It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas!
Speaking of holidays, due to rain Simchat Torah was brought indoors at Princeton, and instead of dancing in the street we danced in the dining hall. (Although, tomorrow's potential news would motivate me to dance in the rain--just not with a Torah). For the uninitiated, on Simchat Torah we celebrate the fact that we've read all the way around the Torah and need to start over again. Because the Torah is a scroll, this means it must be wound all the way back to the beginning. We celebrate this process by taking the Torah outdoors (or, as the case may be, to the dining hall) and dancing around it for many hours. I only stayed for one of those many hours, but I recall my last year at MIT I hopped from shul to shul, ending up at BU at midnight.
For the curious, there were three groups of dancers/Torahs: one of men-only, one of women-only, and one mixed. You can guess where I ended up. Each group reached a critical mass of people, though I'm always a bit saddened by the extremely large male:female ratio at orthodox religious events.
P.S. I'm pretty sure I sent this invite to *every* I know in DC, but just in case: DC United's playoff game is Sunday, 10/30, 4:30pm; seats will be great, only $20; RSVP by Friday at 2pm. In fact, if you are reading this, live in DC, and didn't get an invite, email me because I either don't know you are living in DC, or I don't know your email.
I thought that you had cleverly coined the term "Fitzmas," but alas, no! Thought you might be interested in the Hotline's analysis of the etymology of the word:
"Although the portmanteau 'Fitzmas' is barely a few weeks old, it has spread across the web with surprising quickness. Search Google for the term, and already it returns 156K results. So where did it come from? As of 10/6, Daily Kos's Moulitsas was already anticipating indictments, and said: 'I hope I wake up to good news. This makes me feel like the night before Christmas.' Directly inspired by the comment, liberal Attaturk at Rising Hegemon. The word then percolated through the liberal blogosphere and on message boards such as Democratic Underground, before resurfacing in a diary at Daily Kos on 10/18. The same day, known Daily Kos reader Byron York then posted excerpts to NRO's The Corner, whereupon the contributors repeated the phrase again and again. == The 1st appearance in the Lexis-Nexis database is a tie between the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin and your humble Blogometer. == But the 1st actual appearance of 'Fitzmas' as a word seems to be in the 12/8/97 Rocky Mountain News, which points readers toward an Arizona Staraffil. website with a series of e-cards that, 8 years later, is somehow still online. Although we're not sure what it means, here's the Star wishing you a 'Merry Fitzmas!'"
Also, have you checked out some of the spam comments you've been getting?
Hah! No, I'm not that clever. I am, however, jealous that you still get to read the Hotline. Come to think of it, where do you find the time?! In any case, thank you for posting that etymology. And what's with that Fitzmas card--I'm not able to decipher it either.
Re spam comments, I just went through and deleted a bunch of them. When I updated MT to the newest version, I lost compatibility for my spam filter. I haven't taken the time to solve this problem.
In fact, I don't even know why the spammers bother. They only spam to trick google into thinking that these sites are popular, but anyone with my version of MT has the workaround in place to make sure that google doesn't listen to the spam. Sigh, I guess we need higher fences given their low cost.