All the correct connections

Tired of right and left, red and blue, well, try connecting correctly for a change to good solid thinking about some political issues, try

Friday Fronts: David Cole on Jack Goldsmith on The Daily Blague

and don't forget to try the PodCast.

Thawing out

Idling away the morning folding laundry and watching Iceman on AMC. Took my road bud back to his truck around six, came back home and took Pelé to school around seven, came back home again and began on the INet with The Solar Queen's new notebook, Compaq Presario C727, where the keyboard is just too small for my hands. On mine now, my laptop, Compaq Presario V6171CL, a bigger screen and a much larger and more comfortable keyboard. I don't think anyone truly understood the real meaning of "personal computer" until the advent of laptops, notebooks and handhelds or smartphones, they are for me truly an extension of my being. The physical devices themselves, my smartphone and my laptop are so personal, so known to me in their look and feel that they are like my shoes or my truck, they are in every sense mine and I am as uncomfortable using someone else's as I would be wearing someone else's shoes even if they were the same size and a proper fit. Iceman has been taken down now by The Solar Queen's preprogrammed recording of Democracy Now on Free SpeechTV with Amy Goodman. I'll dump Amy in a minute and probably hear about it later tonight but for now I just marvel at the marketing in play here with Amy's physical appearance and apparent left sided vagus nerve compression, she has all the signs of a mild case of Bell's Palsy to me. God forbid that she has Ramsey Hunt syndrome, not nice. Amy looks like a Mennonite or Amish woman in the privacy of her own room, plain straight unstyled hair, no visible makeup and certainly "plain dress". The content is not remarkable just the presentation format, image and marketing, it is all image and marketing. Style is everything they say, different styles for different marketing niches, I suppose. Where will all this fragmentation end or better yet lead us? Trent Lott is on now with video that was done on a cell phone or some lo res video but fairly high res audio device, it is noted in the upper right hand screen corner as " live on 26 Nov." Back to Iceman and soon back to my road truck to retrieve my own power adaptor for my laptop, I robbed The Solar Queen's just a moment ago to power up my laptop which had gone completely battery dead in "hibernate mode" since I last closed the lid on the road truck probably the day arrived here back on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. As I say, I have no one except Pelé to simply to talk with and he does a fine job within the limits of his small but ever expanding and developing realm. I try not to stretch him too far too soon. I suppose I talk to a lot of people daily but all within the bounds of the particular social context, fuel desk clerks, counter clerks at the food shops, drivers on the radio, my company's administrative staff on the phone, my shipper's and receiver's personnel on the phone and in person. Sort of an "open prison" I'm in it seems. Well, enough I'm sure, you have a life. This is in many ways the same stream of consciousness, the conversational monologue, if you will, reduced to writing that I was so prone to write for you three or four years ago but it seems more readable now. Not much better content but more readable. Perhaps we are on the way to really learning to write readable interior monologues for a larger and more organized narrative, a short story perhaps. But only perhaps, so many things stand in the way, mood, my personal mood and the time remaining in a lifetime not being the least of the obstacles.

I'm going to copy this to Quezon, if only to provoke an email conversation. I have other email to answer from him and will do the answering by one thirty when I have to leave to pick Pelé up from school. Pelé could, I suppose, ride the bus but we have fallen into the habit of my taking him and picking him up when I'm at home and able.

I feel a certain kinship with poor old Charlie, the defrosted Neanderthal, in Iceman. How long have I been thawed out now, thawed out in terms of relationships, loving or physical - it really doesn't matter at this point, physical will do - with other humans of my kind? What are my kind, I wonder?

Quezon has included in the email that I need to answer this morning a very well worded rant about his dissatisfaction, and the general dissatifaction of many educated Filipinos, with his country and culture. I will ask if I can excerpt that part and foward it to BoozWha for his comments to both of us.

Have a pleasant day. My phone is on and with me. Call, write or come by.

Tricks of the trade

How do I send email to someones cell phone?

Well, Bubba, here's how, at least for a number of CSP's that I've used successfully.

You have to know your recepient's CSP and then address the email to their "10digitphonenumber @ CSP MessagingPortal".

For example, for a Verizon cell phone whose number is 7135551212 use 7135551212@vtext.com.

