The British theatre celebrates Rachel Corrie

Steven Plaut discusses the new British megahit, My name is Rachel Corrie, which has been sickeningly praised in the British press. He suggests some other Rachels who might be remembered:
1. My Name is Rachel Levy (Israeli girl age 17, blown up in a grocery
store)
2. My Name is Rachel Thaler (Israeli girl aged 16, blown up in a pizzeria)
3. My Name is Rachel Levi (Israeli girl aged 19, murdered while waiting
for the bus)
4. My Name is Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband and son while at
home)
5. My Name is Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a cafe)
6. My Name is Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 6
while sitting at home)

It would be interesting knowing how many of THESE Rachels were murdered
with explosives smuggled in through the same tunnels that Rachel Corrie
and her ISM pro-terrorist friends were "defending"!

A Robert Burns poem for today

0, my love is like a red, red rose,
that's newly sprung in June.
0, my love is like a melody,
that's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair thou art, my bonnie lass,
so deep in love am I,
And I will love thee still, my dear,
till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
and the rocks melt wi' the sun!
And I will love thee still, my dear,
while the sands of life shall run.

And fare the weel, my only love!
And fare the well awhile!
And I will come again, my love.
Tho it were ten thousand mile!

Christopher Hitchins has a good word for Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin, who was pelted and ridiculed for decades of her life, was another of those rare people who feel other people's pain as if it were their own. When she first sent me one of her books, I was all ready to snigger. But she could write, and think, and argue, and it was often a pleasure to disagree violently with her, which is more than I can say for some of her detractors. Like many clever and tormented people, she had the gift of getting the gist of supposedly complex questions. It wasn't OK with her that President Clinton had a special staff of private dicks to "handle" and to slander truth-telling women; it wasn't OK with her that Serbia used rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing; and she wasn't neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females. That she could be denounced as a "conservative" for holding any of those positions says much about the left to which she used to belong. If she was indeed crazy, I wish she had bitten more of her twisted sisters.

The criticism of Dworkin has been rather unpleasant, focusing on her looks and grooming habits and putting words in her mouth which she never used.

I might get into trouble here

I think I have mentioned previously my propensity to get lost while driving.

Well, it happened to me again last week. I was in a neighborhood far, far from where I thought I was headed. I spotted a street sign: Oh, oh! Martin Luther King Ave.

Why must MLK Ave always be in the heart of a revolting slum? Couldn't they find a nice street to name after him? Fifth Ave in New York springs to mind.

Do people enjoy having awful things named after them? The guy they named the Major Deegan (horrible congested highway, for those not in the know) after must be revolving in his grave, so many people use his name in vain. I've never heard anyone say a nice word about JFK Airport. And was Alois Alzheimer proud to have a nice disease named after him?

If anyone wants to name something after me posthumously, heres a hint: how about a nice rose? Yellow is my favorite color, but I wouldn't object to pink or red.

Income tax forms claim another victim

Another blogger makes a good point::

Recently, in the Life and Arts section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a reporter by the name of D. Parvaz has cropped up with a column called “Popping Off”. [] In a March column .... “Confessions of a writer who didn’t pen a memoir”, Parvaz rambles about the abundance of memoirs that have flooded the literary market. Though I agree with her that there are a few too many crap memoirs out there ..., I don’t like her tone towards bloggers. She writes, “Those who don’t make it into print embrace blogs, painfully detailing their every triumph and trauma.” So what? Unlike Parvaz’s words and the plethora of bad literature out there, at least readers aren’t paying to read a bloggers ponderings. The beauty of the blog is that you can click in and click out. Tune in or tune out. If a blogger speaks to you and you jive with what they are putting out there, cool. I personally have spent many an hour comforted by blogs where authors share experiences similar to my own or better yet, open my eyes to cultures and ways of thinking that I might never experience.... As long as no animals or small children are harmed ..., then it’s all good.;

Neo-neocon asks a good question

[I]s being an expert like being "President for life?" That is, once you are anointed, appointed, elected, whatever, to "expert" status, is there nothing that can impeach you? Like, maybe, being wrong; like maybe, over and over and over again?

I have noticed that a bad track record on analyzing or predicting events is brushed over and ignored, and that experts keep on prognosticating and experticizing (yes, I know it's not a word, but I think it should be). They are rarely, if ever, called on it.[]

It reminds me of a related question I've often wondered about: does anyone check up on psychics? How many of their yearly predictions actually come true--the ones that aren't totally vague, that is?

I've often wondered, if these people can predict the future so well, why they are not fabulously wealthy from shrewd investment in the stock market.
That would be a much more valuable use of their time than predicting (wrongly, as it happens) that a million Afghans would be killed if we attacked the Taliban.


Read the post; the comments are good, too.

Another poem for April

Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth, part V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

More surfing--isn't this interesting?

Usually, all warships of the United States fly the Union Jack (in US usage, that's the canton of the US National Flag - the blue part with the white stars - and not the British jack) as their naval jack (the jack is the flag flown from the front of the ship, as opposed to the ensign, which is flown from the back. In the US Navy, the ensign is the US National Flag - the "Stars and Stripes.")

On September 11th 2002, exactly one year after the war on terror started, the Navy started to fly the First Navy Jack from all of it's ships. The first navy jack is a flag consisting of 13 horizontal alternating red and white stripes with a rattlesnake diagonally across them. At the bottom is the motto "Don't Tread On Me." It is, as the directive ordering the change put it: "an historic reminder of the nation's and Navy's origin and will to persevere and triumph."

The Navy SpecWar liasion at Camp Vance (the special operations headquarters in Afghanistan) had one flying over his office, and it was always a pretty moving moment to look over past the National Flag flying in front of the TOC (the HQ building, basically), and see, lower and smaller behind it, the "Don't Tread On Me" flag. It always made me feel like, as long as some of us remember where we came from, our nation would be OK.

So what does that have to do with the Star Spangled Banner? Just this: just as we changed our navy jack, I'd like to see the military change and sing the fourth verse of the National Anthem instead of the first during the war (at official functions, Army-Navy games, and so on.) Just the change would be a reminder of what we're about, and the fourth verse speaks to the US view of war better than almost anything else (of course, its politically incorrect as anything, given that it invokes God's blessing on our nation, but I don't see that as a bad thing, actually.)

O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

(Information on the Navy Jack came from www.navyjack.info)

I found this quite moving, actually.

This is what you come up with when you idly surf the web

Everyone has an IRS rant--here's mine

I did my income tax on TaxActonline way back in March. Since I owed the IRS money, I didn't worry about filing it just then. Let them wait.

I decided to file it last Friday. Monday I got an e-mail saying the government had refused to accept my return! You're pretty low, beneath contempt in fact, when the US government spurns your tax return. This meant that the NJ one could not be sent either.

They claimed my employer's EIN number was inaccurate. I checked the form and it looked Ok to me, but I called my employer, and I had the right number. I submitted it again.

Rejected again! This was yesterday, April 13, mind you. I called the IRS. They told me it was a computer glitch and I had to print the return and file it. The printer didn't work! (I have bad printer karma.) My huband helpfully suggested I buy a laser printer, which I couldn't afford because I owed the government so much money.

Then I found a previous printout so that was okay. But New Jersey? The TaxAct folks had me receiving a large refund from NJ, more than I paid out as it happens, but am I going to argue with H&R Block?

I did the Nj one online, and discovered I had a modest refund of $98 coming. So much for the accuracy of H&R Block.

The IRS encourages you to use this software! What are they thinking?




























How do I get my $7.95 back from TaxActOnline?

Mad hatter's disease

An interesting Slate article about the dangers of sushi:

Talking Tuna
How much sushi and albacore is too much? Be careful who you ask.
By Amanda Schaffer
Posted Tuesday, March 29, 2005, at 4:23 AM PT
[]
New research continues to probe the long-term, neurological ills of mercury, the fish-loving contaminant. Doctors in California warn that some of their affluent, fish-eating patients show signs of mercury poisoning. The California attorney general's office is skirmishing with the tuna industry, demanding that it post warnings to consumers about toxic exposure. Watchdog groups are threatening to sue the FDA over its latest consumer advisory.

Now we know what happened to Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn, Whoopi Goldberg and countless other poor unfortunate celebs.

