Hyperbole

The Switch!

2004-01-22T14:37:00.000+04:00

I have made the switch. I'm still committed to learning Dreamweaver, but have accepted my short term limitations. However, I want more features than Blogger offers--after six or seven months, they STILL haven't reinstated their premium service, so fuck 'em.

Change your bookmarks, Hyperbole fans:

www.xanga.com/hyperboleonline

Kristof

2004-01-21T19:58:00.000+04:00

Read Nicholas Kristof's column from Saturday and from today in the New York Times, regarding prostitution and sex slavery in Cambodia, and his decision to buy the freedom of two prositutes. Must-read journalism.

2004-01-21T14:29:00.000+04:00

Just to follow up a little bit, I highly recommend that anyone interested check out this link:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/elec04.prez.main/index.html

Partway down the page you can click in the "Related" box under "Audio Slide Show: Candidates React" to see a brief clip of Howard Dean's speech after the Iowa results were announced. (It follows a couple of other short clips).

It seems very clear that Howard Dean is batshit-insane. Obviously, one can't fairly judge a candidate by a speech they give, but my ideal candidate to take on Bush isn't prone to screaming "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" on national television.

Iowa!

2004-01-20T13:56:00.000+04:00

John Kerry won.

John Edwards came in second.

John Kerry won.

John Edwards came in second.

Holy shit.

Dean got less than half of Kerry's support, and Gephardt failed, utterly and completely. Wow.

The polls in the last few days were suggesting that Kerry and Edwards were starting to surge. But I have to confess I didn't believe them. But I'm happy to see it. I'm thrilled, I'll say.

Here are the questions at hand--though this is more of a curious academic exercise between now and New Hampshire's primary, which is in one week.

Q. Is Dean done?
A. No....maybe. But this is a killer. He put a lot of resources into Iowa, and just a few short weeks ago the media was calling the race to the nomination. I certainly fell into that trap. But I'm not convinced now that he wasn't riding momentum. He is still ahead in New Hampshire, but he's facing an extremely tight race, challenged seriously by both Clark and Kerry. Any could win. If Dean fails to win New Hampshire, he is absolutely done for. And he may be done if he doesn't win by a lot. Does anyone seriously think that once attention turns to South Carolina, that someone with no Southern or military cache is going to do the job down there? Nope. If things last for a very long time, his money advantage should help. But he's in trouble.

Q. Can Kerry keep it up?
A. I think so. I like Kerry a bunch, and have from the get-go. I think his military background gives him a lot of immunity from that Northeast liberal thing, despite the fact that he IS a Northeast liberal--his voting record is generally excellent. He's more liberal than Dean--something that few people seem to understand. I worry about his money, but he could get it together fast, I suspect. He's got a lot of substance, the experience, the military background.

Q. Edwards? WTF?
A. I do not know. I read somewhere that this gives Edwards a free pass through the drubbing he will receive in New Hampshire. Probably. He's from North Carolina, so he should have a very, very good chance in South Carolina, though he's been polling behind both Clark and Dean there. But the polls can change fast, as Iowa has shown. Edwards is Clintonian, IMO--quite centrist, smart, likeable. Whether he has the substance to beat Bush--which is hilarious given how utterly substanceless our President is--is a different question. But I'd rather see him than Dean. More on this below.

Q. Wheat from the chaff? Can we separate it?
A. God, please. Gephardt, thanks. Bye. Kucinich? GET OUT. Sharpton? SHUT UP AND GET OUT. Lieberman? GET OUT AND GO AWAY. Gephardt is gone, and I predict Lieberman will get out after New Hampshire. Sharpton and Kucinich are likely to hang around, annoying everyone, for months. But the marginalization of the peripheral candidates has really gotten going in earnest.

Q. Who does Hyperbole support?
A. In this order, here's who I'd like:

Clark, Kerry, Edwards, Dean.

Clark will punish Bush. PUNISH him. This crap about Clark waffling on the war is going to be irrelevant soon, and not because it's false, but because in a general election, the Bushies simply have to hope no one cares about Iraq. Because that situation will be a mess, still, with troops still dying. Clark is everything Bush wishes he could be.

Kerry has substance, military experience. I love his politics, and I respect him greatly.

Edwards is likeable, and if he gets far enough to actually get the nomination, will be a unifying figure.