Verizon: @vtext.com
Former AT&T customers: @mmode.com
Sprint: @messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: @tmomail.net
Nextel: @messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: @cingularme.com
Virgin Mobile: @vmobl.com
Alltel: @alltelmessage.com OR @message.alltel.com
CellularOne: @mobile.celloneusa.com
Omnipoint: @omnipointpcs.com
Qwest: @qwestmp.com

Remember, any charges incured and the way messages are
delivered and displayed depends on the wireless device and service
plan.

How cozy

How cozy and it will be that way for quite sometime in fact for evermore it would seem

2. Supporting the Republic of Iraq in its efforts to combat all terrorist groups, at the forefront of which is Al-Qaeda, Saddamists, and all other outlaw groups regardless of affiliation, and destroy their logistical networks and their sources of finance, and defeat and uproot them from Iraq. This support will be provided consistent with mechanisms and arrangements to be established in the bilateral cooperation agreements mentioned herein. 3. Supporting the Republic of Iraq in training, equipping, and arming the Iraqi Security Forces to enable them to protect Iraq and all its peoples, and completing the building of its administrative systems, in accordance with the request of the Iraqi government. ~read more~

I try to restrain myself from drinking this early in the morning but this morning I just might relent. Won't someone, please, rid us of these troublesome NeoCons! And, the sooner the better. Where are Lee Harvey, James Earl or Charles when we really need them or is that just the way crazy people do things? Why surely no one would go out and create a stable of the unstable just in case no one might need to push them over the edge. Pushed of course in the right direction over the right edge. Well, let's not pursue this line of speculation lest the professional speculators send their cretinous goons out to talk to us, eh.

Trouble, we ain't got no trouble. None!

Sidiki Conde lost the use of his legs at the age of 14. In Guinea, where he was raised, the handicapped are looked at with suspicion and fear. In an effort to fit in with his culture, Sidiki learned to dance on his hands. He now performs as a dancer and teaches other wheelchair users to do the same. This pod is set in Miami, Florida and follows several people in wheelchairs as they prepare to perform in public. ~read & see more~

Doesn't hurt my eyes any, no not at all.

Now the heart, well, that remains to be seen. I would rather sail through a storm or two than stand on the pier. Every storm comes between long periods calm seas and fair winds. Looks like a pair of very rosy sunsets to me. With any luck there will be no red dawn, least wise nothing we can't handle. Ain't that right there, Quezon, ain't that right? And, me mate, Quezon, he said,"Try oranges." Funny fellow, Quezon, perhaps too much Curacao in his coffee lately. And so, Quezon and I have put out to test the seas again. How does it go

If you smile at me
I will understand
'Cause that is something
Everybody everywhere does in the same language

Something about wooden ships on the water as I recall, very free and easy I believe it went. Oh yes,

Go take a sister, then, by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away, where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don't need us

And it's a fair wind
Blowin' warm out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I'll set a course and go

I'm sure David will forgive me this lifting, he got it so right, so very free and easy.

Such a sweet sound to my ears

Aggies top Longhorns!

Tidbits

From The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Catch Me, I’m Falling
By SAMUEL I. SCHWARTZ
Published: August 13, 2007
THE horrific collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis was but one more in the history of infrastructure failures, and I’m afraid it will be old news soon. In 1967, during the busy Christmas shopping season, the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed, plunging scores of people into the river and killing 46. During my nearly 20 years as an engineer with the New York City Department of Transportation, I witnessed ~read more~

"Money is like manure, it should be spread around." - Brooke ( Russell Kuser Marshall ) Astor, 30Mar1902-13Aug2002. How do you properly list all the previous surnames w/o a narrative?

Jonis Agee, author of TheRiver Wife, related to James?


From Early Warning
Posted at 08:43 AM ET, 08/14/2007
Partisan Warfare
In the coming weeks, as Congress and the American public prepare for the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus on the progress of the surge in Iraq, we'll hear a lot about the value of "professional" military advice. As President Bush has said, Washington ought not substitute "the opinions of politicians for the judgments of our military commanders."
But are military officers, specifically flag officers (generals and admirals), also political partisans? Increasingly -- and sadly -- they are. More important, the brass is profoundly "political," which is to say that its recommendations and decisions are hardly ever made for purely tactical or operational reasons....continue >>

From The Biscuit Report
Think about that for a minute. There are people in this country who believe, when hired to screen out naughty language and naked people, that non-profane criticism of George Bush somehow qualifies. We live in a country where it's possible to have such a "misunderstanding".Bravo, Republicans! Bravo! Why make it an actual crime to criticize the Dear Leader when you can just convince people to censor the criticism as a matter of course?

