Subtrahend

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Canada's New PM Very Busy


· If you visit Paul Martin's weblog ("Paul's Blog"), you'll see that he hasn't been wasting valuable work time playing around at the computer. The latest entry is from October 19th. In general, there's not a lot there.
It's not a bad idea for politicians to have a website, at least, but this seems a bit informal, all this "Personal Paul", "Paul in the Media", "Where Paul Stands". It's Land O' Paul. He should rein it in before it gets out of hand: PaulNotes. PaulPicks. PaulRants. Etc.
Whatever you do, don't confuse his site with this apparently unrelated site.

 — posted by P | at 11:04 PM | |

Some Trouble?


· According to this story in The Mirror, President Bush and PM Blair have not been getting on so well:
The two leaders have fallen out over plans for the reconstruction of the country and the heavy-handed action of American troops against the civilian population.

And the rift has been deepened by a Washington ban on a proposed morale-boosting visit by the PM to British troops in Iraq during the Christmas holiday.

...

Mr Blair and Mr Bush have had at least three phone conversations during the past seven days which Whitehall officials described as "increasingly terse".
How did Whitehall officials come to be saying that? They don't have to say anything, surely. If the business of the ban on a Christmas visit by Blair is true, it's, well, awfully strange. (Via Suburbanguerrilla)

 — posted by P | at 9:02 PM | |

In and Out of Banach Spaces


· The noted scientist Dr. K. explains that there are probably a thousand planets out there which could probably sustain life, probably, but probably these life-forms would probably not be like us.
" ... probably drivel and probably ignorant nonsense"
That is probably drivel and probably ignorant nonsense, because probably they would be just like us in every respect. And probably they would send us a note saying they were going to be dropping by soon and would we be in? And they would land, and we could take them around to see things—our monuments, our parks—and then have them back for some wine and cheese. We would probably have little to say to each other, however, and everyone would sit around grinning uneasily. Finally it would be time for them to be getting back, and we would go out and admire their space ships. "Oh," they would say, "but you guys probably have much better space ships!" And we would say, "Oh no, not at all. We don't really do much travelling these days. Although we have been to the moon." "The moon?" they would say, "Oh, you mean—your moon. Oh yes. Sure. Why gad about when you've a lovely planet right here?" And they would look around appreciatively. And we would all probably shuffle our feet and finally they would get into their space ships, and we would wave to them and say "Safe home! Thanks again for coming all this way!" And they would say, over the roar of their engines, "No, no—thank you for having us! And if you're ever out our way—come by! You know where we are now!" "Yes, yes", we would say, "absolutely!" "Promise?!" "Of course!!" And we would mean it, too—we would probably enjoy going out there on a visit. But what's the point?

 — posted by P | at 4:51 PM | |

The "Future" will be in "Quotation Marks"


· Fred Q. was an actor whom you will have seen in comparatively small roles on late night television. Typically he is breaking into an office after hours looking for something. He goes over to the filing cabinet, puts the flashlight in his teeth to facilitate his search.
"Within seconds he draws the necessary folder from the cabinet."
Within seconds he draws the necessary folder from the cabinet. The third sheet of paper in it tells him all he needs to know: so it was a set-up all along! McQaid was just playing for time and had Schaeffer killed to make it look like an accident.

Suddenly the lights go on. And what do we see?

Fred Q. was in several musical comedies: he was the irrepressible but less attractive friend of the romantic lead who consoles the girl when she thinks she has been rejected. He never seems to have a girlfriend, though, until the very end of the movie, when he starts holding hands with the irrepressible but less attractive friend of the romantic lead's girlfriend.

But Fred Q. had a series on television for a while: he is the bemused father of some children. He has a career, one of those undemanding jobs where you spend most of your time coming home from the office with a briefcase. Sometimes he breakfasts at home, and then sets out for the office, but only if some issue involving his family requires it.

Similarly, Fred Q. played the father of a problematic family in a number of later films: he often feels harassed and lacking in support in these instances; he wants a peaceful life with his hobbies, or he wants simply to enjoy his vacation without interference. To this end he sometimes retreats to his "den", or goes out to do some "yard work". He is sometimes seen to take a drink, usually a cocktail, as the social context may dictate, but there is no reason to suppose that he self-medicates with alcohol when alone. Undeniably, Fred Q.'s emotional life is rather thin. He is disinclined to verbalize, however, preferring to make light of his lack of affective connection through harmless-seeming "quips" and witty comeback-making behaviour.

The lights go on without warning. Fred Q. freezes, and then begins to turn around slowly. He has learned something valuable here, but the once again the game is up, at least for now. He raises his hands and hopes for courage, ideas, luck, but best of all: a mistake by his enemies.

 — posted by P | at 12:28 PM | |

Saturday, December 20, 2003

· Phraseology is interesting. A Russian friend pointed out that the English expression "as hungry as a bear" sounded strange; in Russian it's "as hungry as a wolf". But one thing about bears is that they hibernate, and thus, etc. What about "as healthy as"? In Irish it's "chomh folláin le bradán", "as healthy as a salmon". Strange.

 — posted by P | at 9:31 PM | |

· There's an interesting piece by Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker about the war in Iraq. I notice the magazine has a continual criticism of this, week after week.

 — posted by P | at 9:20 PM | |

· Êíèãà. Just trying to see if this works. And it does not.
Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955) was the author of Macfadden's Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, (New York, 1911-12), in five volumes. The Physical Culture Publishing Company was located at the Flatiron Building; but according to the frontispiece, the company had its HQ in a "magnificent building, with its superb equipment, representing an investment of a quarter of one million dollars" at Grand Boulevard and 42nd St., Chicago. This is interesting. At that time there was a geat deal of scope for health gurus, who would usually turn yellow and die when they were 63 or so.

 — posted by P | at 8:10 PM | |

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

· Not a great deal was said about the death of Robert Stanfield. Of course, I only watch "The Space Channel", but I noticied that everyone kept commenting on his "decency", as if that were an eccentricity in a politician. As if they might have been saying, "And did you know he was also a great go player? Yes! Eight-Dan Stan, we used to call him." I'm sure more will be said later on.

 — posted by P | at 7:39 PM | |

· A scholarly-type blog writer has just written the following: "I just finished writing up a 500-word entry ..." That's good. I prefer "writing-up"; it has a more sideburns 'n' windbreaker feel to it, but that's good, nevertheless. Later in the same entry he uses the expression nihil obstat, and discreetly links it to a dictionary. He knows his readers just might be challenged there. "I'm using this term which you prolly don't know, so here's the definition—but not in parentheses or something. That would be too obvious, and you might feel insulted." Who is he writing for? People who will follow the argument but not get the vocabulary? Is that wise?
Another interesting bit from a blogoscholar; this time from Samizdata (I enjoy the pun: samizdat, you know, self-published information, for which Russians would have spent years in labour camp, but which we laughingly offer on our beautiful website, but in the form of outright, real, true-blue, data):
This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results - which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.

Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation - so to speak, to go bad.
So there you have it. Nothing much to worry about here. The poor fools, those Russians. Probably, being poor fools, they didn't suffer as much, either. You know. What can you expect? It's Chinatown, man. Better the devil you don't know, I guess.
Intellectuals used to sometimes say: "But we didn't know ...!" And Russians would say: "You didn't want to know."
Just look back at what he is saying. Tell me if I am wrong or if I misread him: Nazis were worse because you can't excuse them. We don't expect much from Russians. Don't you expect something a bit more post-adolescent from a whole collective of intellectuals?

 — posted by P | at 6:55 PM | |

· The thing about Spider-Man is he's not very much like a spider, really. He doesn't look remotely spider-like. Unlike a spider, he has a job and (as far as I know) doesn't suck the juices out of flies for nourishment. He has "spider-strength", but is strength something you associate with spiders? "Why look at that man, he's as strong as a spider." Do people say that? They might say, "He's as revolting as a spider." Next, he can walk up walls. I don't think spiders could do that if they were wearing boots and gloves, though. Well, let's leave that. The big spider-like thing he does is fire webbing at things. But he can do this because he has an engineered device that he has made in his basement. It's not some talent he got from the radioactive spider-bite. Furthermore, spiders do not, at least on this continent, travel by firing webbing at remote objects and swinging therefrom like Tarzan.
No, the only reason he is Spider-Man man is because he says he is and runs around at night wearing a spider-suit. He could just as well run around claiming to be a pirate. Why is this?
Well, look at his personal life (and is there any other kind?) He can't get along with his boss, yet won't seek another job. He worries about his aunt, but apparently won't feed her—you've seen the pictures, she's obviously been living on water and crackers for years. He has no friends, and wouldn't know how to amuse them if he had. And, finally, his "girlfriend" is a problem of some kind, rather than a delight. That's because everything is a problem for him. There is no aspect of his life that is not an insoluble problem. Yet are these problems truly insoluble? He hasn't had time to work on that, because he's too busy devoting himself to the really important business of pretending to be a spider.
So the story of Spider-Man is really the story of a man who prefers a fantasy life, interfering with law-enforcement, instead of trying to help himself or those around him.

 — posted by P | at 12:38 AM | |

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

· I can remember when VCRs came out, one of the selling points was that you could record what was on tv. That way, in case the rest of the world forgot what was on tv, at least you'd have this recording. Posterity would be able to squint at all these flickering images of Man about the House and This Hour has 22 Unfunny Writers and so on. But what I need is a machine that would detect entertainment somewhere out there and alert me to it. After you're done coursing hounds or studying the arpeggione, it's nice to watch something amusing. However, I notice that some channels show the same thing all day long, as if they don't expect their audience to have any short-term memory. Yesterday I was watching the same episode of Murder, She Wrote that I seem to have seen many times, and it occurred to me that the network must be trying to send me a message. That's what you would think, if someone persisted in sending you the same signal over and over again. You'd think, "Maybe this means something! Maybe they're trapped, and this is their only way of communicating with the outside world." Or maybe it only means something to a select few, who are even now streaming toward their undisclosed locations. The rest of us are just going to be vapourized right after Murder, She Wrote.
If you get a DVD player, then you can watch all this junk about the movie you're watching. That's meta-entertainment!

