Γνωθι σεαυτον.

The above Greek characters brought to you by the extremely-talented Emily Smith, nee Kubec. Thanks, Em!

You know you have a problem with being the Interlibrary Loan guy when...

...all of the books that come in that day are for you!

Today's specials:

Archestratos of Gela - Greek Culture and Cuisine in the Fourth Century BCE: Text, Translation, and Commentary
Sport in Classic Times, by Alfred Joshua Butler
Dangerous Tastes - The Story of Spices, by Andrew Dalby
Food in Antiquity, ed. Wilkins, Harvey, and Dobson
Food in Antiquity - A Survey of the Diet of Early Peoples, by Don Brothwell
Language in Danger - How Language Loss Threatens Our Future, by Andrew Dalby

The first five are only semi-recreational, as I'm putting together a seminar about Ancient Greek cuisine (what else?). What started as a harmless classroom introduction to the tastes of antiquity has rapidly snowballed into a full-scale Broadway production, not just as a lecture now but as a real sit-down meal at a respectable restaurant and guests that may or may not include the food critic for The Boston Globe! Of course I'm excited, but at the same time, I'm only a self-taught cook, with only a dilettante's knowledge of food history. Granted, I've spent a lot of time with the sources, and you don't need to know much about Ancient Greek cuisine to start calling yourself an "expert", but pulling off such a stunt is going to take an awful lot of knowledge and effort, to say the least. It is a subject I am passionate about, however, and how better to educate people about the passions of the classical world than by immersing them in its food and drink? And even a failure to make this event happen would be something to talk about. So why not?

The sixth book is merely a happenstance find, by the same author of Dangerous Spices (and the monumental Siren Feasts, which documents food and the Greeks over a period of three thousand years). Linguistic diversity is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I'm eager to see what Mr. Dalby has to say about it. For a while, my brother and I were thinking about launching a non-profit venture dedicated to disappearing languages, as a "good works" adjunct to his brainchild, an online language instruction company called LingLang.com. Yes, I know, the link doesn't work. But it was a good idea at the time, and even though the business model morphed from language instruction to online tutorial services, and the linguistic diversity offshoot idea was soon lost in the shuffle, I was truly sorry to see the company go under, because my brother poured his heart and soul into making it fly, and too few people are trying to fill the cracks in our nation's educational system these days like LingLang did.

Long time, no blog. I've spent the past week wrestling with two major issues - one physical, one mental. The former was a cracked tooth which became infected and lead to my very first root canal, which didn't hurt a bit, once they finally managed to get the damned tooth numb. Up to that point was another story entirely, and an excruciating one at that. Since the nerve in the tooth was extremely irritated, I had what dental practitioners call a "hot tooth", which all the locally-administered painkillers in the world can't quiet down, and can only be deadened by drilling into the still-sensitive tooth until you hit the nerve, then pumping the tooth full of numbing goodness directly. Needless to say, I experienced the longest two minutes of my life to date sitting in that chair, waiting for the constantly-apologizing endodontist to make it through to my enraged nerve and make the pain go away, at least for a little while. And it got me to thinking, as I drove home, arms and legs actually aching from having clenched and unclenched so tightly in response to the drill's probings, that newfound advocates of torture as a tool in the "War On Terror" (such as the ever-more-unhinged Alan Dershowitz) should spend some time in the dentist's chair without any novocaine and see if that doesn't change their outlook on employing such a tactic in the name of democracy. I go back for a second round next Tuesday.

The other issue is my ongoing saga with Boston University, which has been sitting on my degree for more than five years now, thanks to a host of administrative and financial problems that are only now beginning to become resolved. Having finally wrested the Bachelor's portion of my Classics degree away from my old alma mater, I was all set to walk away from my unfinished Master of Arts when it was discovered that one of the first classes I ever took as an undergraduate (a Latin class at Harvard, which I was permitted to take as a cross-registered student from MIT, and as it turned out the only course I passed that awful first semester at the Institute) would actually count for graduate credit and give me all the coursework I'd need for the combined degree, after all. Now all I need to do is pass an exam, on the history of Greek Literature. And maybe write BU yet another check. Grumble grumble grumble. But I'm just glad I stuck with that Latin course, way back when!