Dean. Ah, Howard. Here's the thing: I like Dean. I have liked him since I saw him on CNN, talking about Iraq and health care and whatever else, and it's clear that he is a straight talker, smart, determined.

But--and I hate to say this--I don't think he can win. Not because he's "angry" or "negative" or "liberal" or whatever other crap there is. It's because the media doesn't like him. It's unfair and stupid that media spin should determine electability. But it's a fact. And we saw what happened to Gore--a far superior candidate was destroyed by a nasty, personal, lying media machine. They will do it again, and Dean is 2004's media punching bag. Nominating the punching bag will doom us.

I know it is not very idealistic to say that we can't elect a good man because the media has decided it is so. But I am willing to abandon most of my idealism to see Bush out. The practical realities of the Bush presidency are so horrific that the end must come. We have sunk far when we advocate the dismissal of a candidate because of the spin. But lamenting the fact that we've sunk that far will not change the fact that we have, indeed, sunk.

Inertia

2004-01-18T15:42:00.000+04:00

Inertia is my enemy.

There's no question about it. I can't get the things done that I want to get done, because various things sap my will to overcome inertia.

For example:

I would like to have a new website. I have overcome the inertia which was preventing me from actually purchasing the domain name. I have now done that. My very good friend Shasta did me an incredible favor by sending me some outstanding software to design my site. I overcame inertia enough to put it on the computer.

And yet I am now stymied. I have Dreamweaver, but I don't understand how to use it. I get halfway through the tutorial and my will to work saps away. I have a half-finished design scrawled down on some paper. I have attempted to sort out what pictures I want on the site. I fail. And so I soldier on, using this workable but uninspired blogger page.

I want to write more. Yet I do not.

I want to read the Bible. I have gotten through Genesis. That's the first book. I'm thinking about reading Harry Potter again.

I need to get to work on dog obedience. Soon.

I may soon need to begin learning to speak Arabic. How?

I manage to do five things:

1--Care for children
2--Care for dog
3--Play Scrabble and study some
4--Triathlon training
5--Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I am particularly good at #3 and #5.

Why? Why is inertia so powerful?

I think Apollo has tripled the power of inertia around here, though that's just a rough estimate.

I never thought of myself as lazy. Not exactly a working powerhouse, but not lazy. Yet I feel lazy now. Very lazy.

I've written too much. I need to lie down.

2004-01-16T13:29:00.000+04:00

There is no form of life lower than the goddamned housefly.*

*Tom Delay exception applies.

Albums!

2004-01-14T17:05:00.000+04:00

I have had no lists in a while. And it's time, people. It's PAST time.

I'm revisiting a list that I did a while back, when we were still situated at Salon Blogs. It's a list of my Favorite Ten Albums. Why the revisit? Because things have changed. I've changed, the music has changed. Two albums I've gotten in the last 6 months have moved solidly, and unquestionably, onto the list. Things change.

To be clear, this is not a list of the ten "Greatest" albums of all time. I'm not considering importance/influence/impact. Pure subjectivity here. My list isn't your list. But your list sucks compared to mine.

Let's roll. These are not in any particular order. And I chose not to duplicate albums by artists--no more than one per artist.

My Ten Favorite Albums
January, 2004

1. A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay. Been whacko about Coldplay since I first heard the single "Yellow", which was on my All-Time Top Twenty Singles list, but has since been replaced by "Clocks". This album is better than the first, Parachutes, by some margin. And that's saying something. One of the new additions.

2. Kill the Moonlight by Spoon. The other brand new addition. People, if you don't know this album, and it' s likely you don't, then you are REALLY missing out. Even if the whole album sucked but it still had the single "Something to Look Forward To" then it would STILL be a great album. Run, don't walk.

3. Grace by Jeff Buckley. Truly a tragic death. What a voice! One of the most influential, and best, albums of the past 15 years.

4. Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen. I think I'd previously included "Nebraska" on this list, and while that's still a mind-boggling piece of work, "Born in the USA" is really more even. I chafe at this a little bit, for two reasons--it's the Boss' biggest commercial success, which makes me feel like a chump. And, like many, I used to think that the title track was a big patriotic anthem, which is like a Toby Keith turnoff. But it's not at all, and is one of the highlights to a classic album.

5. OK Computer by Radiohead. My opinion about the best Radiohead album can fluctuate quickly. I adore them. I think OK Computer is the best, probably, maybe. I listen to it the most.