 — posted by P | at 11:48 PM | |

Saturday, November 22, 2003

· I can dimly remember hearing about Kennedy being shot. People were worried. And then all kinds of people pretended there had been some kind of conspiracy to kill him, even Woody Allen: "I've been working on a non-fiction version of the Warren Report." And it just got worse, so that even a recent movie about President Johnson pays homage to the idea that Johnson miight have been involved. All this in the face of my "Lone Jackass" theory, which contends that some people just want to destroy figures of popular adulation. "Oh, you like him? Here you go, then. Bang!" Think of some recent targets: the Pope, Ronald Reagan, John Lennon. Other than the fact that they were very popular, what point would there be in shooting them? You just have to read the diary of the man who shot Governor George Wallace to see that. Of course there have been conspiracies to kill people, such as Caesar and Tsar Aleksandr II, but the whole story usually becomes apparent.
Anyway, CNN has the story of Dr Robert Grossman, who saw Kennedy immediately after the shooting:
Through his research, Grossman has come to agree with most of the conclusions of the Warren Report, though he says his mind is open to different conclusions should new evidence surface.

 — posted by P | at 3:05 AM | |

Thursday, November 20, 2003

· There seems to have been some big protests in London during President Bush's visit. News photos show quite a lot of people marching along the usual paths. According to CNN:
"Our message is quite simply, 'Go home, Bush,'" said one speaker at the protest, which police said drew between 100,000 and 110,000 people.
In other words, even the cops thought there were something around 100,000 people protesting. For a city the size of London, that's not a staggering figure, and then you have to consider that this sort of thing draws out all sorts of groupuscules—Greens, feminists, anarchists, Trotskyites, folksingers. Large numbers of protestors don't necessarily mean anything.
But Eugene Volokh and others have the extraordinary advantage of having an unknown friend in London who said there was nothing going on. So who do you believe, the friend or your lyin' eyes?

 — posted by P | at 9:02 PM | |

Friday, November 14, 2003

· Dictionary of Newfoundland English. You can even make a link to a given word, such as dotard

 — posted by P | at 3:05 PM | |

· This comes from CNN today:
The two soldiers were killed Thursday in a roadside bomb attack on their convoy north of Samarra, between Baghdad and Tikrit, a Fourth Infantry Division spokesman said. Three soldiers were also wounded, the spokesman said.

All five were in the 4th Infantry Division's Task Force Iron Horse, charged with ferreting regime loyalists and former leaders.
I assume they mean "ferreting out". Anyway, I don't like the sound of their task: that's the sort of thing that can get really messy really quickly. It's not very easy to do, and usually might happen is the job gets outsourced. That's what could happen with this whole "New Rules Sets" stuff that you keep hearing about. When things go wrong, just delegate to strongmen and appoint satraps.

 — posted by P | at 2:26 PM | |

Thursday, November 13, 2003

· In Gazeta Wyborcza there's an interesting article in Polish How a Gazeta Correspondent Bought an Anti-tank Rocket in Iraq, by Mariusz Zawadzki (Baghdad 13-11-2003). After the the Chinook helicopter was brought down, the reporter wanted to see if he could buy a shoulder-fired rocket in Baghdad. The place to go, he explains, is Falluja, "as every child in Baghdad knows". He goes there, meets two men who agree to deliver a rocket for $500 in Baghdad. They meet him at Mansour Square and sell him an old Milan—not some infrared-guided surface-to-air missile. He, in turn, hands it to a U.S. intelligence lieutenant, who, upon examination, tells him they sold it because it's so risky to use: the shooter has to keep the target in sight after he fires it, unlike with "fire-and-forget" weapons.
Before getting down to business, the journalist had an extraordinarily interesting talk with the two weapons merchants, "Moustache" and the "Lebanese":
A week after Wolfowitz [i.e., the attack on the Al Rasheed hotel], a Chinook helicopter was shot down. My guides tell about this with pride, although it wasn't one of their weapons. 15 soldiers died who were to go to America on vacation. News agencies reported that two helicopters had been attacked, but only one was hit. "Moustache" explains that it was different: the fighters only aimed at the second helicopter—that's what you have to do. The one in front can't see what's going on behind, and there's more time to get away, they say. They fired three rockets. Only one hit its target, because the Chinook fired flares every 5 seconds, which are meant to disorient surface-to-air heat-seeking rockets. The missile struck the rear of the helicopter. It somehow managed to land on just its front propeller. Therefore 20 people survived. "We'll fight until we smoke them out. Let them make their government in Baghdad, but stay away from Falluja. We have supplies of weapons for a year", they say. I ask how many fighters there are in the town. "Nobody knows", says the "Lebanese". He explains that the resistance movement in Falluja is not centralized. Many small cells are at work who often don't even know about each other. Those who don't fight under arms help the cause financially. Otherwise they would lose their neighbours' respect.
I have no idea how valuable this is.

 — posted by P | at 7:39 PM | |

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

· Mackerel & Tuna Flavours with Crunchy Seafood Flavoured Middles. I'd offer it to my guests. Wouldn't you?

 — posted by P | at 6:54 PM | |

· A fair view of the Matrix series: Unplugging The Matrix: Why the sci-fi franchise went south, by Matt Feeney. "Whatever the hell the Matrix was, it had something to do with the fact that these people, in some vague but objective sense, were way cooler than everybody else."

 — posted by P | at 4:50 PM | |

· In Russia's war against Napoleon there were partisans called "Kirillovtsy", who might be thought to have had a leader called Kirill or Kirillov. In fact, it's a corruption of Spanish "guerillas". Strange but true. You can check Vasmer's Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.
This factoid comes from the Tel-Aviv chapter of the "WhatWhereWho?" club, and there's lots more.


 — posted by P | at 4:46 PM | |

Thursday, November 06, 2003

· In a moment of diffidence visit: The Men of the Deeps—North America's only coal miners' choir.

 — posted by P | at 5:10 PM | |

· In the Boston Globe there is something about Richard Pipes. He says of Paul Wolfowitz:
... "Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures." He bluntly dismisses the promise of a democratic Iraq—"impossible, a fantasy"—citing obstacles similar to Russia's. "Democracy requires, among other things, individualism—the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run."

What about the constitution soon to be written in Baghdad? Pipes laughs. "Stalin had a wonderful constitution, the most perfect constitution in the world. There's a lot of naiveté in that. I should think we'd be satisfied with some kind of stability, preventing Saddam Hussein from coming back".

 — posted by P | at 4:27 PM | |

Thursday, October 23, 2003

· When Chris heard God had invited Himself to the party, he thought it was all over. There was probably no getting around it, though ... [more].

 — posted by P | at 7:46 PM | |

· Anne of Green Gables. Anne of Green Gables. Anne of Green Gables. Do people never tire of that? Anne of Green Gables. Based on the novel Anne of Green Gables. I assume there was such a person, once: Anne of Green Gables. I sort of wondered about her after I had heard the name for, oh, the ten thousandth time. I read somewhere that "Anne of Green Gables is a trademark and a Canadian official mark of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc." So you see? If you were thinking of calling your novel Anne of Green Gables ... [more].

 — posted by P | at 7:26 PM | |

· I've decided to start a bibliography of Georges Duhamel here.

 — posted by P | at 6:39 PM | |

Saturday, October 18, 2003

· I've noticed that people often tell you things about themselves that are not, strictly speaking, true. They tell you they grew up in some interesting place, or that they had a fascinating job once, and it turns out to be nonsense. I used to think this outrageous, but a friend of mine explains that people do this for a justifiable reason. They want to hide things, and they want to earn your respect, and even friendship. Earning your respect means cloaking things they hate about themselves (probably wrongly).
So I'm no longer outraged. But I do think this habit of giving out a bogus biography implies a lack of trust, even a lack of common sense. Also, it's slightly offensive: am I really the kind of person who would think less of you for having grown up in Stellerton, NS, rather than Aix-en-Provence?

 — posted by P | at 12:26 PM | |

Friday, October 17, 2003

· One of my friend's earliest memories was of being taken to the movies by his older sister. The lights went out and he started screaming his head off, and had to be taken out.
I've no idea how many of the above statements are true. Some? None? I don't know. Anyway, that's that.

 — posted by P | at 3:41 PM | |

· Ave, fratre, atque vale. Obiit amicus noster carissimus JMB 16.IX.03.
I hadn't seen my friend very much since Christmas. I usually hang around with my mother a few evenings a week, and then I have to go all the way down to Inglis Street, so one way or another I haven't been around Spring Garden Road of an evening. Also "The Danube" started closing at 7:00 pm, and the other place is always chock-a-block with bearded musicians and their grisettes. But I found him a few times at "The Dandelion" (which I also don't like) and the computer cafe next door.

