IMSAns everywhere

In honor of that fact that over 90% of our wedding party went to one tiny, weird high school in the middle of a corn field, I bring you this wonderful anecdote from Babak Khoshnood, IMSA c/o 1996:

So I’m walking down the streets of Brosov, Romania. I’m one of only 170,000 Peace Corps volunteers EVER, and one of only 730 to ever come to Romania. And as I’m talking with one of my fellow volunteers, she asks me what school I went to. I get as far as “Illinois Math a-” before she screams “GET OUT! SO DID I!”

So it turns out that I’ve travelled a gazillion miles just to run into an IMSA alum, class of 2000. Her name’s Ase, but she goes by Meghan, her middle name. And she even had Pine for bio :) And not only are we in Romania group 19, but we’ll be spending the next 10 weeks living in the smae little town 15 km from Brosov.

F$$$ing IMSA people everywhere, I tell you. It’s creeeepy.

It is, in fact, creepy. For those of you who know the whole Kerosinka connection for Muscovites, it’s exactly the same thing for us Illinoisans who were cursedlucky enough to go to IMSA. Enjoy your weekend, everyone—I’ll be hitched when you come back on Monday!

Harry Potter and Harold Bloom

Michael Bérubé has written a great apology for the Harry Potter books following the release of the third film. His dismissal of Harold Bloom’s rants against the series is priceless:

[Harold,] you style yourself after Falstaff, but you have no sense of humor whatsoever. You never did– and your Rowling snits seal the deal. Now, what do we call people who think of themselves as latter-day Falstaffs, but who have never uttered a funny thing in their lives? Don’t think Shakespeare– think Restoration comedy.

(Link via Making Light.)

Success!

I am now officially a Bachelor of Arts in Russian, cum laude, with College Honors in Russian.

Get your very own copy of my B.A. thesis here. Makes a great gift!

RIP Ronald Reagan

There are a couple of interesting articles making the rounds. First, Steve Gilliard takes issue with the Reagan hagiography, and in a Washington Monthly article from last year, Joshua Green writes about Ronald Reagan the progressive.

Ultimately, I think the truth about Reagan’s legacy is a little from both. Although Steve Gilliard is right in pointing out that the efforts of East Germans, Czechs, and other Eastern Europeans cannot be discounted in the story of the fall of the Iron Curtain, President Reagan’s policies had a tremendous effect on speeding up that process. In addition, he provided a model for dealing with recalcitrant states that involved flooding them with the culture of the free world rather than using embargos that ultimately hurt common folks. (It’s too bad we don’t apply these insights to Cuba.) His accomplishments in shifting the tax burden to corporations and expanding the earned income tax credit are truly admirable. Plus, he was our first movie-star president. How cool is that?

That said, his administration’s record in Iran, in South America, in Iraq, in Indonesia, these things can’t be ignored. Optimism cannot erase the people who died as a result of his short-sighted, ideologically-driven foreign policy.

So I’m fairly ambiguous about the Reagan legacy. I’d rather simply take him as another person, someone who did great things for America and had an optimism about this country that cannot be ignored, but who also did quite a bit of bad. Even hindsight won’t tell us what Carter or others would have done in the Presidency from 1981 to 1989, so rather than play what if, we ought to learn from Ronald Reagan’s mistakes and accept the benefits of his successes.