In England, in the 19th century, hatmakers were considered crazy. That's because they used mercury in the manufacture of hats and it affected their brains.

So Streisand, et al., are not just crazy, there's a medical reason for it.

Interesting people you meet at work

Our manager called our entire team into her office, and she looked pretty ill at ease.[] We all thought there was bad news on the horizon, and she was going to announce restructuring and the subsequent layoffs. I don't think any of us had any idea what we were in for.

Turns out, the topic of the meeting was another member of our department who was out on vacation, and was due back shortly. This meeting was to prepare us for Rob's glorious return.

It seemed that when Rob returned on Monday, he was no longer going to be Rob, but instead Roberta. Rob was going to have a sex-change operation, and would be counting on all of us for our understanding and support.

He would not be a woman yet, but he would be wearing women's clothing, and makeup, and talking like a woman, and we were to treat him with all the political correctness we could muster[]

As this news was being relayed to us, suddenly, it all clicked.

A few months before, a bunch of us noticed that Rob was growing a goatee. We all figured that maybe he was trying to toughen up his image, since he was kind of a mousy guy. Since the goatee really didn't do much except evil him up a bit, we promptly began referring to him as "Evil Rob." This played out in a few weeks, and we didn't think too much of it after that.

The goatee apparently wasn't working out for him, because he shaved it off and started growing out his hair. We thought maybe he joined a band or something, and didn’t want to have both, since then he’d look like a mousy, evil jesus christ, which would not do.

The new rocker hair was coming right along, but we knew something was off when we noticed the fingernails. The nails were very nice --long, polished, and buffed to a subdued, yet sophisticated luster. At this point we had no idea what the hell was going on, but we figured that maybe the band thing was still the right answer, given that androgyny is a pretty common thing among rockers, and lots of rock guys paint their nails. []

So back to the infamous meeting. The obvious questions came up. Did we call him Roberta, or did the final whackin' have to happen before that? No, we were to address him as Roberta. Which bathroom was he/she going to use, and can I please use a different one? She will be assigned a bathroom on the first floor that nobody else would use. The questions went on for a bit in this vein.

[]
We were all dismissed back to our desks to let this news sink in, and let me tell you there was some furious instant messaging happening after that shit.

So the next Monday rolls around, and everyone is trying like hell not to look at Rob as he stumbled into work wearing stiletto heels and a dress. Clearly, there was more practice needed on the "walking in heels" thing, because he obviously had no idea how it was done. He was walking exactly like an average guy would when suddenly deprived of the flat part of his feet, or placed on stilts for the first time. Kind of a rolling, shuffling, zombie-like gait interspersed with some quick, balance-catching jerks and almost-rolled ankles. I was waiting for him to hit the floor with a compound ankle fracture.

Initially, we were all pretty understanding. Shocked, a little freaked out perhaps, but understanding. He had some sympathy points built up, but he pretty much squandered them his first week back, mostly because of his newly developed in-your-face attitude.

[]
The make-up job made Mimi Bobeck look reserved. He really needed a hand with that. I had frat buddies in college who dressed as women one Halloween and they were more convincing than this dude, even though he clearly had some face-work done while he was away.

[]
The other insanely annoying thing was the artificially high, "girlish" falsetto he had adopted. It was like Mrs. Doubtfire had taken it up an octave. His high-pitched, tittering laugh was enough to make you think seriously about jamming sharpened pencils in your ears. Every time you heard it wafting across the room, if you were a guy, your balls would shivel just a little bit. You’d have to ask the women in the office what effect it had on them, but I imagine their ovaries twitched or something.

I remember commenting to a friend that he wasn't acting like a woman, or even a girl, and he clearly needed lessons very, very badly, because no woman I knew acted like that. It was like when he put a dress on, he got a lobotomy. Suddenly, there was this airhead, giggly schoolgirl act. I had never seen anything like it. Ru Paul acted more like a real woman than this guy. He had some serious learning to do, as I’m sure we all would, but he seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. When you decide to take the bullet train out of Normalville, you'd better know what track you’re supposed to be on, and it was painfully obvious that he did not.

It was completely awkward for most of us. Sometimes he would slip and lose the fake falsetto for a few seconds in the middle of a sentence and then things got really weird. In every single interaction with this person, it was like there was a gigantic pink elephant in the room that you were supposed to ignore, except this particular elephant just happened to be in drag.

Luckily, this guy wasn’t on my immediate team, so my interaction with him was limited. I heard the horror stories from other people, and I’m glad it wasn’t me. From what I hear, he got off on weirding people out. If he got a whiff that you were a little freaked, he would go out of his way to make you even more uncomfortable, to the point of sometimes becoming confrontational. If he had been wearing men’s clothing, he probably would have gotten his ass kicked multiple times. I’m not sure what the rules are on face-punching a Tranny, but I’ll look into that and get back to you.

A few of the women on the team even had the distinct pleasure of some one-on-one “girl talk” which I’m sure was a blast. I did find out later that he WAS on my team in a more general sense, in that he still liked women. Apparently, he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, but also a lesbian.

Chew on that tidbit for a while. Go get a snack, and when you get back, we'll talk about Part II

Part II: Enter the Bra-Dude

So here we are once more...

Right around this time, we enter part two of our story, which starts with my experience in the lunch line. There was this other long-haired dude who I never paid much attention to, who was apparently a friend of Rob's. They were in the same band, so to speak. I was standing behind him in line, and he was wearing your normal clothes for a business casual environment. Khaki Dockers, a button down white shirt and tie. As I was waiting to pay for my food, I noticed something else. That something else would be the outline of a pink lacy bra. Again, I try not to judge. I may laugh and point, but I don’t consider that judging, although some people might. Maybe he had manboobs and needed the support.

I started noticing him around more after that. You know how when you buy a new car, suddenly you start seeing cars just like yours everywhere? I’m not saying I identified with this guy in any way, but I just started seeing him around more after noticing the bra. I mean, I’ve never worn women’s undergarments. The closest I’ve come to this was finding a pair of my wife’s panties in the arm of my sweatshirt one day,but that was totally thanks to the dryer, and not to any inclination on my part. I was in this for the pure, comic aspect.

A few times, I saw him wear his hair tied back. With a pink scrunchie.

He was a different kind of dude, but after dealing with Rob, this was nothing. He was reserved, and didn't really advertise, although a pink bra under a white shirt is sort of an important mile marker on the highway of life for a guy. Once you pass that point, it's tough to go back. You’d have to go pretty far to even come close to Rob, but it seemed he was willing to do just that. Here's where things get pretty interesting.

My friend Scuba is a network admin, and part of his job entails cleaning up the abandoned crap that people store on the network and then never touch again. So he’ll do some searches by file size and date and file type, and clean off old spreadsheets and graphic files and what not. Once in a while, he’ll stumble on something that shouldn’t be out there, like bootleg music files, or bootleg videos, or sometimes even porn. []

So he was cleaning up some drives shortly after I had my pink bra experience, and he came across a directory stuffed full of jpeg files. This directory appears to belong to bra-dude. He checks out one of the files, and it’s porn. "Great," he thinks, like a cop who stumbles on a body in an alley. "I don't need this today." The first thing that’s odd to him is that it’s a male in the picture. He looks at a few more. All men. Hmmm. Not only porn, but gay porn. Then he realizes something.

He realizes that he knows the guy in this picture. It's bra-dude, and he's on a bed, arms over his head, dress hiked up, crank saluting at half mast. It is at this point in our story that Scuba goes blind. I'm kidding. He only wished he was blind.

The guy has a porn collection of himself and his man-friends stored on a company server. What the hell is he thinking? After Scuba realizes who it is in the pictures, he looks at a few more, and realizes something else.

Some of the pictures were taken in the building.

This guy was sneaking other guys into the building after hours and taking gay porn pictures of himself and the other guys, and then storing them on his network drive....


Scuba was completely traumatized. He seriously considered taking the rest of the day off. He didn't sleep for weeks. To this day, the images are burned into his mind, and I have it on good authority that on occasion he still wakes up screaming.

Incidentally, neither of these two work here anymore, one of them for obvious reasons. Although they were good for laughs, I have to say I don’t miss either of them. There’s only so much diversity we can stand, and I think I speak for everyone here when I say I’m full up.

It's still Poetry Month

COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; 10
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth

Poem of the Day (you thought I forgot,didn't you?)