6. Paul's Boutique by The Beastie Boys. Flip a coin between this and Check Your Head. Today, it's Paul's Boutique. Who can beat lyrics like

Got busy in Frisco/Fooled Around in Fresno/Got over on your girlie 'cause you know she never says no

7. Revolver by The Beatles. Or Rubber Soul, maybe. Or maybe Abbey Road. Or the White Album.

8. Mermaid Avenue, Volume One by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Prior to this, I pretty much thought Billy Bragg was a completely annoying tool. But the two compilations with Wilco put an end to that fast. Not that I'll be buying any Billy Bragg solo albums.

9. Under the Table and Dreaming by The Dave Matthews Band. I liked Crash, too, but after that I just was no longer into Dave Matthews. But Under the Table has like ten songs on it that I can put on repeat.

10. London Calling by The Clash. If I need to explain this to you, you are not my friend.

No women on the list, again. Hmmmm......Norah Jones and Sheryl Crow are great with me. But I guess not elite. I guess I hate women.

Dean wins!

2004-01-14T16:39:00.000+04:00

Howard Dean won the literally and figuratively irrelevant DC primary yesterday. Al Sharpton came in second, Carol Moseley-Braun third, and Kucinich fourth. You won't see the names "Sharpton," "Moseley-Braun", and "Kucinich" anywhere near the words "second,", "third," or "fourth" again. Watch for "last" or "out of the running".

What this highlights, again, is the absolute powerlessness of the citizens of Washington, DC on national affairs. I've written about this before, but what the hell.

The voting status of the districts citizenry is an abomination. It is indefensible, completely and utterly. There is literally no argument that can be made to defend a situation in which nearly 600,000 people--more than the population of Wyoming, at least--are disenfranchised. They pay federal taxes, they are subjected to Selective Service as well as National Guard requirements. But they have no voting representation in the US Congress. No argument can be made to justify that. I've never even heard one. It's a travesty of democracy.

Comments, redux

2004-01-14T16:22:00.000+04:00

Switched comment servers, which unfortunately means all the old comments are defunct, but I'm hoping to switch sites soon anyway, like in the next six years.

Comments

2004-01-13T17:11:00.000+04:00

Blogspeak, who handles my comments, is down for some reason--account suspended, according to the website. I'll try and resolve it soon.

Updates and politics

2004-01-13T12:32:00.000+04:00

I apologize for the lack of writing lately, but things are really only now beginning to settle enough to be able to spend any time on it. I hope to write something more substantial tomorrow. Apollo is doing well; it's hard to remember sometimes that he's really a baby. Just 3 months old. But he's so freaking big--about 40 pounds--that I am surprised when he acts like a puppy. But things are improving on the maintenance front.

I had intended to take one more day, but I just have to say something about various political items. Don't look for concrete analysis here.

1. Mission to Mars. I've come to believe that, for now, manned space travel is a tremendous waste of money and time. Not that I'm not fascinated by it--space is cool. In light of what's going on with our deficit and everything else, I think Bush's proposal on this is, frankly, insulting.

2. Did anyone read this piece by Maureen Dowd in the New York times last Sunday? I think Dowd is a lousy writer at her best, and a snippety bitch at her worst. I was so angry about this column that I wrote a letter to the editor. The publicity--front page of the New York Times, for god's sake--about Wesley Clark's clothes sends me into an undying rage. Can we talk about something else, PLEASE?

3. The Supreme Court's decision to not hear a case challenging government secrecy on terror suspects is a giant step backward on civil rights. Anyone guess that one was a 5-4?

Big sigh.

Apollo

2004-01-08T14:09:00.000+04:00

Well, Apollo is here. He arrived this morning, safely and soundly.

He's really, really, really cute. And he's really, really, really big. At 12 weeks, he's comparable to what I've seen in Labs at maybe seven or eight months. And his paws are so big that they barely fit in the house--we have to grease him up. His coloring is just fantastic--sort of a dark grey-silver.

His personality seems excellent. He's very calm, interested but still a little reserved, wagging his tail. Obviously, a move away from his human and dog family, changing climates dramatically, flying on an airplane for eight hours are all traumatic. But he seems to be taking it in stride.

He's sleeping now, as I expect him to do a lot for a couple of days, and beyond.

