don't tell God your plans

Pshaw. The nice encyclopedia press sent me a cheque for $250 for my entry-writing efforts, although given said efforts entailed 30 000 words or so, researched and polished to the back teeth, I suspect I've been swizzed. Now all that remains is to fight my way into Claremont, present the cheque to the foreign exchange desk of the main Absa branch, fill in 23 forms and present 96 bits of documentation, have them send the cheque back to America for endorsement, checking, suspicion, scrutiny with an intense scroot and inscription with mystic runes presumably proof against terrorism and assaults on the American Way of Life, after which the American bank will grudgingly convert it back into electronic monies, and send it back here by torturous virtual routes. I leave here a significant pause into which you are please to insert my usual rantings about human inefficiency and orang-utan civilisation. Also, memo to self: overseas writing gigs may not be worth the red tape they're tied up in.

On a more positive note, however, Making Light have reported on this interesting development, which I cautiously hope may have the potential to strike a blow to fundamentalist wossnames of the more pernicious sort. Turkey has instituted an enquiry into Islam, with a view to a sort of reformation of the religion along more modern and enlightened lines which attempt to excise hundreds of years of closed-minded interpretation of the Prophet's basic common sense. Words cannot express how much I both approve of this, and fear the kind of backlash it might generate among the aforementioned fundamentalists. The Making Light discussion is worth a read. (So is their next post, the Fascist Octopus one, which records for a disbelieving posterity the most unbelievably mixed metaphor known to modern politics).