First Parenthesis (tired of earnestness at the moment)

I just saw an ad for a toy DNA sequencer in Wired magazine. (This maybe isn't news. I'm pretty seriously unplugged, and I'm always discovering cool "new" things that everyone else has been tired of for six months.)

Second Parenthesis (needing to boast, because I was so nervous about it)

I just got done chanting Beowulf in Old English, and talking about gold, dragons, and linguistic change to a class at my kids' highschool. There's always a couple of kids you can see getting the bug. ("wyrm is worm and it's the same word except it sounds really cool, and it's a thousand years old, and back then it meant serpent!" and "so that's why knight is spelled so weird!") About half of them were eager for me to come teach an Old English class next quarter. It was so damn much fun to read Old English again and they're such wonderful kids that maybe I'll do it, even if I don't have time for it.

Okay. Back soon to our regularly scheduled programming.