In a town like Boston, you can never have too much baseball, though it sounds like next year's season might put that axiom to the test. According to a source at the New York Daily News, Major League Baseball is considering bringing the Montreal Expos to Fenway Park for 2003 as an intermediate moneymaking move, while the cash-strapped and attendance-poor franchise looks for a new permanent home. "This could be a win-win-win for all the parties involved except the 200 season ticket-holders in Montreal," the Daily News reports. Ouch! But it's true - the average attendance in Montreal for the 2002 Expos was a pitiful 10,025, the absolute bottom of the barrel (the runner-up was the Florida Marlins, with 10,038), and with Bud Selig's plan for contracting the League shelved indefinitely as a result of this season's owner-player labor agreement, the Baseball Powers That Be need to be a little creative to shore up its failing and flailing clubs. This can only be a good thing for Boston, since the demand for Sox tickets only climbs higher with every additional season of frustration. Right now it's gotten to the point that you need to order your tickets six months before the games you want to see, and even then, it might be too late for the decent seats. Having an extra team in town playing at Fenway - apparently the home/away schedules for both teams are compatible enough for them to share the stadium - could offer baseball fans twice as many games to choose from. Granted, one of those teams won't be the Red Sox, but a steady stream of the Expos' high-profile opponents from the National League East would go a long way towards making up for that loss. When Interleague Play featured the Braves, the Phillies, the Mets, and the Marlins, it was a real thrill. It would be great to see them all again on a regular basis. I'll be watching to see how this one shapes up!

Move over, Google- I've found a new way to browse the web.

Gnod is a self-adapting search engine that suggests various books, movies, musical groups, and websites based on your likes and dislikes, sort of like the recommendations you get on Amazon, but more sophisticated and less busy. I especially like how you can give Gnod three of anything (authors, bands, et cetera), and it will then generate a string of suggestions that you can agree with or disagree with, so that the artificial intelligence learns what you're really interested in, and is able to refine its selections for you beyond the simple "Readers who liked this also liked this" rubric. At any rate, it's fun to play with:

I plug in the following three authors: Sophocles, Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft

And here's what I get-

1. Jude Watson
2. Edgar Allen Poe
3. Rimbaud
4. Baudelaire
5. Sacher Masoch
6. Flaubert
7. Jacques Derrida
8. Gunter Wallraff
9. Wolfgang Haffner
10. Marquis de Sade
11. George Lucas
12. Anton La Vey

Now that's pretty eclectic. And a tad disturbing (The Marquis de Sade? Anton La Vey? George Freaking Lucas?). But there's a real gem in there as well. Gunter Wallraff is a radical German journalist who adopted a fake identity in order to infiltrate The Daily Standard - the most influential newspaper in Western Europe during the Cold War - and exposed it as nothing more than a massive propaganda machine. This story may sound familiar to you, as a 1990 film The Man Inside, starring Jurgen Prochnow and Peter Coyote, is a retelling of Wallraff's undercover adventure. Wallraff is considered to be a pioneer and a towering figure in the field of modern journalism, and yet until Gnod dropped his name I'd never heard of the guy. Another interesting tidbit about him is that he was an outspoken critic of the military junta which took control of Greece - with America's blessing and the CIA's help, no less - in 1967, and was arrested while participating in an anti-junta demonstration in Syntagma Square in Athens in 1974. These days he's been dogging Turkey's government for its brutal war against the Kurds and Turkish treatment of Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan. A good guy. And thanks to Gnod, I now know a little about him. This is how the web should work.

Oh, yeah, and while I'm at it, here's another diamond in the electronic rough- HomeStarRunner, one of the funniest and best-designed websites I've seen in ages, with toons, downloads, games that will keep you in stitches for hours. Even the main page comes in 15 different interactive versions! By all means check out Strong Bad, an animated Mexican wrestler who answers his fan email. Thanks to The Flaky Librarian for this link!