All I need now is a scene to plant this dialog within

Someone asked me recently at party, "Do you believe in Bush?" Not wanting to start a political conversation, I coyly replied, "Busch? No, God, no! Don't you have Miller Lite? Or, Killian's Red, that would be great," while I tensed with angst not knowing if they would take the bait and go to the bar or press me further. They took me for drunk and wandered away. Then I felt a warm surge of relief wash over me like the surf, "Believe in Dubbya? Believe? George W Bush? Really! Certainly not! Believing in or believing Dubbya is so ludicrous it makes believing in God seem rational," and I felt much better.

That dialog is largely stolen and reworded from Ann Lamott in one of the last chapters of Plan B: FurtherThoughts on Faith. Ms Lamott reminds me of Laurie Beth Jones who brought me Jesus in Blue Jeans: A Practical Guide to Everyday Spirituality but Ann is far more accessible to me. Laurie and Ann and I could talk in the church lobby but only Ann and I could go out and have a beer - I would be the only one drinking, Ann quit - and talk about faith and fucking. Admirably for a committed Christian Ms Lamott despises GWB and weaves this desperation and her wrestling with the resulting depression throughout Plan B where she deals, in language appropriate to the the topic and her mood at the time, with her daily battles in life and how her particular faith has sustained and strengthened her. Lamott is never preachy and though you might not agree with her you will, like I have, want her on your Lunch Dates I'd Love to Have list. I suppose that I should disclose that I listen to most books and have listened to unabridged versions of the two linked here. Both Laurie and Ann have soothing voices for the road but Ann just draws me in when she recounts how the apostles must have felt in the upper room on Holy Saturday, "... in a room filled with clouds of cigarette smoke I see some really wigged out guys drinking a bit of wine and thinking to themselves, 'boy are we really fucked!'"

Joni and the Cheshire Cat

Warm as ice, cold as fire.
Bright as night, dark as day.
I've looked at
the Cheshire Cat that way.
But, still somehow
it's cat's illusions I have known,
I really don't know cat's at all.

Is it what it seems
the Cheshire Cat
the smile
the smile in my dreams?



Watch for Bubba meets the Zen Shrimper in Bubba's Bait & Sushi, coming soon.

I'm back

Nearly a year since I've done any regular work here. Sometimes I feel like Amy, who commented on DB

Wow, how earnest and clever I was. And how utterly moribund Biscuit is. Every day I think to post on it, and then someone cries or yells "MOM, I need a box cutter and some glue!" and the moment is lost...

about not being able to tend to her blog because of her other responsibilities.

I am in Knoxville, TN since about eight my time, Central Daylight, last night when I fueled up and parked the truck to wait for my Monday morning delivery. It's a bit tight here at one of the older and smaller Pilot truck stops on the west side of Knoxville along IH-40. After I fueled up I had to circle back out in the street, come back in the parking lot, and then I waited for another driver to squeeze his fifty three foot dry van into one of the only open parking spaces directly behind the fuel islands, and then he very kindly got out of his truck and "spotted me" to back into the space next to his truck. There is just barely enough room to do it, pulling up through the fuel island and backing up to "hit the hole" puts you within inches of several obstructions, various curbs which bruise the side walls of your tires, the fuel island pump, trucks in the adjoining parking spaces and all the while other trucks are backed up in the parking lot coming in to fuel and waiting for you to park. Once I had gotten my truck settled into the space I got out to thank the driver, Anthony, who helped me. Anthony and I talked about trucking and all manner of things standing in the parking lot from around nine Knoxville time until nearly midnight with one break to buy soft drinks. It's a solitary business this over the road trucking and personal face to face conversation of any merit does not come often nor last long. Last night was a very unusual occurrence, generally such conversations last only minutes and are pure ritual courtesy but in this case we hit it off for some reason. I know Anthony lives in Chicago on the lakefront downtown with his wife and children, some of his past work history back to Seattle, WA and that he is originally from a small town in Mississippi and he has a similar grasp of my life. It turns out that we are both veterans of the US Navy though our service dates a very far apart, he enlisted in 1989 and I enlisted in 1967. I never asked for Anthony's last name nor he mine and likely we will never see each other again, but if we do meet again, there will certainly be the basis for another friendly conversation of some depth. Anthony and I are both from the South. Perhaps it's a Southern thing not asking for nor giving a last name when you spend some time with another person in a chance meeting, it felt very familiar and comfortable to me. We both agree that cornbread has no white flour nor sugar, only coarse ground yellow corn meal, bacon fat, salt, soda and buttermilk. And, we both recalled having regular family meals, as children, of ham hocks, navy beans, sliced purple onions, chow-chow and, of course, cornbread. All this is generally served with chilled buttermilk, ice water or sweet tea, your choice and sometimes you have all three yourself in the course of the meal. I can't recall in detail all that we talked about standing in the parking lot for nearly three hours but it ranged from the best routes around the traffic in the major areas of congestion to parenting practices.