In August I saw him and said, "You haven't been around much", and he said, "I took some time off and kept to myself, mostly", so I suppose that's when he found out he was ill. From the way he said it I thought he had been just getting moody .
The last time I saw him was Sunday, a week before he collapsed at home. I can't say that he looked very ill, and he seemed to be in cheerful spirits. We had quite a long talk about everything at "Tom's Cigar Bar". So that was good. Maybe from his point of view it was a farewell meeting, because he didn't want anyone to know he was sick, and I'm sure he wouldn't want people coming around if he got much worse.
I was trying to remember when I first met him. It seems like a long time ago because so much has happened in the last few years, but it can't have been much before Spring 1999, as I remember talking to him about the then-recent Columbine shooting and not really knowing him very well.
I met his ex and one of his sisters at the "viewing". The ex seemed completely unobjectionable, unassuming, soft-spoken. Not the incredible harridan I had been led to expect.
Anyway, that's that. It took me a few weeks to get used to the idea. I went to "Gatsby's" and "The Dandelion", just to realign things. I wouldn't want the death of my best friend to mess up things.

 — posted by P | at 3:39 PM | |

Thursday, September 18, 2003

· Notes for a Future Book O' Quotations:

... "Supporters of the bill," the CBC notes, "said fears about censorship are groundless and that C-250 isn't meant to infringe on anyone's freedom of religion."
Interesting bunch of "Liberals" we have in this country, don't you think? "Censorship? We just want to outlaw certain kinds of speech--you call that censorship?"

—Colby Cosh


Although he's a crypto-separatist, Mr Cosh is always a good read, and so is his former co-worker Kevin Michael Grace at The Ambler.
It's a shame that people have these stupid regionalist ideas. And they are stupid, if you think about them for two minutes. Regionalists never seem to know anything about the objects of their hatred. Why should they? They hate them. Understanding just interferes with the cool ease of blind hatred.

 — posted by P | at 8:32 AM | |

· Bibliographical Note:Clum, Woodworth,
Making socialists out of college students; a story of professors and other collegians who hobnob with radicals.
Los Angeles : Better America Federation of California [192-?]
22 p. ; 17 cm.



 — posted by P | at 8:30 AM | |

· A Little Scene:

"What can I get you?"
"Oh, I'll have, uh, let me see .. expresso."
[To a co-worker] ONE ESPR - "
"Er, wait, is that like - really strong or something?"
"Oh no, it's just they roast the beans and we put it through the thing so it gets the strong flavour is all. There's no extra caffeine or anything."
"Oh good. Because - I really want - do you, like, make the cranberries and stuff that you can have in your coffee?"
"Oh no, dear,, that comes already adulterated."
"Oh. Oh. From the fascist regime in Argentina?"
"H'mmm .... no, they're from New Jersey. It says here, "Leakifahsett, NJ". I guess that's where my sister-in-law, she met - "
"Stop, woman! Is this coffee extracted from the back-breakiing labour of peons, or not?!"
"No, just us poorly-paid peons.
"Oh, okay then. I'll have an ekspresso please."

 — posted by P | at 4:43 AM | |

· Rumsfeld sees no link between Saddam, 9/11
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday he had no reason to believe that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld was asked about a poll that indicated nearly 70 percent of respondents believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved.
“I’ve not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that,” Rumsfeld said.
He added: “We know he was giving $25,000 a family for anyone who would go out and kill innocent men, women and children. And we know of various other activities. But on that specific one, no, not to my knowledge.”
The Bush administration has asserted that Saddam’s government had links to al-Qaida, the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden that masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks. And in various public statements over the past year or so administration officials have suggested close links.

Is our children learning?

 — posted by P | at 2:29 AM | |

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

· A&E had a very funny "Biography" show about Phil Spector. Countless people you haven't heard from in 40 years discussed his odious treatment of his wives, children, and everyone else who came into contact with him, but of course there remains his legacy: The Wall of Sound! What's that? Should I ask my doctor? No, it's the agreeable loud noise that his songs come wrapped in. He would record a song for months and months, adding more and more instruments, twiddling this and that, until he came up with a perfectly charming bit of fluff. And he produced many bits of fluff. "Be my baby" is probably the fluffiest. Don't you get that fluffy feeling when you hear it? There was more of this until, at the end of the show, he seems to have shot some unimportant person at his house. He's sort of under a cloud now. But that Wall of Sound! The final comment of one who knew him well: "He'll always be America's answer to Mozart."

 — posted by P | at 10:43 PM | |

Saturday, September 13, 2003

· And here is Johnny Cash in "The Man in Black":

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,

Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,

I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,

But is there because he's a victim of the times.

Well, I think penal reform is a topic for this country. I expect criminals to go to jail to repent of their crimes; I don't expect them to be beaten and raped. A little while ago, some guy tried to break into my house. I scared him off, but he insisted on hanging around the courtyard, so I had to call the cops. When they got there and collected him, they asked: "Would you like to file a charge?" and I said "No, of course not. I just want him out of the freakin' courtyard for now. Give him a talking to." Which they did, explaining that you can't just go about breaking into people's houses and so on, no matter how desperate you are. And the man was desperate. I honestly don't think that sending people like that to an institution where they'll be beaten and raped is much of an answer. So fix this, please, if you can, those of you who are big experts on criminal justice.

 — posted by P | at 8:23 AM | |

Friday, September 12, 2003

· Here's a bit of a poem by Eugene Field: Seein' things:

Lucky thing I ain't a girl or I'd be skeered to death!

Bein' I'm a boy, I duck my head an' hold my breath.

An' I am, oh so sorry I'm a naughty boy, an' then

I promise to be better an' I say my prayers again!

Gran'ma tells me that's the only way to make it right

When a feller has been wicked an' sees things at night!


And of course there's much more at Bartleby


 — posted by P | at 11:58 PM | |

· Interesting that the dual number in languages seems to be dying out. I think Slovenian is one of the few modern languages to boast such a feature. Old English had it, and so did Old Irish, Church Slavonic, Classical Arabic, and Classical Greek (a bit of a stumper, that, since Greek is hard enough at the best of times). Traces survive here and there, for example in the Welsh "dwylaw" - "hands", actually "two hands" (dwy law), since hands usually come in pairs.
But what happens when people lose the dual case? Why did the ancients like it so much, and we moderns find it so useless? I think that's an interesting question.

 — posted by P | at 4:03 PM | |

Thursday, September 11, 2003

· Angua has provided a good link to The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs about modern political anti-Semitism. There's a lot to be said about that. It's not just a matter of not wanting your daughter to marry Irving Berlin. It has become a strange tool in the hands of strange people, and very dangerous.

 — posted by P | at 2:48 AM | |

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

· It's hard to make much of popular culture, beyond saying "Oh, that's great" or "That's no good". In fact, you end up sounding like Beavis and/or Butthead.
A movie I haven't seen yet, but intend carping at anyway: Spiderman, starring Toby Maguire. I saw a brief piecelet of this a few days ago. He's wearing a "Spiderman" suit that doesn't really make me think of the character I used to know. But then I haven't read comic books since I was 14 or so. I somehow I lost the knack. And now, when I see this guy swooping through the city in a "costume", I can't help thinking what a creep he must be!
Comics were never like that. In the world of comics you could tell any kind of pointless story, and it would be interesting, as long as the pictures were good. After all, they were just "comics". Many critics don't seem to appreciate that. It's as if filmmakers and pundits equate "Spiderman" with Madame Bovary or so. There are some very important differences. For example, in the comics world it doesn't really matter why the Green Goblin is evil; he just is. It doesn't matter why Peter Parker decides to fight evil; he just does. I always found it pretty dull going when the comics would try to explain why Batman or whoever had some problem with criminals. Well, who doesn't? We all want a lawless vigilante with unusual powers who is willing to wipe these guys out and, furthermore, get away with it. Who has a problem with that?
Anyway, I doubt that a real comics fan would watch comics-based movies with anything other than an impatient eye: There's no way to get from there to here. Threr was a time when the Fortress of Solitude seemed plausible, and I would have liked a tour. Childhood, and the fascination with comics, come but once. All the rest is disappointment.

 — posted by P | at 3:07 PM | |

Thursday, September 04, 2003

· Yesterday on CNN I watched as a breathless Christiana Amanpour talked about Afghanistan, where there have been a few problems. She talked about U.S. officials "on the ground". That's good. Otherwise you might think they were a lot of Luftmenschen, floating from mountaintop to mountaintop, almost like mystical Tibetans. Actually, why not tap the Tibetans for these and other peace missions? They might do well.
Next she said something about these officials being there and "getting the Lay of the Land." Does anyone know anything about this work? Is it by some anonymous Pashto bard?
Time for some less challenging entertainment, so I watched "Ghost Ship", which I thought would be interesting because it has Gabriel Byrne and seems to have an exciting plot: you've got your haunted house, except it could sink.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be a sixth rate "The Shining", with the luxury liner as the hotel, a ghostly girl, some sort of crime in the past, man almost seduced by a dead woman, etc. What made it even worse was there was way too much butchery. Hitchcock said he wanted to scare people, not nauseate them. Next: none of the characters looked much of a hand aboard a vessel — not the actors' fault, really; the director ought to have studied that. Still, you'd expect more from Gabriel Byrne, who came across as a semi-comatose Robert Shaw in "Jaws". And then, of course, the crew have to fight each other, as in "A Perfect Storm". Where do people get the idea that everyone turns on each other in a life-and-death struggle? I've seen so many movies where, when the chips are down — they're in a lifeboat or trapped somewhere, about to face certain death — two of the characters have to start brawling about who stole whose girlfriend, or who just has the wrong attitude. In a real crisis people tend to put that stuff aside as being fantastically petty. Can you imagine the crew of the sub in "Das Boot" wrangling about domestic issues to the thud of depth charges going off nearby? No, you cannot, and it would only have made the movie less interesting. People only bicker when they're bored witless. Not when they're frightened.
Of course, when it's time to explore the old haunted ship, everyone decides to split up. Mike MacDonald has a bit on this, the incredible fatuity of horror-movie victims. However, in this movie the characters just keep making one dumb mistake after another, and they're also morons to boot. Robert Shaw, or rather Gabriel Byrne, tells his crew of experienced salvagers the story of the Mary Celeste, and they appear to have never heard of it. It's too stupid to talk about any more.
The new films coming out look even stupider.

