Well, the regular baseball season has come to an end, and not a moment too soon for the Boston Red Sox. Sure, our own Manny "I Don't Run Unless It's A Home Run (In Which Case I Jog)" Ramirez captured the American League batting title, and two of our hurlers - Pedro Martinez and the unlikely ace Derek Lowe - are clear contenders for this year's Cy Young Award. And yes, our 93 - 69 record looks pretty good on paper, as the legendary Impossible Dream 1967 Red Sox only had 92 wins and went on to within a hair's breadth of a world championship. So what happened? Why aren't we gearing up for a Fall Classic? The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy and the Herald's Jeff Horrigan attempt to unravel the mystery of the 2002 Red Sox and their wildly-successful yet oddly unsatisfactory performance this year. Personally, however, I found all the answers I was looking for by attending last Saturday's game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, where the new Impossible Dreamers (plus one) managed to blow a comfortable 4-1 lead by keeping their starting pitcher - veteran knuckleballer Tim Wakefield - in too long, only to replace him with some seriously mediocre relief that gave up seven runs in one inning. Now one can argue that it was the end of the season, and the Sox had already been eliminated from playoff contention, so what do you expect? But the problem is that this was the 2002 season in a nutshell. Despite the fact that management completely changed hands last year, the new owners neglected to learn the most costly lesson of the previous regime, which is that all the marquee sluggers in the world can't make up for a team with lousy pitching. We got lucky this year that Derek Lowe rose to the challenge of starting, after the disastrous year before as the Sox closer. Otherwise, it would have been just Pedro again, throwing his arm out by midseason in an attempt to carry his teammates to glory all by himself. But at the end of the day, even two Cy Young contenders aren't enough to fill out a four or five-man rotation, and the Sox suffered as the year progressed as a result. I just hope that the owners take it upon themselves to acquire another ace or two over the long, long winter, or else we fans are in for a lot more heartache.

A final note: in a bid to wring even more money out of loyal Red Sox fans, the new owners somehow managed to convince the City of Boston that they should be able to close off Yawkey Way, the street which borders Fenway Park, and let their concessionaires sell overpriced food and drink outdoors, effectively muscling out the independent sausage and steak tip sandwich vendors who have been hawking their tasty and affordable victuals in the shadow of the ballpark since time immemorial. Apparently the idea was to make Fenway "more like Camden Yards", a neo-retro stadium in Baltimore that originally used Fenway as its inspiration (how po-mo is that?) Never mind that Yawkey Way already had a life of its own - in a bid to turn the home of the Red Sox into a Disney-esque homage to itself, and no doubt to line their pockets with the few dollars that were still escaping their collective grasp, the management has sucked all of the sounds, tastes, and smells out of the venerable alley.

Talk about a gross misuse of pop culture: the Washington Times' Jonah Goldberg stretches credulity and demeans one of the best shows on television by reading his own brand of American geopolitics into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Goldberg sees Buffy as a metaphor for the United States, the unilateralist "Slayer" who must take action while the ineffectual "Watchers" (a.k.a., the U.N.) fail to take charge of the situation time and time again. But the comparison is bunk, pure and simple.

First of all, Buffy rarely acts on her own. Hello? The Scooby Gang! One of Joss Whedon's favorite overarching themes is that teamwork and cooperation are good things, and that trying to go it alone often results in making a problem even worse. Buffy and her friends have always fared best when they acted "multilaterally".

Second, the United Nations is hardly a Council of "Watchers". Sure, the U.N. has drafted an awful lot of resolutions, but an awful lot of them get enforced, by foreign money and foreign muscle, mind you. I don't remember Buffy being ten years behind on her Watchers' dues! And whereas Mr. Goldberg attempts to paint the United Nations as a voyeuristic debating club, the reality couldn't be further than the truth - with peacekeeping missions in some of the world's most hopeless regions and myriad ongoing humanitarian projects in virtually every developing nation, the U.N. is often the only organization willing to do anything to help in areas devoid of strategic importance (and hence America's attention).

Finally, Buffy the Vampire Slayer deals mostly with a world of monsters, whereas we live in a world of men. But even Buffy knows the difference, and the limits of her power and moral authority. In the final episodes of last year's season, despite the fact that the wannabe supervillain Warren had senselessly murdered one of the Scoobies - Willow's girlfriend Tara - Buffy cautioned the enraged Willow about seeking vengeance on a mere mortal: "We love you. And Tara. But we don't kill humans. This isn't the way... if you do this - Warren destroys you too." Slaying vampires is one thing. Slaying Warren, however, no matter how heinous his crimes, is another. Willow ignores Buffy's advice, and uses her powers in rage and arrogance to kill her lover's killer. And rather than finding solace, she plunges deeper into madness instead. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has committed some terrible deeds, not only against his neighbors and his own people. But Iraq is a sovereign nation, and Saddam Hussein is a man, and we have ways of dealing with both, when they cross the line. If we the United States decides that we're above the law and act accordingly to go after what we see as the "Big Bad", like Willow, we run the risk of going the beyond the point of no return, and, in classic Joss Whedon fashion, accidentally becoming the real Big Bad ourselves.

Finally, the loyal opposition finds its voice in America. After biting their tongues in the wake of a bogus Presidential election, then walking on eggshells for a full year after the September 11th attacks, the Democrats are at last speaking out about the state of the nation and our ever-more-misguided "War on Terror", which has all but launched an unprovoked, unjustified war on Saddam Hussein. Senator Tom Daschle angrily excoriated the Bush Administration yesterday for implicitly questioning the Democrat-controlled Senate's loyalty after failing to pass a fatally-compromised bill on Homeland Security that, among other things, would have (in the name of "fighting terra", as Dubya so eloquently puts it) turned fifty thousand veteran unionized federal workers into unprotected scabs with its passage. The crew in the White House has been pulling this act pretty consistently since 9/11, turning every political disagreement on how best to proceed in safeguarding our country into a patriotic litmus test, and up until this week the strategy has worked like a charm. Enter Al Gore. You can love or hate the man (personally, I'm of the growing opinion that - as the Daily Howler has insisted all along - he was screwed out of being taken seriously as a candidate by the media, whose surprisingly vicious ad hominem bias against Gore continues to this day), but the fact of the matter is that by lashing out at the administration's Iraqi war schemes as a calculated distraction from the real issues facing America, the winner of the popular vote in Election 2000 managed to light a fire underneath his hitherto-spineless officeholding political brethren, and now there's at least a chance that we'll have a real, honest-to-goodness debate about the future of our country before we let Bush and Company flush it down the toilet for no good reason. So thanks, Al! The nation owes you a huge debt of gratitude, whether we realize it or not.

The dream is over, at least for another season - the Red Sox officially eliminated themselves from playoff contention tonight, by losing to the Chicago White Sox, 7-2. A pity, because a win would have kept them in the running, as the Anaheim Angels, their rivals for the fourth and and final playoff spot, also lost. But this year has been nothing but one godawful shame for the Sox, who started out with a truly incredible 40-17 spring record only to go into a early summer tailspin from which they never really recovered. Of course the truly bizarre thing is that two of the Sox's pitchers - ace Pedro Martinez and the unlikely hero Derek Lowe - have both won twenty or more games (a remarkable thing for a modern pitcher, period) this season, and the team's big slugger Manny Ramirez is still in contention for the league's batting title. The Red Sox played some brilliant ball this year, no doubt, but unfortunately they only did so half the time, if that. For all the epic hurling from D-Lowe and Pedro, and all the long balls from Ramirez and the rest of the club's hitters, there were periods of agonizing mediocrity that swallowed up such feats and rendered them null and void. What a waste!

