I'm spending the day in Seattle, and boy is it beautiful. I met Dennis Dale today. Dennis tells me he wants some critique of his writing, so go check out his weblog. Tomorrow I'm going to drop in on a ghost of Gene Expression past (in fact, the man responsible for the name, the logo and the general style skin of the blog), Joel Grus. By the way, did you know that Saud bin Abdul Aziz, king of Saudi Arabia between 1953 and 1964, was a habitual drunk? Apparently of such Yeltsinesque proportions that "the family" had to force the abdication of this dissolute potentate.