"Hawk-Eyed Reader"

I've been a fan of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo site for a couple of years. He writes thoughtful, thought-provoking stuff about subjects ranging from Chandra Levy to redistricting. Anyway, today something bugged me about a reader e-mail he was dicussing, so I fired off a response and found myself quoted. Cool.

Who Is Chad Mulligan?

I'm currently reading American Gods, last year's Hugo winner. One of the characters, a police officer, is named "Chad Mulligan". What is odd about that is that there is also a character in Stand on Zanzibar, the 1969 Hugo winner, with the same name. The characters don't seem to have much in common. What's going on here?

A Google Search turns up a a police officer in Arkansas named "Chad Mulligan". At first I thought this was a joking reference to one of the books, but the site appears legit.

For what it's worth, according to Census data, 0.004% of Americans have the last name "Mulligan" and 0.165% of American men have the name "Chad". The 2000 male US population was 138.1 million. If the "Chad"s and "Mulligan"s are distributed evenly among the population, there should be about 9 "Chad Mulligan"s. Yahoo! People Search gives three. (None in Arkansas.)

I have no conclusion here. It's just a thing that makes me go "hmm".

The Lost Roll of Film

I recently found an unidentified roll of film in a camera bag. Christina had it developed, and it turned out to be the last roll of film we took with my old camera. These pictures were taken on Lady Elliott Island during our trip to Australia last summer.



I can't believe we flew in on this tiny plane.







I'm glad I got rid of those clip-on shades.