Nevertheless, the wife and I will be going to Fenway Park for one last game this Saturday, against the consistently-awful Tampa Bay Devil Rays. At least we're almost guaranteed a win...

Here's another nugget of wisdom from the far right: according to House Majority Leader Dick Armey, there are two kinds of Jews living in today's America, "One of deep intellect and one of shallow, superficial intellect." Guess which group is which? That's right - Jews that agree with President Bush and his policies are the smart ones, whereas those who dare to question the reigning junta are lightweights. Representative Armey then extends his positively Aristotelian powers of categorization to conservatives and liberals in general (ah, so it wasn't just an anti-Semitic slander!), arguing that due to their deeper intellects, conservatives tend to be practitioners of the hard sciences and engineering, whereas liberals shun eschew practical disciplines for softer vocations like the arts, since they "want to feel good". How I wish I were making this stuff up, but no, one of the most powerful men in America actually said these things. So now not only is anyone who disagrees with the current administration a shallow-minded simpleton, but just to be safe, we'd better keep our eye on people who dabble in music, art, history, literature, philosophy, or any other of those pesky disciplines that form the basis of Western civilization, since chances are they're all leftist know-nothings as well. What would Thomas Jefferson - or any of the Founding Fathers, who steeped themselves in such humanistic "softness" - have to say about that, I wonder?

So much for dealing with our problems like grown-ups. The United States said today (through its Secretary of State, Colin Powell), that even if Iraq complies with existing and future U.N. resolutions on weapons inspections, as Bush was demanding before the General Assembly just a little more than a week and a half ago, we nevertheless still reserve the right to try and remove Saddam by force unilaterally. Well, Dubya didn't keep that multilateral thing going for too long, did he now? I think it's now becoming obvious to everyone outside of America - with the exception perhaps of Tony Blair, who inexplicably has become an American proconsul in this "War on Terror", a reasonably articulate mouthpiece we can trot out to beguile our European allies and our own easily-fooled domestic opposition who are rightfully horrified at anything that comes out of President Bush's mouth- that we're no longer interested in what the world thinks of us, whether Allies or Axis, friends or foes. Just look at our new vision statement for the 21st Century. A nation whose avowed ideals were once the promotion of democracy, human rights, and freedom has dedicated the sum total of its resources and military might to a glorified global game of King of the Hill. Granted, our government spent an awful lot of time paying lip service to the "liberty and justice for all" line, while fostering the exact opposite both at home and abroad, but to me an integral part of being an American was the struggle to win that freedom for all races, colors, creeds not just here in the States, but ultimately - by backing such entities as the United Nations as an international force for good - for the entire world someday. But the mask is off now. For the first time in American history, we're announcing to the world that, in the end, even for us, despite of decades if not centuries of protestations to the contrary, (to quote last night's Buffy) "It's about power." By stating that one of the new cornerstones of our national security strategy is to prevent any other nation in the world from becoming our rival, like it or not, we're admitting to the world that the old race is still afoot, and that we're not particularly interested in the international cooperative agencies that emerged from the wreckage of the last round of Great Power shenanigans. Flush from our Cold War "victory" over the Soviet Union, which is celebrated here as an unqualified triumph despite the fact that we armed and radicalized the entire world (including such places as Afghanistan) to win it and only avoided fiery nuclear destruction on multiple occasions by sheer luck, we've decided to make beating down the competition our paradigm in perpetuity. In other words, we've learned nothing at all.

Come on world, who wants to play next?

Back into the groove, now that my laptop has been resurrected from the dead. Or maybe reincarnated is a better word for it. Resurrection implies a complete return to what was once there, whereas reincarnation means you're back, only different, and often with little memory of your former existence. My laptop's return from Hades involved an electronic dip in the river Lethe - where souls bound back to the land of the living washed away their old selves before inhabiting new mortal shells - as I had to reformat the machine's hard drive just to get it to boot again. Which means everything that my laptop had experienced since I brought it home with me a year ago was lost irrevocably in the swirls and eddies of induced virtual forgetfulness. Or was it? Plato suggests that since we've all been here before, the act of learning is actually something more like remembering, as a fresh mind makes connections that the underlying soul seems to recall. I wonder if that holds true for machines as well. When I bookmark a favorite old website, re-install a piece of software, or make the trip to the online mail server, does my born-again laptop have a vague sense that this has all happened before, a nagging suspicion that its life is but a groove on an ever-revolving CD-ROM, a deep premonition in its hard drive that there are potentially limitless beginnings and ends lurking beyond its presently established configuration?

This is why I'm not supposed to be drinking coffee anymore!

A lamb and and a pig roasting on spits. Homemade raki (aka, Cretan moonshine) by the jug. People dancing on tables, breaking the fine china, and hanging from the rafters. And a hangover that lasts for days.

Every Greek wedding is a Big Fat Greek Wedding! At least that's been my personal experience so far...

Looking forward to tonight's premiere of Joss Whedon's new series, Firefly, which seems an awful lot like a flashier, sexier version of the British cult fave Blake's 7 (which itself was a darker and more complicated answer to Star Trek, and happens to be my all-time favorite science fiction television series). Let's hope Joss and Company can pull this one off, because with the untimely demise of Farscape, sci-fi fans need something more than a few scattered crumbs from the Trek franchise every now and then...

An interesting article in the September 20th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the article's behind their security wall, which is a shame because it's such an important topic) investigates the recent rounds of budget cuts in libraries, presses, resident culture programs, and other parts of the infrastructure of intellectual life in American universities. In the name of balancing their precious Excel spreadsheets, bean counters in higher education are going after the easy targets - that is to say, the so-called "soft" disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, even physics and mathematics - and slashing funds for everything but the practical (read as: profitable) arts. Even then, no one is guaranteed a stay from the finance dean's executioner. Here at Harvard Medical School, for example, the decision was made to start charging library users for every book or photocopy they request from other non-Harvard libraries via Interlibrary Borrowing (that's me). Whereas before all such requests were free, and the cost written off as the price of maintaining our preeminence as a top research institution, the Powers That Be now think that such a subsidy was a waste of Harvard's money, and have instituted a fairly punitive system of charges in its place designed to drive away all but the desperate and deep-pocketed. Aside from seriously jeopardizing my livelihood, this is horrible idea in principle, and I think a fairly ominous sign of times to come. What the bean counters don't understand about the life of the mind is that discovery is hardly ever a straightforward thing, and that many of our best innovations were happened upon by pure chance. Reducing a library's acquisitions budget or charging users for intellectual curiosity may save universities a few bucks now, but it sharply reduces the possibility for all those happenstance connections - say, a chance discovery in the stacks of a book that transforms an entire field of inquiry, or an article that wasn't particularly useful for the research project at hand but turns out to be invaluable for a completely unrelated one - that have happened time and time again and have lead to countless breakthroughs in science and the humanities. By emulating the "corporate model" for its operations (as if big corporations should be emulated by anyone these days, what with Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, et al!), American higher education is unwittingly sowing its once-fertile fields of humanistic inquiry with salt, and ultimately we will all be the poorer for it.