 — posted by P | at 8:21 PM | |

· Gee, that was a short summer. I'm afraid we're in for another seven months of fog and cold now. A good book to read: La transparence du mal, by Jean Baudrillard. He makes a good case for the problematic nature of an overly-interconnected world. He equates viruses (both physical and internetical) with terrorism and mindless hooliganism, and with a lot of other things. You have to read it! I'm just waiting for the movie.
Towards the end of the book (and, to a lesser degree, at the conclusion of each chapter) he overreaches himself a bit. Sometimes there's just not a lot of nourishment to be had from a dish of hors d'oeuvres. His last chapter is entitled "The Object as a Strange Attractor". A physics buddy once explained to me what strange attractors are, but I've forgottten, so I had to forego this. A shame because maybe it contains some nut grafs.
("Nut graf" comes, of course, from the German Nutgraf, or "Groove Earl", a popular pianist in Berlin cabarets after the the war.)

 — posted by P | at 2:30 PM | |

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

· I saw "The Bicycle Thief" a few days ago. Apparently the movie was made in 1947, so much of the work on it must have been done in the first year after the war. Before that, De Sica had already completed "Shoeshine", which sounds even more harrowing. I wonder if we'll be seeing Iraqi neo-realist movies in a few years' time? I doubt it. But what better way to discredit all the maniacs than by offering a few filmschool scholarships to promising young Iraqi filmmakers? Everyone like mmovies. Imagine the ramifications if in a year or two all these young Iraqis were to return and start casting for their movies. It might spread throughout the region, almost a, oh, domino effect. Not the worst idea.

 — posted by P | at 11:04 PM | |

Saturday, August 30, 2003

· So now we see the realistic side of this Gulf War with the assassination of Baqir al-Hakim. This and the killing of Sergio Vieira de Mello, coming so close together, are alarming events. If important non-Baathists and non-al-Qaedas keep getting killed it will create the impression that the Coalition can't protect anything in any real sense.

 — posted by P | at 10:51 AM | |

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

· Colby Cosh has written a very funny entry about trying to get a cab in a rough part of Edmonton. In Halifax cab drivers won't refuse to pick you up anywhere; it's your destination that can be a bit dodgy. They won't take you to known bootleggers, and I think they might hesitate to drop you off in some of the quieter, darker satellite villes after a certain hour.
Even in the daytime Dartmouth has an untoward feel about it. Once you leave the main drag there are all sorts of inexplicable empty parts, some of them full of marsh grass. I don't believe I've ever seen anyone walking there, either. Sometimes you have to change buses in Dartmouth in order to go to still drearier places: for this they've a large "bus-shelter", thoughtfully built on an exposed hillside. You get the wind from every direction, all the time.

 — posted by P | at 12:39 AM | |

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

· A correspondent writes to say that the words to "Danny Boy" were written by an American, and that the Irish are notably unsentimental. That's perfectly true. Brendan Behan says the same thing in Borstal Boy (I think), comparing the Irish and the English. However, the chief attraction of the song is the air, which is traditional Irish; and anyway, since the song is about emigration, it should be no surprise that an American wrote the lyrics. Then again, it depends what you understand by "sentimental". One man's sentiment is another man's feeling. For comparison, think of a genuine, home-grown, Irish song such as "The Lass of Antrim". It contains lines such as:
Oh, Gregory, don't you remember that night on the hill
when we swapped rings off each other's hands, surely against my will?
Those lines being repeated over and over again. No doubt some people love it, and who shall deny them? The air is beautiful. But to me the words are pure drivel of the most mind-bending, teeth-clenching, won't-you-please-shut-up-now sort. I laugh every time I hear it.

 — posted by P | at 9:31 PM | |

Thursday, July 31, 2003

· A few years ago one of my best friends died, and I (of course) did my best not to think about it, until one day I was sitting in a coffee shop and, since it was March 17th, the radio played the old song "Danny Boy". Ostensibly that song is about some old guy thinking of his son, who has gone away to America. But if you think about it, it's about any human relationship; because things change, and we're not who we were.We're no longer who we thought we were, and neither are our friends. Every day that passes changes us amd the people around us, and so you can't expect to see things the way they were.
Back to my friend: well, we actually had this conversation at his death-bed:

"I'm dying , you know."
"Yes, I've heard. That's why I'm here."
[Then some more jabber about my laziness, and the fruits thereof].
"Hee-hee-hee!"
"Ha-ha-ha!"
And we laughed like schoolboys at this whole problem of his dying, and I rather felt that he treated our time together as a kind of dress-rehearsal for our real life. Maybe that's not a bad way of looking at it

 — posted by P | at 9:06 AM | |

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

· Well, back to the real worlds, I guesss (blats, I wish I knew hopw to typo): Angua has been justifiably angry (if I may be so bold) about this story:
Will the Canadian government give the man the Bill Sampson treatment, the Ahmad Sa'id Khadr treatment, or the Zahra Kazemi treatment. Place your bets now.
posted 12:46 AM comments(1)

Well, I don't know about you, but it seems to me ... we've never been big on being sore-heads in this country. Go and take pictures of people committing genocide (or sociocide, which is the same thing), but their people may kill you, and there's nothing you can do about that. Interesting — we've very few fotos of Stalin's gulags or Castro's, and only (of course) the post-War pictures of Hitler's, because the really oppressive regimes don't even let you anywhere near their "problems". To get any real satisfaction out of the Iranians, it would mean we go to war with them, right now, tomorrow, and we can't. So either we cough up some 50 bil. p.a. on our armed forces, or we stop whining. Because no-one will look after Canadian citizens abroad except us.

 — posted by P | at 10:01 AM | |

· A few weeks ago some atheists were patting each other on the back and marveling at how wise they were. You can read about it here. Yet there are some things to be said about belief.
To be embarrassingly frank, I don't know anything at all about electricity or thermodynamics [sp?], and I am profoundly ashamed of that. I was no good at high school arithmetic, however, so there was really not much point in further study of those matters. I used to think that the word "arithmetic" could be etymologized as "arithmo-emetic".
But if I now set my oven at 425 F., and the little light goes off, I am convinced that my oven has, in fact, achieved that heat. I open the door and find it to be pretty hot; yet — is that really 425 F.? I've no way of knowing. It feels hot enough for most frozen food purposes, but I couldn't tell you why I think that. So I rely on my instruments, which seem to imply "425 F.", and I believe them, and I put my pizza pockets into the oven, fairly sure that they will turn out pipin' hot in 15 minutes. Then I look at my watch, and say, "Okay, h'mm, how fast is it running? Well, okay, I think I can tell when 15 minutes will be up." But my watch is no chronometer. It could be a bit fast.
Of course, this type of argument has been made a million times before. The nub of my gist, however, is that I do this a hundred times a day, for very small things, and so does everyone else. So what about doing this once, for a very big thing?
Next: the problem of the gulf. There is a nice poem by Baudelaire entitled "Le gouffre". Since all that copyright stuff is probaby way over (it's not like it's the latest release of some Cape Breton fiddler, or something big like that), here's the whole text:


Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant.
--Hélas! tout est abîme,--action, désir, rève,
Parole! et sur mon poil qui tout droit se relève
Mainte fois de la Peur je sens passer le vent.

En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève,
Le silence, l'espace affreux et captivant...
Sur le fond de mes nuits Dieu de son doigt savant
Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans trève.

J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou,
Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où;
Je ne vois qu'infini par toutes les fenètres,

Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté,
Jalouse du néant l'insensibilité.
--Ah! ne jamais sortir des Nombres et des Etres!



It's an interesting poem on several levels. Pascal thought that human reason could not explain everything in our lives, because (I believe) ambuiguity and faith are not topics to be dealt with by logic. That's what I understand by Baudelaires's reference to "Pascal's Gulf". But think also of the horror this causes him: "J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou." It's the emptiness, the nothing, and (despite what one gets from 2001), the big emptines of our universe that horrifies us. I'm advised that only 4% of the universe consists of actual stuff — rocks and vast explosions. Then there's another pitiful percentage of stuff that you can't even see and therefore not worth talking about, and then the rest is nothing. I think that's the main thing that makes people unhappy. And this made me think of a bit in the New Testament:


26. And beside all this, between us and you is a great gulf fixed:
so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot:
neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

So there is a big gap or gulf or something between me and perfect knowledge of things. Between me and everything. I think that story implies that that's normal. There are gulfs all over the place, and we should acknowledge them, and maybe do something about them.

 — posted by P | at 8:12 AM | |

Monday, July 28, 2003

· At the Movies:
Truffaut's Day for Night (La nuit américaine) (1973) seems even better with the time that has elapsed. I had forgotten that towards the end one of the older actors (played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, known for Hôtel du Nord, Assignment in Brittany, The Cross of Lorraine), is reported to have died in a car accident, and the narrator explains that his death marks the end of a whole way of making movies. He says something like: "People will film on the streets instead of in studios, with no scripts." He also says that what a director does all day is answer questions, because people keep coming up to him with problems: "How do you like the wig? Too light?", "What will we do about insurance for so-and-so?", "How do you like this candle-effect?", "Which car do you want to use for ...?", etc. And then he acts as a confessor to most of his actors, and a defenceless employee to his producer. The most affectionate movie about movies I have seen. It also features Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jaqueline Bisset, and Dani.

