Old Exile

2003-04-07T17:10:00.000-04:00

"Moving day" is always a misnomer. Sure, there's usually a day and time when all of your worldly possessions are transferred from one location to another with much blood, sweat, and tears (although some people choose to prolong the agony and do the migration in stages, something I've done on multiple occasions and sworn I'd never do again), but the actual moving hardly ends there. Various odds and ends always need tidying up, even if you're fortunate enough to have movers doing the heavy lifting, as my wife and I did this time around - on our former landlord's tab, no less, a rare act of generosity from a mostly despicable cross-section of humanity. And the little things you didn't want to bother the professionals with often take more time to gather up and transport than the bed, the dressers, and the oversized Rubbermaid containers egregiously overloaded with kitchen "essentials". Our movers were done, paid, and off to their next gig by one o'clock in the afternoon last Tuesday, but we were still hauling bags of random bits of three years' habitation down the stairs and cramming them into the hatchback of our tiny but tireless 1994 Ford Aspire until the late, late hour of 10 p.m., when the old apartment had finally been scoured of our presence, more or less. Then we had to unpack. Our new home has a lot going for it, but despite the fact that it has an upstairs and a downstairs as well as a second bedroom (and two bathrooms!), I think it may actually be smaller than our previous residence, and it remains an ongoing effort to try and find space for everything in the new digs, especially our combined collection of book, which made up at least half of our moving bulk, if not more. There are emotional and psychic dimensions to changing your address as well. But that's another story. Right now I have some more of my life to unpack.

2003-04-03T15:54:00.000-05:00

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Former CIA director James Woolsey said Wednesday that the United States is engaged in World War IV, and that it could continue for years.

Did I miss something? What happened to World War Three, or is that what we're calling the Cold War now? I must have not gotten the memo.

2003-03-27T16:06:00.000-05:00

The fallout continues: another diplomat - Ann Wright, deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia - has resigned in protest over the war in Iraq. I'm glad to see at least that America's diplomatic corp has the strength of its convictions to say and do what they know to be right. If only our spineless elected representatives of the House and Senate could do the same.

You know, the more I watch events in Iraq unfold, the more and more this situation is looking like Athens' ill-fated Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War, a war which cost her the support of many allies and signalled the beginning of the end of her imperial reign. The Athenians had been lulled into thinking that Sicily was ripe for the picking (grain was to the ancient world what oil is to the modern, making Sicily the Middle East of the Mediterranean) and would be no match for their naval power (the pre-industrial version air power, naturally); and so on a thinly-veiled pretext (the plea of the Segestans to liberate them from the tyranny of Syracuse, which at least was more plausible than our "ticking bomb" preventive war doctrine against countries that allegedly have weapons of mass destruction in their putative arsenals), the Athenians set out with a fleet of over 100 warships and 20,000 infantry to conquer the entire island, over many objections both abroad and at home (including that of Nicias, the statesman who ironically was ultimately chosen to lead the expedition, think Colin Powell and his recent 180-degree turn on the doctrine of force protection and the importance of diplomacy). Never mind that the experts had warned that most Sicilians would resist an invasion (despite the fact that Syracuse was the local heavy, it was still a Sicilian heavy, and not some imperial outpost of a foreign power - the same reason that is being offered for the unexpected Iraqi support of Saddam Hussein, of all people), and that Syracuse, even if taken, would be next to impossible to hold (just like many are claiming about Baghdad now, given that the Republican Guard and the fedayeen have demonstrated their willingness to use guerilla tactics and urban warfare to oppose American and British forces) - the most important objection to the Sicilian Expedition is that such a naked act of aggression would set the entire Greek world against Athens, and tip the balance of Greek geopolitics in favor of Athens' arch-rival Sparta (although some would say that the French are our new nemesis on the world stage, I think the analogy here is the growing anti-American coalition of nations that are dismayed at the United States' refusal to consider them as equals in matter of diplomacy and absolutely horrified at our unilateral warmongering. No hegemon exists without a counterbalance naturally coalescing to oppose it; and the harder that hegemon pushes, the stronger the counterforce will in the end push back). But the Athenian demos was not swayed by such realistic assessments, and chose instead the counsel of Alcibiades, the infamous opportunist who saw the conquest of Sicily as the springboard for an extended campaign against the Italian peninsula and thus assuring for all the time the supremacy of Athens over the Spartans and her Dorian kinsmen (cf. Richard Perle and the neoconservative agenda for the Middle East - first Iraq, then Iran, Syria, et al., until it's all either in our hands or remade into U.S.-friendly puppet regimes that will ensure our dominance and our empire). Hampered by unfaithful allies, a lack of cities revolting to their side, and poor supply lines (sound familiar?), the Athenian invasion ended in disaster, and set into motion a chain of events that lead to her comeuppance at the hands of Sparta and myriad other aggrieved Greek peoples...

God damn it, doesn't anyone study the Classics anymore? I guess our diplomats do.

2003-03-27T15:03:00.000-05:00

Please, oh please, someone tell me that someone hacked the New York Times' website, a la Al Jazeera. The American military can't be this stupid (or can they?):

Army Depots Have Names of Oil Giants

By NEELA BANERJEE

The subtleties surrounding the sensitive role oil plays in the Iraqi war may have eluded the United States Army. Deep in some newspaper coverage yesterday was a report that the 101st Airborne Division had named one central Iraq outpost Forward Operating Base Shell and another Forward Operating Base Exxon.

The Pentagon shrugged off concerns that now might not be the time to mention the names of foreign oil companies on Iraqi soil. "The forward bases are normally refueling points — they're basically gas stations in the desert," a Pentagon spokeswoman said. "Whether or not we're going to lecture everyone that, due to political sensitivities, you should be careful what you call your gas stations, I don't know if that's something that should be done or would be done."

2003-03-27T12:56:00.000-05:00

Make dinner, not war - fixating on Iraq in a 24/7 manner has gotten me thinking about Iraqi cuisine. I know nothing about it, which disturbed me somewhat, given that I am passionate about food in general and love to learn about what people eat around the world and figure out how to cook it in the comfort of my own kitchen. Googling "iraqi cuisine" wasn't extremely helpful here. Aside from an interesting anecdote about the Jews of Baghdad and their importation of a pizza-like dish called lahma bi ajeen, which is comprised of ground lamb and spicy tomato sauce baked atop yeast bread, the consensus seemed to be that the Iraqis didn't have a real cuisine of their own, and relied on a lot of recipes that were actually Iranian or Kurdish in origin. There is a lot of hankering for grilled foods in Iraq, from skewered meat to local fish, but being that the urge to barbeque seems to be one of the great culinary universals for humanity (cf. Steve Raichlin's The Barbeque Bible for an epic whirlwind tour of grilling around the globe), it's hard to call that something unique to the modern-day inhabitants of Mesopotamia.

But there may be hope for the Iraqi table, after all (that is, if there are any tables left in Iraq when we're through with them). Nawal Nasrallah has just written a 664-page tome called "Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine", which is available through Amazon.com. Unfortunately there isn't a review or description of the book, but it sounds like a timely addition to my already overloaded cookbook shelf. Too bad all my credit cards are maxed out...

2003-03-24T14:09:00.000-05:00

Imperialism is not easy. That's the lesson our budding Americo-fascists (if Andrew Sullivan can coin "Islamo-fascism" as the great boogeyman of the 21st Century, then I'll say that the Americo-fascism which has festered in response to it is an even greater danger to the stability of our Republic and the world at large) learned over the weekend, as their breathless cheerleading of the war against Saddam was tempered by the very real possibility of a protracted guerilla war in regions supposedly "taken" over the past six days of blitzkrieg through Southern Iraq. I'm starting to think that the Bush administration oversold America on the idea that the Iraqi state was a house of cards that would topple with ease if Saddam and his sons were taken out of the picture. They even sold themselves on this idea, and hastily changed their battle plans at the last second and with no prior warning to their Coaliation allies to open the war with a "Hail Mary" airstrike intended to kill the ruler and his inner circle at the very outset of hostilities. The problem with this thinking is that it oversimplifies the true nature of the apparatus which has maintained a decades-long reign of terror in Iraq. Saddam's police state has myriad individuals who have benefitted enormously from oppressing the masses at the regional and local level, and consequently these people have an awful lot to lose in the event in "regime change". At best, they'd lose their livelihoods if Saddam were overthrown; at worst, they'd be tried and convicted as war criminals or lose their lives in a spate of revenge killings. And though I seriously doubt that such resistance will cost the United States the war, it will sour the sweet taste of victory. Already we're being warned by the same people who promised us a cakewalk to Baghdad that the road ahead may in fact be long and difficult. The more cynical of us already suspected as much, but would the American people have been so eager to sign on for this war if they had known that the Iraqis weren't just going to roll over and let us in, as many honestly believed they would do, once we'd shown them a little bit of "Shock and Awe"?

Warblogging is not easy, either. Nor is finding your way through the morass of data that this war is generating. I've found the following websites to be extraordinarily helpful during these extraordinary times in getting the information that American news organizations (at the behest of the Pentagon, yes, but also out of their own self-motivated fear of reprisals from "Middle America", and others who don't like to mix critical thought with their nightly news) are keeping us from:

Unlike their American counterparts, BBC reporters "embedded" in the field have been allowed to keep running blogs, which don't seem to be as censored as what goes out into the radio and television reports. Here's a daily roundup of all those posts. Kvetch all you want about the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation", Andrew Sullivan - the BBC provides one of the best English language news sources on the planet, and the world would be infinitely poorer without its much-needed perspective.

As for getting a radically different take on what's going on in Iraq right now, why not try Venik's Aviation, a Russian site that takes military analysts, radio intercepts from the Middle East, and other data being gathered from the conflict and attempts to peer through the "fog of war". Note: This link was working fine this morning, but now as I'm testing it out as I write this blog, I seem to be getting a server error.

And for a running commentary on all things Left, there is the indomitable Eschaton, which is updated frequently and furiously by Atrios.

I hope you find the above sites as useful as I have in keeping a grip on my sanity over the past few weeks!

2003-03-24T11:39:00.000-05:00

Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while sleep
We will find you
Acting on your best behaviour
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world
It's my own design
It's my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help make the most
Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world
There's a room where the light won't find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do I'll be right behind you
So glad we've almost made it
So sad they had fade it
Everybody wants to rule the world
I can't stand this indecision
Married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world
Say that you'll never never never need it
One headline why believe it ?
Everybody wants to rule the world
All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

2003-03-21T00:41:00.000-05:00

I finished Chapter Two of the novel - which now stands at about 12,000 words - this evening, on the bus ride home to Lynn. It's a glorious mess, but I have some ideas for taking it apart and reassembling it in a more coherent fashion when I finally get around to the second draft. In the meantime, however, it's full steam ahead, although I did take a break after finishing the chapter by starting a short story that I recently got a flash of inspiration for, about the Curse of the Bambino (a topic near and dear to my heart, as a member of Red Sox Nation). I was surprised at how well the first few paragraphs came out, so now I'm going to be torn between continuing on with Chapter Three or pecking away at my new story. Now this is the kind of trouble I wish I'd always had as a writer!

2003-03-21T00:35:00.000-05:00

The most frightening thing I've seen in years: CBS morning news personality and "Big Brother" host Julie Chen dressed in fatigues, reporting from an undisclosed location in the Persian Gulf. This whole embedding (how creepy is it that "embedding" is a managerial term as well, as I reported last week after our monthly library staff meetings. I can't wait for Donald Rumsfeld to start talking about "low-hanging fruit"!) of American journalists with military units is a joke. I have no problem with propagandistic puff pieces during wartime, but for all of the major news organizations based in the United States to pull their independently operating correspondents out of the war zone and rely solely on embedded reporters - who aren't allowed to tell us anything the military doesn't want us to know - while other countries' press, including the Brits mind you, are still alive and reporting from downtown Baghdad says a lot about the sorry state of the American media. At least during the first Gulf War we had CNN sticking it out in Iraq when the bombs started falling, while all of the other news agencies allowed themselves to be sequestered and handled by the Pentagon, who spoon-fed them a steady stream of generic "smart bomb" footage and precious little else.

Random thought: Is it just me, or does anyone else expect to see a Jawa sand crawler in the distance, whenever we cut to the "Live From The Iraqi Desert" footage?