Now is this a bummer, or isn't it? According to an article on the BBC Science News, it appears as if the universe will be collapsing in upon itself after all, and only 10 to 20 billion years from now, to boot. Professor Andrei Linde from Stanford University and his wife Renata Kallosh - both physicists - have recently determined that, despite the fact that something called "dark energy" is pushing the galaxies apart at ever-increasing speeds, the phenomenon is going to reverse itself eventually, and gravity will start to pull the cosmos back together until it's one big happy singularity again. Call me sentimental, but I always liked the idea of the universe ending in a Big Collapse, rather than all the stars flying off into a cold, dark infinity. About 14 billion years ago (give or take), everything we see around us, including a lot of stuff we don't see, was all smooshed up into a point. Just like the Beatles' song "I Am The Walrus": I was he as you are he as you are me and we were all together. And we will be again, perhaps another 14 billion years down the line. I'll be an optimist, and call this comforting. And I'll catch you on the flip side...

Choose your metaphors with caution, folks. No sooner had I written off my experience with wrestling my degree out of Boston University as a horror show, than the supposedly-vanquished monster that is BU administration reared its ugly head one last time, 100% true to the form of a teenage slasher flick. The fact that one little code changed on my graduation application between 1997 and now has necessitated that I take yet another morning off to go and fill out an entirely new application, track down my old faculty advisor, and have him sign it (again), before they'll finally put me on that diploma list. Grrr. Working in the bowels of a university myself has taught me that arbitrary inflexibility is the rule, not the exception, especially when it comes to stuff like this, but having come so close to the finish line only to be forced to run a whole additional lap is just galling, to say the least. Oh, well, once more unto the breach. Once more.

I'm going to stick to the happy news today, so all you gloom-and-doom types are going to have look elsewhere for your daily fix of bitter. The new Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina) will open its doors to the public on October 20th, more than 1500 years after the ancient library ceased to exist. This is a wonderful thing. Sure, there's no chance in Hell that new library will rival her ancient counterpart in the size of its collection or its reputation among scholars, but it is a start, especially for the city of Alexandria, which after enjoying many a moment in the sun has fallen upon hard times of late. It is also an encouraging sign that even if the Egyptians are becoming ever more radicalized as a whole, there are segments of the population that are now willing to look back upon the pagan past of their nation and find something worth celebrating, emulating, even resurrecting. Best of luck of them. I know that the director of The Greek Institute (where I work in the evenings) has been in contact with UNESCO and the Greeks involved with the new library, and has offered gratis the works on CD-ROM that the Treasury of the Greek Language has compiled from ancient, medieval, and modern Greek authors to date. It should be remembered that the original library started with far less, and even had to resort to theft to make their collection the envy of the Mediterranean - the Librarians borrowed the complete works of Euripides from the official archive of Athens, only never to return them, and the Ptolemies made it a standing order for customs officers to seize all incoming books from visitors to Alexandria and add them to the Library's permanent collection (giving the hapless traveler a mere copy in return!). So at least in one regard, the replica is off to a better start than its model.

It's one of those quintessentially New England-y days out there, nothing but grey skies, whipping winds, and raindrops so big you'd swear they were tadpoles falling from the heavens. Weather like this laughs at your puny umbrella, an invention for calmer, more rational climes, that only seems to make you more wet when you use it here on the streets of Boston. Some people hate days like this, but I find them strangely comforting, as if the whole world has been swaddled by mists and misery so thick that the soaking cold howling ick is somehow at the same time warm and inviting. Maybe its the fact that we're forced to huddle indoors and seek such warmth, or that the foul weather narrows our horizons until simple acts we take for granted under brilliant cloudless skies become challenges in their own right. Get to the car, drive down the road, get out of the car, go buy coffee, pick up the newspaper - daily routines suddenly take on an epic quality, when Nature is coming after you with gale-force winds and rain that is just looking for an excuse to be hail, sleet, or snow.