Song On May Morning

NOw the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowry May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose.
Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
Mirth and youth, and warm desire,
Woods and Groves, are of thy dressing,
Hill and Dale, doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early Song,
And welcom thee, and wish thee long.

John Milton

Heretical Librarian Gives Seymour Hersh a Good Fisking

Gossip Journalism

Writing for the April 18, 2005 issue of New York Magazine, Chris Suellentrop ably points out journalist Seymour Hersh's issues with the truth:

Since the Abu Ghraib story broke eleven months ago, The New Yorker’s national-security correspondent, Seymour Hersh, has followed it up with a series of spectacular scoops. Videotape of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib. Evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a “composite figure” and a propaganda creation of either Iraq’s Baathist insurgency or the U.S. government. The active involvement of Karl Rove and the president in “prisoner-interrogation issues.” The mysterious disappearance of $1 billion, in cash, in Iraq. A threat by the administration to a TV network to cut off access to briefings in retaliation for asking Laura Bush “a very tough question about abortion.” The Iraqi insurgency’s access to short-range FROG missiles that “can do grievous damage to American troops.” The murder, by an American platoon, of 36 Iraqi guards.

Not one of these exclusives appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, however. Instead, Hersh delivered them in speeches on college campuses and in front of organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and on public-radio shows like “Democracy Now!” In most cases, Hersh attaches a caveat—such as “I’m just talking now, I’m not writing”—before unloading one of his blockbusters, which can send bloggers and reporters scurrying for confirmation.

Every writer understands that there is a gap between the print persona and the actual self, but Hersh subscribes to a bright-line test, a wider chasm than is usually acknowledged, particularly in today’s multimedia age.

Sy Hersh Says It’s Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print)

Suellentrop draws a clear distinction between Hersh's verbal comments and his written work.... Unfortunately, Hersh's writings reflect the same record of outlandish inaccuracy as his spoken utterances. During the Afghanistan campaign in October 2001, Hersh published an absurdly overwrought account of a special operations raid against the Taliban that allegedly went horribly awry. In late March 2003, he wrote an article implying that US forces would be lucky to fight their way back to Kuwait, never mind taking Baghdad. In April 2004, Hersh returned to the topic of Afghanistan, stating that the "situation there is deteriorating rapidly". Hmm, not quite. While Hersh did help break the Abu Ghraib abuse story, even here much of his reporting has been less than accurate. Hersh's track record, in short, is not exactly the best.

The simple truth is that Seymour Hersh's journalism is politically motivated hackwork based in large part on anonymous "sources" passing along third-hand gossip. Many of these informants are merely cranks and malcontents who tell Hersh exactly what he wants to hear. Take for example, the Air Force officer who allegedly greeted Hersh by saying "welcome to Stalingrad" during last November's battle for Fallujah.... Other Hersh sources have included conspiracy peddler Karen Kwiatkowski. Hersh himself has become one of the main purveyors of the infantile "neocon cabal" thesis, and numerous other equally ridiculous and unsubtantiated notions such as those mentioned by Suellentrop.

Today's poetry saying

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
Russell Baker

What has happened to God? His job has been outsourced to India!

As one anonymous tipster so helpfully pointed out, with YHWH out of commission, who's been running things?

Some intrepid sleuthing on my behalf unearthed the unearthly truth: YHWH {Hebrew reference to God} has subcontracted out His national deity duties to India. Continuing a global trend, the divine services specified in the Abrahamic covenant have been outsourced to the firm of Ganesh, Shiva & Krishna.

According to an internal document I obtained, the quiet change was made possible due to a loophole in the phrasing of the covenant. In all the confusion resulting from the contradictions between between the doublet of Genesis 15 and 17, Abraham forgot to insist on a clause forbidding subcontracting. As a result of this oversight, the controversial change is compliant with the contract YHWH made to be our national deity. For quite some time now, the prayer lines have been staffed at Indian call centers. If you think your prayers weren't answered due to sin, you may be missing the real cause: many prayers went unanswered due to language issues and difficulty in understanding accents.[]

Reaction to the news has been mixed. Up above, archangel Michoel is agitating amongst the heavenly hosts to form a labor union. In a brief statement, he expressed frustration. "I've been busting my hooves for millennia and this is the loyalty I get?" he said. "Outsourcing has gone too far when it puts me out of a job."

Down on earth, the response has been mostly positive. The Reform leadership has announced that they are rewriting their liturgy in Hindi to more accurately reflect the changing times. Some people are worried that the long distance will require greater kavana. Rabbi Gavriel Carlin allayed those fears, saying, "I hadn't notice any difference in response. It's almost as if it doesn't matter to whom you pray."

Memorials to bad drivers

Friday, March 25, 2005
Of Road Grime and Religion
I drove past a new roadside shrine on the way to work today. A cross of flowers next to about 50 feet of flattened guardrail. What the hell is up with these things? Either they've become hip in the last few years, or I just never noticed them before. It used to be just the bikers did it to commemorate where some other biker bit it. They have that whole brotherhood thing going, so I can almost see that -- but now it seems that every time there's a fatality of any sort, up goes the shrine.

I realize that someone died there, and the shrine is probably some distraught person's way of helping deal with their grief, but I find them a little bit irritating. I don't want to know nor do I really care that someone died on that spot. It's a bit gruesome, like staying at a B&B and finding out someone kicked off in the bed you're sleeping on. []
Case in point: There's one about 3 miles from my house. It's been there for about two years now, and I pass it every day. It's two wooden crosses, one painted purple and one painted blue, and there's almost always fresh flowers. It's right in front of a large tree on the top side of a 'T' intersection, directly across from a stop sign.

Clearly, the driver of the vehicle was completely shitfaced and drove straight through the stop sign at a spectacularly high rate of speed instead of turning right or left. This smacks a bit of natural selection to me, and I'm not sure that if I had done something so amazingly stupid I would want it immortalized with any sort of roadside extravaganza. It does, I guess, act as a kind of message to the still living -- don't drink and drive....
This is not even taking into account the religious aspects of it, nor the fact that these shrines are sometimes erected on private property. If you own a nice piece of property and someone gets creamed in your front yard by a log truck, somehow I doubt that you'd enjoy a nice Carnation Instant Cross and some candles placed there to remind you of that fact. Plus, they've got to be a total bitch to mow around.

When you think about the religious aspects of it, it becomes even more baffling. You always hear the justification of the people who put them there. They say things like, "I can feel Steve's presence here, I really can." or "I think Joe and Tammy would want people to remember them on this spot."

My question is: Why? What the hell is wrong with Steve and Joe and Tammy? Were they completely insane? If so, then maybe I can see their position. Hunter S. Thompson once said, "Some may never live, but the crazy never die." If their goal was to gain some semblance of immortality by driving at insanely high speeds into a bridge abutment and have unknown strangers wonder just what the hell they were thinking when they did this, then I guess the shrine serves that purpose. ...

Mostly, it makes me wonder about the person erecting the shrine in the first place. Do they even know what the deceased would want? Do they care?

You can think about it two ways: Either the person believes in an after-life, or they don't. Either way, one thing is for sure -- they are almost certainly not hanging around the side of the road freezing their semi-transparent nads off, just waiting for you to drive by and toss a few prayers and a long-stemmed rose their way. I mean, think about it -- If you were a spirit, wouldn't hovering 3 feet to the left of some dead flowers thumbtacked to a torn up telephone pole be the absolute last place on earth you'd want to be? Call me crazy.

So do me a favor, ok? If I bite dirt in a six car on I-87 at any time in the future, I would request that someone scatter my ashes off a cliff in the adirondacks. Please do not chain my translucent ass to some rusted out car parts on the side of the highway. Thanks.

I can't get the link to work! F**** Blogger!

Mark Steyn on the Central "Intelligence" Agency

Even before the latest budget-bloating ''reforms,'' the U.S. government was spending $30 billion annually on intelligence, and in return its intelligence agencies got everything wrong. British and French intelligence also get a lot of things wrong, but they get them wrong on far smaller budgets. One of the great sub-plots of the post-9/11 world is the uselessness of ''experts,'' the guys who get unlimited budgets to run 24/7 agencies devoted to their areas of expertise. What's startling about the glimpses we get of CIA operations -- that red-hot presidential briefing from August 2001, Joseph C. Wilson IV's non-fact-finding mission to Niger -- is how generalized it all is: Anybody who watches cable news or reads an occasional foreign paper would know as much.

