I'm flummoxed at two points Ms. Miller misses in her review.

First, if there are indeed a lot of Traverses running about in Against, then it needs to be read in light of Vineland, very explicitly; the Traverses had long since landed in Vineland County by the 1984 of Vineland, but are described in Vineland . Since Miller misses this, it raises questions about her reading of Vineland (starting with, did she finish it, or did she find it difficult to read once it began forcing her to live with Brock Vond? Many folks would rather do anything than live with Brock for any length of time; Pynchon's decision to force us to cohabit with Vond is is very interesting one.)

Also, if her reading of Vineland stopped with the role of Nixon, that's again, surprising. Nixon is a foil in Vineland; Vineland is a book far more about Reagan and Bush and prescient of Bush II and their collective work to fight valiantly against a long-dead FDR than it is about Nixon. Moderni

If Against the Day spends much of its time in the period just before world war one, and if Miller doesn't understand it, I'm wondering if part of the issue may be similar to the one I had with Faludi's Big Book About Men and World War II (Stiffed, was it?): if you're ahistorical about what was in the intellectual air just before and just after WWI, and what a transformation that brought, how many of the longer-range philosophical and theological struggles it brought to an end to not by proving one faction correct but by making all factions deeply unsure of their own foundations, then you're going to have a lot of trouble making sense of what's been happening ever since. WWI was horrific, senseless, and had fewer "good" or even somewhat positive actors than WWII did. The Lord told those who still believed what he thought about it with the global influenza pandemic of 1918, for those who were still wondering whose side He chose.

A place I find interesting to start into this mix is Martin Buber's Hasidism and Modern Man. There are many other great starting points, I'm sure, but Buber writes well, translates well, and if you're going to talk Postmodernism, it's probably not a bad idea to understand about the Modern project which came before WWI (lots and lots more than Fascist architecture was involved) and also to think about why it was close to sixty years between Modernism and it's oddly reverential stepchild.

I found the interview fairly interesting, but not as well fact-checked as I would have liked.

When the famous expert in Science declares Polonium to have a short half life, apparently everyone agrees, including the editorial staff at Salon.

Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days, or a bit over 4 months. Yes, you would want to get a fresh batch if you were counting on the radiological effect to do the damage, it's true. However, you could get twice as much as you thought you needed, and have the better part of a year to wait for an opportunity to arise. "Very short" in the context of the article is misleading.

By contrast, Iodine-125 is a commonly used lab reagent, a strong gamma emitter, and you typically do want to do your experiments with it quickly. Still, I've used 125-I that had arrived more than a month before I was ready to use it.

The physical half-life of 125-I is 62 days, so it's twice as fast to decay as is 210-Po; a little-known thing about 125-I is that separate from the physical half-life is the biological half-life, and the biological half-life is substantially longer than the physical half-life, at 138 days. (nope, not a typo!) j

Is there a biological half-life as distinct from a physical half-life of 210-Po? I don't know. If there is, it might further impact the claim of the gentleman in the piece about precision timing.

How was the dosage administered?

How many lethal inhalants really work well without the subject knowing about them? Hell's bells, even if the subject *knows* about them, the inhalation method is dodgy. This is one of the reason it took so very much longer for anesthesia to be introduced than poisoning.

The issues around the gut are interesting, however. I'm not sure one needs to invoke nanotechnology, though; many metal salts are easily complexed to protein, and protein will, following digestion, be passed quickly into the bloodstream.

A misspent youtb fails yet again to pay for itself, but contact me via email if your shady underworld organization has an interest in tapping into my now long disused store of toxicological trivia.

These people really do have a set. I mean, they can't *just* be projecting; they surely remember that Ann of Connecticut has already said this, right?

Ann C: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

The RNC, projecting madly: "Islamic extremists want our laws changed, our culture destroyed and our families converted"

Well, shee-yit. At least the Islamic folks want a legal framework for it.

So, even the RNC is conceding that they're a few rungs lower on the ladder of law and order than the Islamic guys? Good admission, RNC. Did you know you were making it?