This weekend my wife and I ventured back to Jersey to see my folks, and although the drive down was miserable (nasty weather is less comforting when you're hurtling through it at eighty miles an hour, I'll concede) and the return trip horribly slow and traffic-plagued (Hell is a place called Connecticut, I've learned), the time down the Garden State was worth the travel headaches. There was a Greek festival going on close to the family homestead, at St. Thomas' Greek Orthodox Church in Cherry Hill, a.k.a. "Little L.A.", on account of its utterly decentralized suburban sprawl, remarkable even for New Jersey. Aside from there being multiple lambs on spits and more pastries and Greek delicacies than you could shake a stick at, the church itself has these fantastic frescoes, painted in a El Greco-like style that's almost more secular than sacred, at least compared to the art that I've seen in other Greek churches. I have pictures, to which I'll link here once I've loaded them onto the site. It's the little artistic flourishes which make them so odd for Orthodox religious artwork, like a shepherd boy sitting on a rock and playing his pipes, while the infant Jesus (swaddled, no less) and his mother take shelter in cave. Or the depiction of the fish swimming in the River Jordan, where John the Baptist baptises an adult Christ. You almost don't believe what you're seeing. Wonderful. The wild thing about all of this is that I made the realization that I'd been to this festival before, as a high school student, more than fifteen years before, and had completely forgotten about it. I remember how alien the Greeks - the real, living Greeks - seemed to me, the devout Latinist, at the time. After reading all that mythology and history, after only knowing a world through conjugations, declensions, and memorized vocabulary lists, I was without warning thrust into the raw innards of Mediterranean civilization. The smell of oregano and garlic mingled with roasted meat, strange-smelling cheeses, olives laid out in a drab green-brown rainbow of varieties, honey-drenched pastries with long and unpronounceable names, with wailing, oh-so-not Top 40 music filling the air and the ubiquitous sound of a language that I couldn't make heads or tails of at the time, but would come to love with all my heart and soul in the distant future. Athens 1996 merchandise, I remember clearly, because at the time (the late 1980's), the Greek government was making a serious play then to host the Centennial Games, before Atlanta walked away with the prize and left Greece to defer its Olympic dreams until 2004. How strange how time loops the loop like that on you. Here I had returned, after all of these years, the smells now familiar to me, the language no longer a mystery, the Greeks themselves part of my family now. I'm even working on a project for the 2004 Olympics!

After the festival, my wife and I joined my brother and his friend Billy for a trip down to Atlantic City, our favorite haunt along the Jersey Shore, although still on our bad list after trapping us in the parking garage of Caesars for three or more hours during our last visit, over the July 4th weekend (I think Cher was in town, on her farewell tour, and the resultant traffic jams completely clogged the exits even long after the show had ended). I guess Sodom By The Sea felt bad for our troubles, for this time around my wife and I both doubled our money and then some, which we then spent on overpriced drinks and a handful of appetizers at the Hard Rock Cafe, which is always a disappointment. But the company was good, and it's always fun to spend money that isn't really yours, and besides, we caught a glimpse of a real live Cypriot (again with the Greeks!) boy band - One - who competed in the Eurovision 2002 musical competition and placed sixth or seventh, I believe. They must have had a concert at Trump's Taj Mahal, which to its credit books a lot of international pop stars, and stopped into the Hard Rock afterwards to bask in the adoration of their fans. Dave and Billy thought the idea of a Greek boy band was pretty funny, and so did we. Needless to say, we didn't ask for their autographs.