I've decided to root for the Kurds during this war, especially after hearing the news that Turkey has authorized its troops to make a foreign incursion into Northern Iraq so that they can secure the Kurdish territories and prevent the birth of an independent "Kurdistan", a rider to the Turkish Parliamentary resolution allowing the Americans the right to fly through Turkish airspace (which is a far cry from the original plan, which would have allowed the U.S. to send ground troops into Turkey in order to attack the Iraqis from the north) that got virtually no press here in America. A pity, because the Kurds have gotten the shaft so many times during the past few decades, and really deserve a homeland of their own at this point. The Turks should know better at this point, too, having spent the last few centuries trying to screw its former Ottoman subjects out of their fair share of rightful territory, only to be forced to spend decades afterwards fighting until they have to give up everything they should have in the first place, and then some. Greece is the perfect paradigm here. The Ottomans did everything they could (as did the Western powers) to ensure that an independent "Kingdom of Greece" would be a rump state, a mere fraction of the Greek-occupied lands, and a tiny sliver of the whole Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean. As good an idea as it seemed to the Ottoman Porte at the time, the Greeks immediately made it their business to add to their artificially small nation, until Greeks and Turks ended up going to war on and off again for the better part of a century. Mark my words, the same thing will happen with the Kurds, unless Turkey wises up and lets the Kurdish people have what should have been theirs many, many moons ago.

Is Saddam dead? It's entirely possible, following a surprise opening salvo from our side that sought to catch and kill the Iraqi leader in one of his bunkers. Is it legal to specifically target another nation's head of state, war or no war? No one's questioned the legality of the attack, as far as I know, but there's no doubt we'd be howling bloody murder if Saddam tried to do the same thing to our capo. The idea of whacking another country's leader with a Tomahawk missle or a bunker-busting bomb is just a little too Tony Soprano for my tastes. Speaking of guys named Tony, apparently our "Coalition of the Willing" partner Tony Blair wasn't too happy about our attempted hit, either, of which he wasn't informed until the deed was done. Poor English war hawks. They really thought we cared about them, didn't they? All the Brits did was provide a thin veneer of multilateral respectability until the bombs started falling, at which point we started treating them like the rest of the world - come along for the ride if you'd like, but don't think for a second that your opinion really matters to us.

2003-03-20T11:23:00.000-05:00

"Begun this clone war has."

2003-03-19T01:30:00.000-05:00

Coalition Members of the 1991 Gulf War:

Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, The United Arab Emirates, The United Kingdom, and the United States.

"Coalition" Members of the (soon to be) 2003 Gulf War:

Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

It's an impressive list that the State Department has cobbled together to prove that we're about to unleash the dogs of war all by ourselves. But aside from the notable absence of Arab and "Old European" countries on the 2003 list, there's another important (read as: HUGE) difference - the 1991 Coalition was a truly international military force which had been assembled to enforce the almost unanimous will of the United Nations, whereas the 2003 "Coalition of the Willing" is merely a list of nations that are willing to be associated with the United States and the United Kingdom as they prosecute a unilateral war of aggression of questionable legality.

But it's good to know that Albania is there for us. Uzbekistan, too. The best part is that Colin Powell revealed to the press today that not only do we have the "Coalition of Former Warsaw Pact Members and Soviet Republics" cheering us on, but fifteen additional nations who'd prefer to remain anonymous at this time. I'm not exactly sure how this would qualify as support, particularly moral support, but hooray for the Unknown Allies! A question, though - if any of these countries end up sending troops, will they have to wear bags over their heads?

2003-03-18T13:06:00.000-05:00

Generals gathered in their masses,
just like witches at black masses.
Evil minds that plot destruction,
sorcerers of death's construction.
In the fields the bodies burning,
as the war machine keeps turning.
Death and hatred to mankind,
poisoning their brainwashed minds.
Oh lord, yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away.
They only started the war.
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor, yeah.

Time will tell on their power minds,
making war just for fun.
Treating people just like pawns in chess,
wait till their judgement day comes, yeah.

Now in darkness world stops turning,
ashes where the bodies burning.
No more War Pigs have the power,
Hand of God has struck the hour.
Day of judgement, God is calling,
on their knees the war pigs crawling.
Begging mercies for their sins,
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.
Oh lord, yeah!

-- Black Sabbath, War Pigs

2003-03-17T10:42:00.000-05:00

2003-03-14T15:04:00.000-05:00

Ten thousand words now on the novel. I can't believe it! Since Chapter One was a prologue, this second chapter is more or less the first real chapter, and I think I'm starting to wrap my brain around how big this thing is going to be when it's finshed. I'm only just now getting to the meat of the narrative after a whole lot of set up, and there's a lot more to write about than I'd originally assumed. The temptation to linger in my main character's childhood is getting the best of me. Already I've opened up an avenue or two that hadn't been there when I first sketched out his story, and I'm eager to explore them and see how I can make it all fit. So to hell with the outline - they're only good for term papers, and I always hated writing those anyway. This book is first and foremost a journey, so why not take the long road?

2003-03-13T16:45:00.000-05:00

The latest installment in my monthly roundup of Managerial English, fresh from the latest library staff meeting:

1. "Embed" - to integrate.

This month we will be embedding the Weezer records with the rest of the LP collection.

2. "Signage" - aka, signs.

We're proud to report that the Cuckoo Clock Factory has put up all new signage for visitors, making it easier for them to get around.

(This evil little word has been kicking around for a while now, but this is the first time I've reported it here.)

3. "Knowledge Management" - what a library does now, apparently. Could they possibly think of a more creepily Orwellian term?

With our Online Encyclopedia of Jelly Beans, we are committed to improving the quality of knowledge management here at the Candy Resource Center.

Getting props this week in the meeting was a former favorite:

(Bonus) "Low-hanging Fruit" - something that can be done quickly and easily.

We have set up three or four low-hanging fruit committees that will deal with our Spring fashion line.

Never a dull moment in a staff meeting, I tell ya...

2003-03-12T12:08:00.000-05:00

I wasted no time this morning. I'm now almost a thousand words into Chapter Two, and finding that the words are still flowing. Well, maybe it's less of a flow and more of a torrent. Everything I know about this fictional universe that I've inhabited off and on for over ten years now is going to come out in this novel, one way or the other, a grand catharsis that every creative cell in my body has been yearning for since I invented this alternate earth. Getting this place onto paper will free me in more ways than one, but the most important result of finishing the book I'm writing will be that the universe it describes will at last be established, a real imaginary locale that I will then be able to visit and revisit as I please, and get who knows how many other short stories and novels out of in the process. This first work lays the foundation, as it literally takes the protagonist around the known world, and in the end deposits him at its center, from which most of the other fiction I'm thinking about writing in this universe will proceed. So this is the one I had to write first - the others would just be icing on an already tasty cake.

Mmm. Tasty-Kake.

2003-03-12T11:49:00.000-05:00

Was Tom Ridge right? Is duct tape the secret weapon that could very well tip the scales in this "War on Terror"? The AP is reporting that the Iraqi unmanned drone that our Happy Junta was almost gleefully talking up over the past couple weeks on all of the American news networks turns out to be comprised primarily of balsa wood and duct tape, and has an effective operational range of about five miles, provided its remote operators don't lose sight of it. Oh, yeah, and it's not designed to carry weapons of mass destruction, but intended for reconaissance and radio jamming. Our side even got its wingspan wrong by a 50% margin. This is a far cry from the instrument of horror that was being portrayed by Bush's inner circle, which was described as something could fly halfway around the world undetected and kill millions of unsuspecting American men, women, and children (and their pets, my God, think of the pets!) in their sleep with its deadly cargo of smallpox, anthrax, or Tesla. Oops. I guess we'll have to go back to "promoting democracy" as our rationale du jour for war against Iraq, until some other wild speculation about Saddam's doomsday weapons pans out, although the more weapons inspectors case the country, the fewer opportunities the Pentagon is going to have to make shit up. But no matter how much these revelations undermine the credibility of certain Bush administration members, the Iraqis' inventive and insidious use of duct tape in part vindicates our Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, who was roundly criticized for his exhortation to the American public to go out and stock up on duct tape. Little did we know what sinister schemes Saddam Hussein was dreaming up for his already-purchased stockpile...

Spread the word. Tom Ridge was right. There now exists a "Duct Tape Gap", and from the sounds of it we're already way behind the Butcher of Baghdad. So get your ass to Home Depot and start another episode of panic buying - every roll of duct tape that remains on the shelves might as well be a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Why are you still reading this? Go! For God's sake, think of the pets!

2003-03-12T00:16:00.000-05:00

Could this be next? Hey, it even works metaphorically!

2003-03-11T15:29:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings will change the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," a culinary rebuke of France, stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.

Ditto for "french toast," which will be known as "freedom toast."

The name changes were spearheaded by two Republican lawmakers who held a news conference Tuesday to make the name changes official on the menus.

What a great idea! But why stop with the French?

1. To retaliate against the Chinese, no more take-out will be delivered to House office buildings.

2. German potato salad will be replaced with its more American counterpart, the one with all the mayonnaise - er, "Freedom Sauce"

3. House chefs will no longer make the popular roll-up sandwiches with Syrian bread, but slices of Wonder Bread mashed flat.

4. Vodka, that most Russian of liquors, will now be known as "The Spirit of '76"

That takes care of the current naysaying members on the Security Council. I hope you're paying attention, Mexico - it would be a shame if we had to rename salsa to "Liberty Ketchup", wouldn't it now?

(And if Turkey doesn't come around and let our troops in, well then come next Thanksgiving they'll be sorry as well!)

2003-03-11T14:36:00.000-05:00

Chapter One is finished! 6083 words. And the next chapter is already hammering at the door, yammering to be let out. This is a good. Although I'm still writing using the old roadmap for this novel, which called for somewhere between twelve and fourteen chapters, the very fact that this story is a creature with its own mind is making me think that when I finally reach the end, it's going to be twice that. So be it. It will be less painful to pare down a 300-plus page novel than one with half that material, and besides, with the genre I'm writing in (it's fantasy, but with a decidedly different take I hope - let's call it an anti-fantasy), 300 pages is a little on the light side anyway! I'm happy how the first chapter turned out. For a while I wasn't sure where it was going, and that maybe I'd gotten off the right track halfway through and was meandering hopelessly, but then I turned a corner and realized that all of those twists and turns had actually been leading somewhere, and that I only had to write the last paragraph to bring it to a close. It's funny how unpredictable fiction can be. I've been thinking about this particular story for years now, and yet how it's unfolding on paper rather than in my mind or in an outline has been thus far a complete and total surprise, especially when it came to end the chapter. I knew where I thought I'd wanted to take the narration, but then suddenly an opportunity presented itself that not only resolved this episode of the story, but did so in a whimsical and irreverent way that was consistent for my main character and which set the exact tone I wanted for the whole book. So I took it. One of the things that held been holding me back from taking a stab at writing this book was the belief that since I'd been letting the idea stew in my head for so long, actually getting it out into written form would be more of a chore than anything else. How wrong I was! Even the most tired idea kicking around the back of the brain gets a whole new life when it's forced from the place of forms out into the world of words - a lesson I wish I could impart backwards in time to my writer's-blocked self, as inspiration or at the very least consolation. But better to have learned said lesson now rather than ten more years down the road, I guess!

2003-03-07T15:58:00.000-05:00

In happier news, I stayed up until 3 a.m. last night finishing the second draft of my short story. That's right, finishing. I hadn't completed a work of fiction in over ten years until now. Meanwhile, the first chapter of the magnum opus continues to grow, nearing the six thousand word mark. I'm starting to think that having a rough draft for this one finished by mid-April is wishful thinking in the extreme, but that's not going to keep me from trying.

2003-03-07T15:42:00.000-05:00

THE PETITION LETTER

TO: The Members of the U.N. Security Council
SUBJECT: Tough Inspections, Not War
__________
Dear Member of the U.N. Security Council,

We are citizens from countries all over the world. We are speaking together because we will all be affected by a decision in which your country has a major part -- the decision of how to disarm Iraq.

The first reason for its existence listed in the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations is "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind." If your country supports a Security Council resolution that would authorize a war on Iraq, you will directly contradict that charter. You will be supporting an unnecessary war -- a war which immediately, and in its unknown consequences, could bring "untold sorrow to mankind" once again.

The U.N. was created to enable peaceful alternatives to conflict. The weapons inspections under way are a perfect example of just such an alternative, and their growing success is a testament to the potential power the U.N. holds. By supporting tough inspections instead of war, you can show the world a real way to resolve conflict without bloodshed. But if you back a war, it will undermine the very premise upon which the U.N. was built.

President Bush argues that only by endorsing a war on Iraq can the United Nations prove its relevance. We argue the opposite. If the Security Council allows itself to be completely swayed by one member nation, in the face of viable alternatives, common sense and world public opinion, then it will be diminished in its role, effectiveness, and in the opinion of humankind.

We do not support this war. For billions of citizens in hundreds of countries, and for the future generations whose lives will be shaped by the choice you make, we ask that you stand firm against the pressuring of the Bush Administration, and support tough inspections for Iraq. The eyes of the world are on you.

Sincerely,
[Number] citizens of the world.

