new passport

I have received my new passport. This is basically a good thing, and they were quite efficient, but someone's idea of anti-counterfeiting measures involves meant-to-be-iconic drawings, and more-or-less-inspirational quotes, on every one of the visa pages. With explicit invocation of god in one of them; I'm not sure that's adequately counterbalanced by the knowledge that people who richly deserve annoying will in fact be annoyed by the quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. In case anyone was wondering, the key issues the State Department wants to alert me to are international parental child abduction [sic], international adoption, and pandemic influenza.

The photo I sent in looks worse for the wavy lines they put over it (presumably to make it harder for a hypothetical thief to change the image).

More Wiscon posts, and maybe even some book posts, will follow soon, I hope.