The students are beginning to arrive in Amherst. They started trickling in at the end of August, but then a big wave arrived with September 1st and the balance will arrive over this weekend. It's the weekend when Amherst goes from being a quiet town of 25,000 to a small city of 50,000 I don't begrudge the students their time in Amherst -- we get summers and intersession where it's quiet and we couldn't have it if we didn't have them here. I've had a couple of students stop by and see me as they start coming back to campus, which I always love. There's no point in teaching if you don't love the students you're working with/for.
I took the boys to see 
Valiant (WARNING: horrible flash site) today. It was pretty lame. I saw it as trivializing war -- reducing the enemy to a caricature. The characters want to "do their part" so that the "bombs won't fall here".
We liked the new Lilo & Stitch better. Lucy got it for me as one of my birthday presents and it arrived just the other day. It was actually quite good. Not as good as the original, but much better than the first DVD sequel. More in the same theme as the original.
I've been continuing to write reports for raporto.info. A quick three paragraphs only takes a few minutes. What a great site. It's a great way to get a little Esperanto practice and to get some interesting dialog. My most recent posting (about New Orleans) got a comment from someone who said it was what the US deserved after what it's done to other countries and people. I replied saying that it was sad that the ones who suffered the most were the poor and powerless. The rich people who run this country (for the benefit of other rich people around the world) have mostly not been affected by the disaster, beyond having to fill out paperwork to get their house rebuilt or to buy their stuff back. It's the poor, who pay for it with their lives.
Along those lines, I saw a report on CNN that made me truly angry. Anderson Cooper was trying to console a (white) woman who was sobbing over the loss of her house. "What do you say to someone who's lost their whole life," he said. She was someone who had owned a house that was in sight of the beach. I have hard time feeling sorry for someone who bought a house that was in sight of the beach. When you buy a house on the beach, you have to expect it's going to get wiped out by hurricanes. Another (white) family was sad because their miniature horses got killed. Hello! The people we ought to feel sorry for are the ones who had little and who now have nothing -- who are living in a shelter someplace and have no home to return to. I'm sure the people who owned miniature horses that got killed are sad, but it's pathetic when they're held up to us as something we ought to feel sorry for.
StevenBrewer