It’s two—two—two posts in one!

Couldn’t post yesterday due to our Internet cable being hit with a truck (Time-Warner is supposed to put it underground this week), so here’s yesterday’s and today’s posts combined.
Work this week was—a little frustrating. I made my eHow quota but by the end of the week I felt like I was slugging through molasses. No idea why.
And Cry Roboticus is annoyingly short of where I need it to be—I haven’t quite been able to get the relationship aspect of the story (and why even they’re in love, Steve and Dani haven’t married after two years) to feel right. Which means it isn’t right. Of course, I could get it in late, but I really want it done and out this week.
Oh, well. Tomorrow is another week.
Now, as for Books and Movies, the only one to mention (there’s a couple more, but I’m saving them for discussion of the content later is SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon, the grim account of how the post-Civil War South solved the problem of farming its fields without slave labor—not to mention feeding the demand for workers caused by the growth of mining and other industries—by sheriffs and judges leasing imprisoned black men out to work off their fines, a system which unsurprisingly grew more and more corrupt as it progressed. By the post-World War I era, “show trail” would have been a charitable description of the justice involved, assuming there was an actual trial at all, to say nothing of the brutal working conditions and hundreds of murders and rape that were (surprise!) never prosecuted. Despite the (often half-hearted) efforts of the federal government to end this nightmare, Blackmon concludes it was a combination of economics (slave labor having broken the Southern unions, free labor could now be had cheaper) and World War II (the government being conscious that institutional racism undercut our claim to be fighting for democracy and equality) that finally forced things to change. Dark and sobering.