If you are in agreement with the sentiments expressed above, fellow exiles, please visit MoveOn.org to sign the electronic petition, which will be delivered to the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council on Monday, March 10th. President Bush and his junta need to understand the depth and breadth of the opposition to their plans for a political landscape where might makes right and the rule of international law is something that only applies to others. How can we claim that our justification for a war against Iraq is their numerous flagrant violations of United Nations resolutions, when our remedy of a pre-emptive or preventive war directly contravenes the U.N. Charter? If the United States is allowed to pursue this unilateral war of aggression against another sovereign nation, who is to stop the other Great Powers of the world from perpetrating the same acts of hostility against their pet enemies (Russia and Chechnya, China and Taiwan, Turkey and the Kurds, et cetera, ad nauseum). You don't have to be pro-Saddam to support peaceful disarmament of his regime. Do not heed the neocon blowhards who call your rational objections to this war "appeasement" and compare you to Neville Chamberlain. Saddam Hussein may be a cruel, bloodthirtsy, and repressive dictator, but he's hardly the world's next Hitler. He is a sad little man who sits atop a sad little country, broken by decades of war and isolation from the world community, and even with the weaponry he still has in his arsenal, he proves no credible threat to his neighbors as he did in 1991, when the world community rightly banded together to trounce him for his act of aggression against the people of Kuwait. Despite the many attempts by W. and his father before him to paint this monster of their own creation as Evil Incarnate, Saddam is just a man, and after decades of progress in the realm of international law and diplomacy we at last have the mechanisms by which such criminal behavior can be punished. War is not the answer here. We have many options for dealing with this crisis that do not involve the wholesale slaughter of innocent life. As Isaac Asimov so pithily remarked, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." There is always another way. It may not be as glorious or lucrative as conquering the second-largest oil reserves on the planet and declaring ourselves king of the Middle East, but doing the right thing seldom comes with any material reward. It is a sad day when the respect of the world community and pride in having done some actual good in the world (and not simply what's good for the bottom line) aren't enough for the United States of America. If democracy and the rule of law are to prevail on this earth, we must not go down this road.

Thank you for listening.

2003-03-06T09:52:00.000-05:00

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli forces stormed a refugee camp in Gaza on Thursday in raids that killed at least 11 Palestinians, a day after a suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis on a crowded bus.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." - Mahatma Gandhi

2003-03-05T14:14:00.000-05:00

Five thousand words on Chapter One of the novel. Going by the 50,000 word goal set by NaNoWriMo, that puts me at the ten percent mark - an unbelievable milestone, considering how little I've written over the past ten years and how long this particular book idea has been stewing in my head. Granted, National Novel Writing Month is in November, so I'm either really late for 2002 or super early for this year's festivities, but NaNoWriMo has inspired me nonetheless, so thank you Chris Baty and company (and thanks to the Rabbit Blog for tipping me off to such an organization in the first place). Maybe if all goes well with this work-in-progress, I'll sign up next November officially in order to kick-start myself along with another project. Right now however I'm in a celebratory mood. I may not finish the first draft of the novel in a month, but if I can keep to the pace I've set so far, I could have pretty close to 50k by mid-April, when another work-in-progress - my lovely and lively daughter Andriana, a.k.a. "Kicky Toe", who is celebrating her 34th week since conception today - is on schedule to make her big debut. Here's to seeing both in a month and a half!

2003-03-04T14:06:00.000-05:00

Separated at birth?

al-Qaeda Mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

Adult Film Superstar Ron Jeremy

2003-03-04T11:53:00.000-05:00

The Red Sox make the year's first foray against "The Evil Empire" this afternoon at 1 o'clock, when the Yankees come to Fort Myers for a spring training exhibition game. Taking the mound for the boys in pinstripes will be none other than Jose Contreras, the Cuban starting pitcher whom Sox management failed to acquire over the winter, a debacle which engendered a lot of finger pointing and name calling between the new owners at Yawkey Way (most notably Larry Lucchino) and New York owner/supervillain George Steinbrenner. Well, passions have cooled a bit since then, and there's even an article sympathetic to Contreras in today's Boston Globe, but even if Boston really didn't have a chance at signing him, as the piece and Mr. Contreras assert, it does little to change the gut feeling here in New England that Big George and his Yankee front office are out to get us. So don't take it too hard, Jose, if a few thousand sunburned, hungover pilgrims from Red Sox Nation make you feel about as welcome as a hurricane in City Of Palms Park today. Trust me, it'll be a much warmer reception than you'll get at Fenway Park in April.

2003-03-04T11:02:00.000-05:00

These are times that try men's car batteries (women's too, but hey, it's not my line to begin with). Trying to jump-start my brain this morning, as well. I know I've already been here at work for an hour and a half, but all I've been doing is staring blankly at my monitor while I graze the web. At least I got some editing done last night - I'm about halfway through the second draft of my short story, and I'm happy that I'm still liking what I wrote, by and large. I was worried for a little bit that I'd pick it up after letting it sit for a week or so and find it dreadful, but no. I hope to have a finished second draft by the weekend. Meanwhile, I've been spending my commuting time hammering out the first chapter of a novel I've been kicking around in my head for years. It's too early to go into details, but Chapter One is now over four thousand words, and I think the end is in sight. After I finish this chapter, I might play with another short story idea, if only to avoid burnout from working on the same thing day after day, though it may be hard to stop myself from plowing ahead, as I'm starting to feel that same sense of gathering momentum that I had when I'd found my groove with the first story. We'll see. I've been dormant as a writer for so long that I have a backlog of inspiration stretching back to 1990! If only I could sit down for a good, uninterrupted fortnight and get as many of those ideas out of my head as possible, I might feel better about giving my undivided attention to the novel. But things being as they are, I'm going to have to wear as many authorial hats as I can manage for the time being. Which is still a million percent better than not writing anything at all, mind you.

2003-03-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I forgot to comment upon the most important news of the weekend - the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by Pakistani authorities. Shaikh Mohammed is about as far up the al-Qaeda food chain as you can get, save for Osama bin Laden himself, and being that O. B. to the L. hasn't made a video appearance in a long, long time, I would lay odds that the man is dead, which means that this current bust could be the beginning of the end of al-Qaeda, the nominal reason for our "War on Terror". Will this stop Bush and Company from putting the pedal to the metal and zooming up the Highway of Death from Kuwait to Iraq? Probably not. Of course, whatever safety we may have obtained by capturing Shaikh Mohammed is very likely about to be pissed away by our warmongering President and his Dr. Strangelovian Cabinet, who by launching a war of aggression against Baghdad will most assuredly draw the ire of not only the radical Arabs, but moderates and perhaps even those who were once well-disposed towards us...

...guaranteeing in turn the continuation of the War on Terror that should have ended with al-Qaeda! Oh, wait. I see where this one is going now (wish I didn't).

2003-03-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

Resistance is not futile, or at least that's the message of Aristosphanes' Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens, fed up with the Peloponnesian War, decide to withhold sex until the men of Athens and Sparta come to their senses and make peace. The famous Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis has written an opera based on this ancient Greek comedy that was first performed last April in Greece as part of the Cultural Olympiad 2001-2004, and featured the voice of another giant in modern Greek music, singer/songwriter George Dalaras. Needless to say, Theodorakis and Dalaras, who both have been steady champions of the political left and who were outspoken critics of the military junta which ruled Greece - with the United States' blessing, mind you- from 1967-1974, are both opposed to the war against Iraq, and vocally so. While American musicians bow to their corporate masters and censor themselves at the Grammies (leaving Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst as the unlikely hero of the evening), it is comforting at least to know that there are those out there who are still willing to speak out, act up, and fight for what is right.

Holy synchronicity, Batman! I can't believe I almost missed this - The Lysistrata Project is staging a series of all-day, round-the-world readings of Lysistrata today. Find yourself a venue and join the protest, or read the play online in its entirety at eserver.org.

2003-03-03T11:12:00.000-05:00

Score one for democracy - not ours, but Turkey's, whose Parliament failed to win the absolute majority it needed to allow American troops to begin their deployment on Turkish soil in preparation for an invasion of Iraq by land via Kurdistan (aka, The Country Which Must Not Be Named). Already I can see diners across the United States renaming their "Turkey Sandwich with French Fries" to "Liberty Bird with Freedom Fries". And let's not even think of how we're going to overhaul our Thanksgiving dinners, come next November...

Good for the Turks. Ironically, this move on their part might ingratiate them more with the European Union than any American sponsorship ever could have. Already Donald Rumsfeld and his fellow fascists are grumbling about the "untidiness" of democracy. Yes, it is a lot easier to strongarm nations into doing your will when they're run by absolute despots, and doing our bidding uber alles is how Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq in the first place, after all. No, Mr. Rumsfeld, the real untidiness occurs when these persons we train, put into place, nurture, and arm (for who among our current enemies was not once our friend, except the mad dictator of North Korea) finally decide to turn on us, which they inevitably do, and we're put into the unsavory position of having to deal with the monsters we created to do our dirty work all over the world.

But there are many ways to deal with such monsters. War benefits no one in the end, especially not the millions of Iraqis whose lives will be needlessly endangered so that one man may be removed from power. The people of the world are right to question this course of action. Despite the protestations of George Bush and his administration, the United Nations has never been more relevant than it is now, as it attempts to prevent the world's most powerful nation from replacing the rule of law with the law of the jungle for decades if not centuries to come (and who knows what will be the consequences, if the world community should fail). Across the planet, democratically-elected governments are feeling unprecedented pressure from their citizens to resist the American push towards an illegal preemptive war. Some heads of state have already taken their stand against such an action; others who oppose their own people on this issue in order to appease the United States will find that hell hath no fury like a spurned voter.

But democracy is the thing we said we're in this for, isn't it? Be careful what you wish for, Mr. President.

2003-02-27T12:02:00.000-05:00

All aboard for the last ride on the Neighborhood Trolley to the Land of Make-Believe, folks: Mr. Rogers is dead.

2003-02-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

The Red Sox play their first Spring Training exhibition game tonight at 7 o'clock against the Minnesota Twins, who surprised everyone last year (including Commission Bud Selig, who had been scheming to eliminate the team) by capturing the American League Central division by a thirteen game margin and then going on to eliminate the favored Oakland A's from postseason contention before being knocked out themselves by the destined World Series winners, the Anaheim Angels, and their now-famous Rally Monkey. Oh, no. We here at the Jersey Exile haven't forgotten the Rally Monkey! I hope the Sox spent some time during the offseason trying to conjure up their own "rally" mascot - how about a bonafide Rally Monster, instead of Wally, the emaciated Phillie Phanatic rip-off - because they sure as hell didn't go out and hire the pitching they needed to field a winning team this year, but rather chose to plug up their defensive holes with more offense, as they've done pretty much every year since hiring Pedro Martinez back in 1998. If the New York Yankees learned anything from their disappointing 2002 playoff performance, it's that dingers alone won't carry the day. That's why owner George Steinbrenner went out and bought two full rotations of starters over the winter, both for his own benefit and to everyone else's disadvantage (The Onion makes a damned good funny about this); and that's why the Yankees front office have been working overtime to stymie our every attempt to land a decent hurler here in Beantown. And true to form, New England Yankee cheapness has kept the folks at Yawkey Way from responding to New York Yankee extravagance, despite the fact that the Sox have changed owners only a year ago, and despite the fact that Red Sox Nation already pays the highest ticket prices in the league and would no doubt endure even higher costs to acquire another ace or two on the mound, if it meant seeing the Bambino's Curse vanquished once and for all. But that's just one Sox fan's opinion.

Hey, speaking of the Phillie Phanatic, it seems he had a run-in with the White House back in 2001:

Don't put president's head in your mouth

White House aides tone down the Phillie Phanatic

What do you get when you mix a humorless White House aide
with a fat, manic, green furry mascot?

Some tense moments, particularly when the Phillie Phanatic
began dancing with the Greater Exodus Baptist Church choir
on the church steps during President Bush's visit on July 4.

"They wanted the Phanatic to stay in one place, which the
Phanatic, who is hyper, has a hard time doing," said Mike
Alexander, a source close to his greenness.

The aide walked over to the Phanatic and said, "Hey, don't
pull any s---."

The aide was probably nervous since, as he told the Phanatic
earlier, another mascot had once put President Bush's head
in his mouth.

"We don't want this happening again," scolded the aide.

The Phanatic explained that it was anatomically impossible
for him to swallow the president's head, although giving him
15 inches of tongue was another matter.

When they did meet, the Phanatic bowed, kissed and hugged
Bush. In deference to the humorless aide, the Phanatic did
not pull his Phillies shirt over the president's head.

How did the Phanatic wind up there in the first place? The
White House called baseball commissioner Bud Selig to ask
for a baseball presence at the July 4 event. Selig's office
called the Phillies and suggested the Phanatic.

Good thing this wasn't after September 11th, or else the Phanatic may have ended up in Guantanamo Bay for pulling any funny business. I hear they just love beisbol down in Cuba...

2003-02-25T14:03:00.000-05:00

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Lyrics by Donald Fagan ("I.G.Y.")

Hey! Cold War irony is useful again...