Now after a mile and half round trip by foot along the Turkey Creek Greenway to the Wal-Mart Super Center I'm blessedly back in my air conditioned truck where the air is down in the high seventies and relatively dry, outside at five this evening it is still in the high nineties and even though the NWS shows the relative humidity at under fifty percent it's still seems "wet" outside to me. Perhaps lumping my week's supply of groceries back to the truck just made me work a little harder than usual or it is just damp along Turkey Creek. You don't realize what a half gallon of milk, eight packs of yogurt, a half gallon of orange juice, a half pound of pepper cheese, a pound of crackers, two rolls of paper towels, a half dozen bananas, four apples and a few other odds and ends really weighs until you pack it three quarters of a mile over the blazing asphalt back to your house. Now it's time to attend to some tedious financial issues just like last year at this time. And then, naptime until about six local time tomorrow morning when I'll set out to cover the last six miles to my destination. Living in forty eight square feet is interesting especially when you realize that you have to get a bed, first and foremost, into that six by eight foot area. But the adjoining office is only a single pace away and it's a spacious thirty two square feet, four by eight feet, with a very nice picture window view on three sides, high up where you can see what's going on. Three years off the road and now a full year back on the road. Yes, I'm back.

What Really Matters

Did you ever want somebody back?
Not necessarily
in the way
that you might have had them before?
And, this is really sorry language , this had
this verbal talisman of possession.
But anyway, let's just suppose
that you want to revive a relationship
with somebody.

And,
so you start to chat 'em up
and maybe even direct them to
right here.
Well, if you're here,
this is where you're supposed to be.

Did I wound you?
Uh huh.
Deeply?
Yaep.
Am I sorry?
Uh huh.
Does that change anything?
Nope.

But, what's important,
I think,
is that somehow
my behavior
can demonstrate to you,
hopefully over an extended period of time,
that the faith and trust that you once placed in me was not misguided.
And,
that within whatever limits you would like to set for any further interaction,
I am prepared, as well as committed,
to perform.
Perform to your satisfaction.

And, that's
what really matters.

Dreaming of Connections

Reading in Julian Barnes's "The Past Conditional" in this week's The New Yorker

Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, "I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel."

I'm drawn back to a novel which takes the same imagery to begin as Barnes uses to close

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

and I wonder if that is a good enough reason to remember Jailbird and Vonnegut, wonder if such a connection is of any value, wonder if I shouldn't be able to place Kurt is some larger context and in some more particular relationship to the larger cannon of writing that is thought to be important. Then I think, "What the Hell, self abuse is good enough." Especially after having read Oran Pamuk talking about writers

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

in "My Father's Suitcase" just a few pages later in the same issue of The New Yorker. Perhaps it is all self abuse, innumerable writers pleasuring themselves spewing their words out on page after page in medium after medium.

If as I heard WFB say once eyeing the stopwatch at the top of his clipboard while interviewing an author, "If an unexamined life is not worth living then certainly I'm a corpse." and knowing fullwell that WFB intensely examines his life and that he's just not telling anyone about it, perhaps not even himself, then perhaps writers are no more or less alive or worthwhile than others they just live and measure worth differently. Thinking now about how the NOW, the current moment, is the point of tangency between God and Man, the best taste of the infinite that can be had, I settle back into the hot water of my bath, open the tap for a bit more and read Pamuk's paragraph again thinking of the writers I know, RJK, Migs, Elisabeth and Vito Esterno wondering how writers might be like painters. If writers are painters, then I am a house painter, eh? Or perhaps a madman scraping a bit of color off everyone else's canvass and saving it on my pallette for some grand canvass of my own, a grand canvass which has as yet not even a charcoal cartoon.