New Website coming

2004-01-07T13:50:00.000+04:00

I don't know when I'm going to get my shit together to finish it, but I've bought the domain name www.hyperboleonline.com, and I'll be moving there sometime. I don't know when. I like this site fine, but I want something that will allow me to post pictures and graphics. Inertia, holidays, children, and dogs are the only things holding me back.

Apollo's Arrival

2004-01-07T13:49:00.000+04:00

We're at T-minus one day on Apollo's arrival. He boards a cargo plane tonight, and flies direct from Manchester, England to Dubai. We'll pick him up tomorrow morning when his flight arrives at 7 A.M.

It's amazing how many similarities there are between getting a dog and having a child. Obviously, there some pretty substantial differences as well, and those differences are self-evident. But there's still the feeling of adding a member to the family; the preparations of the house, the buying of various necessary items. Like having a child, the feelings are largely positive; it's exciting and emotional and fun.

There are negatives, too. There's the awareness that adding a dog--a Great Dane, no less--will result in even less freedom than parents of a 3 and 1 year old have anyway, and that's not too damned much. There's the financial hit--buying a Great Dane from a good breeder costs A LOT OF MONEY. Not to mention food and supplies. There's the concern that the dog will upset the children. There's the fear that the dog will eat the children. There's the concern that a forty-pound puppy will eat every toy, book, rug, and piece of furniture in the house. Most of all, there's just the vague sense that it's taking on too much. Perhaps way too much.

Our rationalization has been that life is crazy and demanding already, so it can't be that much crazier and demanding. That's absolute foolishness, of course, but it's been working. More or less. And we really do adore dogs. I've always wanted a really BIG dog, and the Dane counts--Apollo will grow up to weigh between 150 and 180 pounds and stand over three feet at the shoulder. I love the way they look, and I love what I read about their personalities. I have little doubt that Apollo is going to enrich our lives in many ways.

Unless he is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and we spiral into bankruptcy, depression, insanity, and ultimately death.

I'm not counting on that. I'm nervously excited. New dog!

I'll put up some pictures once I get the new website up, ASAP.

Move On

2004-01-06T15:47:00.000+04:00

You may have heard about MoveOn.org's anti-Bush Ad contest. The site is here, and it's worth checking out, believe me. Download some (or all) of the commercials to take a gander. The second ad--"In My Country"--is just fantastic, but all are great. I do have to say that emphasizing the war exclusively would be a mistake, but I hope Move On pays for all of these to be aired.

I also recommend you look at this site as well, but turn the sound down if you're at work. Thanks to Dave S. This one is awesome.

Scrabble Journal 13

2004-01-06T15:11:00.000+04:00

I haven't written much about anything lately, and its been at least a few weeks since my last Scrabble Journal. We missed a week at the Scrabble Club around New Year's, and I've just not had it together to write the other weeks, between holidays and family and all that jazz. Things are starting to settle down a bit, though.

A brief update before discussing last night and where things are at.

Two weeks ago I finally won the weekly tournament. We always have a small tournament--just the five or six of us. Minimal financial contribution of about five bucks. No big deal. Just adds a marginally competitive element to the whole thing. Anyway, I'd only come in second until two weeks ago, and then I finally won the whole thing by running through it undefeated. I didn't feel like it was my best night; I played pretty well, obviously, but I was also lucky. In four games I drew all eight possible blanks. So that's a big help. But still, it was good.

Then we had a week off, and I've done virtually no online play or any real studying for a couple of weeks--too busy. And I figure that I know have around 3 months before the UAE qualifier for the Gulf Open; if I can be disciplined about it, I should be able to improve considerably and give myself a real chance. But I do need to work. I've got to get the rest of the threes nailed down, learn some more bingo stems, and make a dent in the fours.

But I can't deny that I'm becoming more optimistic. I'm a more confident player, I'm retaining words, and I'm seeing the board better than I ever have. It's hardly certain--far, far from it--that I can finish in the top seven in the UAE. However--and this is a MASSIVE shift from my initial thoughts on this goal--I no longer believe anyone would consider it an upset if I made it. (Well, properly speaking, no one active in the Dubai Scrabble Club would consider it an upset--the guys who were at the tournament we had in October would be able to prevent themselves from laughing at my previous statement. Oh, but they'll pay. They'll pay! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

There's a ways to go. But I'm becoming a very good player.