How about if that $30 billion was allocated to, say, a program for subsidized bicycling helmets for grade-schoolers or some other federal boondoggle, and they bulldozed Langley, and gave the CIA director 20,000 bucks to put all his agency's global ''analysis'' up on a blog -- spook.com -- and invite comments from readers around the world? It couldn't possibly be less informed than the CIA's decades-long record of incompetence in the Middle East. U.S. intelligence needs a fresh start, and short of buying ol' Sandypants a larger pair of trousers and getting him to smuggle out every single classified document, it's not clear how it's ever going to get it.

They are wrong, stupid, useless and expensive.

Today's Poetry Quote

One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Air Force Wife Has a Great Post

The Lotus & the Mishpokkeh The Principles of Jewish Buddhism

1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You’ll never meet the Buddha with such round shoulders.

2. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

3. Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

4. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?

5. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

6. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

7. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this, and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

8. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.*

9. Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, Danish.

10. The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

11. Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

12. To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has tenthousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

13. Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

14. Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes!

I can add nothing to that!

Omigod, we've got cousins!

Neo-neocon has a link to this fascinating item:

"The Genetic Bonds Between Kurds and Jews"

by Kevin Alan Brook

Kurds are the Closest Relatives of Jews

In 2001, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian scientists discovered that the majority of Jews around the world are closely related to the Kurdish people -- more closely than they are to the Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested. [] Most of the 95 Kurdish Muslim test subjects came from northern Iraq. Ashkenazic Jews have ancestors who lived in central and eastern Europe, while Sephardic Jews have ancestors from southwestern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. The Kurdish Jews and Sephardic Jews were found to be very close to each other. Both of these Jewish populations differed somewhat from Ashkenazic Jews, who mixed with European peoples during their diaspora. The researchers suggested that the approximately 12.7 percent of Ashkenazic Jews who have the Eu 19 chromosomes -- which are found among between 54 and 60 percent of Eastern European Christians -- descend paternally from eastern Europeans (such as Slavs) or Khazars. But the majority of Ashkenazic Jews, who possess Eu 9 and other chromosomes, descend paternally from Judeans who lived in Israel two thousand years ago. In the article in the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University of Israel wrote that this new study revealed that Jews have a closer genetic relationship to populations in the northern Mediterranean (Kurds, Anatolian Turks, and Armenians) than to populations in the southern Mediterranean (Arabs and Bedouins).

On behalf of the Jews, I'd like to say: Welcome to the family.

Poem for today

Draw a crazy picture
Write a nutty poem
Sing a mumble-gumble song
Whistle through your comb
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.
--Shel Silverstien

Ouch!

Florida conservative discovers that liberals can be, well, downright mean

Lately I've been noticing that my liberal friends are just so angry. I realize that they're upset Bush was re-elected. But what I can't stand is that everything seems to be turning so personal and just plain mean. One friend sent out an item about a pending Bush appointee who was pro-life, asking all her friends to write. Well, whenever someone asks me to write, the first thing I do is check Snopes. When I found out the low-down, I simply replied to her that the info (per Snopes) was out of date. She replied to me, and I am not kidding: "Are you even a real woman?"

Another friend wanted to talk about Terri Schiavo a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really want to get into it and chose to limit my response to the fact I was saddened the family had ended up in court in the first place. I wished Michael & the Schindler's had not turned into bitter enemies. My friend responded that it was all Jeb Bush's fault for exploiting a family's suffering for political gain.

I, too, have noticed that stating a conservative view causes my liberal friends to froth at the mouth. They're like little kids: if they don't win, they want to take their marbles and go home.

Today's poem:

Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats



I

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Or deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?



II

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal-yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

IV

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou are desolate, can e'er return.

V

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all

Mark Twain on staying healthy

A cheery thought:

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

Rant about New Jersey Motor Vehicle Dept, Illegal Aliens etc.

A kid in my family sent a $50 check to pay a parking ticket. Turns out the parking ticket was for $53, so they sent him a letter threatening to suspend his license. Could he pay the $3 online? Oh, no. The ticket had to be paid personally and a copy of the receipt forwarded to the motor vehicle bureau, plus ten dollars "court costs."

New Jersey considers all of its residents who have driver's licenses as potential criminals who haven't been caught yet. If you don't have your license, registration, or insurance card you have to make a court appearance, even if your wallet was stolen and you are on your way to the Motor Vehicle office to get a replacement license.

And car insurance: It's compulsory and expensive. If you have anything short of a major accident you'd be stupid report it to the insurance company. They will raise your premiums even higher. It's an extortion racket sanctioned by the State. When the Demos are in office, the price of auto insurance goes up. The Republicans, ditto. It's an equal opportunity mugging.

What has this to do with illegal aliens? Being an illegal alien is a real crime, getting a parking ticket is a trumped up "crime." Not having auto insurance is a trumped-up crime too, one that punishes the poor.

Pity the poor widder woman

Suha Arafat seems to have taken a page from the playbook of our old friend, the Nigerian scammer.

Today's snarky poetry quote

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

By Robert Frost

Why did Sandy Berger do such a stupid thing?

What he did is tough to figure out, but as near as I can see, he stole five copies of the same memo, each of which had handwritten notes from five different people. The notes could have said anything from: Wanna have lunch? to Monica L=hot babe, to Take Immediate action, but, as the Bible says:

The wicked flee when no man pursueth.

I also find it difficult to believe that he cut them up with scissors. Didn't the man own a shredder? You can buy one with its own wastebasket at Staples. $19.95. Plus tax, where applicable. Free delivery.

An e-mail from ALA Presidential Candidate Leslie Burger

Since, as the Buddha said, "What we do no[t] only matters; it molds us," yoga for librarians will again be offered at our NJLA conference next week:

What is yoga for librarians? Just asking.

Hysterical lefty metaphor of the week

Oh, oh! Someone does not like the proposed Constitution Restoration Act:

More than religiosity run amok, more than a sodomizing of the constitution with a rusty word processor, the CRA is organized thuggery of precisely the sort that characterizes the legislative agenda of every fascist state.

Inquiring minds would like to know: how do you sodomize a piece of paper?

British Universities pursue freedom of inquiry

It seems every group of true believers, however grand or humble, needs someone to hate. For the intellectual left, Israel is the villain of choice.

The Association of University Teachers' [Britain] annual council, which begins on April 20 in Eastbourne, will also debate whether to boycott three of Israel's eight universities - Haifa University, Bar Ilan University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - over their "alleged complicity with the government's policies" on the Palestinian territories.

The great irony here is that these Israeli universities are all themselves bastions dominated by the Academic Left, including some extremists that make Ward Churchill look like a sane moderate. These Israeli versions of Taliban John will be exempt from the British boycott, because the motion contains a clause to exclude "conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies". Naturally, the British in question will not be boycotting any colleges in Syria, Iran, Egypt, Dubai or Saudi Arabia.

Liberal right-thinking trumps investigating the facts.

Poetry is Like Fish

" Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat."
-- Osbert Sitwell

Are the Republicans dumb enough to take advice from their enemies?

Mark Steyn, the incomparable, warns against friendly advice from people who mean you no good:

It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.

Ignore them, they're born losers.

Read the whole thing.

A song for late summer

The Oven Bird

by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

In honor of poetry month

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
--G. K.Chesterton

Your tax dollars at work

This was posted on April 1. It's an April Fool joke, isn't it? Isn't it?

The Least Funny April Fool's Joke of the Year

A library joke, courtesy of Conservator:

Gorman Abdicates, ALA Leadership in Disarray
-- 4/1/2005

Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association (ALA), has stepped down just months before assuming office. “It was the blog people, they did it,” said RLG’s Walt Crawford....”

Not too funny, right? Neither is Gorman, a stuffed shirt who hates bloggers. People, it is a library joke! Go easy on us bun- and comfortable-shoe wearing, dowdy old ladies who say shush a lot. We have so little fun!

