I'm about to go out of town till Sunday and am not taking my laptop with me. I may have the opportunity here or there to get online, or I may not. So if you email me or leave a comment for me, you may not hear back until Sunday or Monday.

Also, in case anyone has wondered, I am not doing anything to disable or otherwise interfere with the comments here. As of this moment they are not working, and that's been the case several times over the past four or five days. The comment system is provided by HaloScan and is completely separate from the blog--when you click on a comment or the "comments" button at the end of a post, you're in effect hopping over to www.haloscan.com and working with it. They seem to have been having a lot of problems lately.

Perhaps they're overloaded with blog readers commenting on Jerry Falwell's death. There are an awful lot of people raging with glee--that sounds contradictory but I think it's a good description--about it, even on sites that have nothing to do with politics, such as eMusic. A depressing spectacle.