Save some Christmas cheer

Disney Channel's taken to showing a lot of Christmas-themed movies, or things desperately pretending to be movies, this month -- The Santa Clause, Muppets Christmas Carol, The Santa Clause 2: The Quickening, that Mickey's Twice Upon A Christmas which proves that with a little imagination and computer graphics you can make the beloved Disney regular characters look creepy and wrong. Given the timing and that some of these didn't air last month I have to imagine they got these movies for the post-holiday discount. I bet they stocked up on cards for next year, too, that they'll lose and buy replacements for in mid-December.

The student typing up my lecture notes wanted to try starting out the lecture today, and I agreed to let him present as much as he felt comfortable with. As it turns out he was very comfortable, and presented the whole two hours, with just the occasional pause from me to highlight a point or add the bit of human interest (I always include short biographical sketches of anyone mentioned, however tangentially, in lecture). I could get into this. The mysterious person who added my course appeared; it turns out he's an exchange graduate student, which is why the online system doesn't know what to make of him. he's not sure what his position is either. And then another student wants to add, which is most gratifying to my ego.

I can't seem to find any good pictures of Lego Corporate Headquarters. I was wondering if they had one brick a mis-matched color.

Trivia: The 1:1,000,000 scale International Map of the World, begun in 1909, was terminated in 1987, without being completed. Source: Maps and Civilization, Norman JW Thrower.

Currently Reading: The New Haven Railroad: Its Rise and Fall, John L Weller. There's nothing quite like the story of an insanely convoluted corporate scandal, in this case that of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad management and bookkeeping games in the quarter-century up to 1914, particularly when none of the principals involved even tries to pretend they're going to answer any of the investigators' questions, and one of the high points is the guy roped in for a complicated stock manipulation-to-confuse-investigators scam using it to scam the originators of the plan out of three million dollars on an initial investment of nothing.