Finally, before we headed back to Boston at the end of the long weekend, we stopped off at the always-enticing Reading Terminal Market, which I've mentioned here before. The nominal reason for doing so was to pick up a custom-ordered sugar-free white chocolate brain (1/4 scale), from Chocolate By Mueller, who oddly enough specialize in anatomically-correct chocolate body parts, such as hearts, ears, noses, and brains. I won't go into the gory details of why I had ordered a chocolate brain, but I will say that the recipient was very pleased with the gift. So 'nuff said! While we were at the Market, however, we naturally indulged in myriad other delicacies, including a couple of hoagies from Rocco's, which are bar none the best damned sandwiches in the world. And I also managed to blow the rest of our Atlantic City winnings on spices from a wonderful spice shop that's also been there since forever. I'd run out of their curry powder a year ago, and it was definitely time to re-supply. I wish we had something comparable to the Reading Terminal Market here in Boston. Quincy Market and Fanueil Hall are just outdoor malls, and although Haymarket is an honest-to-goodness open air produce, fish, and meat market, it lacks the Amish and Mennonite lunch counters and bakeries, the offerings of Rocco's, the greasy cheese steaks, the stalls filled to toppling with used books (used books? at a market? The Reading Terminal Market has everything, and always has). It's always the first thing I miss, whenever I return to New England.

So a good weekend, all in all, and a nice escape from my daily worries as expressed here. But I guess it's back to the grind, eh?

And so our Sicilian Expedition begins. This morning the Senate approved- by a vote of 77 to 23 - President Bush's self-authored war powers resolution against Iraq, less than a day after the House's vote to do the same. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the opposition party would have offered a little more, well, opposition. But this wasn't a democratic debate - it was a loyalty test, and every politician with something to lose had to wrap him or herself in the flag and get behind our court-appointed President, or else. How else to explain the Promethean contortions of Senator John Kerry, already gunning for the Democratic nomination for the 2004 Presidential Election, whose cautious skepticism about this imperial Middle Eastern adventure evaporated in the face of Karl Rove's masterful (and absolutely irresponsible) campaign to transform Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction into the only issue of this November's election cycle? Or the embarassing doublespeak offered by Senator Hillary Clinton - another politician with Oval Office hoop dreams - who excused her "yes" vote for the hastily-drafted Bush resolution by claiming it wasn't the carte blanche for the President to act without Congressional accountability that it in fact actually is? I'd like to think that Senator Daschle's rationale for his last-minute reversal in the administration's favor was an act of political judo, a skilled attempt to use the enemy's strength against himself, but we all know that he, too, is a perennial Presidential aspirant, and more interested in looking out for Number One than "to speak with one voice at this critical moment." (His words, not mine) And that was the Senate Majority Leader, mind you. With backbone like that from the top dog, I don't blame the rank-and-file Dems for folding like a house of cards. How wonderful to think, though, that even our supposedly-principled Congressmen have decided to concede Bush his splendid little war in exchange for the mere possibility of running for President in 2004. Are human lives really that cheap? Ten thousand Iraqis for a primary bid? Twenty? Fifty? And what about the poor American grunts who will inevitably die as well, to ensure the political future of some chickenshit Beltway Democrat? Kudos to Senator Edward Kennedy, who began his national political career in defiance of Nixon and Chief Justice Berger's attempt to make protesting Vietnam veterans common criminals, and now leads what's left of the liberal opposition to Dubya's bid for an imperial America that does as it pleases and answers to no one. But he's only one man, in a country that has branded such questions as unpatriotic. Can't be asking all those pesky questions about might, right, and the shape of things to come when there's a war to be fought, can we now?

