T-minus-one: only a day left to prepare for a month out of country, and as usual, I haven’t begun to pack… or indeed, to do any of the numerous other things I’ve got to take care of before I leave. I’m not even sure yet what I’m going to write my LFB column about, and my usual expedient of sitting at Esperanto with a few cups and the Tibetan equivalent of a legal pad is, alas, unavailable here in NJ. I guess I could use the Northvale Diner as a proxy, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same. I’d also like to be able to confer with Damian a bit more about the sub-text project (a media crit webzine I’m developing) before I leave. Conferring with writers and others, I can do easily enough by email. Working on site design and architecture would be a hell of a lot easier in person. But he’s good, so I trust that whatever he comes up with will be fine until I return, requiring a tweak at most. Of course, I’m cooking up photoshopped mock-ups of my Grand Vision, just to be safe.

In other news, I just got back from Andrea Rich’s retirement party, and goddamn but John Stossel’s place is swank. It’s enough to make me reconsider blowing off journalism in favor of the academy. Cato’s Tom Palmer insisted that I should put Prague on my itinerary while in Europe, and offered to introduce me to a young Czech publisher of libertarian books. I remember my old friend Erin raving about the wonders of Prague a few years back, and I’m thinking of doing just that. Except I don’t speak a word of Czech, and I hate playing the Ugly American, insisting that others accomodate me by speaking English. There’s the flip side of American hegemony for you: the dominance of our language has made it easy for us to become a nation of dull-witted monoglots.