2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)
I've seen this several times but I still don't get it. Where is the astronaut supposed to be at the end? How come he's in the space pod instead of the main vehicle? You'd think the space pod would have extremely limited range, but it appears to be zooming along at great speed past all kinds of nebulae and space neon. But I'm not even going to wonder about the mysterious black box, which looks as if it contains a giant's Ikea kit. Another small quibble: their in-flight meals consist of plastic trays containing different-coloured portions of peanut butter, Cheeze Whiz, pureed squash, and some other pastes, to be eaten with a tiny shovel. I say if you can send men to Jupiter and beyond, you can darn well come up with something decent for them to eat. They're going to be up there for several years, and you're giving them baby food? Even pizza pockets would be better.
The video I saw comes prefixed with the original theatre trailer, and you can enjoy the 60's style voice-over: an authoritative baritone rapping out the movie's argument, almost like a news bulletin. So different from the modern, unctuous, slow-talker who seems to be so acceptable now. (Although the best trailers now don't have voice-overs; just really loud music, cars crashing through plate-glass windows, and two-fisted gunmen in sunglasses wasting ammo).

 — posted by P | at 8:05 PM | |

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

· The Tao That Can Be Named Is Not the Eternal Tao (and Why Would You Think It Could Be?):
About health care, you have to consider that it takes the government five or six times as much money to do a thing as it would take you or me. It just is that way, and you have to factor that in. So in order to improve any government thing, you're always going to need more money. And then you're going to need more money after that. And don't forget, it actually costs money to get the money. It might cost more to get the money than the money spent on the thing itself. And then you have to pay people to talk about how well the money has been spent.

 — posted by P | at 2:33 PM | |

· As I was listening to all the grumbling about uranium and Saddam Hussein, it seemed to me that something people don't talk about much is the big difference between war and terrorism. Someone came up with the term "asymmetrical war", to address the kind of war that will have to be fought against terrorists, but that's a bit like saying "asymmetrical love" to describe a situation in which one of the principles is bored. It's not really a war unless both sides are fighting a war.
People only embrace terrorism when they have nothing better to do: it's not a strategic option, and it can't lead to anything. People are only fighting a war, properly speaking, when they have some plan of getting from A to B, no matter how improbable. That's why you can't negotiate with terrorists: not because it's immoral (although it is), but because there can be no practical point.
Anarchists and revolutionaries of the old school, by contrast, seem to have thought that they did have real goals. They reasoned that blowing up the tsar could bring about some massive political change. When the Arabs became convinced they couldn't win a war against Israel, they gave up on the idea and devoted their remaining militant energies to incidental, attention-grabbing outrages. I think the first clear example was the murder of the Olympic athletes at Munich. What possible military goal is served by attacking an Olympic team? It's entirely symbolic. Although people are killed, and many lives are ruined, these attacks are of no more military value than burning the enemy's flag. In this case, our options are limited in one sense, but perhaps a good deal more abundant than we think.

 — posted by P | at 1:04 AM | |

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

· At the Movies:
Fritz Lang's M, made in 1931, stands up pretty well after all these years. It's still difficult to have a final opinion about it. A disturbing quality is its ability to make the viewer at the outset follow the police and the underworld in their separate manhunts for a child-murderer, and then, near the end, start to have second thoughts about their quarry, played by an agonised Peter Lorre. The movie also includes famous German actors of the time: Otto Wernicke as the fat, crafty police detective who smokes huge cigars, a role he resumed in the Dr Mabuse series; Gustaf Gründgens, the German Laurence Olivier (and model for the main character in István Szabó's 1981 Mephisto); and Paul Kemp, the popular comedian.
A few other notes: (1) all the men smoke, pretty much non-stop: in the police station, bars, offices. Not in the final scene, though; maybe because of the tense courtroom drama. (2) The Berlin of the period looks authentic, with its courtyards, tiled stoves and attics full of drying sheets, although it all seems to be the inside of a movie studio.
Lang's favourite theme, the modern city and its mythical , all-powerful underworld, might derive from a poorly-written novel by Norbert Jacques, entitled Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (Berlin: Ullstein, 1920; an earlier edition than the one mentioned at the link above). He also travelled and wrote some books about that.

 — posted by P | at 8:27 PM | |

Saturday, July 12, 2003

· Vladimir Kormer is an interesting writer. He wrote a novel called Krot istorii, which I doubt has been translated into English.
Oh. My cat. Every so often she goes into whingy mode:
Waah?
What? I've replenished your bowl and washed and filled your water dish; what is it now?
Waaah?
What - you see I'm busy right now.
Waaaaah?
But I'm - oh, all right then.
(She had to jump into my lap.)


 — posted by P | at 8:37 AM | |

Friday, July 11, 2003

· Good news, for a change. Boy, 13, rescues cat from hanging , from the Halifax Herald. The link may rot, so you could go to the main thing and search for the story. In general, what happened was some bad teenagers hanged a cat and this 13-year old boy saved him by giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation! Cats have a sort of snout, rather than a mouth, so how do you go about reviving them? Anyway, it's a good story. The young hero looks not unlike the boy in "King of the Hill", who saved a pig in one episode.
One thing I do know is that cats have terrible bad breath.
I think, if I may say so, that this this event justifies a certain optimism. Among us there are kids who will go and try to help a suffering animal.

 — posted by P | at 2:59 PM | |

Thursday, July 10, 2003

· I had a nice game of pool the other night. It was fun, but of course that game with the fifteen numbered balls is the Devil's tool, because I soon found myself memorizing jokes from Cap'n Billy's Whiz-Bang, and certain words were creeping into my conversation; words like "swell" and "so's your old man". And soon I was playing for money in a pinch back suit and listening to some big out-of-town jasper, here to talk about horse race gamblin'! Ah it's a disayze, you know.
What's "pinch back" mean? you're probably asking. It means sham, after a certain watchmaker who used an alloy of copper and zinc to look like gold. I've no idea where "jasper" comes from, though - other than as a "phoney" in The Music Man.

 — posted by P | at 7:15 PM | |

· Best Things in Life are Free:
Some thoughtful comments, as you would expect, on Volokh Conspiracy about downloading music and so on. But I would go further: I would make it illegal for people to just play "their" dumb music for me to hear in public. If restauranteurs and bar owners wanted to have music, they would have to hire real musicians, for a start. That way, you'd probably never have to listen to EuroPop (okay, maybe Ding dinge dong would still be allowed).

 — posted by P | at 4:04 PM | |

· Canada Makes CNN Once Again:
This time for solving the riddle of Stonehenge: It's an anatomical bunch of stones rather than an astronomical bunch of stones. Of course people were always putting up irregular slabs in those times, a hobby of theirs. It might be a stab at immortality. "At least people will know that we were here," they probably said, walking away from their lithourgy. That's why people have weblogs. Maybe 5,000 years from now people will be reading "Instapundit" and looking for mystical revelations.

 — posted by P | at 1:55 PM | |

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

· Pushkin's "The Upas Tree" ("Anchar").


In a withering, merciless wasteland
In soil baked by the sun
Like a terrifying sentry
Stands the Upas tree
Alone in the world



Not a very good (or even adequate) translation, but the rest of the story is this: the upas tree is terribly poisonous and causes all things that are near it to die: grass, birds, anything. It is therefore surrounded by death. Should a bird fly by, it will eventually collapse and die. But a prince sends a man to collect some of the sap and branches of this poisonous tree. He does so, and returns in a cold sweat, and then dies. Then the prince then fires his upas-tipped arrows into neighbouring lands to bring them down.
Pushkin served in the army and knew a lot about the warfare of his period. He was well-read, having an enviable personal library, and was familiar with English, French and German literature. Intrigued by E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Spielerglück" (and who was not?) he wrote the thematically unrelated "Queen of Spades" ("Pikovaia dama"), later made into an opera by Tchaikovsky.
So Pushkin was no fantasist, and when he says "firing arrows into neighbouring lands" it can be taken to mean "sending his archers" etc. But poems have a way of encapsulating many things, so the idea of WMD is not far away.
(I suppose the Russian word "anchar" comes from the Latin "antiariis"; the English word is borrowed from the Malay "upas", or poison. The tree itself is found in Java.)

 — posted by P | at 3:34 PM | |

Friday, July 04, 2003

· Here we go again with secret tapes of the various Old Men of the Mountains; this is from a Mr Saddam Hussein: "no recent days and weeks have passed without the blood of the infidels being shed on our pure land as a result of the jihad of the mujahedeen."
Isn't the phrase "jihad of the mujahedeen" redundant? Well, maybe not exactly, but it seems poorly said.

 — posted by P | at 1:31 PM | |

Thursday, July 03, 2003

· At the movies again, I saw a bizarre little entertainment called Battle Royale (2000), directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Some Japanese grade 9 students go on an outing at the end of the school year and find themselves drugged and whisked away to a remote island, kept under guard by soldiers and their dreary teacher. Their insolent attitude to authority has caused the Ministry of Education to institute an interesting means of chastising them: They have been fitted with neck rings which can explode, and must now participate in a three-day game of killing each other. The last one alive wins.
If you like watching Japanese teens beat each other to death and shoot everyone, then this is highly recommended. If you don't care for that sort of thing, however, there are still some good things in it. Moments of that peculiarly Japanese deadpan humour: a character is riddled with bullets and seemingly killed; the phone rings, and he immediately gets up to answer it, since it is most probably his estranged family calling to favour him with with some reproach or other.
A strange, ridiculous, revolting movie, but not unrewarding. I think the best thing is to look at it as the flip side of Hello Kitty and not demand too much sense.