How quickly a week can pass! Fear not, though - after a week of distraction, the Jersey Exile is back in business. The business diverting me away from the blog was worth the worry and effort, I think, as I've spent most of my mornings scurrying over to my old alma mater (the illustrious and oh-so-international Boston University) in hopes of finally salvaging my college degree. Although I completed all of the coursework necessary for a Bachelor of Arts in the Fall of 1997, a combination of unforseeable circumstances and a lack of funds has been preventing me from enjoying the fruit of my labor or even feeling slightly good about the fact that I'd spent the lion's share of my young adulthood toiling over myriad musty Latin and Greek tomes. Well, at last the worm has turned, and this week I managed - with my wife's tireless moral support - to screw up my courage and confront the beast that is BU's administration, in hopes of convincing them that my time served was indeed just that; and to my utter astonishment, they agreed with me! So once more my name has been placed on the graduation list, and this time I believe I've gotten all the requisite signatures, waivers, and petitions lined up to get me that diploma in January, a mere 13 years after first setting foot in an institution of higher education, way back in 1990. The whole story is probably too long-winded to narrate here, but let it suffice to say that my college education wasn't exactly an "A to B to C" kind of affair. And despite the fact that I seem to have turned out fine without the degree, the nasty particulars of my ins and outs with the university scene were sufficiently traumatic to make me always look back on the whole sorry mess with mixed emotions at the very least, and nothing but regret on a bluesy day. Now, improbably at the threshold of completion, I feel like a character in a Stephen King novel, who's somehow managed after all these years to confront the ancient malingering evil that's plagued him since time out of mind and send it back to the pit it came from, once and for all. Or, to put it into Buffyspeak, I feel like I've finally sealed up the Hellmouth.

On top of the feeling of personal exorcism empowerment, though, is the fact that I can now proceed with my graduate education, if I so choose. The more I teach Ancient Greek, the more I'm convinced that teaching Greek is what I'm meant to be doing with the rest of my life, and a Ph.D. in Classics would doubtless go a long way in getting me to such a goal. The sticking point here is that very few universities offer fully-funded doctoral programs for Latin and Greek, so if the missus and I wanted to stay local (and we do), the possibilities are even more limited. Right now I think Harvard, Brown, and the aforementioned Hellmouth (a.k.a. Boston University) are the only schools offering the Ph.D. in Classics within comfortable commuting distance (and Brown, located in Providence, more than an hour away by train, is already stretching that), and who wouldn't be intimidated at the prospect of applying to Harvard for anything? Even after working at Harvard's Medical School for the past four years, the place still retains a daunting aura about it. Well, I guess I'll never know if I don't try, and the deadline for next Fall is fast approaching... may Fortune favor the foolish!

I don't think I'm feeling very Tao today.

Two arguments today so far with coworkers about matters political and spiritual. The first was in response to the New Jersey Supreme Court's decision to allow the Democratic Party to select an alternate candidate (the venerable former Senator Frank Lautenberg) for Robert Toricelli, whose scandal-plagued Senatorial re-election bid caused him to melt down and bow out with less than forty days to go. Since Jersey election law normally forbids any such substitution after the 51-day mark, the Dems had to take their case to court, and despite the fact that the State Supreme Court there had a majority of Reagan-Bush appointees, the justices voted 7-0 in favor of allowing Lautenberg to run in Toricelli's stead. Needless to say, the Republicans are hopping mad about this. This includes my coworker Richard, an otherwise sensible individual who happens to be gung-ho for Bush and the conservative cause in general, although at times I suspect his zeal for the Republican Party is more an attempt to go against the grain in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which makes no bones about being a proud liberal stronghold. When I came in this morning, he was raring to go. He knows full well that New Jersey is my home State, so he wasted no time in needling me about the Jersey Supremes' "outrageous" decision. Taking the bait, I pointed out that the court's ruling was consistent with precedent, as New Jersey election law allows for last-minute candidate substitution in case of emergency; he countered that switching because you know you're going to lose (and Toricelli was not doing well in the polls at all, thanks to his questionable ethics) is hardly an emergency, and that the Dems were only doing this for political reasons, pure and simple. Fine, I said, so what if that's the truth of the matter - wasn't Florida all about winning, too? If so, then why didn't he call out the Republicans when they shamefully made a federal case out of State sovereignty with regards to the 2000 Presidential election? Besides, there's little to stop the GOP from taking this beef to Rehnquist and Company as well, and we all know how that one will end, since the current members of the United States Supreme Court have decided that voting on personal ideology and party affiliation is more important than the spirit and intent of the law. Check and mate.

