class; 2) you have the entire week to play catch up for all the reading you've missed; or 3) you have so many impending assignments due that you hardly leave your room (let alone the building), forcing yourself to read and write, feel generally arthritic as a result of sitting in the crappy plastic poor excuse for a desk chair, and keep yourself awake through the night sick with worry that you'll never get the work done and will flunk out of grad school and owe thousands of dollars in loans for which you have nothing to show. Guess which one applies to me. Oh, then there are the lucky few who get to travel during reading week. My friend Neel left for Krakow today. I hear it's lovely there.

Oh, so the election, nuts, right? I may be thousands of miles away, but that certainly seemed to run smoothly. I'm sad I missed it, actually. Civic geeks like me get all excited on big election days.

Did you know, though, that Australia (among other countries, I know) have mandatory voting? I think it might be a good idea, but I was trying to explain why something like that would never pass in the US, and could not seem to get my point across.

Right now I'm listening to Arab dance music with a pretty fresh little beat. But if you want something real good to listen to, I'll just add another little plug for Hudson & Gaines, the finest in radio broadcasting the US has to offer.