Last night I went 2-2, but I played better than that: the two games I lost against Selwyn and Aspi were marred by the same problem--in both games I drew three of the four S's all at once. Against Aspi, I then drew the fourth S, so I at one point I had a rack of EIOSSSS. One S is the best thing you can get after the blank. Two S's is not ideal, but it's manageable. Three is flat-out crap. And four is just the worst. Unlike other letters, it's hard to just exchange tiles, because the S is so valuable that you hate to give it to your opponent, or give them the chance to have it rather than you. But dumping those S's on low-scoring words is both literally and--for me--psychologically difficult, because I just KNOW the S should do more. So it's a lingering, multiple-turn problem as opposed to just a one-turn issue.

So I was a bit paralyzed, which is partially my fault, but also just bad luck. I need to draw well to beat Selwyn, but I really ought to beat Aspi most of the time; despite my bad luck with the S's, it was still a very close game. He drew both blanks and the QZXJ, too. But c'est la vie.

I did, however, beat Arvind fairly handily twice. And that was good, because he's good. I saw things well.

I can't overstate the difference I feel in terms of my confidence in these games. I expect to win against everyone but Selwyn. That doesn't mean I will, or even that I will win a majority of the games. But the fact that I go into the games thinking I can and will win means I play better.

This week:

Memorizing more threes
Get ten five-letter words that have JQXZ in them.
Practice a lot

Reeve's Birthday

2004-01-04T11:31:00.000+04:00

Reeve is one year old today. My god, time flies.

A couple of new pictures of Reeve here and Mercedes here.

Happy Birthday Sweet Reeve
Happy Birthday Sweet Reeve
Happy Birthday Reevie T
Happy Birthday to you

Return Of The King

2003-12-26T17:45:00.001+04:00

The Return of the King opened here in Dubai on Tuesday for a couple of late showings; after some consideration, we opted to attend the first show on Wednesday morning, despite a barrage of cooking to be done for our Christmas dinner of 15. It was quite strange to go to a movie that began at 10:30 AM; we left the house around 9:30. Needlessly, as it turned out, because the ticket booth didn't open until 10:00, and there were plenty of empty seats in the theater. I guess a Wednesday morning show can't be expected to sell out both of the theaters they had ready.

Everyone in the world despises watching commercials at movies, unless they are commercials about movies. I've never seen anything like this one, though--there were 15 solid minutes of commercials before the previews. Cars, watches, cell phones, malls, amusement parks, jewelry, gold--these are the products I am not interested in hearing about before watching the Movie Event Of The Millenium. Even so, my spirits remained very high, even through ten more minutes of previews for what look to be terrible, terrible movies, including some new fecal matter starring The Rock and Sean William Scott.

And I was not to be disappointed. There are several elements of the film worth discussing, but in general I'll simply say that I found it to be a stunningly great film. And my expectations were VERY high. I was entirely blown away. Nothing I can say can recommend it highly enough.

An interesting phenomenon, looking at the film in retrospect, was that I found myself definitively going through the entire trilogy, as opposed to just the movie on its own. Return of the King, on its own, is one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. That said, I'm not sure it's better than Fellowship of the Ring. But it's hard to separate the film itself--Fellowship, that is--from the incredible sense of awe at the movie as it developed. By Return of the King, I knew what to expect, so while it was awesome, it wasn't surprising.

I need to see it again to firm up my thinking. But here are some thoughts on ROTK--I've you've not seen it, then there will be some spoiler talk below. But I doubt anyone's experience will be affected much either way.

The Coolest Individual Scenes:

--Shelob. My god. I knew the big spider was coming, of course. I was ready for it in The Two Towers, since that's where it appears in the books. It was worth the wait. It was terrifying, awe-inspiring, just incredible. Someone made a comment earlier that Shelob is the best movie spider ever. Whatever, man. Shelob is--seriously--the greatest movie monster in the history of film.

--Gandalf rides out to meet the Nazgul. When Faramir and the others rode back from Osgiliath, they were harassed by the Nazgul on their reptilian steeds. Gandalf riding forth on Shadowfax sent chills up my spine.

--The first sight of Minas Tirith.

--The army of the dead sweeping across the battlefield at Minas Tirith.

--The charge of the Rohirrim.

--The start of the battle at Minas Tirith, when the orcs catapault the heads of the men of Gondor that they had killed. Holy shit! If I was a soldier of Gondor, I'd pretty much have to ask for the brown pants immediately.