I will grant my coworker one point in his gripe, and unfortunately it's a big and troubling one. "It is in the public interest and the general interest of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit to the electorate ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major political parties as well as of all qualifying parties and groups," the ruling reads (my italics). Regardless of the merits of the Dems' special pleading - and I think their case, however politically motivated, was grounded in enough precedent to be valid, and unlike my coworker, I believe that Toricelli truly had something akin to a nervous breakdown, since right up until this point he was all hell-bent on running against his record, right or wrong - I do not believe that preserving the tyranny of a two-party system should be the intended goal of any democracy. Our Founding Fathers' worst fear is that we would become a government of parties, not individuals, and despite their best efforts to avoid it, that's exactly what has happened. Only whereas before, when grassroots and third-party challenges could actually make a difference, the Democrats and Republicans are so well-entrenched that they are able to monopolize (or would it be duopolize?) the election process entirely, even locking alternate candidates out of debates with the help of the law, as was done with three gubernatorial contenders here in Massachusetts this week, and back in the 2000 Presidential election with the exclusion of Ralph Nader from any of the Bush-Gore debates. It disturbs me that upholding the sanctity of the two ruling political parties is an unwritten axiom that is now bending our written laws, especially since I'm of the growing opinion that the difference between DNP and GOP evaporates a little more every day - witness the Congress' huge cave-in on authorizing the President to launch his Sicilian Expedition against the nation of Iraq.

Okay, argument number two. We have working here at the library a born-again Buddhist, who brings to her newfound Eastern religion a decidedly Christian zeal, especially when she gets a chance to point out the spiritual shortcomings of her unenlightened peers. Normally I choose not to cross swords with her, having learned early on that she's like a force of nature, and that it's more fun to watch her exasperate other people with her senseless (and most un-Buddha-like) raging than it is to try to win an argument with her. But I think the political melee with my other coworker got my blood all angered up, so I decided not to play it safe. The conversation had something to do with nature and our tenuous relationship with it, and how recent meteorological events might suggest that Mother Nature was angry with us, so I said something crass about going after Mother Nature first, before she has a chance to finish us off. Tongue-in-cheek comments don't sit well with the BAB, so suddenly I found myself being berated for lacking a proper relationship with God, since we all know that Mother Nature is God - again, I'm not sure if that's the official Buddhist party line, but then again the BAB's personal theology is a remarkable collage of doctrines cut-and-pasted from myriad faiths, with Buddha and the whole karma thing sort of acting like the glue. Now don't get me wrong, I think I agreed with most of what the BAB had to say about Mankind's track record with the natural world, but I always get my back up when people tell me what I think God should or shouldn't be. Personally I veer between two concepts of divinity - a shiny happy Force-like interconnectedness, or an adversarial God with whom I have a bone to pick, a la the Ancient Greeks and their concept of theomachein (literally, to fight with the gods). Either the universe is unfolding exactly as it should - my Tao thing, which failed me so brilliantly this morning - or the cosmos is a hostile place by design or lack of design, and life itself a struggle. I'm not sure which theology I'll take with me when I get out of bed, or even if I won't suddenly flip from the one to the other during the course of my day, but even then I'd hardly call them cut-and dried. I hate dogma. Dogma got people like my great-great-great-great-great (to the Nth power) granduncle Giordano burned at the stake, so even if the spiritual goods being peddled are nice, clean, harmless Buddhist family values, I'm still not interested in buying.

And now I'm back to feeling Tao. Funny, how a little catharsis will do that for you.

A funny thing - the less I have to do here at work, the less often I update the blog. There's something about vast oceans of free time that turns my ability to focus into mush. Or maybe it's just the TheraFlu, which I've been guzzling in piping hot liquid form in order to combat a sore throat and general feelings of ickiness. The TheraFlu seems to be working rather nicely, but if you ever try this stuff yourself, be sure to follow the directions and stir those contents like a maniac before drinking, because the dregs are murder to get down if you don't. Gah!

