weird post

That had to be just about the unluckiest post in blog history (three below this one, on Drift).

First, I have no idea how a fragment of andrewsullivan.com address ended up in the title. I haven’t looked at that page in months.

Second, Rik Peters (the Drift organizer) wrote in to say that Drift in Dutch means something like the German Drang. Here’s what happened… I remembered it as meaning “urge”. But I wasn’t sure, and looked it up… And no fewer than two online dictionaries said it meant “group” or “set”. So I figured I must have misremembered, but apparently didn’t.

Anyway, Rik’s a native speaker, and I only know as much Dutch as I learned from reading Heidegger’s Zijn en Tijd and taking a couple of months of lessons while there. Rik wins. My apologies for the mistake.

There’s crazy lightning outside the library. Never before have I been trapped in a Cairo building by rain and lightning. The world is turned upside-down.