--The moment when the trolls come through the door at Minas Tirith. Gandalf is entreating the men of Gondor to fight on "no matter what comes through that door!" And then the door bursts, and the GARGANTUAN cave trolls come through. Incredible.

--The destruction of the ring. That entire scene--in book and film--is just remarkably intense. It's such a shock when Frodo announces he's keeping the ring, and a brilliant depiction of Gollum's end.

Some thoughts on the Arwen plotline:

For non-Tolkienites, Arwen Evenstar is really a peripheral character in the books. She's described in Fellowship as stupendously gorgeous, and then she's not in the Towers at all, and then she shows up at the very end of ROTK as Aragorn's escort. In the movies, Peter Jackson massively expanded the role. The flight to Rivendell in the first film, for instance, was ridden by the elf-lord Glorfindel in the books, not Arwen. And the romance doesn't receive any attention to speak of. I approved of the decision in Fellowship. In the end, though, Arwen's character contributed virtually nothing to the trilogy. Did anyone care that she was dying? Nope. In the end, there were only two real purposes: she made the "Will Aragorn pick Eowyn or Arwen?" question more interesting. And she told her father to remake the blade that was broken. In the books, of course, they just make the damned thing before the Fellowship even heads out. But in the books, Aragorn is a less interesting character because he's less conflicted about his birthright.

Anyway, Arwen was OK, but it's annoying that Liv Tyler is featured so prominently in the print ads and on the cover of the DVDs.

The Down Moment:

I was not at all into the scene after Frodo wakes up to find Gandalf and everyone around him. Too silly and awkward. The only moment in the film that was annoying.

The Denouement:

Much was made in reviews about the length of the movie and, in particular, the denouement after the destruction of the ring. I find these to be silly complaints. It was long, sure, but it would have been terribly difficult to impossible to cut anything out beyond what Jackson already cut. I, for one, would have sat through three more hours, but that's me. As for the denouement, I felt that he length was exactly right. It's much longer in the books, after all; the entire Scouring of the Shire is slashed from the movie. There were many plotlines to tie up, and it was very important that the film highlight the real ambiguity of the quest from Frodo's perspective; this was done extremely well. After all, it's not all giggles and happiness--Frodo simply can't go back to his old life in Hobbiton.

Furthermore, in the context of a ten hour film, which is really what the three movies comprise, a half-hour ending is about right.

The Acting:

Sean Astin, playing Sam, stole the show. Outstanding, heartfelt performance, and in a very difficult role--after all, the last half of the trilogy is really more about Sam than anyone else.

Andy Serkis--Gollum's voice and physicality--again just extraordinary. I assume he played Smeagol in the fantastic introduction to ROTK? I could look that up, I suppose. Either way, Gollum was GREAT.

Dominic Monaghan--Pippin--was really very good. Pippin, like in the books, was damned annoying in Fellowship. But he was far, far better by the end. And great work by Monaghan to portray Pippin's silliness in a decidedly unsilly situation.

Viggo Mortensen. Oh, Viggo. I might go gay for Viggo.

And, of course, Ian McKellan. perfect.

The Books:

I recently started reading Fellowship again, and will certainly reread them all after having finished the films. I must say that I think the movies are actually better than the books, as they are less bloated and have more human feeling. And there are fewer songs. But I'll read them all and see what I think of that.

I could go on. And on. And on. This won't be my last writing on this.

See the movie. See them all. The greatest film achievement--taken as a body of work--in my memory.

Birthday Tribute--Brent Siemers

2003-12-26T17:45:00.000+04:00

I started doing these Birthday tributes a while back, and have since missed a bunch of friends' birthdays, most recently Shasta Turner. I'll make it up next year.

This isn't as long as Brent deserves, but time is short and I had to write about Return of the King.

Brent Siemers turned 31 on December 24. We've known each other since college. My last year of college--I took five years due to student teaching requirements--Brent was the centerpiece of my entertainment. Some of my favorite college memories include Brent (and whomever he could gather up) arriving at the local high school at the end of my day of student teaching with a car full of beer and croquet mallets. I'd got straight from being a responsible teacher of today's youth to being a goofy 23 year old drinking beer and playing croquet in the park at 3:30 on a Tuesday. It was awesome. And it personifies how I think about Brent.

There are many facets to our relationship, I think. I don't mean to imply that Brent is a shallow guy that I only have mindless fun with. Not at all. Brent is one of my favorite people for a million reasons, and our friendship has progressed past college and into real adulthood.