2003-02-24T21:24:00.000-05:00

Tonight, at 9:30 on CBS: My Big Fat Grssk Life.

Someone should tell Hollywood that Σ is an "s", not an "e". You'd imagine that this was pointed out somewhere along the line by Nia Vardalos, creator and star of the new sitcom (as well as the enjoyable hit movie about a Grssk wedding), or one of the myriad Greek actors involved in either venture. Or by Rita Wilson, wife of Tom Hanks and producer of My Big Fat Grssk Wedding, who happens to be half-Greek herself. At least you hope it was brought up. What galls me most about this is that the movie was a sweet and extremely funny celebration of what it means to be Greek, something I've had the greatest pleasure to experience firsthand, thanks to my wife Maria and her very large, very Greek family. Mangling something so simple as the Greek alphabet in the course of promoting a movie about Greeks is silly at best, frightfully ignorant at worst.

Well, at least the show was halfway decent. Καλη τυχη to Ms. Vardalos and her costars! I'll be watching and laughing while I write my angry letters.

2003-02-14T15:43:00.000-05:00

Dear Tom Bruno,

A loan that you had requested:

Loan Title: Tomb of horrors : an adventure for character levels 10-14 /
Loan Author: Gygax, Gary.
TN: 61991

is now available for pickup at the Circulation Desk.

Tomb of Horrors! Someone (the City of Mesa Library in Mesa, Arizona to be exact) actually had this vintage Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module, pulled it off the shelves, packed it up, and shipped it all the way across the country so that I could groove on down memory lane. Wow. Back in the days when fantasy roleplaying wasn't something that Hollywood "it" people like Elijah Wood and Vin Diesel would have admitted to dabbling in, even at gunpoint, the original creator of D&D - the one and only Gary Gygax - was still writing the gamebooks and dungeon modules himself. One of these was the infamous Tomb of Horrors, first printed in 1978, an underground adventure that had been specifically designed by Gygax as a deathtrap for high-level characters. I remember when I first ran this game as Dungeon Master. Unlike most adventures written up to this point, Tomb of Horrors was a series of puzzles, requiring players more accustomed to smashing, grabbing, and smashing again to think on their feet, or watch their characters die. Surprise surprise, the latter happened more often than the former with my players, and it didn't take too much carnage for them to decide that this was the worst, most evilly-crafted dungeon module ever; and unlike other adventures, which strangely they enjoyed playing over and over again, even after having "solved" them, they had no desire to ever try their luck with it again. Needless to say, I loved this module. And it's great to take a peek at it again, as I'll be damned if I know what happened to my original copy.

My players probably burned it.

But aside from making a public display of my complete and utter geekiness, I bring up my old D&D days for an important reason. Watching the way George Bush and his Cabinet have been comporting themselves in the face of (rightly) skeptical allies and unfavorable vetoes this past week or so, I couldn't help but find their petulant behavior familiar. Then it hit me. They were acting exactly like my age-old friend back in high school, when we used to play D&D for entire weekends at a time. He was a great player, who approached his character like a Method actor, hurling curses at his enemies, relishing his victories in a grand, high fantasy style, even lurching around the table during a "fight" as he parried imaginary blows and hacked and slashed with an equally nonexistant sword. But one thing he was never good at back then was losing. Not having things go his way - a bad roll of the dice, other players mussing his epic moments, or losing a favorite magical item or piece of treasure - would cause him to fly into a rage and threaten to quit the game. As Dungeon Master, this always put me into an awkward position. Should I mollify my friend to keep him at the table, and undermine not only the good will of the other players (who never caught such breaks) but the integrity of the game itself? Or do I tell him too bad, and risk his berserker wrath? The United Nations and NATO are now finding themselves in a nearly identical bind. The world's most powerful nation doesn't like how the game is turning out, and is screaming bloody murder that if it doesn't get exactly what it wants, it's going to kick us all out of the living room and finish up on its own. But that's not how D&D works, nor is it how international relations in the 21st century should work. In either case, the magic (be it a successful night of gaming or the survival of civilization itself) is only kept alive by a roomful of geeks sitting around a common table, agreeing to abide by the rules, even if the dice don't break their way - especially if the dice don't break their way.

But I don't suppose George Bush played much Dungeons and Dragons, back in the day. Too bad, because unless we figure out a way to stop him, he's about to take our country (and the world along with us) into the Tomb of Horrors...

2003-02-14T13:03:00.000-05:00

Forgot to do this yesterday - most of my Thursday morning was taken up by all-library staff meeting, during which (while I was paying attention) I caught a few new snippets of Managerial English I thought I'd share. "Managerial English" is of course an oxymoron. It refers to the neverending stream of buzzwords that infiltrates the minds of middle management, like rainwater makes its way through a ill-shingled roof, leaving unpredictable damage and non-removable stains in its wake. Well anyway, here's the latest batch of words and phrases since the last monthly meeting:

Driver: Impetus, Reason, probably from 'driving force'

"The lack of biscuit manufacturing space is the driver for our new cracker reorganization plan."

Lives: To be located, especially on an organizational chart.

"The Department of Widgets is where the new supervisor lives."

Low-Hanging Fruit: Something that can be done now, with no great difficulty.

"Since the spinal realignment brochure is low-hanging fruit, we can make that our first priority."

I've got to say that I'm not normally fond of Managerial English, but "low-hanging fruit" is uncharacteristically risque for the administrative set. So I'm going to allow it - for now...

2003-02-14T00:28:00.000-05:00

The short story is finished - my first completed piece of fiction in over ten years. Woo-hoo!

2003-02-12T16:41:00.000-05:00

On a more sublime note this afternoon, I thought I'd share something that a coworker of mine discovered last week while leafing through The Penguin Book of Hindu Names, which someone had borrowed through Interlibrary Loan and returned (this coworker likes to pick through the returns, as do I. Since we work at a medical library, our collection is a little on the dry side, which means anything interesting usually has to be ordered through our office. We also handle a lot of what we call 'courtesy returns' - books checked out from another Harvard library that are returned to our Circulation Desk - since the Medical School is located in Boston, a good haul away from the main campus. Chance finds in the returns pile is one of the quirky perks that keeps me here). He looked up the name Kalpana, which is the first name of Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Columbia when it was lost during re-entry, and here's what he found:

Kalpana (Sanskrit, Feminine Name)-- imagination; doing; decoration; composition; idea

A beautiful name for one who dreamt beautiful dreams. Hopefully her death - and the death of her comrades - will not have been in vain, and the dreams of space exploration will go on.

2003-02-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

North Korea has an untested ballistic missile capable of reaching the western United States, intelligence officials said Wednesday.

As the U.S. continues to inch toward war with Iraq, a jealous and frustrated North Korea is wondering what it has to do to attract American military attention.

The first lead sentence is from the AP Wire, the second from The Onion. We are living in frightening times, indeed, when our best source for satire in America doesn't even have to make up its headlines anymore!

2003-02-12T14:12:00.000-05:00

Grr. I lost a post between last Friday and today about "Old Europe" taking its diplomatic revenge on the Bush Administration, but current events are moving so quickly it's hard to zero back in on yesterday's outrage, so let's stick to the present. Colin Powell and the usual gang of blowhard lawmakers in Congress have worked themselves into a froth about France, Belgium, and Germany's recent attempts to halt or at least delay the United States' headlong rush into its first purely imperial war in over a century (more about that when I get a chance, but I've about had it with America's total amnesia of its late-19th century antics and the last time we tried to put together an empire, the fallout of which we are still dealing with, all these years later!). The three nations were responsible for blocking a NATO proposal that would have beefed up fellow member state Turkey's defenses "just in case" Iraq decided to attack its neighbor during the course of a U.S.-led invasion. Never mind that such a prospect is unlikely in the extreme - Saddam doesn't have the military force to defend his own nation against the American armed forces, so it's unclear as to how he'd have any men or material to spare for a retaliatory foray against Turkey - what the Continent found objectionable was the proposal's implicit presumption that war was already a done deal, and that any ongoing attempts to resolve the standoff between the United Nations and Iraq by diplomatic means were effectively (if not officially) at their end. No one is seriously suggesting that Turkey be left to twist in the wind, but that's how it's being spun here in the States. Already the knuckleheads - among them Representative Tom Lantos (D) of California and Representative Henry Hyde (R) of Indiana, proving that chest-thumping patriotic ignorance knows no party affiliation - are charging the French, the Belgians, and the Germans with ingratitude for all the wonderful things we did for them back during World War Two and the Cold War, as if the debt of having America as an ally comes with some sort of eternal interest attached to it that compounds daily. If that weren't bad enough, now the AP Wire reports that Powell, the pols, the pundits, and the Prez are all claiming that this current rift between NATO allies threatens the very alliance itself. Funny, haven't we been hearing the same exact thing about the United Nations? How juvenile has this nation of ours become, that faced with an otherwise friendly nation who happens to disagree with us on some issue or another, we brand them as traitors, threaten to pull out of all of the ties that bind us, and even refuse to take their phone calls, as actually happened to Germany last fall? Have we forgotten the most basic principle of democracy, that the leaders of other nations (however allied) must in the end answer to their own citizens, and not necessarily kowtow to Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush, or the U.S. House of Representatives? How dare the rest of the world make decisions that might not benefit us, first and foremost! These latest tantrums, both at NATO and the UN, are displaying in vivid Technicolor something I've been shouting up and down for years now - America doesn't give a flying fuck about democracy abroad, only that its friends and allies do what they're told, when they're told to do it, with as little lip as possible, thank you very much. What a surprise that this isn't sitting well with the rest of the civilized world, who have put their faith in the democratic process - at our insistence, mind you! - as the way to peace and prosperity for all nations, only to find that the U.S. prefers democracy at home but tyranny abroad when the chips are down.

Oh, and now we're supposed to believe that Iraq and al-Qaeda are in cahoots, based on a new Osama bin Laden tape urging the Arab world to resist an American invasion and calling upon Iraqis to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers, if need be. News flash, folks - bin Laden wants this war, at least as much as the Bush Administration, if not more so. Rightly or wrongly so, bin Laden believes that the sight of American troops occupying Baghdad, once the jewel of the Arab world, and definitely a symbol of Islam's former heydey, will finally set the Muslim world off on a global jihad against the West. That's all he's wanted from the start. Idiot commentators are trying to figure out why bin Laden would broadcast such a message on the eve of war, since he must know full well that the United States and its "coalition" (read as: England, Australia, and George Bush's parents) would use it as evidence of an Iraqi-al Qaeda link. Wake up, America! When the enemy of your enemy hands you the other enemy's ass on a silver platter, there's often a pretty damned good reason for it.

2003-02-07T13:39:00.000-05:00

Bruce Campbell as Elvis, Ossie David as J.F.K., fighting an ancient Egyptian evil that's stalking their East Texas nursing home. No, you're not "tripping" - it's Bubba Ho-tep! Apparently this gem's been kicking around since last fall, making the rounds with the various film festivals and delighting the critics along the way. The next screening will be in Hollywood on Thursday, February 27th at 7:30PM, at the Egyptian Theater (where else?). Once again, I am made painfully aware that I am living on the wrong coast.

2003-02-07T01:50:00.000-05:00

British Intelligence apparently plagiarized a California graduate student's paper (containing 12 year old data, no less) in its latest propaganda "dossier" meant to shore up support at home for the America's military adventure in Iraq, the BBC World News reports. Now this is something I'd expect from a self-proclaimed "C minus" Yale alum, but M.I.6? Say it isn't so, England.

2003-02-03T11:26:00.000-05:00

Money spent in 2002 by the federal government on NASA:
14 billion dollars.
Money spent in 2002 by the federal government on the military:
330 billion dollars.
Projected cost of potential war with Iraq:
62 billion dollars.
Projected cost of President Bush's 10-year tax cut, per year:
67 billion dollars.

(Figures taken from the Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2003 Historical Tables and CNN.)

