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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, July 16, 2006

I've Been to Some Beaches.

Don't want to boast, but I've been around the world, beachwise. And there's one thing about beaches in America, with Americans on them.

You see just how enterprising a nation this one is when you look around at what Americans do on beaches.

On beaches in other countries, people arrive, light a cigarette, lie down in a beach chair, and go to sleep.

In America, they begin engineering projects. They dig enormously deep pointless holes. They build medieval villages, with cathedrals and cottages.

They read self-improvement books. They sell real estate on the cell phone.

Competitiveness abounds. People sketch out, on the sand, their strategy for winning the beach volleyball game that night. Groups of women in well-worn semi-circles play round the clock gin rummy.

When they go in the water, it is either to complete four healthful parallel-to-the-beach laps, or to collect water for their engineering projects.