The election is over. And on that note I am going to disappear for a while. I leave you all in the capable hands of the current editors and contributors.

I'm here in Vientiane and might stay for a few more days yet. It's a lovely capital, very mellow and the banks of the Mekong are gorgeous. I collect my Vietnamese visa tomorrow and will soon visit Vietnam. I will go to Hue first, then Da Nang and visit the site of my Uncle Paul's death during the war in 1969. After that I'll go to Hoi An and the Ho Chi Minh City and visit some friends.

I may be offline for a day, a week or maybe longer. Who knows. Something may compel me to blog, but for the time being I'm going to disappear. Of course I'll follow the news and if some new facet of the financial crisis erupts I'll chime in. But, I'm not making any promises.

I've been blogging pretty continually for two months now (and for a while before that while working in Singapore) and I really need a break--a bit of a vacation, as it were, as this is my new full time gig once again. (Y'all can blame Stuart, as he suggested I 'logoff.') I also need to spend some time thinking about the book and getting started on wrapping it up. I'm getting close. My friend Rajesh in Mumbai found me a small place in the foothills of the Himalayas for dirt cheap, a kind of writer's refuge as he described it. So, at some point when I am in India I really will disappear, probably for at least a full month, maybe longer.

But for now, I need to recharge intellectually, read a couple good books (Austerlitz by Sebald, The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, Herodotus' Histories and the Diamond Sutra--the seminal Buddhist text), and just write.

One final comment: at some point very soon when I come back online we'll be completing our drupal upgrade. We need a few beta testers and if you are interested, please shoot me and email and I'll connect you with our new technician who is handling the upgrade. There will be no changes made to The Agonist--or at least no major alterations. Just a simple upgrade, but because much of the site is customized we've had to crack the drupal code again and that's why we need the beta testers. So, if you have some spare time, please let me know.

On that note I'll see you all real soon.