Any wonder why NASA has to keep reusing twenty-year-old shuttles until they literally fall apart? Look at the table scraps it's been getting, compared to the U.S. Armed Forces. If the Air Force wants a brand new stealth aircraft, it gets a blank check to develop it, no questions asked; whereas for some reason NASA has to do things "faster, cheaper, and better", and witness the results. Even when a tragedy like the loss of STS-107 illuminates this disparity in a way that Excel charts and a slick PowerPoint presentation to Congress could never manage, the President's response is to mumble something about the astronauts going up to God (which God would that be, Mister President? The God you believe in, who doesn't care for pagans like Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist and will damn any Jew - such as Israeli astronaut Ilan Roman - not defecting to Christ's fold at the Second Coming to eternal hellfire? Too bad you didn't elaborate on how you square your beliefs as a born-again Christian with your feelgood, mealy-mouthed platitudes about "The Creator"), and announce that he's going to add a paltry five hundred million dollars to NASA's budget. Never mind that half a billion barely keeps pace with inflation. Saturday morning's disaster has reduced the size of our space shuttle fleet by a quarter, and it's now been made painfully obvious that we as a nation shouldn't be relying on those remaining three spacecraft to take us into a new century of exploration and discovery. It's not fair to NASA to be forced by financial constraints to keep flying a shuttle whose estimated accident rate is one in a hundred, as opposed to the one in twenty thousand odds faced by U.S. combat pilots (this chilling figure from NASA adminstrator Dan Goldin, courtesy of a 2000 article on Space.com), when the field of aeronautical and astronautical engineering has made a whole generation of advances that could be utilized by a new generation of spacecraft. Imagine what could be done if President Bush diverted just a year of tax cuts for his multimillionaire cronies towards building a replacement fleet of shuttles. Or if he chose to forego the costly and unnecessary (and at this point inevitable) war against Saddam Hussein. With a hundred and twenty billion extra dollars, we could have ten new space shuttles, fly to Mars, and still have change left over for social programs, health care, and education. But no. Our commander-in-chief is more interested in the needs of the few - the oil executives, the ultra-wealthy, the pharmaceutical companies - than he is in making the world a better place. So he makes pretend with doing good, promising to fight AIDS in Africa and Asia, for instance, but only offering three billion dollars a year to do it, while earmarking just as much to develop new vaccines to protect American citizens from the as-yet still phantom menace of germ warfare. You'd think a war against an actual disease claiming more lives in Sub-Saharan Africa than the Black Death did in Europe might garner a little more financial assistance from the people who once rid the world of smallpox, gratis. But no. Africa gets a little over three hundred dollars per HIV-infected person (that is, if the pro-lifers allow such a plan to get through Congress, which I doubt, because it will involve distributing such horrible godless things as condoms to help prevent the further spread of AIDS), and that's for treatment and prevention combined. I guess in this context, the "Columbia Seven" didn't die in vain after all - 71 million dollars per fallen astronaut in extra funding is nothing to sneeze at, in these fiscally and socially conservative times.

2003-02-01T13:09:00.000-05:00

Space Shuttle Columbia was lost during re-entry over Texas this morning. Terrible news, yes. But surprising? Columbia was first launched in 1981, and is the oldest shuttle in NASA's geriatric fleet (even the "youngest" shuttle, Endeavor, has been in use for over ten years now). There has been growing concern for years that NASA wasn't properly addressing the safety issues involved with relying exclusively on such an antiquated transporation system for our manned missions. The 2001 annual report of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warned:

The Panel has focused on the clear dichotomy between future Space Shuttle risk and the required level of planning and investment to control that risk. The Panel believes that current plans and budgets are not adequate. Last year's Annual Report highlighted these issues. It noted that efforts of NASA and its contractors were being primarily addressed to immediate safety needs. Little effort was being expended on longterm safety. The Panel recommended that NASA, the Administration, and Congress use a longer, more realistic planning horizon when making decisions with respect to the Space Shuttle.

Since last year's report was prepared, the longterm situation has deteriorated. The aforementioned budget constraints have forced the Space Shuttle program to adopt an even shorter planning horizon in order to continue flying safely. As a result, more items that should be addressed now are being deferred. This adds to the backlog of restorations and improvements required for continued safe and efficient operations. The Panel has significant concern with this growing backlog because identified safety improvements are being delayed or eliminated. NASA needs a safe and reliable humanrated space vehicle to reap the full benefits of the ISS. The Panel believes that, with adequate planning and investment, the Space Shuttle can continue to be that vehicle.

And so here we are. Yes, the NASA suits are already explaining on the 24-hour news networks, the shuttle fleet is old, but that doesn't mean it isn't safe. But the truth of the matter is that NASA, cut to the bone by a Congress increasingly hostile to the original ideals of space exploration, has been forced to make do with less and less every year, and it's beginning to show. Despite the fact that this is only our second manned loss in seventeen years, something already being reiterated in a mantra-like fashion by talking heads on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, it's yet another disaster in a string of failures that have plagued NASA over the past few years.

What an awful day.

2003-01-31T23:12:00.000-05:00

The short story is almost finished. The ending occurred to me while I was taking a walk this morning, on a break from work. I always knew how the very end of the story would go, but the matter of getting there from the beginning of the end was presenting me with a logistical challenge. But then it came to me, as I crunched across the frozen courtyard of the Harvard Medical School, and I laughed out loud, because I knew right then and there beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was going to finish this goddamned story after all, my first completed piece of fiction in ten years. I think I'm going to attempt the grand finale this weekend. Wish me luck.

In other news, I discovered yesterday on Dispatches From Revland, another favorite blog of mine (I should really make a list of links), that there are people out there turning old Dungeons and Dragons adventures (a.k.a. "dungeon modules") into honest-to-goodness books. Don't believe me? The novelization of The Keep on the Borderlands, a dungeon module that came with every Basic Rules Set, is available for sale at Amazon.com right now. Go ahead. Buy it. I dare you. Revland will even get the commission, if you do.

Because I obviously have too much free time at work - witness the Binder Clip Monsters - and in the interest of fluffing my monthly statistics, I then decided to see if any libraries out there had cataloged any dungeon modules and actually shelved them in their stacks. I punched "Keep On The Borderlands" into OCLC, the massive electronic catalog that connects more than 20,000 libraries all over the world, and lo and behold, there were available lenders! Not many, mind you, but it just boggled the mind that a librarian had seen fit to acquire, catalog, and circulate a copy of something that was such an indispensable fixture of my geeky childhood (as opposed to my geeky adulthood). Delighted and disturbed, I tried the names of other classic adventures - Against The Giants, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and the immortal slaughterfest Tomb of Horrors - and found at least one library for each that wasn't ashamed to admit having a copy in their stacks. O brave new world, that has such people in it. Today's young geeks just don't know how good they have it. Comic books have gone mainstream, fantasy roleplaying is the stuff of best-selling games for Sony Playstations, and local shopping malls hold weekend-long training sessions and tournaments for the latest collectible card games. Hollywood action hero Vin Diesel is even a proud D&D player. Where were these people, when I was busy getting slammed into lockers back in the 80's. Ah, well. Better late than never, I guess.

Needless to say, I ordered some D&D modules on Interlibrary Loan, for old time's sake.

2003-01-30T16:31:00.000-05:00

I'm looking for some names for my Binder Clip Monsters, pictured below. Right now all I have are Pretzel, Stouffer, and Bernice. Pretzel and Stouffer come from the name of a law firm that does business with our library from time to time - my coworker was reading their address out loud and I just couldn't help myself - and Bernice comes from, well, Bernice. These are fine names, all of them, but do they really do my creations justice? Send me an email if you'd like to suggest a name, and if I like it, I may send you a Clip Monster of your very own (some assembly required). No, really.

I don't know what angers me more: that our alleged President Bush used the term "Hitlerism" in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, or that "Hitlerism" is actually a word. Having not heard the speech myself, I was alerted to Shrubby's use of this seemingly made up word by the Rabbit Blog, one of my favorite places on the web since the untimely demise of Filler (which was the brainchild of Rabbit's Heather Havrilesky and artist Terry Colon). Intrigued and incensed, I immediately Googled "Hitlerism" to see if it was in fact kosher, expecting to get nothing but the transcript of Bush's address, but lo and behold, there were over four thousand hits. Pretty good for something coming out of the mouth of our Mangler-in-Chief. Here's the definition, from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

The fascistic and nationalistic theories and practices of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Okay. Straightforward enough. But why not use the term "fascism"? Or "Nazism"? Either would have been a little less obscure. Could it possibly have had anything to do with the Administration's inexorable march to oust Saddam Hussein, whom Bush the Elder labelled as "worse than Hitler" shortly before the First Gulf War back in 1991? Why else favor a term scoring 4,000 hits on Google over one that turns up 359,000? Now what seemed to me at first to be another amusing Bushism (hey, you've got one too, Mr. President!) is looking a little more clever. And a lot more sinister.

But before I veer off entirely into Gloom-and-Doom-Land - population roughly six billion - Googling "Hitlerism" did also yield a page called Hitlerism vs. Odinism. I bet Odinism could lay the smack down on Hitlerism any day of the week - Bushism, too. In fact, I think we should have a WWF (wait, it's WWE now, isn't it?) style Battle Royale between all of the isms, and see who's left standing when the dust settles. That would be fifty bucks well spent on Pay-Per-View...

2003-01-24T17:10:00.000-05:00

Luke Be A Jedi Tonight - no, you're not in a fugue state, there really is such a thing as Star Wars: The Musical Edition, which will be making its big-stage debut at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where else?) starting January 31st and running until February 8th. Now there's a funny story behind this Friday afternoon link. In ancient times, aka 1990, I arrived at MIT as a wide-eyed freshman, and promptly began to have the intellectual snot beat out of me, in what must have been one of the worst semester performances for an incoming student in 'Tute history. During this six-month period of hell, I became fast friends with someone who found himself in exactly the same situation as I had, and I'm happy to say our friendship endured, even after we both escaped from MIT and found our own separate ways in the world. This friend of mine happens to be the set designer for the upcoming Star Wars musical. A happy coincidence and little more, this I'll admit. But that's only half of the tale. After surviving a harrowing first year at MIT, I decided to take refuge in music, something that I'd neglected during my freshman ordeal. I joined the Chorallaries, an acapella group that combined a lot of skits and song parodies in with more traditional covers of contemporary songs. The Chorallaries are now a venerable institution, having been around since the 70's, and it wasn't unusual for long since graduated alums to show up at post-concert parties and sing a couple old standbys with us in between the obligatory drinking, of which there was a lot (remind me to tell you about Windex and Liquid Kermit sometime). One of these old alums turned out to be half of the duo responsible for Star Wars: The Musical Edition. I remember him now talking about noodling around with turning Star Wars into musical theatre, but at the time we just laughed, since skit-writing is what we all did, and we knew damned well that stretching a nice gag into something substantial was usually more trouble than it was worth. Well, I guess he went to the trouble of finishing this thing. I'm afraid to see it, but given the circumstances, how can I not? Pray for me.

2003-01-24T16:05:00.000-05:00

I've been writing. Not here, obviously, but on my commutes back and forth from teaching Greek in the evenings. I don't want to go into details right now, so as not to jinx it, but it's the first short story I've written in over ten years. Hell, it's the first anything I've written in over ten years, creatively speaking. Right now it's at about three thousand words, give or take - not a lot, but considering the dry spell I'm coming out of, three thousand words feels like three hundred thousand - and the story itself is safely beyond the halfway point. I forgot what a rush it is, when you first catch sight of the ending of the story, and what was starting to seem like hopeless meandering pulls tight, and you're suddenly rushing headlong towards the final sentence with a terrible, wonderful velocity. How I've missed this feeling! Now ideas that have been backing up in the nooks and crannies of my brain are all trying to break out at once, the characters morphing into each other, the plotlines interweaving and colliding, and dialogue spilling out of my imagination and onto my moving lips, inadvertently, when I'm waiting for the bus. The hardest part is going to be staying focused on one story at a time. But that's infinitely preferable to indefinite writer's block. Here's to hoping the words keep flowing.

Oh, and I've also been dabbling in a little bit of sculpture. With office supplies. No, really:

I'm calling them "When Dinosaurs Roamed The Cubicle".

2003-01-24T12:52:00.000-05:00

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."

C.P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley

2003-01-23T11:07:00.000-05:00

But enough about beer...

According to the BBC World News, the latest proposal for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site has come from an unlikely source, the celebrated and long-dead Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi's 95-year-old plans for a futuristic hotel roughly the same height as the Empire State Building (shown above) is currently being championed by a group of architects and urban planners who have so far been uninspired by the two rounds of designs already presented. In lieu of an outdoor park or some other such monument dedicated to the WTC victims, the Gaudi building would utilize a cathedral-like interior chamber that was originally intended to be a massive "Hall of Presidents" as the memorial space, thus integrating the new building with the monument in a way that doesn't seem chinzy or contrived. Now I have to tell you that until seeing this design, my gut feeling about the WTC site has consistently been to leave it alone. I think part of my reaction was in response to the fact that many of the proposals submitted so far have emphasized the new buildings at the expense of the memorial, as if our intention in re-building there is to bury the awful truth of what happened two Septembers ago, conveniently paving over the hows and the whys with millions of square feet of office space and "tasteful" commerical and retail development. The memorials proposed in conjunction with these buildings seemed tacked on, almost as in an afterthought. Gaudi's design, in contrast, is its own living shrine - not only to the WTC dead, but to archetypal Manhattan itself, a time when even New York's skyscrapers had their own humanity. Tasteless ideas such as building the world's tallest building or otherwise "replacing" the Twin Towers are a kind of collective denial on the part of their proponents. Short of turning the whole area into a memorial park, I think integrated designs such as Gaudi's are the only way to rebuild without cheapening the human life that was lost there, and I wish the coalition sponsoring the Gaudi revival the best of luck.