Sick of opinions

The wonderful and always refreshing James Lileks reflects on the Internet and Terri Shiavo opinion, pro and con:

Speaking of which: if nothing else, this entire affair has made me heartily sick of the very act of reading the Internet. Pardon my language, but I am simply goddamn sick of opinions, period. Right or wrong, well-reasoned or poorly expressed, snarky or solemn, I am tired of the lot of them, my own included. I’m tired of reading blogs and bulletin boards and noting that it’s OK to joke about one dead person, perfectly fine to kick the Pope when he’s about to give up the ghost, but a breach of human decency to be less than reverential about the passing of a comic who specialized in dope humor. That sort of thing is expected on the internet, but what makes me weary is the blogligation to have an opinion about it and bang it out so the whole world knows I stand four-square against bashing near-dead Popes.

Speaking of which, the radio and television news is covering every last symptom of the Pope's condition. I expect to hear any moment now, that he has, or has not had, a bowel movement. Gruesome! Let the poor old man die in peace.

He's not married, so he doesn't have to worry about anyone pulling the plug.

Oh-oh, I've expressed an opinion. Sorry.

The two sides of the Holocaust

Should David Irving Be Allowed a Forum?

Controversy has erupted over C-Span’s plan to broadcast a speech by a Holocaust denier to “balance” broadcast of remarks by a Holocaust scholar.

“Balance” is a cherished concept for journalists, but sometimes it can run amok. Consider the textbook, The Reporter and the News, a 1935 volume that was then used to train American journalists. The book offers a startling example of a news story that needs to be “balanced,” that demands that “both sides in a controversial matter be given a chance to have their position stated.”

“A case in point,” the textbook solemnly declares, is “the Jewish persecution by the German Nazi Government.” It involves a struggle “between rival groups, each of which is strong in its own right, and each of which is anxious to get as much propaganda across to newspaper readers as is possible.” In other words, every claim by the “strong” German Jews had to be balanced with an equal response from the Nazi regime. [].

Lest journalists smugly assume we’ve gotten past such insidious examples of the need for “balance,” C-Span reminds us we haven’t. The cable network, which broadcasts Congress in session and other public affairs programming, planned to show a March 16 speech by Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt discussing her experiences as the defendant in a libel suit brought by Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving sued Lipstadt for statements she wrote about him in an earlier book. A British court dismissed Irving’s suit against Lipstadt in 2000, concluding that he deliberately misrepresented historical evidence.

Still, C-Span decided that it couldn’t show Lipstadt’s speech without balancing it with Irving’s position. As a C-Span spokeswoman told the New York Times, the network decided to tape an Irving lecture in order to cover “the plaintiff’s side of the trial.” When Lipstadt learned that C-Span planned to include Irving’s talk, she refused to allow the network to tape her speech. At first, C-Span said it would show Irving’s lecture anyway, but is now debating what to do.

The episode suggests that some journalists continue to lack both an understanding of the Holocaust and of the proper use of balance.

Read the whole thing.

Terrorists R Us

True religion, dark destroyed

Doesn't this sound scary? Especially if you look at the price.

a Fashion Statement of a Different Kind

Handbags do nothing for me

Handbags are cute, but I consider them furniture, not clothing. Does anyone look better with a nifty handbag? Does it complement your hairstyle? Bring out the blueness of your eyes? It's usually under the table or left on the bed in the spare bedroom. Now shoes! I definitely get shoes. And jewelry--I totally am all right with that.

Anyway, renting out handbags is a novel form of enterpreneurship. Good luck to her, them, or it.

Ashcroft is gone, but the legend lives on

Conservator comments:

THE "HYSTERICAL" LEGEND LIVES ON! Andrea Mercado of the Library Techtonics blog writes regarding the Bush administration and librarianship [emphasis mine]:

The bottom line is that I see an administration who has delivered a mixed message on librarianship, from calling librarians "hysterical" to creating funding to help the profession grow, and I would be more satisfied if their message was more consistent, and less geared towards its own political benefit.

Okay, now hold the phone! Has someone in the Bush administration called librarians "hysterical"?!

Of course, we have seen that the Bush administration has increased library funding, but calling librarians names? I have emailed Ms. Mercado to inquire about this, and will certainly post any details she is able to provide.

UPDATE: Andrea Mercado kindly sends a long, detailed explanation of her comment, explaining that she intended an "inference" by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. []

Interestingly, she refers to Ashcroft's use of the phrase "breathless reports and baseless hysteria" in his September 15, 2003 speech to the National Restaurant Association in Washington, D.C., rather than his reference to "charges of the hysterics" in a speech three days later in Memphis, Tennessee.

In fact, one searches either speech in vain for any occurance of the word "hysterical," in any context whatsoever. (We have seen one previous unsupported imputation of the word to Ashcroft himself.)

A final point is that John Ashcroft is not even a part of the (current, second) Bush administration, so that holding any comment of his—however unacceptable, however genuine—against the current administration seems most unfair.

Ashcroft is gone, and the victimized-librarian-American community misses him.

Travels with my box cutter

I traveled all the way to Italy and back with a box cutter in my purse.
I'm not proud of it. I just forgot it was there. Easy to do. I haven't really cleaned out my purse since the Reagan administration--no, make that the Nixon administration.

I have arthritis in my hands, so I carry a box cutter to open those little cellophane packets of crackers and breadsticks they give you in restaurants. Very handy. Somehow it got through the metal detector--both ways. Must be some really crappy form of metal. If I remember rightly, the thing cost a dollar at the hardware store.

It was finally discovered at the airport in San Suis Obispo, CA. It didn't set off the metal detector there--my keys did that. I wonder what kind of metal it is. Kryptonite?

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

My suggestion for a Starbucks coffee cup. By Edmund Burke

Why Be Jewish?

Miriam Gross has this to say:

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived.

My parents both came from secular, middle-class, professional German (and Russian) families and although ... they didn’t convert to Christianity, they were nevertheless assimilated members of German society. Indeed they believed that assimilation was the best answer to the Jewish ‘problem’. []

Despite these views my parents both emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s (they weren’t married at the time), very soon after the Nazis started introducing anti-Jewish legislation.[]
I was sent to an English boarding school where being Jewish was neither here nor there — it was never mentioned. []

Of course I was aware of the history of anti-Semitism, of Hitler and the Holocaust, but it seemed that these terrible things, however unforgettable, were over and done with. I learnt nothing about Judaism or about Jewish traditions and culture at school, any more than I did from my parents. I never once took part in a Jewish festival nor did I ever go into a synagogue.

So it is not surprising that, for most of my life, I have had almost no sense of Jewish identity. I feel much more English than Jewish. This must be true of hundreds of Jews with similar backgrounds.
However, just as my parents were forced by the Nazis to focus on their Jewishness, so the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world has made me much more conscious of being a Jew. Not that I have ever personally encountered anti-Semitism. But even in England ... there is more of it in the air; the anti-Semitism of the past, which I mistakenly thought had faded away, is coming back into the open.

So that I now sometimes find myself telling new acquaintances that I am Jewish for no other reason than to prevent the possibility of their letting drop some anti-Semitic remark. It would be less easy to do this when talking to Muslims who have been taught that Jews are devils....[]
In this new climate I feel more of a bond with other Jews than I ever have in the past — indeed it is a rather comforting fellow feeling, somewhat akin, perhaps, to belonging to a secret society. But no one would wish to acquire a sense of identity based on the negative fact of other people’s prejudices. It’s true that many Jews, perhaps most, have been shaped by traditional Jewish religion and culture, but it would be spurious for me to claim a part in experiences which I don’t share.



•

Coincidentally, I just returned from Purim services. Purim is a joyful holiday, when children dress up in costumes and people give little gifts of food, and also donate money to charity. It celebrates the triumph of Queen Esther and her cousin Mordechai over enemies who wanted to kill all the Jews. We used a little book full of Purim songs, pictures,and prayers. But in an afterword by Jacob Neusner, this sentence occurred:

Purim was invented to remind Jews that they always have enemies.

It is a shame that Miriam Gross knows nothing about the traditions and customs of Jews, if only to be able to reject them intelligently. There are some beautiful things in Judaism.

Sideways: the book

I haven't yet managed to see the movie, but I got the book at the library. What lame writing--scarcely a noun appears that is not shackled to an adjective, like a convict handcuffed to a policeman. An occasional verb is unaccompanied by the chaperone of an adverb, but not many. A sample:

Something caught his attention and he slowly lifted his head over the menu. ...a tall , strikingly beautiful woman with brunette

hair cascading over broad shoulders, in an eye-catching black cocktail dress...