I was thinking of something witty and insightful to say about the latest antics of Dubya and Company, but then this week's Onion had to go and beat me to the punch. I'd post the headline, but I'm not allowed to. Ah, The Onion - in my opinion, their coverage of the September 11th attacks - aka, the Holy Fucking Shit Issue - is still the bravest piece of humor out there about the events of that awful Tuesday. While the talking heads of America were going on and on about "the death of irony" in the feverish days following 9/11, the master ironists at The Onion, undeterred by the pundits, were busy putting together what would be their finest work. I remember how good it felt to be able to laugh, after two whole weeks of gut-twisting fear and anger (Volume 37, Issue 34 came out on September 26th). Wickedly good satire may not prevent the world from going to Hell in a handbasket, but at least it'll make the ride a bit more pleasant. I call shotgun!

Too little, too late? At last, the Democrats mount their first serious critique of the Bush Administration since the September 11th attacks more than a year ago, but with the dogs of war now all but loosed upon Iraq, it's hard to tell if anyone will be able to deter Dubya and Co. from their splendid little adventure in the Middle East. Having had their bluff called on the issue of weapons inspections, which are now set to resume, the hawks are now reverting to Plan B, which is to denounce any concession Saddam Hussein makes to the U.N. as a "ploy", and call for his out-and-out removal, regardless of international law. By now it should be clear to everyone that the present administration will say or do anything in order to get this war underway, just as it was willing to win the 2000 Presidential Election at any cost. Al Gore came face to face with that evil resolve two Decembers ago, only to shrink away from it then, perhaps more out of surprise than anything else that the conservatives would trample their own core values (i.e., States' rights and the need to minimize the reach of the Federal government) and who knows what else in order to wrest the White House away from the Democrats. But this time he knows better, and by speaking out against the so-called "War on Terror" in a California press conference earlier this month, he finally opened the floodgates of doubt and dissent, and regardless of whether you're a conservative or a liberal or something in between, you should thank Mr. Gore for doing so. Contrary to what Ari Fleischer and the conservative talking heads say, it is patriotic to question our leaders, even in a time of war. Heck, especially in a time of war. Pundits may blast Al Gore's speech as no more than political grandstanding for the 2004 Election, but the fact of the matter is that for an entire year the business of politics (and I don't use the word here in a pejorative sense, because politics are the lifeblood of a democracy) had ground to a halt, as the Bush Administration wrapped itself in the tattered World Trade Center flag whenever any of its policies - foreign or domestic, military or economic - were questioned. Only a person with nothing to lose this November could break the jingoistic spell that had fallen over Washington, and only Mr. Gore had the national profile to level such accusations as he did and not be immediately dismissed as a crank. Al Gore is a patriot, in the truest sense of the word. Let's just hope that his shot of courage is enough at this point to pull America back from the brink of insanity.

Rolling Stone released its Top 100 albums of all time, as chosen by the magazine's readers. The site forces you to scroll through the list album by album, I guess in some misguided attempt to get you to buy one or two along the way, so allow me to cut to the quick and give you the top ten, free of synergistic web-marketing practices:

10. Achtung Baby, by U2
9. Led Zeppelin IV, by Led Zeppelin
8. OK Computer, by Radiohead
7. Appetite for Destruction, by Guns and Roses
6. Abbey Road, by The Beatles
5. The White Album, by The Beatles
4. The Joshua Tree, by U2
3. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by The Beatles
2. Nevermind, by Nirvana
1. Revolver, by The Beatles

Holy John, Paul, Ringo and George, is all I have to say! Now I'm all for giving the Fab Four their due, but not to the exclusion of bands like Pink Floyd, whose Dark Side of the Moon came in at 11, The Wall 31, and Wish You Were Here (my all-time fav) a distant 100. And how about poor Queen, with only one album - A Night at the Opera - on the list, and at #83 to boot? Though I am glad to see Guns and Roses get some much-deserved respect, however belated it may be. All in all, though, a strange list, to say the least.