2003-01-22T16:24:00.000-05:00

Do you believe that the universe is endless?? Scientists believe that the universe goes on forever and ever. Our teachings says that beer is everlasting to everlasting, that beer is eternal. I don't completely understand it, but if the universe is eternal how much more is the creator.

Did you know that archaeologists are trying to figure out what fish fossils are doing at the peak of some mountains? It's a big mystery to someone that doesn't believe in the great flood of Beer (12BB).

Some naive people believe that beer is simply a drink for the weak willed, but how can you explain the fruit that is old turning alcoholic or the fact that yeast is a natural substance that has been on this planet for so long. Alcohol was given to us as a means to reach our promised land and to release us from the solid state of body and mind.

After reading this I hope it will influence you to go on the most Adventurous Quest of your life. The search for the meaning of life, and obtaining the peace of alcohol, which surpasses all human understanding. And most importantly, reconciling yourself to beer and the search for the one good pint.

We feel that we need to stress one point before you read any further. We do not endorse or agree with excessive drinking. To be an Alchodite is to believe in Alcohol, it has nothing to do with how much you drink. We do not have any members who are alcoholics since we can not help them, only a trained professional can make them better.

Courtesy of Google Image Search - above is the number one hit for "Guinness". Finally, a worldview I can get behind!

2003-01-10T17:05:00.000-05:00

I'm not ignoring you, fellow Exiles, honest I'm not! As the three "hymns to Fortune" below might suggest, I seem to have stumbled into a crucial juncture in my life. A good one, to be sure, but suddenly change is on the horizon, so damned close that I can taste it. And this is a good thing. But more about that later. Right now, why don't we take a look at three BBC news items about my favorite potent potable, beer:

A French Government drive against alcoholism has incurred the wrath of Belgium's famous Trappist monks.

The craze for a cheap beer made out of sea water and raw malt is denting Japan's brewing industry.

Raspberry and chocolate beers aimed at women are to go on sale in (London) supermarkets.

Ah, yes. Beer. What would I do without it? A funny thing - the below-mentioned Carmina Burana is one big collection of Medieval college drinking songs. Kind of funny that we've turned it (thanks to Carl Orff's brilliant musical interpretation of the text and the movie Excalibur's inspired use of Orff's score) into the very stereotype of epic movie music. I guess drinking was a little more of a contact sport back then...

Cheers (for now)!

2003-01-09T13:02:00.000-05:00

Three hymns to Fortune:

Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,
To learn my lineage, be it ne'er so low.
It may be she with all a woman's pride
Thinks scorn of my base parentage. But I
Who rank myself as Fortune's favorite child,
The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.
She is my mother and the changing moons
My brethren, and with them I wax and wane.
Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?
Nothing can make me other than I am.

- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.

- Anonymous, Carmina Burana

They call you Lady Luck.
But there is room for doubt
At times you have a very unladylike way of running out
You're this a date with me
The pickings have been lush
And yet before this evening is over you might give me the brush
You might forget your manners
You might refure to stay and So the best that I can to is pray.

- Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls

2002-12-28T13:17:00.000-05:00

Roomba was a major disappointment, as it turned out. The Christmas Day nor'easter kept Maria and me holed up in Jersey for a day longer than we had planned, so we had time to power up and give my mother's tiny new robotic vaccuum cleaner a trial run. iRobot, the manufacturers of Roomba, say that their product works on up to medium-pile rugs, but it was clear that even your garden-variety carpeting was too much for the self-guided automaton. Now I have never considered my parents' carpets to be shag, but as far as Roomba was concerned they might as well have been three feet deep. Although Roomba did exactly what it was supposed to on our linoleum kitchen floor, it noticeably struggled with the berber rug in my brother's room, and was mired as if in quicksand when placed upon the slightly thicker carpets in the rest of the house. Roomba also seemed to have a problem navigating irregularly-sized rooms, especially if they had features like closets with folding doors. Instead of bumping into such doors and registering them as "walls", the A.I. seemed to be baffled by anything in the room that wasn't 100% solid, causing it to spiral helplessly until someone took mercy on it, picked it up, and restarted the cleaning sequence. Bummer. Frankly, I was expecting a lot more from iRobot, who have successfully deployed their robots at the Great Pyramids at Giza and the caves of Tora Bora - you think they could have made Roomba a little more rugged so that it could handle a house with wall-to-wall carpeting. Granted, this is a first-generation product, and perhaps in a year or two Roomba's successors will not only be deep-cleaning our carpets but scrubbing our bathrubs and toilets as well, but if you were thinking about bringing this little robotic helper into your household as a labor-saving device, don't bother unless your floors are mostly hardwood, linoleum, or extremely thin berber-style rugs. The funny thing is that Roomba would probably have worked perfectly in our Lynn apartment. Maybe I'll get Maria one for her upcoming maternity leave. It's fun to watch bump and pirouette around the room, if nothing else.

Saw The Two Towers last night, and again I have to say that Peter Jackson has pulled off what I assumed to be the impossible until I saw Fellowship of the Ring last December - somehow he has managed to do Tolkein's epic justice, at times even more so than Tolkein himself. The beauty of this trilogy of films is that they were filmed back-to-back-to-back, which means that next year's Return of the King will almost certainly kick ass. Mr. Jackson masterfully blends CGI with live-action in a way that makes the new Star Wars trilogy like a Sega Genesis video game, especially with the character of Gollum, whose hauntingly real computer-generated appearance was draped like a costume over Andy Serkis' actual movements and expressions. Contrast this with Episode II's CGI Yoda, who ended up looking more fake than the Muppet that portrayed the 800-year-old Jedi master in the four other films. Another great example of George Lucas' CGI overkill is the digital rendering of the Clone Trooper army, whether in the panoramic long shots or the close-ups. Again, The Two Towers steers clear of doing things digitally simply for the sake of doing things digitally, so that when we see orcs and Uruk-hai up close, they're actual people, with all the millions of tics and twitches and slight imperfections that make something that is real palpably real. By now we all know that Mr. Lucas is a self-proclaimed visionary, for whom the soapbox he's chosen to stand on is more important than the stories he's telling, or even the stories he's already told (as far as I'm concerned, every mediocre Star Wars sequel or prequel he makes from now on is only going to retroactively lower my estimation of his original trilogy, and especially so if he further alters Episodes IV, V, and VI for their eventual DVD release, as has been rumored). Filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, however, or the Wachowski brothers - creators of The Matrix- are more sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the digital revolution, and as a result they use the new technologies much more competently and artistically; whereas all the CGI wizardry in the world will not redeem Star Wars Episode III.

2002-12-25T12:43:00.000-05:00

Peace on earth.

Christmas at the family homestead is never dull. After a Christmas Eve dinner of pork roast and baked macaroni and cheese (a Bruno holiday tradition since time out of mind, don't ask me why, though I think the roast pork may be a Slavic thing), my brother Dave, my wife and I settled in for a night of movies on Ye Olde DVD Player. Saw Attack of the Clones for the first time since it came out last May, and I have to say that I'm still mostly unimpressed with this second installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The special effects are interesting, but even then there's an awful lot that George Lucas should have done with models and live human beings, such as the sequences with his Clone Trooper army, so that the end result didn't look like a glorified version of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The funny thing is that the deleted scenes which come on Disc Two were actually interesting. Episode I's deleted scenes gave you an idea of how deeply Mr. Lucas was scraping the barrel in order to put The Phantom Menace together, whereas Ep II's would have gone a long way to fill out the plot and enliven the cardboard characters reading their way through the film. Oh, well. Then we watched Saving Silverman, which I have to admit is way funnier than it should be. Blame Jack Black and Steve Zahn for that. These guys probably could make C-SPAN watchable.

This morning we exchanged gifts. Maria and I got Dave a pair of Phillies and Georgetown ski caps, and three bargain-basement DVDs - The Cannonball Run, Transformers: The Movie (to go with his G.I. Joe: The Movie DVD we got him last year), and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, one of Dave's favorites from 80's daytime HBO reruns and one of the best "B" movies of all time. Dave got us a cool bust of Bacchus that doubles as a wine chiller that he found online, as well as a poster-sized blowup from a "glamour shot" photograph that I had taken as a high school senior. It's a truly hideous picture. I'm not sure where he found it - I think it may have been kicking around in the attic all these years - but I will have to take my revenge next Christmas. Consider yourself warned, Dave. Dad got a small television and a compact stereo system for the kitchen, but Mom took the grand prize this year, a robotic vaccuum cleaner which goes by the name of Roomba. Roomba, which is about the size of a Boston creme pie, was designed by iRobot, an MIT-spinoff company based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and word is the thing actually does work. However, since the battery takes at least 12 hours to charge, and we're due back in Beantown this evening, we'll have to take the family's word for it.

Oh, and just in case you're not done salivating over what the Ghost of Christmas Future will be bringing you in years to come, take a gander at this BBC News article about futurists' predictions for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year in 2050. From nanobot-cooked synthetic turkeys to "mood" clothing that responds to its wearers' emotions, the main thrust of the article is that Christmas fifty years from now should be more or less the same like the one we celebrate today, only with better toys. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be comforting, or not.

2002-12-19T15:30:00.000-05:00

Mmmmm. PlayStation 5. Courtesy of the Onion.

2002-12-17T13:56:00.000-05:00

A belated congratulations to the European Union, which extended membership to ten countries (including Poland, ancestral home to half of my family) last week, in a bid to expand its ranks from fifteen to twenty-five nations and effectively double in size, population, and economic power. Among the invitees was Cyprus. Despite the collapse of talks meant to reunite the island after almost thirty years of Turkish occupation, the Greek Cypriots will be allowed to join the EU in 2004 on their own, in effect achieving the political enosis or unification with Greece that Turkey had so melodramatically feared and sought to prevent with its ill-conceived invasion in 1974. The second irony here is that by torpedoing any possible power-sharing plan in Cyprus out of hand, the "Turkish Cypiots" - many of whom are mainland Turks, imported at the behest of Ankara to maintain the fiction of a functioning state on their third of the island - have also ruined for now their best chance to get a Turkish foot into the door of the European Union, in light of the fact that Turkey did not receive an invitation to join the EU this time around, on account of its questionable human rights record. And I say good riddance. Until Turkey gets its act together, owns up to past misdeeds against the Armenians and ongoing atrocities against the Kurds, and starts behaving as though democracy was a fundamental value and not mere window-dressing to woo EU ministers and assuage Americans' concerns that our best ally in the Middle East is a military dictatorship, it has no place in a European state. Cries of anti-Islamist sentiments being behind the Turkish snub are baseless. Europe already has a sizeable Muslim population, which will continue to grow with or without Turkey's membership. Moreover, Turkey is hardly an "Islamic" nation - in fact, its absolute repression of any form of religious expression among its citizenry is part of the reason why Turkey currently fails to live up to the EU's criteria on human rights. Now I'm no partisan, despite the fact that my wife's family hails in part from Asia Minor, which was Greek since before the Jews had even been promised a Promised Land, up until Turkish nationalism drove them out in 1922 (though Greek nationalism was also to blame, it's true). If Turkey can shape up and learn to respect its people - all of its people - I don't see why the Turks shouldn't be one day invited into the European Union. There have been encouraging signs here and there, but a true sea change has yet to come.

But a sea change is exactly what has happened with the EU's historic decision to expand to almost twice its present size. As one would expect, the American reaction to this news has been muted, and that's if there's any reaction at all. Americans typically react to any European development with disdain, as we're trapped in the mindset that the Europe of 2002 is somehow still the Europe we had to save from itself twice, during World War One and World War Two. To us, Europe is socialized medicine, Germans in black turtlenecks named Dieter, bleeding-heart wusses who instinctively criticize everything the United States government does for the benefit of the rest of the world. Europe is irrelevant, EU or no EU, as far as most of America is concerned. Boy, are we in for a surprise. For the first time in history, Europe has united under a banner of peace, not war. Say what you will about faceless Eurocrats shuffling paper in Brussels - this is no small feat, that Germans settle their disputes with French and English and Dutch and Belgians (and vice versa!) in meetings and negotiations, and not on the field of battle, and who truly knows what the consequences will be in the long-term? Here's to finding out!

