I am back from a 12-day family trip to Germany (Christmas with the grandparents), and am still working through my (and the kids') jet-lag, but I want to get a post up for the new year and there's some interesting stuff going on there that I don't want to completely ignore, so here's some quick jabs that I might (but very well might not) come back to in greater depth.

• To begin with, Happy New Year to all. May we us strive in 2006 "to be men not destroyers," in the words of Ezra Pound.
• Giving up the Internet cold turkey for nearly two weeks was made less painful by the fact that I'd bought the entire second season of Battlestar Galactica from iTunes just before the trip. Having digested that, I am pumped for new episodes starting tonight. The series really is excellent and, I think, a remarkably complex meditation on politically charged topics like religion, family, war, and leadership.
• Mark Bernstein has been tracking a blogospheric debate on whether links subvert hierarchy. I don't want to get into the whole thing, but I second Mark's call for better precision in terms. Hierarchy is an organizational structure. Hypertext (or links) is another one. It's not so much a question of subversion as being two different ways of looking at the same stuff. Not much to debate there. The real debate is over whether technology (or maybe just communication media) subverts social or political power structures. The answer to that is simple: sometimes. A much more useful debate would be about whether (or which) tools at our disposal right now can be used to a more just and equitable world, and if so, how.
• Listening to it on my iPod yesterday, I reached the conclusion that Pavement's cover version of the Schoolhouse Rock classic "No More Kings" (from the uneven but interesting compilation Schoolhouse Rock Rocks) might be the greatest cover version of any song ever. Just so you know.
• LibraryThing had a very busy holiday, with a bunch of new features like tag-based recommendations, advanced searching, and new RSS feeds.

Um, that's it. Is that OK?