A little more:

Their tiny tasting room was a ramshackleroadside barn, broken at both ends by enormous sliding doors....It was a refreshing change from the sterility of most tasting rooms, and an unpreprossessing rebuke to the tawdry excesses of Fess Parker's vulgar estate

....

And yet again:

"The sun poured bright parallelograms of mote-swirling light through the venetian blinds of my rundown, rent-controlled house in Santa Monica..."

The net effect is that of a wagon clumping along on four square wheels. I suspect that they turned the movie script into a book, which never works for me. The dialogue is okay, but you just know it needs actors to flesh it out.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the pretentious wine talk.

Back to the library. Thank God I didn't shell out for this!

Robert Frost on the Fragility of Early Spring

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her first leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In honor of our--delayed!--Spring and Poetry Month, which I thought was March...but their website says it's April.

All the better--we have more than another month to leaf through our poetry books and revisit poets, great and minor, who we enjoy.

Hatemonger's Quarterly plans big bash, calls for suggestions

The crack young staff seems to lack imagination when it comes to party-planning:

There’s just one hitch. The Official Events Planning Team of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly”—God bless it—isn’t exactly chock-a-block with precocious talent. In fact, its “Fog a Mirror” entrance exam hasn’t ensured that the team is made up of the best and brightest.

We mean, it’s not as bad as the CIA, but it certainly has its share of dim bulbs.

May we suggest a costume party? Everyone could come as somebody hatefulor just terminally annoying--Moqtada al-Sadr, Walter cronkite, etc. The list is endless.

Mick Jagger could come as himself. And bring the family, Mick.

Jeff Weiss may have been inspired by tribal leader

The Radio Equalizer suspects that the Nazi sympathizing teenager who went on a killing spree may have been inspired by a tribal leader:
z

A firestorm erupted across Canada in December 2002 when Dr. David Ahenakew told a reporter from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix in Saskatchewan that Hitler "fried six million Jews" to keep them from taking over Europe. “

"

That’'s why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they'’re doing. They'’re killing people in Arab countries,"” Ahenakew was quoted as saying.

Worst jobs--the historical approach

I have to admit they're worse than some of the jobs I've had.

Old headache for libraries; new headache for train stations

An old library problem resurfaces in train station.

airforce wife asks: Has the American Library Association Gone crazy?

The short answer: Yes.

Computers don't help kids learn

Computers are not an aid to children learning in school, but an impediment, according to a Royal Economic Society study, reported in the Telegraph, London;

The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.

[]

... the study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: "Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading."

Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University.

Their report also noted that being able to use a computer at work .. had no greater impact on employability or wage levels than being able to use a telephone or a pencil.

The researchers analysed the achievements and home backgrounds of 100,000 15-year-olds in 31 countries taking part in the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study in 2000 for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Pisa, to the British and many other governments' satisfaction, claimed that the more pupils used computers the better they did. It even suggested those with more than one computer at home were a year ahead of those who had none.

The study found this conclusion "highly misleading" because computer availability at home is linked to other family-background characteristics, in the same way computer availability at school is strongly linked to availability of other resources.

Once those influences were eliminated, the relationship between use of computers and performance in maths and literacy tests was reduced to zero, showing how "careless interpretations can lead to patently false conclusions"....

The more access pupils had to computers at home, the lower they scored in tests, partly because they diverted attention from homework....

Pupils tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching.

This seems to prove that throwing money at schools, the favored nostrum of the left, does not work. It has never worked, and never will.

The rights and wrongs of execution

Eugene Volokh approves the Iranian way of execution:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

And, yes, I know this aligns me in this instance with the Iranian government — but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in this instance the Iranians are quite correct.

UPDATE: I should mention that such a punishment would probably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. I'm not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it's cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.

[]
In any event, there's nothing unconstitutional about letting victims' relatives participate in the execution; it's only the use of cruel means that would require an amendment.

I know exactly how he feels. He's angry. So am I.
.
BUT: It is wrong to encourage people to enjoy cruelty. The Puritans banned bear-bating not for the sake of the bears but for the sake of the bear-baters. Cruelty degraded them. The enjoyment of torture is bad for a society. Another example: the behavior of guards in Nazi concentration camps. These guys might have been ordinary husbands, fathers, and churchgoers in other circumstances.

What happened to the cedars of Lebanon?

I always wondered if these ancient cedars were still there. Most were cut down:

As remote as they are, the cedars are not untouched by history. The grove we see today descends from an immense primeval forest of cedars and other trees such as cypress, pine and oak that once covered most of Mount Lebanon including part of its east facing slopes.
The Cedar is an historical entity mentioned often in the Bible and other ancient texts and it played an important part in the culture, trade and religious observances of the ancient Middle East. Serious exploitation of these forests began in the third millennium B.C., coastal towns such as Byblos.
Over the centuries, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians made expedition to Mount Lebanon for timber or extracted tributes of wood from the coastal cities of Canaan-Phoenicia. The Phoenicians themselves made use of the cedar, especially for their merchant fleets. Solomon requested large supplies of cedar wood, along with architects and builders from King Hiram of Tyre to build his temple. Nebuchadnezzar boasted on a cuneiform, inscription: "I brought for building, mighty cedars, which I cut down with my pure hands on Mount Lebanon". Prized for its fragrance and durability, the length of the great logs made cedar wood especially desirable. Cedar was important for shipbuilding and
was used for the roofs of the temples, to construct tombs and other major buildings.
The Egyptians used cedar resin for mummification, and pitch was extracted from these trees for waterproofing and caulking.
In the second century A.D., the Roman Emperor Hadrian attempted to protect the forest with boundary markers, most carved into living rock, others in the form of separate engraved stones. Today over 200 such markers have been recorded, allowing scholars to make an approximate reconstruction of the ancient forest boundaries. Two of these markers, carved in abbreviated Latin, can be seen at the American University of Beirut Museum. In the centuries after Hadrian, Lebanon's trees were used extensively as fuel, especially for lime burning kilns. In the Middle Ages mountain villagers cleared forests for farmland, using the wood for fuel and construction. The Ottomans in the 19th century destroyed much of the forest cover and during World War II British troops used the wood to build railroad between Tripoli and Haifa.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

An Englishman gives up eating

Simon Heffer is getting old:

As I reach my mid-forties I fear the time to give up eating is near, and I start to formulate a plan to retire from it in the not-too-distant future. I suspect it is only because my childhood was not blighted by twizzlers and nuggets that I have lasted this long. My retirement will be from recreational eating, and instead I shall stick to the necessary intake that makes for boring repasts but long life. This will also benefit those who dine with me, as none of them will die from passive eating. This may be a Sinatra-style retirement, with a long farewell tour and the odd comeback. However, it cannot happen until I have achieved my aim of eating in three three-star Michelin restaurants on the same day. My friend and fellow Spectator contributor Leo McKinstry has agreed to help me in this arduous project, which has the working title of ‘Two Fat Bastards’. Sadly, there are only three such eateries in England, and none of them does breakfast. So before we go to Bray for lunch and Gordon Ramsay for dinner, where do we get the bacon and eggs? Who serves the best breakfast in England?

I don't think he'll starve to death just yet.

New Jersey official disgraces herself

La Shawn Barber tells the sad tale.

Inside a Jet Engine

Fascinating.

Louise Brooks--Glamour to Spare

What a beauty!

God wants to get to know you better

A clever quiz.

Suicide Bomber Family Not Proud of Him

The family of Raed Banna denies their jubilation.

Apparently their son was a lover of the USA, something like Mohammed Atta:

Mr. Banna, the owner of a cement distribution company in Jordan, described his son as a great fan of the United States who fell in love with the country during an 18-month stay in Southern California, from 2000 to 2002. Mr. Banna showed a visitor a stack of photos taken in the United States, one of them showing his son straddling a Harley-Davidson, another showing him smiling in front of the World Trade Center before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

I think we just have to keep these people out of the US, particularly California. There must be something in the water that makes them crazy.

Courtesy of tinkerty tonk.

MSM is not biased

This article claims that there are more conservative bloggers than liberal ones.
That's because conservatives are better educated. They can count to eleven without taking their shoes off.

