These are the days I feel kind of like Prince Humperdinck in conversation with Count Rugin:

Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work. But I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped!

My two paying clients are v. busy right now, my two charity clients are even busier, and Biggest Guy just showed up from Virginia, so I have a houseful of kids as we get ready for the holidays.

But wait! There’s more!
I have to go to the Bay Area next week to visit another potential client, and then Joe has passed on to me an invitation to meet with the Marines at Camp Pendleton to discuss ways to support programs like Chief Wiggles’; an invitation that – as a liberal hawk – I’m proud to have been offered and I feel an obligation to accept.

The uncle who helped raise me has pancreatic cancer, and so I’ll be heading East in a few weeks to see him in New York; I may as well swing south and watch Biggest Guy sign his ROTC papers and make it official.

Oh – there’s one more little thing – TG and I have set a date in Spring, and picked a tentative venue.

So I trust that folks will be understanding about my abject inability to blog much this month.

Here’re some of the topics that I would be blogging, if I had the time. I’m sore the posts you can make up around them will be as good or better than what I have actually written.

* “Precision by Division,” or how to get blog and journalistic commentary to limit the level of detail that it raises to something approaching the actual amount of knowledge held – and why it is that neither seem very interested in adding to knowledge, as opposed to fitting knowledge into pre-existing opinion.

* “Real Quants,” about Crooked Timber’s post on the appropriate and inappropriate use of mathematical metaphor in politics and economics.

* “Emergent Politics,” about the impact of emergent analysis on politics and on my conception of liberalism.

* Part IV of my discussion with Calpundit – about the need to increase troop levels.

* A reprise of my earlier post on job exports, and on the various political and moral issues raised by folks since my first post, with a tie to the overall issue of the future role of unions.

…I’ll see what I can get done in the next week or so.

…oh, and pretty damn cool about Saddam, no?