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Time for mashup number twenty-six. Hey, that’s half a year! Not too bad. Our subject today is the classic Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days (original). It’s your basic travelogue in fictional form, with the added excitement of (unjust) pursuit by the law. Phileas Fogg, accompanied by his faithful servant Passepartout, must transnavigate the globe in 80 days to win a fairly sizable bet. That provides the essential aspect of time pressure. Everything else is just trouble along the way, with Detective Fix as a secondary plot backbone. Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron—at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old.

The prelim Nebula ballot is up, with links to many of the nominees in full. Three out of the four novelettes were published on-line first.

According to Sistani’s office, there was no assassination attempt. That’s a distinct relief.

Look! Consequences. Consider this as, perhaps, retribution for the suicide bombings up in Kurdish territory.

So, how’d I do on predictions? Arizona I said it’d go Kerry, Clark, Dean in that order. It did. Missouri I said Kerry, Edwards, Dean. Yep. Oklahoma I said it’d go Clark, Edwards, and Kerry in a tight race. (Polls had Kerry ahead of Edwards for second.) Yep again. South Carolina Edwards won it pulling away, as per prediction. Delaware I said Lieberman would come in second to Kerry and then quit; I was right but only by a couple of hundred votes. Edwards nearly beat him. Lieberman did quit. ...

Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is out. He’s made it available on the Web under a Creative Commons license again, so you can always download it and read it if you aren’t sure about buying it in the store. This one didn’t work so well for me. As an extrapolation of current cultural trends, I can’t make it dovetail. Doctorow gets the tribal aspect of Internet culture right — we do form tribes across the time zones, driven by our own interests — but I’ve never ever seen a tribe form around a specific time zone. In fact, part of the attraction of the Internet tribe is the knowledge that whenever you log onto the MUD — hit the IRC channel — visit the bulletin board — fire up AIM — whatever — someone will be there. Part of the attraction is that the Internet is always on. Time is irrelevant. ...

The first person who changed my life, I never met. He or she left some old SF paperbacks in a little villa on Green Turtle Cay, in the Bahamas — Perry Rhodans, as I recall — and I read them while I was ten or so and on vacation. They blew me away, far more so than the golf books. I haven’t stopped reading SF yet. That’s why my dad’s friend Peter Olotka said “Hey, your son likes SF — he can share our room at Boskone if you like.” Dad said sure, and that was my first SF con. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I more or less stopped going when I hit college. ...

Welcome to your handy guide (biased and slanted) to today’s primaries. We have seven primaries today, which will greatly affect the chances of three and a half candidates. (If Kucinich, Lieberman, or Sharpton win any of the primaries, that will have an effect as well, but I’m dubious about their chances. Which is a shame, at least in one case.) Dean’s strategy is to spend all his money on Michigan and Washington in an effort to win both of those states. Winning Michigan would put him solidly back in the race. However, he’s not expecting to win anything today. ...

Just as a reminder: Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? ...

Bush neglected to add funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to the budget. Again. That’s a little unfair of me, since in the one case we’re talking military funding and in the other we’re talking human aid. Still, either way he’s avoiding the true cost of the war. “The White House expects to cover the war costs with supplemental funds after next fall’s elections.” Indeed.