It's been a while. Got a brief weekend visit from my friend Asad, and we spent a good chunk of Saturday wandering around Central Park--all the way from 110th street to 63rd, in a fairly rambling path. I'd say my favorite bit was Belvedere Castle just because I like castles, and because it had a view of Turtle Pond. . ."turtles all the way down," quoth Asad. We saw some people filming a guy hamming it up in one of the turrets, and randomly both commented on the sorrow of his tracksuit. Asad asked one of the crew what they were filming for, and when she told us he was a subject of TLC's What Not To Wear I blurted out, "So is he before or after?". After, I'm afraid.

We have an exercise for our critical issues class which is annoying and enlightening at the same time. We have to go through last Friday's New York Times and list the sources for each and every article in sections A, B, and C. (Front, Metro, Business.) The story about an engineer who (sorta) tried to do something to prevent the Columbia Shuttle disaster was pretty depressing. I just have a vision of a bunch of sad, sad geeks who don't know how to fight for their convictions because no one ever taught them to.

I've been a member of NYTimes.com about 8 years, or as long as I've been on the Internet, and their search engine never quite keeps up with current technology to satisfy me. I think Google's convention that all search terms entered into the query field are assumed to be connected by a logical AND unless otherwise specified should be considered a standard by now. It's silly to have to put an AND in between each search term, and in this Google-era, highly counterintuitive.

I've been reading the trial summaries published by the Center for Justice and Accountability in the Estate of Winston Cabello, et al. vs Armando Fernandez-Larios, a case going on now in Miami. No, not a totally neutral account, but I don't claim to be neutral on this one. Winston Cabello was my friend Roberto's uncle, murdered during the Pinochet coup. Roberto's parents and Cabello worked for Allende.

A J-school alumnus, David Makali, the class President from 2001, has been arrested in Kenya after publishing an article about the possibility the ruling party had ordered a recent killing. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, this year at least 24 journalists have been killed in the line of duty, so to speak.