While we're still talking about the strange and unusual (but when aren't we here, really?), I thought I'd share one of my favorite mail-order food links from the Delaware Valley, as part of the Jersey Exile's survival toolkit. Philadelphia has a wonderful place called the Reading Terminal Market, once the terminus of the famous Reading railroad, then later an important culinary landmark, as various food vendors took up residence there to hawk their victuals. Threatened with extinction at the end of the 20th Century, the Market was saved by a city that put its money where its mouth was, in more ways than one, and mobilized to preserve it as the gritty living thing it was, and not some mall-ified simulacrum. To this day you can sit down and eat fresh apple fritters from a Mennonite waitress, just steps away from Rocco's Hoagies - where they pile a hard roll chock full of only the finest Italian lunchmeats and Provolone cheese so sharp it makes your head spin when you bite into it! Spices are still sold by the pound, and the butchers and fish vendors are the real deal. There is a curious little candy store in the Market, as well. Chocolate by Mueller is a family-owned sweet shop whose claim to fame is a series of anatomically-correct body parts. Get your mind out of the gutter, now! Not those body parts, but things like ears, noses, human hearts, even brains. Mueller's started selling this odd speciality due to its proximity to some of the finest hospitals in America, whose resident physicians kept on asking for custom novelty orders of chocolate and white chocolate organs. Now there are always a few body parts on display in the glass case, along with the more-mainstream fare, especially around Valentine's Day. For what better way to say "I love you" is there, than with a four-chambered milk chocolate heart?

This is not the set-up for a joke: did you hear that Clive Barker is writing children's books? Next month Abarat, the first volume of a planned four-book fantasy series, will be available in bookstores. Look out, J.K. Rowling! The cool thing about Clive is that he's not only a writer, but a damned good artist as well. One hundred original paintings will illustrate October's release, some of which you can get a sneak peak at here. I didn't realize this at first, but Abarat will not be the author's first foray into "children's fantasy" (I don't approve of the term, because it assumes that children aren't ready for the real thing, which is patently absurd. What about Grimm's Fairy Tales, for crying out loud? Trying to keep our children free from any exposure to life's darker side for their own so-called good will inevitably screw them up even worse in the long run, as a generation of American parents attempting to raise their kids in culturally-sanitized bubbles are doubtless going to learn) - Clive Barker's 1992 book The Thief of Always, another illustrated book, was extremely well-received, though I haven't had the good fortune to read it yet. Might just have to snag a copy, via the magic of Interlibrary Borrowing. Because that's what I do.

Back to Andrew Sullivan, for his article in yesterday's Salon is still rubbing me the wrong way. It's amazing how much outright garbage he was able to pack into just a little over 300 words, but what I'm finding particularly irksome today is his use of the word "Islamo-fascism", which I've noticed he's rather fond of. This darling neologism that has been making the rounds of late among conservative pundits is classic Newspeak for a phenomenon that hits a little too close to home for the right to demonize it without an Orwellian name-change: we call it fundamentalism. Because you see, if the problem the West is facing these days lies with Islamic fundamentalists, and not Islamo-fascists, then we might have to suspect our own home-grown fundamentalists of being equally deranged and dangerous to world stability. For example, how about all those "born-again Christians" in Congress and the White House who believe that the Second Coming is literally going to happen within their lifetime - you don't think that may be skewing their policies on the Middle East, do you? (Of course not! What are you, some kind of an anti-Semite? Check out Antiwar.com for an interesting argument about who the real victims of anti-Semitism might be in this "war on terrorism" - hint, Arabs are also Semitic people - and further investigation into the neocons' creation of an Islamo-fascist bogeyman as a justification for regime change without end.)

I have an idea: why don't we starting calling our own fundies "Christian-fascists", and let's see how that plays in the Heartland!

Switched today from my regular tiny lunchtime bottle of Tabasco Sauce to the new Tabasco Brand Garlic Pepper Sauce. A month or so ago, I wrote a veritable ode to Tabasco here, only to have my browser crash before I had the chance to publish it. Ouch. But my love for the hot vinegary sauce from Avery Island, Louisiana is unabated, so much so that when my office stash threatens to run out, I start to panic. If my food doesn't at least tingle my gums, I'm not quite satisfied - like the Spaniards said of the Aztecs, who even spiked their chocolate drink with chile peppers, "Without chile, they do not believe that they are eating." Now Tabasco is a great-all purpose sauce, as are its variants (among them Green Jalepeno Sauce, the above-mentioned Garlic Pepper Sauce, and even a Habanero Sauce I've yet to sample) sold by the McIlhenny Company, but this isn't to say that I'm not also partial to the competition out there. And there's a lot of hot sauciers these days to choose from. Inner Beauty Hot Hot Sauce, created by East Coast Grill owner/chef Chris Schlesinger, is another favorite of mine, a tropical blend of fiery habaneros, mustard, and fruit juices that turns a plain old hot dog into an atomic treat. One of my favorite Fenway Park pushcart vendors always had generous squirt bottles of this sauce alongside the ketchup and mustard for the more adventurous baseball fans - I wonder if he's still in business and dishing out the heat, now that Red Sox management has staked off Yawkey Way for its own personal profitmongering? I used to also love a unnecessarily incendiary sauce called Capital Punishment, which was best used by the eyedropperful, lest you render your meal inedible.

And yet to my tastebuds, Tabasco still reigns supreme. Perhaps it's that vinegary tang to it, or the fact that it blends seamlessly with a good bowl of clam chowder (good for those frigid New England months just around the corner!), but like the Aztecs, I shake at least a little bit into practically any food I can get away with. Thank goodness the wife shares my love for spicy foods! Now if only I can convince her to go to Avery Island for our next vacation...

btw, the Garlic Pepper Sauce is tasty!

Does Andrew Sullivan even try to write anymore? With a piece of slander against the "knee jerk left" that was so short, it could have been keyed in on his cell phone (less than 500 words), not only does he completely miss the point of Mary McGrory's comparison - i.e., that Saudi Arabia presents an equal if not greater threat to the United States of America than Iraq does right now - but he also misses the mark on most of his point-for-point debunking.

For example:

"Iraq is not a theocracy, as Saudi Arabia is. It's an ostensibly secular military police state, run by a single despot. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is an oil-rich, religiously conservative theocratic oligarchy. However noxious both regimes are, it's indisputable that they are very different in their particulars."

Wrong on both counts, Andy. Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime may have started out on a more or lessly secular program, but Saddam has increasingly been playing to his own foaming-at-the-mouth religious right to shore up his regime. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is a MONARCHY, not an oligarchy, and uses horribly oppressive police state tactics to ensure the perpetuation of the now-shaky House of Saud. The theocratic oligarchs who terrorize the Saudis when the royal family's secret police aren't are just icing on the cake there.

And by the way, Iraq is also oil-rich. Now why would a conservative pundit forget to mention that, I wonder?

"Iraq has been developing weapons of mass destruction. Saudi Arabia hasn't, isn't and won't."