 — posted by P | at 6:01 PM | |

Monday, June 30, 2003

· What happens to children's authors sometimes? I think they get a bit funny in the head. Everyone has seen the recent personality cult of Harry Potter; lots of adults even read the stuff with squeals of delight. I wonder if people have thought of the strange political import that children's authors may enjoy. Erich Kästner, for example, was a well-known anti-Nazi. Danish author Estrid Ott (1900-1967), on the other hand ... well, it's hard to say. here's a list of her publications.
Ott became successful with her series of books about a Pooh-like stuffed elephant and his young mistress Babsi. The first entry was Bimbis Bog om Babsi, or Bimbi's Book about Babsi (Kobenhavn: Jesperson og Pios, 1936). In this work Bimbi, the elephant, tells how he came to be the little girl Babsi's choice stuffed toy. They went on to have a series of adventures, usually involving Lapps and Eskimos. Often the stuffed toy would get separated from his friend Babsi, but she would retrieve him somehow. Yet there was also an adventure entitled Bimbi er Frihedskaemper (Branner, 1947), which I can't find, but which seems to mean Bimbi is a Freedom Fighter, unless I'm making a ghastly mistake; does this mean what I think it means? What was Bimbi's posture on the war, exactly? Without seeing the text we've no way of knowing.
Yet we do have this: In 1940 she published a work entitled Med Finlands Lottor i Fällt, about women volunteers in the Russo-Finnish War. And earlier she wrote something called Bornene i Amerika, or Children in America (1932), and in 1953 she wrote Sverre i Canada; I would very much like to know what the tenor of these last two were. And I would like to know what the burden of Sally Smaalotte hjaelper sit Land was, as it was published in 1941 and 1942. How did this "Sally Smaalotte" help her land? Did she tell the Germans that the British were staging a commando raid? I do think we ought to be told.
I remember being rather disappointed in Hergé, the creator of "Tintin", when I detected a slight anti-British and anti-American bias in his works, notably in Tintin en Amérique and Tintin au Pays de l'Or Noir. There was also a dull caricature of a Jewish antiquarian in La Fétiche des Arumbaya. Well, the long and the short of it is we know where this great artist stood. A shame.


 — posted by P | at 8:50 PM | |

· A bit more about Bunny Lake is Missing: The movie was based on a novel by Evelyn Piper, who wrote under the pseudonym Merriam Modell. The novel was published in 1957 by Harper. Piper also wrote: The Motive (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950); The Lady and Her Doctor (New York: Doubleday, 1956); Hanno's Doll (New York: Atheneum, 1961); and The Nanny (New York: Atheneum, 1964). The last was also made into a movie starring Bette Davis, hard on the heels of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It was not very good, according to this review.

 — posted by P | at 7:09 PM | |

· CNN again with this Great Leap Forward: "Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah -- which includes Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- announced Sunday they would cease attacks on Israelis temporarily."
Maybe I'm a bit obtuse or unkind, but it seems to me this offer falls just a tad short of being any use at all. Of course the very next day there was an attack which left one man dead, but this was by "renegades" (described in the same CNN story). Which is to say "bad terrorists", rather than "good terrorists". Do the members of Al Aqsa who took responsibility for the attack now stand to be drummed out of Al Aqsa? Is the head of Al Aqsa saying to his lieutenants, "Bring me the head of Muhammad Garcia", to punish these disobedient terrorists? After all, they've made him lose face: people will say he's just a big maricón who can't control his own men and, therefore, weak and replaceable. Or maybe this whole agreement is a sham.

 — posted by P | at 6:43 PM | |

Sunday, June 29, 2003

· According to this column on CNN.com, a ceasefire has been announced by Palestinian militants, coinciding with a visit by Condoleeza Rice to "jump-start the so-called road map to peace." A bit heavy on the metaphors, but I believe the U.S. State Dept. has officially sworn off the expression "peace process" and has yet to come up with some new expressions to fit the "road map" idea.

The road map calls for a Palestinian state by 2005. But incremental steps include Palestinians clamping down on terror groups and Israel dismantling illegal settlement outposts built since March 2001.
No matter how you look at it, that seems unfair to begin with. "Clamping down" versus "dismantling". How about "dismantling" the terror groups? Wouldn't that be a start?

 — posted by P | at 7:55 AM | |

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

· Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
It's a 1965 picture all right: black and white London just before the swinging and the stupid prankster outfits. Everyone is in a jacket and tie except for the Dylan Thomas figure (played by Noel Coward), who has a mellifluent BBC voice and happens to be the landlord of our happless American brother and sister. I saw this years ago but forgot what the gimmick was. Many critics don't care for it and, it's true, the final 20 minutes or so are considerably poorer than the rest; still, it's exciting, puzzling, and well done. If anything, the passage of time makes it seem a better movie than modern entries in the shock/suspense genre.

 — posted by P | at 8:49 PM | |

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

· I don't know. A strong opinion forcefully expressed is one thing, but non-stop bile is another. It can be funny in short bursts, but they do have to be short if they are to avoid being tiresome.
This general habit of expression is also making it difficult to find out anything. Both sides in any hot polemic tend to end up lying about everything. It is therefore now impossible to find out if, indeed, the entire Iraqi National Library has been destroyed, or only the Recent Acquisitions shelf in the lobby. Pro- and antiwar fans have had too much fun making claims and counter claims even about this (to them) comparatively unimportant matter.
"Burn a Country's Past and You Torch Its Future" is the title of Robert Darnton's piece in The Washington Post for April 20, 2003. Seems to be in agreement with this article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung dated June 16th, which also points out that many books were stolen or destroyed during Hussein's regime. I've still no real idea of how many books were destroyed or looted. No point in asking, is there?

 — posted by P | at 10:22 PM | |

· How do Movies Like This Get Made? I saw the following on tv over the weekend:
Slapstick of a New Kind (1984)
I watched in aggregate about six minutes of this. It's a Jerry Lewis movie based on some Kurt Vonnegut novel about large, alien infant twins who try to save the world through their own unknowable goodness; Pat Morita plays a miniature Chinese man who lives in what appears to be a bedpan, along with some followers.
Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)
Our friends Mel Gibson and Danny Glover team up once again, joined by Chris Rock and Joe Pesci, but they soon discover that their movie has no plot. They run around just doing stuff hoping something will develop.
Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)
Directed by Bill Condon. A tall black ghost with a hook mysteriously harasses a New Orleans woman and her family, eventually killing everyone in the movie except for our heroine, who destroys him by breaking an old mirror. Shot on location in a New Orleans cleverly made to look like an old backlot.
Help! My Dog is on Fire! (2003)
A vine-ripened tomato grows legs and sets out to seek his fortune. After some self-searching and growth, he eventually realizes some things about himself that he didn't know before. Stars Kevin Spacey in his finest rôle to date. Yes, that's the one I made up.

 — posted by P | at 6:59 PM | |

Thursday, April 24, 2003

· Everyone seems to go from one hopeless day to the next. Each day at 5:00 they say, "Phew! That's the day finished. Now to tackle the evening, get through that somehow. Then get some sleeping in, then get started on the next day." The only remotely high point of anyone's life is the last half hour of work.

 — posted by P | at 3:30 PM | |

Friday, April 11, 2003

Here's the Spectator, being shocked and awed:
The US Agency for International Development has shown a remarkable lack of gratitude to the British in announcing that the main contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq will go to American companies, but that foreign companies 'might be considered' when it comes to subcontracting work. This is the America of steel tariffs and import quotas speaking, and it is an America guaranteed to win few friends abroad.
Silly British! Trix are for kids.

 — posted by P | at 12:00 PM | |

· My Bad Leftie Friend says: "Yeah, well David Frum is an idiot and a traitor. He should just concentrate on keeping the stupidity from coming out of his mouth. Hard task, of course."

 — posted by P | at 10:53 AM | |

· Maybe he goes too far but Daily Kos does have a point.

 — posted by P | at 9:51 AM | |

· My Bad Leftie Friend says: "Oh well, yeah, I can see that: America woke up after 9/11 with a fierce desire to help the Iraqi people out of their nightmare. That's the main thing going through everyone's head: Gosh, how to help the poor suffering Iraqis? Because, forget that oil they may have (oil? they have some oil?), we're mainly concerned about their well-being. We want the Iraqis to be happy and free, and that is the chief (if not only) reason we are fighting. We are unhappy to see our Iraqi friends, or indeed any Arabs, suffering under a dictatorship. We have come to save them."
I must argue with him about this.

 — posted by P | at 7:56 AM | |

Thursday, April 10, 2003

· Thanks to Oxblog, we are alerted to the the Washington Post's piece about insane Rep. James P. Moran Jr., who believes that the American Israel Public Action Committee (AIPAC) will "direct a campaign against me". There's also a picture of him. I thought he would be much older-looking.

 — posted by P | at 11:28 AM | |

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

· "Corporal Bernard Gooden, a 22-year-old tank gunner with the U.S. Marines, is the first Canadian to be killed in combat in the war to oust Saddam Hussein"—today's Globe and Mail (link may fade soon), via Flit.

