After numerous false starts the computer is finally up and running. I was without a steady home PC for over a month, and in that time I rediscovered things I had forgotten about. Like girls. And books. And friends.

The rudiments of the first Project Gutenberg, uh, project are up at the PG subdomain . The first and only completely marked up text is Tartuffe.

A surprising number of the available PG texts are Russian in origin; Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, et.al. Probably because the type of person who would spend several weeks typing an eight hundred page novel into a text editor is the type of person who would get a kick out of reading that novel in its original language. I am not that hard-core, but I do like to get into the spirit of things, so this evening while I was on the phone with a beautiful woman I cooked up a big mess o’ borscht. My recipe is as follows, in descending order of volume of ingredients: water, beets, potatoes, onion, celery, carrot, salt, Tabasco. The precise proportions don’t really matter. In this borscht is a lot like gumbo. As long as you have beets, pretty much everything else is done to taste. The Tabasco is in place of the more traditional vinegar, and it compliments the deep red of the soup nicely.

For those of you who think I am now a communist or something, let me assure you that the only Marx I follow has a New York accent.

On a less irreverent note, I added a new photo page, currently linked in at the bottom of the navigation. All pics were taken with an Olympus D-550 set to take low-light pictures. Slow shutter speeds and fast motion blurs.