2002-12-10T13:45:00.000-05:00

Crazy Tasty! That's the new slogan for SPAM, the celebrated canned meat invented by Hormel Foods back in 1937. Slate has a great article today about the recent advertising campaign Hormel has launched to revive Spam sales, complete with links to two deliciously demented television commericals. My only beef (or should I say pork?) with the Slate piece is that the author has never even tried Spam, a fact which I feel diminishes his appreciation for the now-kitschy staple of the old American pantry. I have fond memories of eating fried Spam sandwiches by firelight, while camping and canoeing my way through the Jersey pine barrens with a friend. The miracle of food in a can is not lost on you when you've been paddling your arms off all day. The author also neglects to mention that while Spam may have become better known as the junk mail we all receive daily on our e-mail accounts here in America, the gelatinous spiced ham food product still has cachet in certain parts of the world. In Hawaii, where Spam-eating started during the dark days of World War II, it is still thought of as a delicacy, and is prepared in myriad imaginative ways such as Spam sushi, grilled Spam with pineapples, even Spam with poi; the same is true in Korea, where Spam with fried rice is considered a classic home-cooked meal. In Guam you can get Spam on your pizza at Pizza Hut! The scary thing is, the more you search for the presence of Spam in cuisine around the world (try the indispenable Chowhounds website if you don't believe me), the more you find it, from Spam and onions in the Czech kitchen to fried eggs and Spam served up in Cuban restaurants for breakfast. All told, Spam-love is still alive and well among peoples outside of America, who don't need any zany commercials to keep their relationship fresh!

2002-12-09T13:57:00.000-05:00

"It belongs in a museum!" Yes, but whose? The BBC News reports that a coalition of 18 of the world's most prominent museums - including the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston - has issued a declaration of noncompliance with countries demanding the repatriation of antiquities removed from sites within their borders. By redefining themselves as "universal museums" and sidestepping the shady details of how their institutions acquired their collections, these museums are hoping that strength in numbers can somehow stem the tide that is returning archaeological artifacts to their countries of origin in ever-increasing numbers. But their arguments are specious at best, and downright insulting to the rest of the world at worst.

"The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones," the statement reads, which even if tue does not vacate the museums' moral obligation now to return what was admittedly ransacked in ages past.

There may be some truth as well when the coalition declares: "The universal admiration for ancient civilisations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artefacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums." But that time has past. Whereas until very recently the museum and the idea of cultural preservation was a Western phenomenon, even the remotest corners of the earth have museums now. To argue that antiquities belonged in an environment conducive to their survival and appreciation was one of the greatest rationales of the colonial powers, when they carted off art and artifacts by the boatload to such institutions as the British Museum and the Louvre. The argument had a certain seductive logic to it, though even during the time of Lord Elgin (whose "Elgin Marbles", stolen from the Parthenon in Athens, remain a bone of contention between the United Kingdom and Greece to this day) it was starting to ring hollow to some.

Today such reasoning is intellectually bankrupt, and smacks of more than a little paternalism on the West's part. There is a museum revolution going on in the world today, from small Native American museums in New England to visitor centers at lowland Mexican jungle ruins, and it's silly to say that big museums should keep their booty because only they can do these items justice. Antiquities don't need to be permanent features of Western museums in order to go on fostering a love for all things ancient. Smaller museums have made a cottage industry of lending out their collections to the larger institutions, as the Egyptians did recently with their wildly-successful tour of mummies; and with the advent of digital archives and the world wide web, admiration is only a click away.

2002-12-09T12:04:00.000-05:00

112 days until Opening Day of the 2003 season for Major League Baseball. Yes, I did count that out on my calendar. So far the only bold move the Red Sox have made in the off-season was the hiring of 28-year-old Theo Epstein as General Manager, the youngest GM in MLB history. Whether Theo will turn out to be the wunderkind promised by the team's owners or little more than cannon fodder for the sports radio blowhards remains to be seen, but one thing you can depend on is that Red Sox Nation won't be cutting him much slack, especially on the heels of such a disappointing season as last year's. Our new GM claims that baseball is "in his blood" - let's hope he has a rawhide-thick skin as well.

A less ballyhooed but more potentially interesting announcement by the folks at Yawkey Way was that they were now seeking the counsel of Bill James, the eminent baseball statistician, whom they've made their senior operations adviser. Baseball is the game of statistics, and yet very few clubs have employed mathematicians to help them divine winning patterns from the accumulated data of batting averages, E.R.A.'s, slugging percentages, and the like. Which is a shame, because the field of statistical analysis has evolved rapidly in recent years, and baseball has always been a pet field for many a math whiz (inlcuding one of my calculus professors at MIT), so the pairing seems natural to me. At any rate, getting a genius to run the numbers for us couldn't possibly hurt. We've had priests and psychics performing exorcisms at Fenway Park and a team of scuba-divers searching a pond in Sudbury for a grand piano reportedly tossed in by Babe Ruth, and God knows who else trying to ward off the Sox's bad mojo on the Mulder front; it's about time we hired ourselves a Scully, as well.

2002-12-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

Lest we forget what this holiday season is really about, the folks at Cthulhu Lives present the Carol of the Old Ones, as sung by the Dagon Tabernacle Choir:

Look to the sky, way up on high
There in the night stars are now right.
Eons have passed: now then at last
Prison walls break, Old Ones awake!
They will return: mankind will learn
New kinds of fear when they are here.
They will reclaim all in their name;
Hopes turn to black when they come back.
Ignorant fools, mankind now rules
Where they ruled then: it's theirs again

Stars brightly burning, boiling and churning
Bode a returning season of doom

Scary scary scary scary solstice
Very very very scary solstice

Up from the sea, from underground
Down from the sky, they're all around
They will return: mankind will learn
New kinds of fear when they are here

Look to the sky, way up on high
There in the night stars are now right.
Eons have passed: now then at last
Prison walls break, Old Ones awake!
Madness will reign, terror and pain
Woes without end where they extend.
Ignorant fools, mankind now rules
Where they ruled then: it's theirs again

Stars brightly burning, boiling and churning
Bode a returning season of doom

Scary scary scary scary solstice
Very very very scary solstice

Up from the sea, from underground
Down from the sky, they're all around.

Fear

(Look to the sky, way up on high
There in the night stars now are right)

They will return.

Now did they mean H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones, or Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Admiral Poindexter, and - last but not least - Henry Kissinger?

Ah, well. Either way, it works!

2002-11-29T13:42:00.000-05:00

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. One of my favorite blogs out there, Ghost in the Machine, links to an excellent article in the Christian Science Monitor that speculates on what the Pilgrims actually ate in the fall of 1621. For starters, forget roast turkey with all the trimmings. What few people realize is that their "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner is the brainchild of a 19-century ladies' magazine editor, and that many of the foods associated with the holiday didn't become regular features of American cookery until long after the days of Myles Standish and company. Although wild turkeys may have been included in the fowl that the Pilgrims were by then regularly hunting, the main entree was very likely venison, courtesy of King Massasoit of the local Wampanoag tribes. Lobster and other shellfish were probably part of that first Thanksgiving table, as according to contemporary accounts lobsters were so plentiful that they'd wash up by the thousands along the Massachusetts coast after a storm, and until modern industrial times gathering mussels and clams in New England was simply a matter of walking down to the water and picking what you needed. Cranberries may have already entered the Pilgrims' diet, but not as the sugary sauce or relish that many now eat alongside our turkey, as sugar was an extremely expensive commodity, and not a regular part of the 17th century Pilgrim pantry (an interesting note: based on what we know about the cooking staples and equipment that the crew of the Mayflower did bring with them, food historians have suggested that the earliest colonial New England cuisine was more Mediterranean than Northern European, with an emphasis on grilled and roasted meat, the use of fresh herbs, and a reliance on imported olive oil until dairy cows and locally-produced milk and butter transformed the diet into something more like your classic "traditional" Northeastern fare). Potatoes weren't yet available, nor were there sweet potatoes, and while a variety of indigenous squashes may have been part of the feast, pumpkin pie was not, although it would not be long before colonial New Englanders would hollow out pumpkins, fill them with apples, pie spices, sugar, and milk, and bake the gourd whole.

For the first time in our five years together, my wife and I did not hit the road this Turkey Day. Since we're expecting our first child, due in April, we thought it was about time to start our very own family tradition, so we stayed home for the holiday and cooked up our own feast. Maria spent the day making gingerbread cookies, while I prepared what I hope will become our standard Bruno-Zervos Thanksgiving meal, all the while completely unaware of the above article, mind you. Here's a menu of what we ate:

Cranberry Salsa
Cranberries, Chipotle Peppers, Onion, Cilantro, and Lime Juice

Mashed Sauteed Butternut Squash
Squash, Onion, Olive Oil, Sherry Wine, Oregano, Red Chile, Salt, and Black Pepper

Baked Stuffed Lobster
Lobsters, Bay Scallops, Shrimp, Ritz Crackers, Butter, Onion, Tarragon, Parsley, Salt, and Black Pepper

I come from a fairly contrary family to begin with, when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner. The holiday meal of choice (not just for T-Day, but Christmas, Easter, and Flag Day as well) in my parents' home is Pork Roast with Baked Macaroni and Cheese, and has been since time out of mind. The roast pork I imagine is a Slavic thing, as pork is the New Year's entree bar none throughout Eastern Europe and my mother is Polish on both sides of her family, though I'll be damned if I know how the mac-and-cheese dish got into the picture. Every once in a while, my mother would try to rebel against our demented household tradition and sneak a mainstream feature like stuffing or cranberry sauce onto our table, but if ever she wanted turkey as part of the holiday meal, she'd have to roast one alongside the pork loin, or else meet with out-and-out mutiny from the Bruno males. Compound this upbringing with my wife's - she being the daughter of Greek immigrants, Thanksgiving never really had any special significance to them, although my mother-in-law was nice enough to cook a turkey for all the Thanksgiving dinners we've shared with them (by the way, turkey with tzatziki is absolutely fantastic!). So let's just say Maria and I were primed to try something new this year.

Dessert was a key lime pie. Completely un-authentic, from a food historian's perspective, but delicious nonetheless. Maybe next year I'll try baking a whole pumpkin...

2002-11-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

There are many reasons why I love to teach ancient Greek, but one of the best by far is the fact that every so often someone stumbles upon a forgotten manuscript or lost papyrus scroll and adds something new to the study of a so-called "dead" language. According to today's New York Times, 112 collected works of the Alexandrian Greek poet Posidippus of Pella, from the 3rd Century BC, have been discovered in the material used to mummify an Egyptian body a century after the poems were written (we're not the first culture to recycle - papyrus was sufficiently expensive that it was used over and over again, first as stationery, then as whatever was needed, like mummy wrapping). Posidippus wrote epigrams, pithy little poems kept intentionally short for inscriptions that gradually became their own established art form, and this recent find, aside from increasing his corpus of known material by a factor of five, sheds light in general on the rise of the epigrammatist in Greek literature. It's so exciting to imagine what else might be waiting to found out there- few people know that more than ninety-five percent of the literature from the ancient Graeco-Roman world was lost, and only known to us as footnotes or marginalia in some other long-dead author's text, making Classics more a field of filling in the blanks than anything else. Sure, we have Homer's works handed down to us intact (miracle of miracles!), but round up the tragedians and you will find that only ten percent of the total works of Euripides, Sophocles, or Aeschylus have survived the intervening centuries. Less than ten percent! Compound that with the knowledge that the "Big Three" of Greek tragedy were only a small fraction of the playwrights practicing their craft during the heydey of Attic drama, then afterwards, when tragedy spread to the entire Greek-speaking world, and you suddenly wonder how even the most learned professor can speak on the subject of this art form with any authority whatsoever. The same problem exists with every genre of Greek literature - we get a lot of hearsay from the ancient lit-crit crowd about what's good and what's not so good, but woefully little in the way of primary source materials, by which we might judge ourselves. Particularly maddening is the thought that there may have been authors just as worthy of our consideration as the ones handed down to us who simply didn't make the Alexandrian critics' "cut", for whatever reason. For instance, until now the surviving epigrams of Posidippus were all of a racy nature, leading Classicists to believe that erotic poetry was his thing. The discovery of this collection, with not one poem about love or sex in the hundred-plus collected works, shatters that assumption into a million pieces, and makes you wonder if the Hellenistic-age editor who gave us nothing but Posidippus' erotica just didn't have a dirty mind. Who knows how other future chance finds might change what we think we know about the ancient literature?

2002-11-26T12:52:00.000-05:00

Just read: A Cook's Tour, by Anthony Bourdain. You may recognize the guy on the cover as the cranky host of the television program by the same name on the Food Network. Capitalizing on the unexpected success of his previous book, Kitchen Confidential, he decided to take a year off from his day job as the executive chef at brasserie Les Halles in New York and bum his way around the planet, in search of the perfect meal. He eats whole roasted lamb in the Moroccan desert, iguana tamales in Mexico, and still-beating cobra heart in Vietnam, and unlike your normal TV chef, who's never met a local dish he doesn't wax poetic about (because that's what the tourist board is paying him to do), Mr. Bourdain is brutally honest about what's good and what's bad along the way. I was surprised to find that his writing style is just as engaging and witty - if not more so - than his on-screen patter and voice-over commentary, and of course even cable television has to leave out all the best parts of a trip like this, such as his page-long rants about politics, corporate culture, and the other Food Network celebrities. If you love food, you'll be salivating the whole way through, but especially so during his stay in Vietnam, where you can close your eyes and stumble into the best meal of your life. Upon finishing the book, I had no choice but to hole myself up in the kitchen and cook up a batch of pho - the beef and noodle soup that is the specialty of Hanoi and considered the unofficial national dish of the Vietnamese people - for the wife and me. Though I'm sure it was a pale imitation of what you can get over there, sipping the spicy, beefy, limey broth made us think of warmer climes and fabulous future culinary escapades.