The majority of hijackers who transformed four American airliners into what many have called weapons of mass destruction were Saudis, not Iraqis. And thanks to our turning a blind eye to Saudi internal affairs, there is little if any guarantee that another crop of equally-demented zealots won't try to do something similar again. When's the last time that Iraqis killed nearly three thousand American citizens? They couldn't even pull that off during the Gulf War.

"Saddam has fought two disastrous wars against its neighbors, Iran and Kuwait. He invaded Kuwait and threatened to invade Saudi Arabia if the West hadn't stopped him. Saudi Arabia has never invaded another country."

People to the right of Mr. Sullivan have argued that Saudi Arabia, by encouraging the militant brand of Wahhabism that is indigenous there, is waging a de facto war on Western civilization. Whom has Iraq threatened of late?

"Iraq is in violation of umpteen U.N. resolutions. Saudi Arabia isn't."

Again, Mr. Sullivan might want to check a few facts before writing for a publication other than his blog. Resolution 1377 of the Security Council condemns those states which harbor and render financial assistance to agents of terror. Even the Rand Corp had a brief moment of clarity in seeing that Saudi-sponsored terrorism is perhaps the greatest evil we in the West face today.

See also various U.N. resolutions about the equality of women (most recently General Assembly Resolution 56/188), and the treatment of minorities, in particular the application of the death penalty for gays and lesbians.

Moreover, if we were to use the table of U.N. resolutions as a "hit list" for countries in need of immediate, violent regime change, when are we going after Ariel Sharon and the state of Israel?

"Iraq has gassed its own citizens and used chemical weapons in wartime. Saudi Arabia hasn't."

Iraq committed these offenses with our blessing at the time, Andy forgot to add. We provided logistical support and money to Saddam Hussein while he was employing chemical weapons both against the Iranians and his own rebellious citizens. Saudia Arabia may not have ever used weapons of mass destruction on its people, but by inflicting a misguided fundamentalist legal code upon them which features amputations for petty theft and capital punishment for adultery and same-sex relations, it has terrorized its citizenry no less than Saddam. Only last December fifteen girls were left to die in a burning school, because Saudi zealots would not permit male firefighters to be in the same room with them. How is that less evil than gassing them to death?

To his credit, at the end of his blog-McNugget of an article, Mr. Sullivan does acknowledge that Saudi Arabia might be part of the problem. But nevertheless his priorities and those of the war hawks (among them the present American administration) are completely out of whack. If as we're told every day by our leaders we are indeed fighting a "war on terrorism", then by any standard of measurement Saudi Arabia's corrupt monarchy and the fundamentalist terrorist breeding ground it provides and shelters should be in our crosshairs right now, not Iraq, whose links to terror are tenuous if not altogether nonexistent. Yet the drumbeat for war leads us inexplicably to Baghdad, to oust a tinpot dictator who no longer poses any credible military threat to his neighbors and whose much-touted plans to build weapons of mass destruction are fabricated out of evidence so flimsy that President Bush won't even let our own Senators see it.

Sloppy journalism, Mr. Sullivan. Go back to your blog. And shame on Salon for printing such obvious hack work.

File this one under "You Can't Get There From Here":

My laptop died over the weekend. One moment I'm multi-tasking away, the next I'm staring at a blue screen informing me in jargon I can barely parse that the computer has decided to go to the Bad Place for an extended holiday. Reboot? Same message. Reboot again? The same. Take out all of the batteries, power it down for an hour or so, then try another time? No such luck. Inform the laptop that if it does not cooperate and power on with no funny business I'll take it to the ocean and feed it to the crabs and lobsters? Silence, and again the ugly blue screen (how I hate that blue screen!).

So I, trying to be the informed, empowered consumer that corporate America is supposed to value these days, dust off the old desktop and go online to try and figure out what the hell happened. Mercifully, it doesn't take long - apparently I've experienced a Windows XP problem. Egads! They shipped XP when they knew it was still buggy? I'm so shocked I can barely type! No biggie, I think, I'll just order whatever fix I need to order and get on with the business of jacking myself back into the Continuum. When your laptop becomes an extension of self, you know you have serious problems. But I digress. Having diagnosed the problem, and found the solution, I figure I'm just a hop, a skip, and a jump back to a happy humming laptop, sans blue screen. I call COMPAQ, explain my situation, and ask for the CD-ROM I'll need to set things right.

"I'm sorry," the cheerful tech support person tells me. "But I can't authorize sending you a CD until we have a record of troubleshooting your computer."

This is not good. I'm not home at the time, so troubleshooting right then and there is not an option, nor will it be for a few nights hence, thanks to my schedule. And besides, didn't I troubleshoot the problem by going online to COMPAQ's own tech support website and successfully diagnose the problem?

Again the pleasant tech support drone: "I'm sorry. We can't give you the CD until we've officially troubleshooted the laptop."

Well, can't we be reasonable about this, I'm thinking. I ask if there's any way I could have gotten the specific error message I got, if the problem weren't exactly what I thought it was (and what there own website said it was, to boot)?

"I don't think so, but I still can't send you the CD without a troubleshooter's OK."

At this point I get a little obstinate. I didn't used to be obstinate with customer service people, considering I'm sort of kind of one myself during my day job. But I don't like where this conversation is going, and hope that maybe I can force someone's hand to just send me the damned CD without having to wait until later in the week.

"I'll talk to my supervisor. Please hold."

Okay. This is progress. Suddenly I'm feeling good about being impertinent. Maybe sometimes it does pay off. Hey, this could be a huge life-changing experience for me....

"Thanks for holding. I'm sorry, sir, but I just can't authorize that until you've been troubleshooted."

Now of course we all know that this is the moment of truth. Will I say thank you and hang up, or will I cross the threshold of jerkdom and start getting obnoxious. Remember, impertinence is good. Obstinacy can be a virtue. Mercy is for the weak.

Um, all right then, I say. Thank you. By the way, sorry for putting you out earlier.

"That's quite all right. Have a good day and thank you for calling the new HP, and COMPAQ Presario."

Man, what a pushover I am. So much for the jerky new me.

This is what happens when you finally try and organize your bookmarks - you find all sorts of gems that you haven't visited in ages, such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Even if you don't think you know these guys, you do. Remember the Doomsday Clock, whose minute hand is moved closer or farther from midnight depending on certain international events in order to illustrate how close humanity is to wiping itself off the face of the earth? Well, that was their baby (and btw, we're seven minutes to midnight, back where the clock started in 1947. There's nothing like progress, eh?). The Atomic Scientists have a few choice things to say about the Bush Administration's so-called "evidence" of Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. Dick Cheney and company have been blitzing the media with allegations that Saddam could have a working bomb imminently, although they've been coy with revealing the intelligence that would substantiate such a chilling scenario. Well, the reason why we haven't seen any of it on CNN yet is that it doesn't really exist, and that the administration - surprise, surprise - is distorting what few scraps they do have of attempted Iraqi violations concerning weapons of mass destruction into their new-and-improved casus belli, now that the conjectured Saddam-Al Qaeda link is sounding more and more like, well, conjecture.

And here's another stunner: apparently George Senior pulled exactly the same stunt in 1991, when dire (and completely fantastic) predictions of Saddam and nuclear-tipped Scud missiles helped the United States get its first Gulf War on. Like father, like son, I guess. Dad didn't try to ram a hasty Congressional vote authorizing military action down the opposition's throat right before Election Day, though, whereas Dubya's already busy turning his campaign against Iraq into the ultimate electoral litmus test...