Celebration for an illustrious son

Al-Banna family in al-Salt received greetings for son Raed's martyrdom in an Iraqi resistance operation

Al-Banna family in al-Salt organized a martyr's wedding yesterday for their son Raed Mansur al-Banna who blew himself up in an explosive-laden car that he was driving in Baghdad in al-Hilla on March 1.

The father of the martyr proudly received the well-wishers in the tribe's reception hall in central Jada in the center of the city of Salt. The story of Raed is similar to that of many youth from the city that left for Jihad across the globe. Raed's appointment with martyrdom came on March 1, when he blew himself up inside an explosive-laden car that he was driving in al-Hilla in Baghdad that resulted in the killing of over 133 people, the majority of whom were Americans.

In our faith, we prefer our sons to become doctors. Via Natasha Hynes.

Tim Blair fisks Maureen Dowd

It's an unfair contest, really. Criticizing Dowd is like shooting fish in a barrel.

The last word on Hunter S. Thompson

Nothing more to be said.

Feeding the deserving rich

I went to the doctor for a checkup and inadvertently found out that the drug companies cater lucullan feasts for the physicians and staff.
Later, by coincidence, I had dinner with a doctor who brought a beautiful salad from work--she, too, apparently is enjoying a free lunch.

The irony of drug compamies feeding doctors, who can well afford to buy their own food, and then claiming that they spend most of their money on research somehow galls me. I'm fairly conservative, but I would respect Big Pharma more if they would give some of that food to soup kitchens.

To those who have many, more is given, and as for him who has nothing, what little he has is taken away.

Sorry for the sermonette.

Heather McDonald vs. Susan Estrich

Heather McDonald wipes the floor with Susan Estrich: Political pundit Susan Estrich has launched a venomous campaign ... against the Los Angeles Times’s op-ed editor, Michael Kinsley, for alleged discrimination against female writers.[]

Estrich’s insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female populations. Harvard President Larry Summers had had the temerity to suggest that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite decades of vigorous gender equity initiatives in schools and universities, may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Summers hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.

A feminist gadfly in the audience, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, infamously reported that she avoided fainting or vomiting at Summers’s remarks only by running from the room. And with that remarkable expression of science-phobia, a great feminist vendetta was launched. It has reduced Summers to a toadying appeaser who has promised to atone for his sins with ever more unforgiving diversity initiatives (read: gender quotas) in the sciences.[]

The Harvard rationality rout was a mere warm-up, however, to the spectacle unfolding in Los Angeles, brought to light by the upstart newspaper, the D.C. Examiner. USC law professor, Fox News commentator, and former Dukakis presidential campaign chairman Susan Estrich has come out as a snarling bitch in response to L.A. Times’s editor Michael Kinsley’s unwillingness to be blackmailed.

Read the whole thing.

Sinister organization encourages obesity

If you can't trust the Girl Scouts, who can you trust?

The IRA must go

The sooner the better.

Little girls want to be thinner

By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 08/03/2005) from the Telegraph, London


Girls as young as five are unhappy with their bodies and want to be thinner, according to a study which blames peer pressure in a child's early years at school.

Most girls thought that being slim would make them more popular, claimed the research in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. They would also have no hesitation in dieting if they gained weight. The study was conducted among five- to eight-year-olds in South Australia, but experts said last night that British children felt "paranoid" about their weight - partly because of the Government's anti-obesity message.

Dr Andrew Hill, of Leeds University Medical School, said research among more than 200 eight-year-olds showed a high awareness of the campaign against obesity. "Children have absorbed anti-fat messages loud and clear", he said. "To get people to listen about a condition, you talk it up, and we have got obesity on the health agenda....


"We want people who are overweight to do something about it. We don't want to terrorise youngsters."

The UK Eating Disorders Association said it was known that children as young as eight had been diagnosed with eating disorders and there may have been instances in younger children....

The latest research was conducted by academics at Flinders University among 81 girls. They were asked what they thought about their peers' level of unhappiness with their bodies and if they discussed body shape.

Almost half (46.9 per cent) wanted to be thinner, and 45.7 per cent said they would go on a diet if they gained weight. Among five-year-olds, 28.6 per cent wished they were thinner. After being shown pictures of a girl before and after putting on weight, 35 per cent of the girls thought her eating habits were to blame, and 28.6 per cent said she should go on a diet. Around 71 per cent of girls aged seven said they wanted to be thinner.

The report's authors said: "Body dissatisfaction and dieting awareness develop over the first two years of schooling."

Most of the girls believed that being thin would make them more likeable.

Assad's disastrous career choice

Bashar Assad is actually a trained eye doctor:

Bashar Assad
The evil moron who's running Syria.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 4:22 PM PT

Movies and comic books condition Americans to think in terms of the "evil genius," a dangerously insane but diabolically brilliant adversary who carefully and calculatingly plots to destroy the world. Think Lex Luthor attempting to obliterate the California coast, or the Joker scheming to poison Gotham, or the countless forgettable villains who have conspired to change the orbit of the moon in an effort to unleash destructive tidal waves that will destroy the Earth's major cities.

For better or worse, this archetype has spilled out of the realm of fantasy and into the real world, coloring how Americans view nonfiction villains as well as fictional ones. As David Plotz pointed out more than a year ago in Slate, "We always put a face to our misery. And every so often, we anoint some foreign malcontent as the arch-fiend responsible for all our global difficulties." Before Saddam, Osama. Before Osama, Saddam. And so on. But there's one problem with this worldview: In the real world, most evil men aren't geniuses. Instead, the real danger, more often than not, comes from evil morons.

Take Bashar Assad. Has there been a more disastrous geopolitical move in recent years than the 38-year-old Syrian president's decision to cast his lot with Saddam just prior to Iraq's stunning military defeat? Before the war, Syria had actually done quite a bit to improve its standing in the eyes of the United States.
...

Now it appears that Assad may have gambled all of that away. By foolishly providing moral and material support to Iraq during the war—and, the administration says, now by harboring high-ranking Iraqi officials—he's created an environment that makes it possible for a Democratic presidential candidate (Florida Sen. Bob Graham) to openly support war with Syria. Already some hawks are pointing to the tantalizing parallels between Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. Weapons of mass destruction? Check. Support for terrorism? Check. Repressive domestic intelligence services? Check. The comparisons go further: Both countries were ruled by tyrannical men who are not members of the ethnic majority. (Saddam was a Sunni who ruled over a largely Shiite country, and Assad is an Alawite who rules over a Sunni majority.) To top things off, Syria even has a Baath Party and a Republican Guard. No one expects war anytime soon, but Assad's stupidity has put the subject on the table.

When Assad came to power in June 2000, one week after the death of his father, Hafez Assad, many hoped that his ties to the West—the two years in London he spent training to become an ophthalmologist, his facility with English, his British-born Syrian wife—would make him a different kind of dictator. (Quote from Slate.)

Why didn't Assad choose a career as a lasik surgeon? He's be making $75,000 a day without all this tsuris.

What about the rubber suit?

Edouard Stern
(Filed: 05/03/2005)

Edouard Stern, who was shot dead on Tuesday aged 50 while wearing a rubber suit in his Geneva apartment, was a financier with a reputation as an abrasive and uncompromising deal-maker.


For some years Stern was heir-apparent to his father-in-law, Michel David-Weill, chairman and controlling shareholder of the investment bank Lazard Freres. A great-grandson of one of the firm's founders, David-Weill had run the tripartite group - which has operations in Paris, London and New York - since 1977; and in 1992 he brought in Stern to be a senior partner in Paris and New York.

Stern also became a significant shareholder in Lazard's holding companies, and a power struggle swiftly ensued between the two men. It was reported that Stern's aggressive manner led to his being ejected from two of the bank's senior committees. He departed angrily in 1997 to run his own investment fund, leaving a vacuum that was filled by the arrival of the Wall Street veteran Bruce Wasserstein as David-Weill's eventual successor.
The French press labelled Stern le gendre incontrôlable (the uncontrollable son-in-law).

The circumstances of his death remain unexplained: Stern led a private and somewhat mysterious life in Geneva, and was said to have told friends recently that he felt threatened. Theories in financial circles include the possible involvement of the Russian mafia.

Edouard Stern ... joined his family's private investment house, Banque Stern, in 1977.