 — posted by P | at 11:11 AM | |

· I don't mean to seem dismissive of some struggling writer's efforts, but a few lines from Mr John Moss' Being Fiction really annoyed me.
One of his stories is entitled "Kafkaesque". It goes something like this:
The names of some writers exceed in importance the achievement of their work. In my present state of distraction I find a search for examples unyielding. I can think of only one. Kafka. There must be others but Kafka is so appropriate to the moment the others seem unimportant enough to let the generalization collapse. I have no fondness for Kafka's writing, no sympathies, epiphanies or relevelations come to mind as I recall his texts.
Then he proceeds to tell a pretty weak story of his own for a few pages. It contains the phrase "moving back to Toronto", which practically guarantees the story will be a terrible bore.
First of all, just notice the sheer bad writing in this little paragraph, which is, after all, the beginning of a story about writing. (If the writer were going to talk about motels or Swiss watches, that would be one thing. But if he's going to dish out criticisms of Franz Kafka — or Mister Franz Kafka, as I knew him — then you'd think he would have tightened this initial paragraph up a little. "Exceed in importance" — doncher mean "are more important than"? Oh, and I don't mean to be picky, but by "achievement" we should probably understand "value". And what's this guff about "epiphanies?" I thought only James Joyce enthusiasts were allowed that word.)
Maybe I've missed the point of this, but what sort of person starts a poorly-written, dull story by inviting comparison with the author of "A Hunger Artist"? A tactical error, surely.

 — posted by P | at 10:44 AM | |

· Speaking of regime change, I happened to come across a book by Genadii Chemodanov entitled Nerchinskaia katorga, the memoirs of a prison convoy commander in Siberia. It was published in 1930 and describes events in the Tsarist prison system. One of the editors is listed as "N. Chuzhak", which I decided must be a pseudonym, since it means "outsider" or something. Sure enough, a little research revealed that the man's real name was Nikolai Fedorovich Nasimovich. He was the co-editor of V tsarskoi kazarme, a collection of historical accounts about soldiers and sailors in the 1905 revolution. More importantly, he was a literary theorist, and compiled (and contributed to) a collection called Literatura fakta, which calls for some new revolutionary way of thinking about literature. When I saw that he died in 1937 a few alarm bells went off. Did he suffer the fate of so many other proponents of the new regime? I can't seem to find out much more about him.

 — posted by P | at 9:56 AM | |

· No reports yet on the fate of Saddam's private fairground. It has to be seen to be believed: A satellite picture of "An amusement park for vacationing Iraqi leadership and their families. A Merry-go-round, Ferris Wheel and other amusement park rides are visible."
Frankly, the idea of Iraqi leaders and their families going on vacation is strangely untoward, though I don't know why it should be. Hussein, like Hitler, is reported to have enjoyed watching movies. Well, who doesn't? I suppose. Some particular favourites: The Day of the Jackal and The Godfather, according to Mark Bowden in The Atlantic.
I imagine at the fairground the menfolk would spend some time chortling into their moustaches and looking around for whom they might devour, but at some point they would have to indulge the kiddies and go on the Ferris Wheel.
Given what has been written about the fortunes of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, these vacations were probably a bit tense at times. Good times, but—

 — posted by P | at 7:17 AM | |

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

· Obsession for Slogans: Run the Government like a Business and Run Business like the Government!

· Here are some thoughtful considerations about the scientific couth of studying the possibilities of antigravity at aeronautics.ru:
Respectable research institutions look at this problem and weigh the unlikely possibility of a positive outcome (however significant its consequences may be) against a guaranteed avalanche of criticism and outright condemnation from the scientific community.
If they had any faith in it they wouldn't be weighing anything.

 — posted by P | at 11:37 AM | |

·No doubt someone will explain to me why I am wrong, but I think it strange that the more ambiguous a question is, the fiercer people polemicize about it. Think of any issues automatically deemed by the press to be controversial: don't they invariably allow legitimate arguments both ways? Isn't that what keeps people arguing? And in that case, isn't it inappropriate for people to get that vicious about it? After all, since people who are not demonstrably insane can keep arguing, it's safe to assume they have some point, so there's no call for spitting and swearing.
At first I thought the problem might be the mere complexity of the issues: there are so many threads to untangle, so much background you would have to master, etc. Mathematics, however, is such a field. It's complex, and there's a lot you need to know before you even start. Yet mathematicians don't scream at each other. You either prove your theorem or you don't. And people don't just dismiss it angrily as so much eyewash, they spend weeks or months checking the work for flaws.
So I propose that if a thing inspires lots of angry rhetoric, then the thing itself is uncertain and nebulous.

 — posted by P | at 10:10 AM | |

Saturday, April 05, 2003

· A curious story about Fritz Kolbe, the legendary cog in the machine who tries to undermine the machine, in the Boston Globe. It's a fascinating and yet very sad story, and the reason people are thinking about it is that, of course, the west needs to take a look at who we're dealing with and why, and what will happen to potential intelligence resources. In Iraq I see brouhaha in the making.

 — posted by P | at 9:23 AM | |

Thursday, April 03, 2003

· Erik Satie's house was very untidy. He didn't entertain much, at least not in the conventional sense of inviting people over. The most he would do was perform one of his miniature pieces for the piano, preferably at someone else's house, which caused everyone to look serious for a moment or laugh ironically, depending on who they were at the time. In his own home M. Satie had a sort of routine: Wake up. Eat something. Go out. Come back. Drink some more cognac. Wake up. Drink some more cognac. Wake up. Et cetera. In between times he managed to write a fair number of compositions. Not a staggering volume of things. A modest output. He was busy, much of the time, mulling over things and observing his friends. As for the house, there really isn't time to tidy up - books and magazines get stacked here and there, papers and things lie down in heaps. One accumulates things, and things accumulate dust. There are all sorts of things, all over the place, and one is too busy thinking about people and things to clean up.
People said: "There you are again, observing, never taking part. Why is that?"
Erik Satie said: "Well, I get a bit tired of Erik Satie sometimes."



 — posted by P | at 9:40 AM | |

· Even as I speak there are developments. Talking Points Memo has just mentioned that dead Iraqis have been found outside Baghdad wearing chem-gear, as reported by CNN's Walter Rodgers. From this he speculates that the Iraqis are considering using chemical weapons of some kind:
The question that arises is basically a political one for the Iraqis. Once they use chemicals, if they do, they will not only lose a lot of ground in the propaganda war in the Arab world and even more in Europe, they will also confirm a lot of the rationale for American action. So, for them, it must be a difficult calculation. If they have hopes of dragging this out in a guerrilla war or some urban fighting then you'd expect they wouldn't do it -- it would be counterproductive, since they believe they have some hope of eventually wearing America down and turning world opinion further against us. On the other hand, if they think they're on the verge of complete collapse -- which looks like a distinct possibility -- then they may be in 'go down in blaze of glory' mode.
Maybe. But it's much simpler to assume that they are doing what the Coalition forces are doing—donning gasmasks whenever shells hit. They may be expecting some kind of non-lethal gas, for example, such as the Russians used on the Chechen terrorists in Moscow. Just an ideoid.



 — posted by P | at 9:04 AM | |

· I'll bet the next two or three days will be very important in the Iraq war. According to Flit: " ... with the Adnan [Guard Mechanized Division] showing up, all Iraq's remaining offensive combat power is basically inside or just outside Baghdad now." Should I put an exclamation mark in square brackets behind that? I just don't know.


 — posted by P | at 8:51 AM | |

· Every so often you read something new and—well, good.
On the far side of the Rockies the land flattened out and lost the excessively lived-in appearance that begins to make Colorado look like the East. I realized that I hadn't crossed the deserts since I had hitchhiked them in the Sixties. Much had changed since then, and more since I had first seen the big empty lands while crossing the continent at age six with my parents. The deserts were still appallingly large despite the intrusion of the Interstates. Towns, though, were giving way to the homogenization and franchised conformity that cause any part of America to look like any other. The West remains magnificent territory.
That's from Mr Fred ("Fred on Everything") Reed's piece on his recent trip to the Grand Canyon in the U.S. Everything he writes is worth a look. It's not only, or principally, opinion-airing, but some thoughtful writing.


 — posted by P | at 8:16 AM | |

· It's always nice to have an expat rightwing British journalist on your side, or behind you, or whatever. Have a read of Andrew Sullivan and see if you don't think he has earned his cup of rice this week.

 — posted by P | at 7:25 AM | |

· I notice Mr Raed (of Where is Raed?) hasn't broken web silence since March 24th.
He is presumably in Baghdad and used to post regular reports on events there. Many people have links to him. Now he has stopped. Probably nobody can get to the internet under the circumstances, but it would be nice to know if he is all right.

 — posted by P | at 5:25 AM | |

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

· I would like to have that job of coming up with suitable names for programmes, projects and operations. I'm sure lots of people in various departmenst sit around thinking up lists of names, but someone has to peruse them and cross off those that are no good and then forward the best picks to the relevant instances.
I think I could do it.

• Operation Endearing Freedom
  
• Operation Busy Road Map for Peace
  
• Operation We'll Kick Your Ass
  
• Operation Guns 'n' Latrines


And I could think of more.

An interesting place called Wibsite features this strangely dull yet compelling weblog. Here's a sample:
The internet has quite a lot on it       February 7
I looked at the internet for a while. There seem to be a lot of pages one can look at these days. I carried on looking at the internet for a while longer, but there were still plenty more pages to be looked at another time.



 — posted by P | at 12:23 PM | |

· I had to go to a meeting the other day, and apparently someone who was looking for me was baffled to not find me at my desk at that time. She broached the difficulty a bit later:

"H'mmm, how can I find out— if you're at a meeting?"

It is a problem, since her office is at dizzying heights above mine, way up on the fourth floor. It's just not efficient for people to ride elevators back and forth hoping to find each other. I was stumped.

Suddenly it came to me. "Wait!" I said, "I think I've got it! What if you were to use the telephone?"

"You mean—"

"Yes, I think it would work. It just might work. You phone from your office, up there, down to mine. You see? That way ... "

"Right, right," she said. "I think I do. And I would ask if you're at a meeting or not? Or ..."

"Exactly. And it should be possible to find out. Either way."

Working in an office is a bit like doing math. It exercises the brain.