But I forgot - we're talking about a sequel here. This time, it's personal.

While we're on the subject of music news, I heard this morning that Warren Zevon has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Terrible news. My all-time favorite Warren Zevon song: "My Shit's Fucked Up", from his 2000 album Life'll Kill Ya. Zevon's one of the real rock artists - a superb songwriter and musician with a wickedly demented satirical bent. He'll be sorely missed.

(And this is something I only just learned about him: his long-time fishing buddy and song co-writer is none other than Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald columnist and author of a slew of fantastic neo-noir novels, such as Sick Puppy, Striptease, Double Whammy, Tourist Season, and his latest, Basket Case. Now that I know, it makes perfect sense that Hiaasen and Zevon would team up - they're truly birds of a feather!)

In the CD player this morning: Bang on a Can's Music For Airports (1998), a brilliant arrangement of Brian Eno's album by the same name, only for live musicians - namely, the Bang on a Can All-Stars - with a full orchestra behind them. Started in 1987 by David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can began as an annual one-day musical event in New York City and has grown into an international phenomenon. The kind of music that Bang fosters defies pigeonholing. Is it world music? Is it experimental? Is it fusion? Is it post-modern? I don't know, but it's fantastic stuff. I had the unique pleasure of attending the NYC festival in 1995, which was a 12-hour marathon showcase of up-and-coming musicians and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a six-man ensemble of clarinets, saxophones, electric guitar, cello, bass, keyboards, and percussion that has toured the world many times over with its visionary original compositions, such as member Evan Ziporyn's Tsmindao Ghmerto, a reimagination of a Georgian hymn using overtones and throat-singing techniques to play actual chords on a clarinet (you have to hear it to believe it!).

Music For Airports is the perfect way to ease into a weekend, I'll tell you what.

Well, this morning Dubya sure was polite to all those U.N. folks we supposedly don't need to do the things we want, wasn't he now? Could it be that he and his administration are finally getting the hint that all this talk of preemptive unilateral war against Iraq is scaring the hell out of the American people, who are all for saddling up and going after the bad guys, provided that it doesn't make the world hate us even more than it did before (and thus practically guaranteeing another horrific bin Laden-esque terrorist attack in our future)? Hey, those knee-jerk, One World Government-lovin' liberals were actually right on this one - it is a good idea to get the international community's permission to declare war on another sovereign nation! Who'd have thunk it?

Of course it remains to be seen whether the Congress is going to wait on the United Nations, as we know all too well how our Senators and Representatives feel about those selfless blue-helmets who have been holding the most dangerous places in the world together with rubber bands and a prayer for decades now - who needs 'em, right? Except maybe in Afghanistan. And Kosovo. And Cyprus. And East Timor. And Sierra Leone. And the Congo...

...and maybe, in the not-so-distant future, Iraq.

Now everyone wants to be a cowboy - the BBC World News reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened neighboring Georgia with unilateral military action if it fails to do a better job in eliminating the Chechen rebels who are holed up within the former Soviet republic's borders, in the remote Pankisi Gorge. Most commentators see this ultimatum directed less at Georgia and more towards the United States and its impending all-but-declared war against Iraq, as in his letter informing the United Nations of the demand, Putin employs the same language and logic as can be found in Bush's "justification" for going after Saddam Hussein, accusing the Georgian government of harboring terrorists in violation of international agreements and U.N. anti-terror resolutions. He may chill my bone to the marrow, but Vladimir Putin is one shrewd operator, and perhaps the specter of a world full of trigger-happy buckaroos unconcerned with global cooperation will give the United States pause before it embarks upon its "you're either with us or against us" crusade versus the Iraqi regime.

All this political hoo-hah is giving me a headache. Might be time for a Slurpee. Mmmmm. Too bad my local 7-Eleven no longer has Vanilla Coke Slurpee on tap, because that's what I was really jonesing for. Damn that tasty Vanilla Coke!

Forget Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or even John Ashcroft - I have seen the face of true evil, and it is called the Jiffy Bag.

For those of you not in the know - O, blessed ignorance! - the Jiffy Bag was invented by Satanic forces as a low-cost mailing alternative to envelopes with bubble cushioning (or good old-fashioned cardboard boxes with crumpled newspapers or even styrofoam peanuts). Jiffy Bags use shredded waste paper as their padding material, which I'm sure sounds great and earth-friendly in these conservationist times. The problem, however, lies in the opening. For you see, another key aspect of the Jiffy Bag's cheapness is that they're extremely flimsy. Even when you can open one correctly by pulling the easy-pull tab, the padded walls rupture about half of the time, showering you with a fluffy cloud of 60-100% post-consumer recycled material, which looks great on your dress clothes and tastes even better when you inadvertently suck it down into your lungs. Of course, many times you don't even have a chance of opening a Jiffy Bag correctly, as the fiends who inflict this form of delivery upon you diabolically decide to compound their malfeasance by covering the easy-pull tab with a layer or two of packing tape, for reasons that confound any sense of logic or human decency. Handling such a Jiffy Bag is an object lesson in no-win situations, a true test of character under fire.

So far today, I'm not exactly maintaining a passing grade...

Of all people in the world, I think Ronald Reagan said something once that illuminates what happened on September 11th, and why it engendered such a sympathetic response from the world. He wasn't talking about 9/11, of course, but was speculating about what would happen if the Earth were ever invaded by aliens (can you believe this guy was actually President?)

"But I've often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by an outer -- a power from outer space, from another planet.

"Wouldn't we all of a sudden find that we didn't have any differences between us at all, we were all human beings, citizens of the world, and wouldn't we come together to fight that particular threat?"

For a lot of people in the world, 9/11 was just that - an alien invasion moment - and for probably the first time in modern American history even our enemies were falling over themselves to offer their condolences. It was a truly bizarre thing to witness, I have to tell you.

In my opinion, that moment COULD (no, SHOULD) have been something more than it's turned out to be. How we've squandered such universal goodwill on pursuing our own stupid national agenda sickens me almost as much as the terrorist attacks themselves. This could have been a turning point in the world community, when we finally gave the United Nations the backing it needed to confront the issues that threaten the entire world's stability - disease, poverty, hopelessness, ethnic hatred - and generate madmen like bin Laden with axes to grind and nothing to lose.

But no, here we are, a year later, with our President drumming up another oil war, hoping that no one is paying attention to the fact that most of Al Qaeda is still at large and none of the larger problems that breed suicidal-homicidal tendencies have even been acknowledged, let alone addressed. 365 days and counting, America. There's some goodwill out there yet - if only we had the courage to take it and make the world a better place for all, instead of just a better place for the U.S. of A...

...or would that have to take an actual alien invasion? I wonder.

Talk about getting off topic: someone should gently remind the Bush Administration that today is supposed to be about honoring the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and not trying to sell anything to the American people, least of all a damned fool war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever. And yet there is every indication at this point that our appointed President is going to make an Iraqi crusade the implicit theme of his address to the nation this evening. I'm glad I'll be teaching tonight, or else I'd probably put a shoe through the television screen.

