Wow. Positive comments about government employees, including Citizenship and Immigration Services. How often do you see that?  ¶ 21:30

  This kind of bothers me. I've got no trouble with developing knowledge about another culture, but why is the Department hosting an event like this when we have to go out of our way to refer to that big office lunch we have every December as a "holiday party" instead of a "Christmas party"?  ¶ 23:09

  What was I saying yesterday about nothing good coming out of the sixties and seventies? The same theme is showing up in this thread over at Open Book.  ¶ 22:52

  Family reunification through child smuggling. According to the article, 115,000 unaccompanied minors were caught last year. In many cases, the parents won't come to get them.  ¶ 22:28

  Local man causes controversy by building turret.

This is something I dream about. Not just a turret, mind you, but an entire castle. All that stands between me and full-blown eccentricity is several hundred thousand dollars.  ¶ 22:22

  Finally! Grammar is once again being taught in schools. Well, some schools anyway.

Grammar lessons vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. A generation of teachers and students learned grammar through the act of writing, not in isolated drills and diagrams.

How'd that work out?

Nationwide, the Class of 2006 posted the lowest verbal SAT scores since 1996.

Looks like the students DIDN'T learn grammar through the act of writing after all. I remember doing sentence diagrams in English class many, many years ago, but it wasn't until studying Latin that I learned much about the whole concept of grammar, and to this day I can still tell a participle from a gerund. I think.

Once again I am left wondering whether anything good came out of the late sixties and seventies, but that's a topic that will have to keep until I'm in a particularly cranky mood.  ¶ 22:05

  Immigrant workers in the United States send home $45 billion in remittances.

As a comparison, the current U.S. foreign aid budget seems to be something in the area of $28 billion.  ¶ 22:14

  Americans claim asylum in Britain. Turns out it's freeloaders and not disgruntled leftists.  ¶ 07:06

  The little bits and pieces of immigration law still in my brain can get dredged up at the strangest times. Like here, where Consul at Arms wonders about British immigration law. Believe it or not, this was something every U.S. inspector had to know about at one time, at least to a small degree. You see, British citizens identified as such in their passports are allowed to enter the United States without visas under the Visa Waiver Program, but other British nationals, who have basically the same passports, must have visas, unless the passports are endorsed to show the bearer has the right of abode in the United Kingdom, in which case they don't need the visas after all.

Just another remnant of the good old days of the British Empire, when much of the world was subject to the King or Queen. But then came the Second World War, followed by independence for so many of said subjects, and the citizenship laws changed. A lot of the British nationals without the right of abode were of South Asian ancestry or from Hong Kong. Here's an overview of current nationality law in the U.K.

My guess is that very few of the ones in Guantanamo speak any Cantonese.  ¶ 20:51