Just started: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. Mr. King often gets pooh-poohed by the reigning literati, I'm guessing more out of jealousy of his sales than for any bonafide critical reason, because he writes in a clear and unassuming style that most aspiring authors spend years and countless dollars in writing schools to attain. You may quibble with the subject matter (although I don't - I believe Stephen King is one of the few legimitate heirs to a rich American storytelling tradition whose practitioners have included Hawthorne and Poe, as well as many, many other less-known authors such as H.P. Lovecraft), but even if you do, you owe it to yourself to read some of the man's short stories and see if you don't have at least a minor change of heart.

2002-11-20T16:14:00.000-05:00

I'm back, Jersey Exile Nation, and with both guns blazing. At last, it appears that my academic troubles are in the process of resolving themselves once and for all, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of my friend and former advisor at Boston University, Professor Stephen Scully. Steve is a rare bird, indeed, one of those classicists who didn't in the course of being ground through the mill that is the modern American academic-industrial complex forget what the Classics are supposed to be all about, a wellspring of humanistic inspiration for all time. With his help, the administrative obstacles hindering me from walking away from B.U. with both my pride and my diplomas simply vanished, and now instead of pulling out my hair about how to set right what had gone so far astray (hopelessly, I thought), I'm now actually contemplating what to do next. Now many of you out there probably don't browse through college catalogs and try on degree programs in your head the way I do almost every day, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that I'm positively giddy now whenever I think about my scholarly future. Yes, I am a geek. And proud of it.

You may have noticed that my recent posts have been suspiciously devoid of political commentary. Well, it's no accident. Recent events both at home and abroad have dispirited more than enraged me, and I wonder if Americans even want to wrestle with the life-or-death issues which have been thrust upon our collective plate. This month's elections do not provide an encouraging sign here, nor do recent House and Senate votes that overwhelmingly rubber-stamp our alleged President's increasingly unhinged agenda, such as the absolutely irresponsible 90-9 vote last night in the Senate to approve the "Homeland Security Bill", which will strip tens of thousands of unionized federal employees of their hard-won protections and effectively create a bloc of close to a quarter of a million jobs that the Executive Branch can dispense at will to its party faithful. Forget about making our country safer (we already have multiple so-called intelligence agencies, all of them already bloated and incompetent), this bill is a return to the Spoils System of yore - where the ruling party in Washington controlled who worked and who didn't in the federal government - and little more. But who really expected anymore from an administration whose idea of responding to the threat of al-Qaeda is to leave Osama bin Laden and his cronies alive and plotting in the wilds of Pakistan and turn our attention to a recalcitrant tinpot dictator and his pitiable arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction", most of which were at least partially-financed by our own government, back when Saddam was our buddy? Do we honestly need a whole other branch of the federal government from the self-proclaimed champions of "limited government", headed by an individual - Tom Ridge - whose brightest idea so far in his year-long tenure as Director of Homeland Security has been to color-code our fear? Where's the punchline here? Because I could really use a good laugh right about now.

There are other matters I'd love to discuss, local matters of free speech and the dangers of censorship right here in my own workplace, the World's Greatest University, but frankly I'm too worried about my job to do it (although I will link you to the relevant op-ed articles dealing with both incidents in the Boston Globe, here and here. I disgree strongly with the Globe editors on one of them, and agree with them on the other - I'll let you and campus thought police try and figure out which is which). That's what it's come to, ladies and gentlemen. I wonder what color that kind of fear is.

2002-11-20T14:54:00.000-05:00

My supervisor returned today from an extended weekend in Southern California, bringing back with her two boxes of Original Glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts for our gustatory pleasure. If you have never sampled one of these torodial delicacies, then you are a much, much poorer creature for it, and I pity you. The best part - eight seconds in the microwave and a day-old Krispy Kreme tastes like the moment it was born, warm and chewy, dripping with its supersugary glaze, with not even the slightest hint of the aftertaste you get with other chain store doughnuts. My coworkers and I are guiltily eyeing the rapidly-disappearing stockpile of American manna, hoping that it won't be too long before that neon "HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW" sign will be blazing in a zipcode nearer to us, so that it won't come to this, man turning against his fellow man for just one more taste Paradise Here On Earth.

2002-11-20T13:03:00.000-05:00

Best salad dressing ever - Yasou Original Greek Dressing, brought to you by Ulysses Foods in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Unlike most "Greek" dressings, which are a sickening goop of feta cheese, this stuff is the closest I've ever tasted to what Greeks actually put on their salads in the comfort of their own homes. It's heavy on the olive oil, with a touch of vinegar and herbs, as opposed to your standard off-the-shelf salad dressings which are seemingly nothing but vinegar. The Greeks have a faith in the taste of olive oil, and lots of it, that can be a little disconcerting at first to outsiders, but trust me, once you start eating your vegetables this way there's no going back, especially when you have quality olive oil on hand. Oliviers & Co. offers a fantastic collection of olive oils from around the Mediterranean, as well as sea salts, peppers, herbs, and other kitchen essentials for all you gourmets and gourmands. There's nothing better than ripping into a freshly-baked loaf of Italian or French (or, in our neck of the woods here in New England, Portuguese) bread and dipping it into a plate of olive oil imported from the Peloponnese region of Greece, such as O & Co.'s Mantinea and Avia. Heavenly.

2002-11-15T16:37:00.000-05:00

While we're on the subject of intellectual property and that endangered noble beast we call the Public Domain, here's a little bit of ironic serendipity for you: the BBC World News reports that a 700-year-old fresco has been found in a church in Austria that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mickey Mouse, although art historians think that the water-damaged image might actually be that of a weasel (funny, some people feel the same way about Mickey and his creator, the Walt Disney Corporation). Now here's the kicker. The weasel fresco might look so much like Disney's beloved trademark that, strange as it sounds, it might invalidate the company's claim to it - since the likeness obviously existed centuries before Walt put ink to paper- and retroactively throw Mickey Mouse into the Public Domain. This would be just peachy, as far as I'm concerned, as Michael Eisner and the Walt Disney Corporation have been shamelessly courting the U.S. Congress for years, who in 1998 totally re-jiggered existing copyright laws to keep Mickey and the gang privately-owned and licensable likenesses, and probably would have again when the need arose. Many artists and writers have been intellectually shanghaied into supporting this awful piece of legislation, which was titled "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act", confusing the desire of the heirs (not the creators, mind you) of a body of work to profit from said work in perpetuity with the already-uncontested right of a creator to enjoy the fruit of his labor for his lifetime, and even then some. It's all well and good to want the recognition and compensation you as an artist or writer deserve, but it's another thing to deny future generations the ability to use your work as the wellspring of their own creativity. It serves the Rat right.

2002-11-15T12:47:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine just forwarded me this article, I'm assuming from the AP Wire:

A US journalist has reportedly been contacted by lawyers representing a former Rolling Stones member Bill Wyman over use of his name, which happens to be the same as the guitarist.

Journalist Bill Wyman, a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has written an article about receiving the letter, a copy of which is included on the newspaper's website. He wrote that the letter, from Howard Siegel, of New York-based Pryor Cashman Sherman & Flynn, threatened "legal action" over use of his name.

"Mr Siegel magnanimously allowed I could continue to use my own name if I could prove that I had come by it legally, and if I added a disclaimer to everything I wrote in the future, 'clearly indicating that [you are] not the same Bill Wyman who was a member of the Rolling Stones'," he added.

Bill Wyman's former Stones' colleagues are still going strong. The journalist said that having been a pop music writer for more than 20 years, he had worked effectively with Rolling Stones publicists in the past with no problems.

"I remember scarfing up some food next to Keith Richards backstage at a shed in the middle of Wisconsin with no legal repercussions," he said.

The journalist added that the former Stone was actually born William George Perks, and changed his name to Bill Wyman by deed poll in 1964, according to a book about him called Stone Alone.

"Me, I was born Jan 11, 1961. What I need now is a lawyer to ask Mr. Siegel that his client stop using a name I have claim to by several years," he said.

Pryor Cashman Sherman & Flynn were unavailable for comment.

Sheesh. If this is how things are going nowadays, I'd better keep my eyes open for a letter from Major League Baseball. Tom Bruno is the name of a former player who pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1978 and 1979 (before that he'd played for Kansas City and Toronto). I remember how weird it was as a kid to get baseball cards and find my own name in the stack. Little did I know at the time that I was violating the MLB's and Mr. Bruno's intellectual property rights! What a little felon I was! But like Bill Wyman, I would have a possible avenue of legal retaliation, if push came to shove - I was named after my father, also Tom Bruno, and whereas the St. Louis Cardinal Tom Bruno was born in 1953, my father was born in 1949. Maybe he and I should be sending a cease-and-desist to Major League Baseball, as a pre-emptive strike. Those are all the rage these days, so I hear...

p.s.- Whatever you do, don't try looking for a picture of the above-mentioned Tom Bruno using Google's image search. But if you do, in the name of all that is holy, do not look at this picture. That's not me on the far left, looking like a total dingbat. I deny everything.

2002-11-05T17:25:00.000-05:00

Introducing the latest addition to the Bruno family. It's a girl!

2002-11-04T13:11:00.000-05:00

Another daily dose of Greek wisdom-

Προs την Αναγκην ουδ' Αρηs ουκ ανθισταται

"Not even War can stand in the way of Necessity."

Courtesy of Sophokles. The quotation below from October 31st is the Socratic maxim, "Know thyself," although fans of The Matrix may remember it better as its Latin equivalent, "Temet Noste". I guess the Wachowski Brothers figured that the Roman alphabet would be a little easier on the eyes!

Hope everyone got a fistful of candy corn this Halloween. I had to teach on Thursday, but one of my students did bring in a whole lot of Russian chocolate. Considering I didn't even have to go door to door in costume for it, I guess I should consider myself lucky, since the fall here in New England has all but disappeared, and the past week has been positively winter-like, with nary a hint of Indian Summer to be found. I've never seen the leaves on the trees change color and then drop so quickly afterwards! Those brave children who did go trick-or-treating in our neighborhood were rewarded well this year, as our downstairs neighbors (who live for Halloween) transformed our triple-decker into a house of horror fit for a ghoul, ghost, or goblin, complete with a blacklit stairwell, spooky noises, and four bloated corpses hanging from the second-story porch. The folks downstairs always put on a good show, and last Thursday night was no exception, but the problem with our little Halloween theme park is that it tends to go up around Columbus Day and come down just in time for Thanksgiving. I already have problems with people who for some reason can't seem to let go of Christmas, putting their decorations out at the end of November and steadfastly refusing to remove one blinking light from their display until Valentine's Day, but now all of a sudden Halloween is beginning to creep backwards and forwards through the American calendar into another de facto "holiday season". I'm totally fine with the idea of corpses hanging off our porch for a week or two. Beyond that, however, and I start to worry. At least the downstairs neighbors aren't the sort of people whose idea of Halloween decorations is orange Christmas lights. I'll take stumbling up a blacklit stairwell festooned with glow-in-the-dark nasties, extra-large x-ray blowups, and a talking raven on the bannister that scares the living shit out of me every morning for another whole forty days over a house draped with Interchangeable Holiday Lighting (tm). Now that's a truly frightening thought!

2002-10-31T16:09:00.000-05:00

Γνωθι σεαυτον.

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

2002-10-31T16:06:00.000-05:00

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.

2002-10-31T13:36:00.000-05:00

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!

2002-10-24T16:48:00.000-04:00

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!

2002-10-23T12:19:00.000-04:00

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!

2002-10-21T17:12:00.000-04:00

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...

2002-10-21T16:57:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-10-16T15:48:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-10-16T14:27:00.000-04:00

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?

2002-10-11T11:00:00.000-04:00

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?

2002-10-10T14:44:00.000-04:00

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!

2002-10-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-10-02T16:23:00.000-04:00

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!

2002-10-01T13:07:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-10-01T12:24:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-09-30T17:12:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-09-26T16:35:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-09-26T13:21:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-09-26T00:42:00.000-04:00

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...

2002-09-25T13:44:00.000-04:00

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?

2002-09-25T12:23:00.000-04:00

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?

2002-09-25T10:50:00.000-04:00

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!

2002-09-24T16:29:00.000-04:00

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...

2002-09-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

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...

2002-09-20T13:45:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-09-20T12:35:00.000-04:00

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?

2002-09-19T16:11:00.000-04:00

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.

2002-09-19T15:22:00.000-04:00

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!

2002-09-18T12:37:00.000-04:00

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!