At least the rest of the world isn't afraid to call us out for turning our pain into a permanent casus belli against anyone who dares defy us. Nelson Mandela had some particularly harsh words for Bush and company, particularly Dick Cheney, whom he labeled a "dinosaur". Then again, I might feel the same away about someone who went on the record to support my incarceration as a political prisoner, as Cheney did when Mr. Mandela was languishing under the brutally-oppressive apartheid South African government.

Make no mistake about it - 9/11 is a still-raw wound in the American psyche, but that's not going to stop our leaders from trying to using it for political purposes. Would that one of those leaders take a stand against such a hijacking, lest a most dangerous precedent be set for this terrible anniversary.

Many people will turn to music today for solace and comfort. I know that Mozart's Requiem will be making quite the rounds, but as much as I love the Requiem (I once sang it with a full choir and orchestra when I was a high school student), I'll be listening to Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, Opus 36, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Gorecki, a modern Polish composer, wrote his hauntingly beautiful Third Symphony in 1976, and the enthusiastic reception it received catapulted him into international reknown (he is still alive and writing music today). Here are the lyrics from the third movement of this work, in Polish, then with the English translation:

Kajze mi sie podziol
moj synocek mily?
Pewnie go w powstaniu
zle wrogi zabily.

Wy niedobrzy ludzie,
dlo Boga swietego
cemuscie zabili
synocka mojego?

Zodnej jo podpory
juz nie byda miala,
chocbych moje stare
ocy wyplakala.

Chocby z mych lez gorkich
drugo Odra byla,
jesce by synocka
mi nie ozywila.

Lezy on tam w grobie,
a jo nie wiem kandy,
choc sie opytuja
miedzy ludzmi wsandy.

Moze nieborocek
lezy kay w dolecku,
a moglby se lygac
na swoim przypiecku.

Ej, cwierkejcie mu tam,
wy ptosecki boze,
kiedy mamulicka
znalezc go nie moze.

A ty, boze kwiecie,
kwitnijze w okolo,
niech sie synockowi
choc lezy wesolo.

Where has he gone
My dearest son?
Perhaps during the uprising
The cruel enemy killed him.

Ah, you bad people
In the name of God, the most Holy,
Tell me, why did you kill
My son?

Never again
Will I have his support
Even if I cry
My old eyes out.

Were my bitter tears
To create another River Oder
They would not restore to life
My son.

He lies in his grave
And I know not where
Though I keep asking people
Everywhere.

Perhaps the poor child
Lies in a rough ditch
And instead he could have been
Lying in his warm bed.

Oh, sing for him
God's little song-birds
Since his mother
Cannot find him.

And you, God's little flowers,
May you blossom all around
So that my son
May sleep happily.

Estimated civilian casualties from the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks: 2801 dead and missing.

Estimated civilian casualties from the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan: No official statistics, and the United States has bent over backwards to stymie any attempt to gather the numbers independently. Best guesses range from 1300 dead (The Commonwealth Institute), upwards to 8000+ dead (from a European demining expert in Kabul who works closely with the Pentagon). Many respected NGO's such as Médecins Sans Frontières offer figures somewhere in the middle, around 3000-4000 dead. See the special report in the February 12 issue of the Guardian, which does its best to make sense of these statistics.

I'm all for respecting the memory of the 9/11 dead, but how about a moment of silence for all of the innocent people who have died as a result of these attacks, directly or indirectly?

Peace on Earth.

And back to the Moon. Apparently this morning former astronaut Buzz Aldrin socked a lunar conspiracy theorist in California, who had demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he actually landed on the moon in 1969. Now I'm all in favor of not trusting our government, but when the Fox Broadcasting Network (who aired a one-hour fake moon landing theory documentary earlier this year) is leading the quest for truth, I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with the conspirators on this one. For an excellent point-for-point debunking of the conspiracy theory, I suggest that you try Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, a site that is just chock full of astronomical beefs with the media, be it television, the movies, or popular misconceptions that just won't die.

This just in - The Jersey Exile is banned in China! And after all the nice things I was just saying about their space program...

Thanks to Harvard Law School researchers Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, now you, too, can determine whether your site is viewable from Chinese internet portals. So much for making a killing selling OODJA! merchandise to the Middle Kingdom. Damn!

Looks like my "Eat McDonald's On The Moon Before I Die" fantasy might come true after all. TransOrbital of California will be the first private company to send a spacecraft to the lunar surface, according to the BBC Science News. Granted, this will be an unmanned probe, but experts on the field of commercial space travel wonder if this is the beginning of a whole new era. I say best of luck to them. The United States has demonstrated no interest whatsoever in the final frontier lately, except perhaps to militarize it, and if that means other nations or private entities need to take the initiative to get humanity back out there, then so be it. If it's not careful, America could very well end up like China in the Middle Ages, when it turned its back on an incipient age of exploration and surrendered its spoils to the West and doomed itself to play a mean game of catch-up for the next thousand years. I've mentioned here before that China doesn't seem to want to make the same mistake twice - its highly-secretive space program is running full steam ahead, according to those in the know, which is more than anyone else can say right now.

Want to send something (albeit light) to the Moon? Go to TransOrbital's website and get on board, to the tune of $2500 per gram!

Please note however that despite my enthusiasm for this and other parties' endeavors into space exploration, I am 100% opposed to the privatization and/or militarization of space itself. The United Nations Outer Space Treaty (in force since October 1967), to which we the United States are a signatory, states clearly:

The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind;

Outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;

Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means;

States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;

The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes;

Astronauts shall be regarded as the envoys of mankind;

States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental activities;

States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects; and

States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.


Humanity should do everything within their power to hold the governments of the world to this agreement, lest Donald Rumsfeld and his ilk turn the cosmos into their own personal nuclear playground, or sell it off to the highest bidder.

The boss is gone for the day, so all meaningful work has ground to a halt. As proof, I offer you this fruit of my idle websurfing, the T'inator, which will dynamically translate any other website into Mr. T-ese (that's Mr. T of "A-Team" fame). Look what it makes of the other Mr. T's account of the Sicilian Expedition. "I pity the fool who can't learn from history!"

I didn't have my oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast this morning, so I wonder- can I count a fistful of chocolate-covered blueberries towards my five servings of fruits and vegetables for the day? Or does dipping a piece of fruit in chocolate render its nutritional value null and void? Hmmm. I've gone from the Peloponnesian War to scarfing chocolate-covered blueberries in the space of five hours. It must be a Friday.

The makeover of The Jersey Exile continues. My goal is to make this someday look like this, but making Blogger's template do what I want is proving a little trickier than I'd originally thought. Stay tuned, true believers!

Uh, oh. I just learned that SimCity 4, the latest installment of the insanely-popular SimCity computer game series, will be available in stores in November (I can feel what's left of my free time draining away already!). Which is good news for everyone but the Greeks, since apparently they've recently banned all computer games in an attempt to squelch online gambling. This seems a little extreme to me, even though I know full well from personal experience that the Greeks are gambling fiends. But we all know where the road paved by good intentions leads...

I wonder what Thukydides would have made of this one?