Yo soy un conductor, yo soy un viejo Tejano gringo puro. ¿Y, yo soy un pinturista? No se.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be looking for a place to park my truck in Chicago as close to the Dan Ryan and West 51st St as possible until I can get it unloaded at eight o'clock Tuesday morning and all this will be a dream.

Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood.

... non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and al-Qaida have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to fry. If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a U.N. seat and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of use to such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and Lebanon is. They act locally but they think globally.

And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's Christians may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to note the numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent weeks who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his (Shiite) Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew used to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe a few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire populations are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any means, but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which they're nominally citizens.

Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39 percent of Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent consider themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been writing about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of 2002: Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.

That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood.

-read more-

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST, August 13, 2006

Think well, write well, it's always worth your time.

Think well, write well, it's always worth your time.  Tony Blair must have an outstanding group of researchers and speech writers. In speaking recently about the current conflict in Lebanon Blair said in part

It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding. But it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities. But once that has happened, we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us. There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region.

To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation, that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. My argument to you today is this: We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.

The point is this. This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind.

9/11 in the US, 7/7 in the UK, 11/3 in Madrid, the countless terrorist attacks in countries as disparate as Indonesia or Algeria, what is now happening in Afghanistan and in Indonesia, the continuing conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, it is all part of the same thing. What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? My point is that this war can't be won in a conventional way. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative. Doing this, however, requires us to change dramatically the focus of our policy.

Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalize the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win.

What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.

The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11th, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world.

The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change," it was "values change." What we have done therefore in intervening in this way is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.   -read more-

The British prime minister delivered this speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on August 1.

A speech well worth anyone's time to read and ponder.

 

Taxing thoughts

A friend reviews Little Miss Sunshine today leading me to compare Mary Lynn Rajskub and Renee Zellweger, adding them both to the "Lunch Dates I'd Love" list I begin to wonder who said, "Wanting to meet the artist because you like the art is like wanting to meet the goose because you like paté."  A woman I think from around here somewhere, a novelist, passed on I believe.  Then I begin to ponder why I want

... when a grad student with whom he fell in love fell in love with the second-best Proust scholar

in my friend's review to read

... when his lover, a grad student, dumped him for the second-best Proust scholar

Taxing my brain again when what I really need to do is figure and pay my Federal and State income taxes for 2005.  August 14th draws near.  The weather here today is miserable, there's a real chance taxes might get paid today but who did say that about art, artists and geese?   Ankle deep ponds of last night's rain litter the gray streets during the sunrise walk this morning with gray overcast skies nearly hugging the ground.  Damp, close, windless, a bit more heat and New Orleans or Houston would come to mind.  Ancient gray Schnauzer snoring at my feet now.  Out the window green peppers and clusters of red cherry tomatoes tugging the vines down to where the Westie can graze.  A dog who eats tomatoes, who knew?  Pick tomatoes and peppers or pay taxes?  The morning is young still.  How many taxes could a pepper picker pay, if a pepper picker paid ... 

 

Which is better

a dog who active verb ...   or   a dog that active verb ...

which is correct, does one or the other convey a different meaning?  If there is a rule, can we break it to get a different meaning?  Is it like Uncle Sid's middle aged housekeeper riding along Westheimer from downtown  between Louisiana and Montrose Blvd for the first time, fresh off the plane from Guatemala going to meet her new jefé, eyeing the crowd on both sides of the street saying softly to me, "Mira, Jorge, los femininas.", using the contrast of gender between article and noun to avoid the vulgar M word?  Can we cross languages like that and keep the mood, keep the meaning?  Subtlety, subtlety, all is subtlety except penalties and interest.

 

Taxing thoughts.

Surf's Up! Who's got that coin from the fish's mouth?

Surf's Up!, a call that always interferes with work. Work will always be there but good surf comes and goes.


A nice start from memeorandum a political news summary site with some interesting sister sites.


A few nice runs from the Washington Post, one from three years ago, one from this week

Hussein's Baghdad Falls

U.S. Forces Move Triumphantly Through Capital Streets, Cheered by Crowds Jubilant at End of Repressive Regime

By Anthony Shadid

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 10, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, April 9 -- Swept aside by U.S. troops who drove through the streets of Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein's government collapsed today, ending three decades of ruthless Baath Party rule that sought to make Iraq the champion of a modern Arab world but left a legacy of fear, poverty and bitterness.

