My triumphant return!

Please, please, hold your applause. I know it's been hard, but you give me too much credit. Yes it's true that, absent my moderating influence, The New Republic and DailyKos nearly destroyed each other with nuclear weapons. And, yes, I wasn't here to prevent Slate from disfiguring itself into an even more unreadable format. But somehow you all managed to muddle through. Give yourselves a hand, people! I promise never to leave again.

Meanwhile, without the distractions of blogging, I've been free to acquit myself more productively. For instance, I've had the time to spend many, many hours lounging in the sun by the pool, trying to read but mostly staring that the blonde French woman who sunbathes topless. Also, sometimes I go to work.

Not today, though! Today my stomach was seized by a hostile invading force which demanded that I remain nearby a toilet at all times. So I sat in my hotel room -- wearing a tie even, to further the illusion that I was working from home rather than nursing a rebellious gut -- and taught myself a little Visual Basic. I need to write some web applets for work, you see. It's been probably ten years since I've done any programming, aside from a little shell scripting here and there, but it comes back quickly, especially with something as easy as VB. Four hours worth of wrestling with VB Step-By-Step and what little I remember from AP Computer Science yielded the world's largest and most functional "Hello World" program. Man, what leet skillz I have.

The problem with programming is that I have very little patience for the grind. Once I've figured out how to do something, I have no interest in actually writing the code to do it. This, of course, is merely a symptom of a larger issue that has haunted me throughout my life: intense, unrelenting laziness.

I've been reading A Perfect Spy by John le Carre, an author who seems almost too appropriate for Rabat. Philip Roth, via the back cover blurb section, has declared this book to be "the best English novel since the war." Perhaps he means Gulf I or maybe he was making an ironic comment on the state of British literature. APS is an excellent book -- at halfway through, I'm prepared to say it might be le Carre's best -- but I wouldn't put it in the same realm as Graham Greene's top-notch work. Still, recommended. After all, there's only so much Graham Greene out there, and only half of it is very good.