From Thukydides, Book VI, on the eve of the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415-413 BC, when Athens squandered its preeminence among the city-states of Greece on an unnecessary and ill-conceived war of conquest (sound familiar?). The following is a speech attributed to Nikias, who, having been elected commander of the invasion force against his will, sought to dissuade his fellow Athenians from what he rightly recognized as a doomed adventure in imperialism:

"Although this assembly was convened to consider the preparations to be made for sailing to Sicily, I think, notwithstanding, that we have still this question to examine, whether it be better to send out the ships at all, and that we ought not to give so little consideration to a matter of such moment, or let ourselves be persuaded by foreigners into undertaking a war with which we have nothing to do. And yet, individually, I gain in honour by such a course, and fear as little as other men for my person- not that I think a man need be any the worse citizen for taking some thought for his person and estate; on the contrary, such a man would for his own sake desire the prosperity of his country more than others- nevertheless, as I have never spoken against my convictions to gain honour, I shall not begin to do so now, but shall say what I think best. Against your character any words of mine would be weak enough, if I were to advise your keeping what you have got and not risking what is actually yours for advantages which are dubious in themselves, and which you may or may not attain. I will, therefore, content myself with showing that your ardour is out of season, and your ambition not easy of accomplishment.

"I affirm, then, that you leave many enemies behind you here to go yonder and bring more back with you. You imagine, perhaps, that the treaty which you have made can be trusted; a treaty that will continue to exist nominally, as long as you keep quiet- for nominal it has become, owing to the practices of certain men here and at Sparta- but which in the event of a serious reverse in any quarter would not delay our enemies a moment in attacking us; first, because the convention was forced upon them by disaster and was less honourable to them than to us; and secondly, because in this very convention there are many points that are still disputed. Again, some of the most powerful states have never yet accepted the arrangement at all. Some of these are at open war with us; others (as the Lacedaemonians do not yet move) are restrained by truces renewed every ten days, and it is only too probable that if they found our power divided, as we are hurrying to divide it, they would attack us vigorously with the Siceliots, whose alliance they would have in the past valued as they would that of few others. A man ought, therefore, to consider these points, and not to think of running risks with a country placed so critically, or of grasping at another empire before we have secured the one we have already; for in fact the Thracian Chalcidians have been all these years in revolt from us without being yet subdued, and others on the continents yield us but a doubtful obedience. Meanwhile the Egestaeans, our allies, have been wronged, and we run to help them, while the rebels who have so long wronged us still wait for punishment.

"And yet the latter, if brought under, might be kept under; while the Sicilians, even if conquered, are too far off and too numerous to be ruled without difficulty. Now it is folly to go against men who could not be kept under even if conquered, while failure would leave us in a very different position from that which we occupied before the enterprise. The Siceliots, again, to take them as they are at present, in the event of a Syracusan conquest (the favourite bugbear of the Egestaeans), would to my thinking be even less dangerous to us than before. At present they might possibly come here as separate states for love of Lacedaemon; in the other case one empire would scarcely attack another; for after joining the Peloponnesians to overthrow ours, they could only expect to see the same hands overthrow their own in the same way. The Hellenes in Sicily would fear us most if we never went there at all, and next to this, if after displaying our power we went away again as soon as possible. We all know that that which is farthest off, and the reputation of which can least be tested, is the object of admiration; at the least reverse they would at once begin to look down upon us, and would join our enemies here against us. You have yourselves experienced this with regard to the Lacedaemonians and their allies, whom your unexpected success, as compared with what you feared at first, has made you suddenly despise, tempting you further to aspire to the conquest of Sicily. Instead, however, of being puffed up by the misfortunes of your adversaries, you ought to think of breaking their spirit before giving yourselves up to confidence, and to understand that the one thought awakened in the Lacedaemonians by their disgrace is how they may even now, if possible, overthrow us and repair their dishonour; inasmuch as military reputation is their oldest and chiefest study. Our struggle, therefore, if we are wise, will not be for the barbarian Egestaeans in Sicily, but how to defend ourselves most effectually against the oligarchical machinations of Lacedaemon.

"We should also remember that we are but now enjoying some respite from a great pestilence and from war, to the no small benefit of our estates and persons, and that it is right to employ these at home on our own behalf, instead of using them on behalf of these exiles whose interest it is to lie as fairly as they can, who do nothing but talk themselves and leave the danger to others, and who if they succeed will show no proper gratitude, and if they fail will drag down their friends with them. And if there be any man here, overjoyed at being chosen to command, who urges you to make the expedition, merely for ends of his own- specially if he be still too young to command- who seeks to be admired for his stud of horses, but on account of its heavy expenses hopes for some profit from his appointment, do not allow such a one to maintain his private splendour at his country's risk, but remember that such persons injure the public fortune while they squander their own, and that this is a matter of importance, and not for a young man to decide or hastily to take in hand.

"When I see such persons now sitting here at the side of that same individual and summoned by him, alarm seizes me; and I, in my turn, summon any of the older men that may have such a person sitting next him not to let himself be shamed down, for fear of being thought a coward if he do not vote for war, but, remembering how rarely success is got by wishing and how often by forecast, to leave to them the mad dream of conquest, and as a true lover of his country, now threatened by the greatest danger in its history, to hold up his hand on the other side; to vote that the Siceliots be left in the limits now existing between us, limits of which no one can complain (the Ionian sea for the coasting voyage, and the Sicilian across the open main), to enjoy their own possessions and to settle their own quarrels; that the Egestaeans, for their part, be told to end by themselves with the Selinuntines the war which they began without consulting the Athenians; and that for the future we do not enter into alliance, as we have been used to do, with people whom we must help in their need, and who can never help us in ours.

"And you, Prytanis, if you think it your duty to care for the commonwealth, and if you wish to show yourself a good citizen, put the question to the vote, and take a second time the opinions of the Athenians. If you are afraid to move the question again, consider that a violation of the law cannot carry any prejudice with so many abettors, that you will be the physician of your misguided city, and that the virtue of men in office is briefly this, to do their country as much good as they can, or in any case no harm that they can avoid."

Here it is: Jersey Exile, version 2.0! Okay, right now it's mostly just a picture of the NJ Turnpike on top, but it's a start, right? Keep checking back as I figure out how to monkey with the Blogger template and not make the whole thing crash...

Red Sox Nation has little to cheer about these days, what with being eight and a half games out of the American League East and six and a half back for the Wild Card slot, but fans of recently-traded Scott Hatteburg (formerly a Sox catcher) can at least savor his game-winning home run that propelled the Oakland A's to their twentieth victory in a row, an AL record and the third-longest winning streak in the history of baseball. Go Hattie!

More disturbing Red Sox news - apparently the new owners have declared war on the pushcart vendors who have sold their sausage sandwiches, hot dogs, and steak bombs on Yawkey Way since time immemorial. With the permission of the City of Boston, the Sox were able to close the street to the public on game days (starting this afternoon), creating a ticketholders-only venue where only "officially-sanctioned" food vendors will be able to sell their treats, shutting out the majority of the old concessionaires. Neighborhood activists decry the fact that beer will also be for sale along the cordoned-off Yawkey Way promenade, prompting silly predictions of Bacchic anarchy on game days - as if people don't get tanked at baseball games already! - but the real injustice to me is the treatment of the hard-working independent salesmen being run out of their livelihood. Part of the magic of going to a game at Fenway was stuffing your face with a greasy sausage sub from one of many of the vendors, who hawked their products with an almost theatrical pushiness in order to stand out from the competition. Now that it's all the Red Sox' money, one way or the other, something is going to be missing. Sure, the quality of the food - crab cakes and Cuban fare, I'm told - sounds much better, but I can get fancy food anywhere in Boston. But I wonder, what will become of the Sausage King?