As U.S. Army troops occupied the west ... -read more-

'Waiting to Get Blown Up'

Some Troops in Baghdad Express Frustration With the War and Their Mission

By Joshua Partlow

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 27, 2006; Page A01

"How did it become, 'Well, now we have to rebuild this place from the ground up'?" Fulcher asked.

He kept talking. "They say we're here and we've given them freedom, but really what is that? You know, what is freedom? You've got kids here who can't go to school. You've got people here who don't have jobs anymore. You've got people here who don't have power," he said. "You know, so yeah, they've got freedom now, but when they didn't have freedom, everybody had a job."

-read more-

Very tubular from Time

World

Condi in Diplomatic Disneyland

Viewpoint: The Secretary of State tells the Lebanese that the blood they're seeing represents the birth of a brave new order. She's convincing nobody

By TONY KARON , Posted Wednesday, Jul. 26, 2006

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faced a thankless, all but impossible task in trying to sell the Arab world on the U.S. policy of delaying a cease-fire so that the Israeli military can continue its anti-Hizballah campaign. But her case was hardly helped when she explained that the violence that has already killed more than 400 Lebanese and turned more than a half million into refugees represents the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." Phrases like that and her rejection of the call for an immediate cease-fire on the grounds that "whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East" carry a revolutionary ring that scares the hell out of America's allies in the region. It was revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao, after all, who rationalized violence and suffering as the wages of progress, in the way a doctor might rationalize surgery painful, bloody, even risking the life of the patient, but ultimately necessary. Social engineering is not surgery, however, and its victims find little comfort in the homilies of its authors.

-read more-

One final run from an obscure SciFi author

When there is no real hope, we must mint our own. If the coin be counterfeit it still may be passed.
- Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light, 1968

Why am I having trouble sending tax money in?

OK, W-2's, 1099R's, 1009I's, bank statements, 2004 Intuit passwords, coffee ...

Ready, begin, www.turbotax.com. Who's got that coin from the fish's mouth?

Gets my attention

In Western literature, the form of the novel is coincidental with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the late seventeenth century, and this is why, for its first century, the novel is all about birth, possible orphanhood, the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career, and society. Robinson Crusoe. Tom Jones. Tristram Shandy.

To locate a beginning in retrospective time is to ground a project (such as an experiment, or a governmental commission, or Dickens's beginning to write Bleak House) in that moment, which is always subject to revision. Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that either is fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time. And so the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth, the exfoliation from a beginning: in the time from birth to youth, reproductive generation, maturity. Every culture offers and circulates images of what has been wonderfully called the dialectic of incarnation, or in FranÁois Jacob's phrase, la logique du vivant. Again to give examples from the history of the novel (the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex image of ourselves that we have), there is the bildungsroman or novel of education, the novel of idealism and disappointment (L'Education sentimentale, Les Illusions perdues), the novel of immaturity and community (like George Eliot's Middlemarch, which the English critic Gillian Beer has shown was powerfully influenced by what she calls Dar- win's plots for the patterns of generation that structure this great novel of nineteenth-century British society). Other aesthetic forms, in music and painting, follow similar patterns.

But there are also exceptions, examples of deviation from the overall assumed pattern to human life. One thinks of Gulliver's Travels, Crime and Punishment, and The Trial, works that seem to break away from the amazingly persistent underlying compact between the notion of the successive ages of man (as in Shakespeare) and aesthetic reflections of and on them. For it bears saying explicitly that both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness, by which I mean that what is appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa. You will recall, for example, the stern biblical observation that to everything there is a season and a time, to every purpose under the heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die, and so on: "wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? ... All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean ...  -read more-

The text above likely tests the limits of fair use and was lifted from the first chapter of On Late Style by Edward Said, posted on The New York Times at First Chapters.  An NYT registration is required to follow the links.  I may have bitten off more than I can digest here but what I've read here will move me toward buying the book.  There is, I'm sure, a vast literature in the history of the novel of which I'm completely ignorant save for Jane Smiley and there, as is indicative of my depth, I have read only the review linked here.  I encourage your recommendations in the area to increase my resonance.

 

L'esprit de l'escalier

Mes amis,

Remorse, regret, recrimination are they of any value at all in this party we call life?  Such thoughts haunt me today.  Let the rough side drag, eh?  Ditch the past and run with the moment!