Two years later, he ousted his own father from control of the business, which he sold to a Swiss bank in the late 1980s, though he remained chairman until 1998. After his departure from Lazard, Stern deployed his Geneva-based €600 million investment fund, Investment Real Returns, to become one of the most controversial players in the European corporate scene.

Typical of his style as an active shareholder was his intervention at Rhodia, the troubled French chemicals company, where he was co-opted as a director and promptly called for the group to be broken up to maximise shareholder value. Rhodia's annual general meeting in 2003 rejected his proposal to oust the chairman, and instead ejected Stern himself from the board.

He was also involved in recent ructions with Suez, the industrial conglomerate, and the Vivendi media group. In Britain, his name was connected in 1999 with an attempt to gain control of the troubled textile group Coats Viyella, in combination with Lord Rothschild and the company's former chairman Sir David (now Lord) Alliance. ...

Edouard Stern's only known hobby was a passion for game shooting and collecting guns.


I still want to know about the rubber suit.

The obit is from the ">Telegraph, London. They give you a good sendoff.

How to get through the next four years

In passing, I read the headline of a New York magazine issue. As a librarian, I am ashamed to admit that I cannot find the exact reference--too long ago. But the headline was, "How to get through the next four years." I would guess this refers to the Bush victory and the ensuing trampling on our civil liberties.

My suggestion for getting through the next four years is to read this book.

Journey into the Whirlwind (Helen and Kurt Wolff Books)
by Eugenia Ginzburg "The year 1937 began, to all intents and purposes, at the end of 1934-to be exact, on the first of December..." (more)

woes of a small town library director

As one who dabbles in everything but specializes in nothing, this job suited me. Of course, there were times when I found myself fishing potato chip bags from the commode, but they were few.

The patrons were awfully grateful if you did the least little thing for them, like find a book on the shelf. I also couldn't walk down Main Street (yes, there was a Main Street)without seeing and saying hello to several people. When I left there, I left behind a lot of friends.

We had our share of nutcases, too. A man we called the Admiral, whose car was full of papers, used to come in and compalin to everyone who would listen about his doctors, his ungrateful family, etc. He claimed his family only wanted to see him because of his money. I sympathesized with them. I didn't want to see him either.

Then there was the patron who would corner you and explain that the US had never dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. He also had some theories about how babies were born which I will not detail here. The first time you talked to him he sounded plausible, until he wandered off to Hiroshima, babies, etc. You did not talk to him a second time.
He used to buy all our used books. All of them. He needed them for his project, which was either to prove the existence of God or vice a versa, I forget which. What good "Your Future as a Dental Technician" would do for this project was never explained.

When I said all, I meant all.He stored them in a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. We had nightmares that he would die and leave them to us.

Then there was Mr and Mrs Grumpus. They never cared for the material on offer. Once Mr G told me, "You don't have the right books." I asked him what books he would like, and he replied, "I don't know, but these are not them."

Still, it was great fun. I had a great staff and a good board. The only thing lacking was enough to live on.

But that is a story for another day.

Terrorists are not having a good day.

Terrorists have their troubles, too,a> sarcaastic.

Sweden has troubles

Sweden is having problems with being open-minded, tolerant, and liberal:



Too bad!

Via Rant Wraith.

outworn words and phrases

I've got a little list of words and phrases that should be retired.

Political: Nazi, fascist, religious right, liberal (as an epithet), moral values, disenfranchise; and any mention whatever of Hitler in any way shape or form;

Slang of yesteryear: WHATEVER!!! Awful word, means nothing, belongs in the junkheap with 23 skidoo and rouged knees;

psychobabble: visioning; outside the box--hearing this one makes me want to crawl into the box and scream quietly; synergy; paradigm, especially new paradigm--if there are any old ones I've never heard of them, or any middle-aged ones either.

Friends, if you're out there, help me out here. Send me your own faves.

My mother the lawyer

I recently got a postcard reminding me that the anniversary of my mother's death is coming up. She's been gone more than 25 years now and I still miss her. She drove me crazy often while alive but her death left a hole that can't be filled. Still, we go on. I'm not saying I'm unhappy or anything; I just miss her.

Goldie Kanter Mayer was a combination of Yiddishe mama and firecracker lawyer. Sometimes she got the roles confused. She would mother her clients and fight for them. In return, they would mow her lawn or paint her house. They were hardbitten people, not a millionaire among them. Black people, and recent migrants (white)from West Virginia. They worshipped her, and she did not let them down. She loved, really loved, the law and being an attorney. She practiced law for at least forty years. She knew all the judges, court personnel and cops.

At her funeral, my uncle said, "They should have had Goldie's funeral at the first Baptist Church if they really wanted a big turnout."

She was honest and fearless. Any moral strengths I have can be attributed directly to her example.

France and the French

I've been to France twice, and I love it. I love the French language and the musical way it is spoken. It's almost like a song. The parts of the country I've seen are beautiful and Paris is like a dream. I went there from Barcelona, which is charming and delightful, but Paris is the big leagues, the Yankees compared with your minor league team.
As for the French, I've had nothing but superficial contacts with them, but they have all been courteous. My advantage, or handicap depending on the way you see it, is my ability to get lost or inability not to get lost. This makes for a lot of interactions with the natives. I always try to speak French to those I meet, and everyone has been kind and nice. After I leave, they may be splitting their sides, but they don't laugh in my face. Certainly nobody persecuted me for being American.

I like to go into a shop and be acknowledged with "bonjour, madame." A woman of a certain age does not like to be called, miss, honey, or dear. Madame is respectful and dignified.

As for their politicians, politics, or political views--not their strong point. Not now, not ever. But I can cut a little slack for the people who built Notre Dame.

Late night blogging

I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, when everyone in the world except me is asleep. It's a lonesome feeling. Then I log onto the Internet and find that the people out there in the blogosphere have been busy. People on the other side of the world are blogging--in Australia, New Zealand, Iraq, even California. The world outside my doors is still alive, reading and linking and going about their business. It seems magical to me, and reassuring.

It strikes me that it is extraordinarily difficult to write anything worth reading. It takes a lot of nerve to post anything. Who cares what I think?

Nobody. But maybe someday they will.

By the way, isn't Bill Moyers loathsome? He's actually a Baptist minister as well as a liar. Nasty things he says about Christians, things he himself knows are untrue. Southern liberals are the most pompous, self-righteous hypocrites in the world. Chief exhibit: Jimmy Carter.

ward churchill, again, also Eason Jordan

It turns out that WC isn't an Indian, not even an old and ugly one. It seems he just pretended to be one to get a job and get his name on the Official Victims List, so he cold say nasty things about dead people and insult their survivors.
It would have been prudent of him to keep his mouth shut--his cushy job would have been safe. I think tenure protects him---those are the rules. Whether he could be fired for misrepresenting his ethnicity I don't know. It looks like fraud to me.
Ward Churchill strikes again: he

l says that more 9/11s may be necessary. In fact, he considers the necessity of such attacks on our homeland a "no-brainer." This is what he told a publication called Satya:

One of the things I’ve suggested is that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary. This seems like such a no-brainer that I hate to frame it in terms of actual transformation of consciousness. ‘Hey those brown-skinned folks dying in the millions in order to maintain this way of life, they can wait forever for those who purport to be the opposition here to find some personally comfortable and pure manner of affecting the kind of transformation that brings not just lethal but genocidal processes to a halt.’ They have no obligation—moral, ethical, legal or otherwise—to sit on their thumbs while the opposition here dithers about doing anything to change the system. So it’s removing the sense of—and right to—impunity from the American opposition.

But Eason Jordan--he should definitely lose his job. He doesn't have tenure, just a lying mouth.

Loathsome old guy Ward Churchill

There's been a lot of hoo-ha re Ward Churchill these days. I won't recapitulate it, because he has already been done to a turn by the bloggers--no links, google him yourself if you have been living in a coal mine since 2004. Lileks has his picture.. and a brief reference.

< The blogosphere has been alight with the merry song stylings of Ward Churchill, whose act of promiscuous idiocy got him in trouble with those who don’t believe the janitors and busboys in the World Trade Center actually deserved their fate. About that nonsense I have nothing to say here, but I did note this. His picture:

I want to talk about the picture, not the man. I saw him on television, and the man looks like ten miles of bad road. That must be his high school yearbook picture.