Here in America we deep-fry a lot of unusual things: dill pickle slices, steak fingers, even candy bars. Homer Simpson once had his shirt deep-fried, much to the consternation of his wife Marge! But somehow I don't think we're quite prepared for fried spider, a survival food for Cambodians suffering under the Khmer Rouge that has of late become a runaway national delicacy. Now I'm a pretty adventurous soul when it comes to food, but spider is pretty close to where I draw the line, although it can't be too different from soft-shelled crab, right? Roughly the same size, roughly the same texture, roughly the same parts. And the Cambodian preparation - deep-frying them with lots of garlic and salt - sounds like the only way in the world a person could eat a spider and enjoy it. Hmmm. Okay, I'm intrigued.

Weird fact - I may or may not be related to Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance philosopher who met an untimely end at the hands of the Italian Inquisition in 1600, a family fact that I picked up from a very-inebriated great uncle at a wedding when I was eleven or twelve years old. I haven't been able to verify this tidbit one way or the other, although someday I plan to go to Italy and do a little sleuthing, but since that childhood revelation Giordano has loomed large in my imagination, and has inspired me on more than one occasion to take the road less traveled by. It isn't easy to be a heretic, even when they're not burning your kind at the stake anymore, but I look to "Uncle G.", and whether or not his blood flows in my veins literally, it does metaphorically. Here's a fantastic site dedicated to the man (with music!), and another, more minimalist tribute. Although Giordano was more of a mystic than anything else, he's remembered chiefly today for his heresy of infinite worlds, in which he speculates that if space is infinite, then there must be an infinite number of planets out there, replete with an infinite number of civilizations, and, so goes the logic, an infinite number of Incarnations. What would later become the kernel of a pretty nifty Star Trek episode was a blasphemy punishable by death back in the 16th Century, so Uncle G. found himself on the run for most of his life, lecturing at Oxford, showing off his "Art of Memory" in Paris and Geneva, and writing a series of theological/philosophical tracts and mystical poems until he was ultimately betrayed by one of his students (the ungrateful wretch!). Taken into custody by the Venetian authorities and brought to Rome for his trial and execution, Giordano was burned in the Campo dei Fiori, where a statue of him stands today. I was in Rome once, at the Campo dei Fiori no less, but I didn't realize at the time that the hooded figure staring at me was in fact my possible ancestor! Next time I'll come with an offering...

I seem to have entered the third phase of my recurring battle with the demon bean that is coffee. Phase One is when I realize that "I don't need coffee" - like anyone "needs" anything! - and enjoy a few weeks of cold turkey euphoria. My energy levels are good, herbal tea still tastes palatable, and I'm not really even thinking about what I'm missing. Then comes Phase Two, when for one reason or another I start sneaking an occasional morning cup into my daily routine. "Hey, it's the weekend!" I say to myself. "I'm running on empty - just one cup, and I'll be fine." This stage tends to last about a month or two, when my cravings for caffeine are held in a kind of equilibrium that seemingly could go on forever. And then one day I'll stupidly break the spell, and treat myself to an afternoon cup. That's when Phase Three comes crashing down all around me. Suddenly where no cups or just one cup was all I needed, two doesn't seem quite enough any more, and I start daydreaming about espresso machines, iced Vietnamese coffee, and that Starbucks they're building across the street from the library (not fast enough, dammit!). Madness soon follows. Eventually I tire of not being able to sleep at night and get back on the wagon, but it's usually a wild ride before I re-attain that kind of clarity...

At least I'm not down South, or in Jersey, where sweet tea is cheap and plentiful and oh-so-caffeinated. My mother unwittingly raised me on a steady diet of this supersweet nectar (which if you're not familiar with it, is what many people confuse with "iced tea". Don't be fooled! Iced tea and sweet tea are two different animals. The former is generally swill, with a chemical "lemon" flavor that tastes like cleaner, and usually sold in bottles; whereas the latter is made with real sugar, real high-quality brewed tea, and lots of ice, and served generously throughout the Southern states. Of course, both may seem barbarous to hot tea afficionados, but I assure you that sweet tea is far less a sacrilege than a bottle of Snapple!), so between the sugar and the caffeine I buzzed around like a hummingbird as a child, just brimming with nervous, devious energy. Poor mom - I guess she meant well! These days I save my sweet tea binges for vacations, although there's an excellent Chai Spice blend from Stash Tea that makes for excellent Indian-style iced tea.

Sometimes it's just hard to let a long weekend go.

For those of you still wallowing in despair since Dubya and Co. did a little smash-and-grab at the Electoral College, fear not! The Mighty Cthulhu is planning to run for President again in 2004, and the Great Old One doesn't need to hire image consultants or put on a phony Southern accent in order to drive a feeble-minded Texan mortal incumbent out of office and into stark raving insanity. IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!

But of course Cthulhu has a softer side as well, and isn't afraid to show it. I wasn't aware that someone out there manufactured plush Cthulhus, but I sure as hell want one now...

H.P. Lovecraft is an old favorite of mine. I know he's poo-pooed by a lot of serious scholars, but that's more a sign of their own bias and snootiness than anything else. H.P. is a master storyteller, who almost single-handedly invented the genre of supernatural horror fiction. Ask any of the horror greats - Stephen King, Clive Barker, et al, and without fail they will mention Lovecraft's stories as a primary source of inspiration. But whereas the modern claimants to the genre have necessarily watered down their product for a general audience, H.P.'s works are classically-constructed and mythologically dense almost to the point of impenetrability. But you see, that's the point. In most modern horror writers, the evil that plagues the protagonists can most of the time be named, understood, then contained (much to the relief of the general public); whereas in Lovecraft the evil is so beyond the scale of human reckoning that it's not even fair to call it "evil". The Great Old Ones like Cthulhu are manifestations of the infinite slithering amorality of the cosmos, and the horror is one of scale and awe, when the progressive modern investigator, armed with his multiple translations, his gun, and his derring-do, runs smack up against a universe that isn't actively hostile towards him but almost blithely unaware of his existence as it chews him up and spits him out. I've thought a lot about this sense of "cosmicism" that pervades the Lovecraftian oeuvre, and the more I read, the more I become convinced that his stories are less an epic battle of good versus evil than a latter-day tale of Apollo versus Dionysos. Apollo is the rational world of today, with its science that purports to explain everything and its benevolent anthropomorphic gods who reward the good and punish the bad. Dionysos is the reality that lurks beyond the sheltering sky of rationality, where entire galaxies can be ripped apart by titanic forces that don't listen to reason - he is a god of many terrible aspects whose heart is not moved by tearful prayer, only the maddening yet irresistable beat of the cosmic dance. Hop on his merry-go-round with a pure soul and you might just enjoy the ride, but ignore Dionysos at your own peril - for like the Great Old Ones, he existed long before we conjured up any of our shiny happy modern gods, and he will still remain when they have all faded into the stuff of myths and legends.

There's a book in here, I just know it: Cthulhu and the Classical Tradition! Nyarlethotep would be proud....