 — posted by P | at 9:42 AM | |

· There was a period when the music of Charles Alkan was hardly ever played, roughly from the time of his death, in 1888, until about ten minutes ago. He wrote orchestral works for piano (thus removing the need for reduction). He met and was fond of Chopin, who was about three years his senior, but in later life he became secluded. It is said that he died trying to reach a volume of the Talmud on an upper shelf of his bookcase, which then fell over and crushed him.

 — posted by P | at 8:31 AM | |

· At Conservative Commentary you can see a British war memorial in France defaced by the locals, with comments such as "Rosbeefs go home" and "mort aux Yankees"; also a swastika. They didn't sign their work, though. Nothing but well-reasoned arguments from the anti-war crowd.
Another thing about the antis: they always turn up at their demonstrations beating on drums and wearing ridiculous woolen hats with bobbles. Then they start picking fights with the police, who are there chiefly to stop people fighting each other.

 — posted by P | at 12:51 AM | |

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

· According to the Grauniad for Monday, March 31, "Three British soldiers in Iraq have been ordered home after objecting to the conduct of the war. It is understood they have been sent home for protesting that the war is killing innocent civilians." The Guardian is not the most impressive of papers, but if this is not a mistake or an out-and-out lie, it's unprecedented. Is it possible that the men got into some other kind of trouble, and this is their excuse? I doubt that.


 — posted by P | at 10:06 PM | |

· What I don't like is when people come to my desk with some message or remit or something, and they stand there with a fistful of mail or notes or some other papers, looking through it as they speak, and then putting the stuff they want to discard into my wastebasket! I sometimes feel like taking it out and saying, "Hey, don't forget your junk."

 — posted by P | at 12:25 PM | |

· There has been a serious friendly fire incident on Friday reported at the BBC's site and discussed at Samizdata (amid claims the incident has escaped the notice of US media): A US A-10 destroyed two British Scimitars 40 km. north of Basra in broad daylight. The thing is, incidents such as this, how they are handled, and a few other things make you wonder how competent the US can be in designing elaborate war plans, and drawing up a whole new map of the Middle East. "Fog of war" is good. Just how extensive is this fog?

 — posted by P | at 7:15 AM | |

Sunday, March 30, 2003

· Here's a good bit from Lt. Smash, which I recommend. He's in Iraq, or nearby. Anyway, visit his site:
Met with some of the locals again today.
They were excited. They are anticipating the end of Saddam’s evil regime even more than we are.

They were glued to their satellite TV set, switching between Al-Jazeera, FOX News, BBC, the local station, and Iraqi TV. They especially enjoyed the female anchor on FOX, with her short skirt.

“What city?” One asked, pointing at the woman on the TV.

“New York.”

“I must go there!” They all laughed.

Switched to the Iraqi station. An Iraqi general was giving a briefing. He had dark circles under his eyes, and was looking around the room as if he was frightened for his life. Probably hadn’t slept in days.

They translated some of his statements, for my benefit. The general was making outrageous claims of victory on all fronts, which were met with cries of “Bulls—t!” from my hosts. They mocked him.

Switched to BBC. The anchor announced that the port city of Umm Qasr had been secured, and would be receiving humanitarian supplies within days.

“Sir, is it true,” they asked me, “is Umm Qasr secured?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Can we go there?” This puzzled me.

“Why would you want to go there?”

“Dancing girls! Beer!”

Then it hit me – Umm Qasr is a border town. For these men, it holds memories of a different time, a time before war, when they could travel freely to Iraq, and do all the things not allowed in their own country.

Umm Qasr is their Tijuana.

I was invited to stay for lunch, and I could not refuse. They served roasted chicken on a bed of rice, with curry spices. The food was on communal plates, and they weren’t at all shy about using their hand to eat – but only their right hand. Desert was chopped dates.

I was torn away, all too soon, by a call on my radio.

Back to work.




·And unfortunate, but it seems that woman who got run over in Israel was just reckless: here's a good summary on Oxblog.

 — posted by P | at 10:01 AM | |

Saturday, March 29, 2003

· I don't know. If I were Saddam Hussein, and I had a lot of WMD salted away, now is the time I'd dig them out and use them.

 — posted by P | at 2:46 AM | |

Thursday, March 27, 2003

· Now I want to remind myself (and anyone else ... er) that "Watch" has a new address, which I've also fixed in the "blogroll" to your immediate right. His new address is http://watch.windsofchange.net/, i.e., at "windsofchange.net". Some kind of beehive of excitement they have there.

 — posted by P | at 12:31 PM | |

· I've been thinking about Mr Marshall's points (quoted and alluded to a scant 1.5 cm. below this). This is the thing that has been bothering everyone, and it might be the answer to all those searching and sometimes abusive pieces in the media, "Why Do those Bastards not Agree with Us?" (meaning France, Germany, etc.), and so on.
It's not just invading Iraq that gives one pause. It's the idea of taking up the jihadi gauntlet on mujahedin terms. Our own terms—which are more comforting—involve thinking or talking our way out of a difficulty, or at least, "coming up with something". The mujahedin want to fight to the death, with really crude weapons.
The non-mujahedin way doesn't always work. But is this faint-heartedness? Maybe not. Maybe, for the time being, it's no more than a careful appreciation of what exactly we are facing. I don't think you need to hurry with that.


 — posted by P | at 11:19 AM | |

· And now this from Joshua Marshall:
This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism.
Sounds like a, yes, a Bit of a Job. Read more here.
I don't say that I agree with Mr Marshall. I really can't think of any objections to his points, however.

 — posted by P | at 10:46 AM | |

The Grauniad says ( and I know this from Eschaton):
TALLIL AIRFIELD, Southern Iraq (AP) - The first U.S. airplane landed Thursday at a key Iraqi airfield, which forces informally renamed "`Bush International Airport.''
It is indeed informal, yet one wonders: is that really necessary? Don't you think it would be good to not do that?

 — posted by P | at 10:11 AM | |

· Stephen Pollard has a link to this Most Loathsome New Yorkers business. I don't know who most of these people are. Oh, here we are: No. 27, "John Negroponte, U.S. Representative to the U.N." ... "The latest incarnation of this unkillable Friday the 13th-style right-wing monster haunts the Camp Crystal Lake of our own U.N. building..." Yes, all right. The sentiment is fairly clear. Who else? Woody Allen (his latest movies, I take it, are "one gigantic exercise in bourgeois team-building"—afraid I don't know what that means; have a look yourself), Steinbrenner ("infantile persecution complexes"), Kissinger, Safire, right. I can see why you might be a trifle weary of them, but you'd hardly loathe—wait! Tina Brown, former editor. Ah, that was terrible. The New Yorker, that monument to Ross and Thurber, E.B. White ... allow me to relive that for a moment. She turned it into some kind of nutty British gossip raglet. It was like The Sun on very expensive paper. "Whew, What a Scorcher" I kept expecting as their headline.
Fortunately The New Yorker is back on track now. Have a look. Cartoons still good, reportage interesting, stories kind of sub-Updike.


 — posted by P | at 8:54 AM | |

· Flit has a good link explaining the merit of the Kornet E, a Russian anti-armour missile which may have been used against U.S. tanks in Iraq. Here's a paragraph from there:
Kornet is a third generation system, developed to replace the Fagot and Konkurs missile systems in the Russian Army. It is designed to destroy tanks, including those fitted with explosive reactive armour (ERA), fortifications, entrenched troops as well as small-scale targets.
It was a good idea to replace that Fagot thing. And what a weapon! It's extremely versatile, either on a tripod or vehicle. The article mentions that some have been sold to Syria.

 — posted by P | at 8:22 AM | |

· It is the year 2001.
You are in weightless condition aboard the spaceliner, Orion, on the first leg of your journey from Earth to the Moon.
That's, of course, from the liner notes to the soundtrack of 2001: a space odyssey (MGM Records, Inc., 1973).
But 2001 was a couple of years ago and we are not weightless, but heavily encumbered. We are practically in the middle ages, fighting the Saracens again! More from the cover (actually, the inside; it was one of those folding things with stills and so on inside):
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is an adventure which spans the whole history of the human race. Seeing it takes you on a voyage into the great age of exploration that is opening up for mankind among the planets and beyond....In 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the great American director, Stanley Kubrick ("The Killing", "Lolita", "Paths of Glory", "Dr. Strangelove") reveals the strangeness, beauty and wonder we will discover on the moon, the planets, and among the stars—in the year 2001.
(I presume these notes were written around the time of the movie's release, in 1968.)

 — posted by P | at 7:48 AM | |

· In the future you might wake up and find that you are the only person who knows how to play a 33 1/3 rpm LP from the mid-sixties. Just imagine, these future guys, these Tomorrow's Joes (Jap. = Ashita no Joe) , are puzzling over a vinyl recording and wondering what it is. It's "Antiques Road Show", let's say, and you are able to explain to them: "It's 'analog', and has to be played at 33 1/3 'rounds per minute'". And they ask: "What do you mean by 'minit'?"
In Italian this "Tomorrow's Joe" is called "Rocky Joe". The Japanese means "Joe of Tomorrow" , "Joe of the Future", or "Future Joe", or something like that. If you look at this Italian site you will get some idea of how enthusiastic adults can get about a comic-hero.
If I'm not mistaken, Superman was sometimes referred to as "the Man of Tomorrow" in early strips. Something funny about this idea of futuristic demigods: doesn't it suggest people are unhappy with the way things are in this boring old "today", which is really all we have? When they talk of these things, and read and write comic strips about them, it means they're entertaining themselves with daydreams: "And then I might do this, and then this could happen, and then I could be like James Bond."
It's big business.

 — posted by P | at 6:03 AM | |

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