Perhaps, all I really need is a nice ride with the top down to the Bolivar Ferry and back, eh?

Un jour nous serons victorieux au dessus des escaliers, n'est-ce pas?

Le maître de l'esprit de l'escalier,

George

Something worthwhile

Finally, from the daily stream corporate email something worthwhile

On July 25th, 2006, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies. If you have a cell phone, whether company owned or not, you will start to receive sale calls, and YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS. To prevent these calls you should do the following to get your number on the National DO NOT CALL List:

1) Call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time.
It blocks your number for five (5) years.

Or,

2) On the Internet, log onto: http://www.donotcall.gov/ and follow the on-screen 3 step instructions completely.
Again, it blocks your number for five (5) years.

I would, and you can, register any phone number, not just cell phone numbers, using this information.

Enjoy!

Elephants, Snakes, Blue Candles and Red Feathers

Elephant repellent can be anything you like from the whimsical to the outrageous, from crossing your fingers to an excuse for public flatulence. As long as there are no elephants in view or recalled in recent memory by the audience any action serves to repel elephants. Generally the audience is young and gullible. Snake repellent works about the same way as elephant repellent. Always looking out for an elephant you might miss the snake and get bitten, while always looking down for the snake you might get squashed instead. Looking out and listening for elephants and snakes is hard work but having a repellent is much eaiser. Elephant and snake repellent is great fun but only if it is facetious. Let's go back a few years and search Wikipedia - admittedly not the best reference source but a convenient one - for some recent elephants and snakes

World Trade Center bombing on February 26,1993 in New York City; The Oklahoma City bombing on April 19,1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building; Centennial Olympic Park bombing on July 27, 1996 in Atlanta; The September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.; Anthrax Attacks in the United States during the Fall of 2001 following the 9/11 event; Bali Nightclub bombing on October 12, 2002; Beltway Sniper Attacks during October 2003; Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004; London bombings of the subways and buses on July 7 and 21, 2005.

Just a few of the major elephants and snakes in the last thirteen years or so. Some are solitary snakes that would have been hard to detect, some are either dens of snakes or herds of elephants, depending on your point of view, that should have been at least partially detected. Wikipedia has even more comprehensive lists and I'm sure better sources like LexisNexis and others could reveal a mountain of events that could be termed snakes or elephants in the context of risk here. There just seem to be snakes and elephants everywhere. Damn! Maybe we live in a jungle. Who knew?

Real threats, real risks if you will, require serious avoidance measures. Risk avoidance requires risk detection and assessment. Detection is the real problem and precedes assessment and avoidance. Quine and Wittgenstein are correct, no matter how much they are ignored, how the question is framed is crucial to getting an answer, a real answer. No one wants to get bitten by a snake or squashed by an elephant. But, poor detection methods, poor ways to see snakes and elephants, ways that are very high tech but have very poor discrimination, ways that generate mountains of data about all the animals in the jungle but are very poor at unambiguously finding snakes and elephants or even traces of them, ways like the NSA's data mining of communications records, are in the last analysis nothing more than snake and elephant repellent. 'Who is talking to who?' may not be the best question, especially when the question is more like 'who is everyone talking to?'

Until the NSA either publicly fails, God forbid, in the face of another catastrophic event or publicly succeeds in foiling such an event the current methods will serve only to set public opinion against responsible and productive detection work. Maybe, just maybe, Stephen Kappes return to the CIA as the second in command under General Haden will produce more real detection and less in the way of snake and elephant repellent. I wonder what General Alexander will do now at NSA, will he continue the mining?

Maybe trying not to attract snakes and elephants unnecessarily would be better than believing that the current actions have repelled all the snakes and elephants. It's been nearly a year now since any snakes or elephants caused any trouble. Let's sift and chain another terabyte of communications records this week and see if the elephants and snakes stay away, eh? I hear they're lighting the blue candles and using the red chicken feathers this month in New Orleans too. Nope, no elephants, no snakes, no storms here, not a one. Anyone got any more rum, my hurricane is getting a bit light?

More light reading on snakes and elephants, feathers and candles

The NSA is on the line -- all of them

LISTENING IN

Big Brother Is Listening

Wiretaps: How to Fix FISA

How the NSA Does "Social Network Analysis"

Blue Candles, Red Feathers

Mo rum, pleeze