Outside Counsel

I should say a word about last week's trip to Northampton, just to preserve it for the record. EGA is a participant in a program called STRIDE, which is surely an acronym for something. She receives a stipend for working with a faculty member on an academic project. It is, like everything at her school, very fancy, and very well done. At the end of the year the STRIDE students and the faculty members put on presentations that describe the nature of the work that they are doing. The professor that EGA is working with is studying language development in children, specifically when certain linguistic distinctions, like plural "s", or the use of the reflexive, appear. It is interesting stuff, and although EGA didn't get to be too hands on with it until towards the end of the year, it really is the sort of thing that is right up her alley.

It was fun to see her, and she was excited and glad to see us. We got a chance to meet some of the faculty that she has had (her Logic professor is straight out of Central Casting: tweed jacket, white tennis shoes, bushy mustache, distracted air), and we met a couple of her friends. Got to hear some of her radio show, got to hang around NoHo. I've said before that it seems like a kind of heaven to me-- it is all book stores and record stores and restaurants that look nice, and music venues and intellectual culture. It is also quite a bit like Wonder Woman's home town, Paradise Island: I like walking around a place that is full of attractive young women, but feels a little peculiar being a Y chromosome person there. Our vehicle fit right in, though: the Dean sticker made it look like every other car in the lot, except for the ones with Kucinich stickers. I saw one car with a Clark sticker-- by Smith standards, obviously a right wing nut.