(after discovering there is Wi-Fi at my B&B)

A bit pissed that the PT bookstore has only PNM in paperback and no BFA. My bio mentions the second book, so why not have it there since I'm basically back here on the strength of the second book?

That was balanced by checking out the select bibliography of Alex Steffen's World Changing book, which lists BFA (first time I've ever seen that).

Remember two years ago when the famously crabby guy named Arthur who ALWAYS sits in the second row on the right looking down from the stage asked me a snarky question and we had a bit of back and forth?

Well, one of the attendees (who saw me at TED a year-plus back and verifies my Charles "Roger Rabbit" Fleischer story--"You're the best stand-up I've ever seen!") corrals me for dinner with a bunch of other attendees and sits me down next to... the famous Arthur, who apparently remembered me, because everytime somebody asked me a question, he tried to steer the conversation to something else. After a while, he just got up and left (although he did come back to pay his share of the bill, which made me respect him). I'm betting money the first question today comes from him, and it'll be a variant of "Doesn't Iraq prove the whole 'white man's burden' thing is a complete disaster? I mean, who are you going to convince to do all this nation-building in the Gap?

My answer will be--as always--go with those who are motivated. That ain't Europe. It ain't Japan. In the end, it may not even be America. So if it ain't the West, we need a new definition of the core.

And that New Core will shrink the Gap, whatever it takes. Why? They want a better life, and like American settlers heading out across the Plains and over the Rockies in the second half of the 19th century, they're willing to do just about anything to make that better life happen. That's why the Chinese are all over the Gap, just like freed Negro slaves were all over the American West, constituting, for example, the vast majority of the cowboys (a poorly understood fact, just like most people today not knowing about the Chinese being everywhere).

You can say, "But the Chinese do your Gap-shrinking very differently than we Americans do!"

And I'll say, "And what does that tell you?"