I hate Fall. Nasty rotting smells in the air; shortening of days; the slow, zigzag but finally certain cooling off as the animals flee and land dies. In Finnish, two of the autumn months (October and November) are "Mud-Month" and "Death-Month".

Happy Mud-Month.

I'm fine, how are you?

Let me toss off a couple of quick links. Google's desktop search application finally gives me what I've been asking for for years: the ability to Google my hard drive. What took them so long?

Here's an interesting account by an American woman, a Jew, living in England. I say "interesting" because I don't want to say "depressing". Thankfully, I either don't hang around with the sort of people who would launch into personally directed anti-American tirades, or else they feel inhibited by me.

Here's a sort of a companion article from the Center for the Public Interest: A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism which makes the interesting point:

it [anti-Americanism] widely came to be thought of as a creation of communism that would vanish if ever communism should cease. The collapse of communism has served, on the contrary, to reveal the true depth and strength of anti-Americanism. Uncoupled from communism, which gave it a certain strength but also placed limits on its appeal, anti-Americanism has worked its way more than ever before into the mainstream of European thought.

Anti-Americanism: a foundational political philosophy, or just a tool?

Whatever.