But fundamentally, the key thing is probably that there is virtually no one on earth I more consistently have fun with than Brent. Stupid fun, more sober fun, simple fun, whatever. We once attempted to play Trivia Pursuit, one on one, first player to win fifty games wins the bet. The stakes were only a six pack of beer, but we took it seriously. I think we played around sixty games or so before Brent had to concede defeat, but it was touch and go for a while. And awesome. We've also really put away more than our fair share of alcohol. Well, properly speaking, I put away my fair share, and Brent put away the shares of six or seven people and some horses. We've stayed up all night making mixed tapes. We've played a lot of basketball. And I once contributed some money to a fund to encourage Brent to run entirely around the block naked, which was one of the funnier things I've ever seen. There had been some drinking.

I have to put in one more word about Brent's ability to imbibe, which is stunning. I am sure he's lost most of his conditioning over the last ten years. But in his prime, I saw Brent drink a can of beer in less than five seconds--not uncommon. I saw him drink three beers in thirty seconds. I saw him drink a bottle of champagne in thirty seconds--for my money the most stunning feat of alcoholic consumption in history. I saw him sit under a keg, nozzle running in his mouth, for over two and a half minutes. My hero.

Brent is a responsible, extremely bright, politically astute, kind, and thoughtful friend. And a hell of a drinker.

Happy Birthday, my friend.

2003-12-22T14:08:00.000+04:00

Hyperbole will be sporadically updated this week--family here and Christmas planning swamping other things. As a matter of fact, that sporadic production is likely to run until just after New Year's, as there will be more family coming and a trip to Oman.

2003-12-18T19:50:00.000+04:00

Headline in the English language Dubai paper Khaleej Times today:

FRENCH LAWYER READY TO DEFEND SADDAM

Is that not something right out of The Onion?

ROTK again

2003-12-17T14:26:00.000+04:00

So today is a big, big day in history. Return of the King opens. I am one of the many millions that have been looking forward to this for two years. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was the singular movie experience of my life. As a mid-level Tolkien geek, it has been extraordinary seeing the brilliant story come to the screen in such a loving and accurate way.

I've confirmed that it opens in Dubai in one week, so I'll see it--insha'allah--on Christmas Eve.

I am certain that I've never seen more effusive praise for a film in movie reviews. There are 92 presently posted on Rotten Tomatoes, and 90 are overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"No hyperbole or apologies: The Return of the King is one of the best films I have ever seen, and the trilogy it rounds out is the most significant filmmaking accomplishment I've witnessed."

"The final chapter completes The Lord of the Rings series in thrilling style -- and restores faith in the idea that popular entertainment can soar to majestic heights."

"Looking at the sum of its parts, The Lord of the Rings is probably the best trilogy ever made."

"[M]ay well be the transcendent cinematic experience of our time..."

"A staggering work."

A number--a large number--of the reviews are unabashed in saying that LOTR is the finest trilogy ever made. This is an interesting question. There are some who will claim that Star Wars--the first three--were more important or better, but this is laughable, pathetic folly. The trash that was Return of the Jedi end whatever claims George Lucas could make, and the first two movies were far outstripped by Fellowship and The Two Towers.

The only serious competitor has to be The Godfather. The first two films were among the finest ever made, period. The third was, in my opinion, still quite good, but obviously not in the same league as I and II. I'll withhold my own judgement for now, and write more after I've seen ROTK.

There are two people who gave ROTK bad reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Look. There is no accounting for taste. No doubt about it. And movie reviewers cannot be expected to agree on everything, nor should they. But when 98% of your peers love a film--and not in the sort of way that people give positive reviews to an above-average romantic comedy or something. They gush about it, they say it's grand larceny if it doesn't win Best Picture, they push hyperbole to the limit, they express sadness that it ends despite being 3 1/2 hours long, and they make statements about its historical greatness. When that happens, and you don't agree, you are wrong. And you are a bad reviewer. I'm not just saying that because I adore Lord of the Rings--to put it mildly. I would say the same about any great film. If you're on the opposite side of the universe as everyone else, you have no business professionally reviewing films.

I'm so excited to watch ROTK next week that I can't stand it. All of you in the US seeing it today, make sure and tell me what you think. But I think I know already.

ROTK

2003-12-16T20:51:00.000+04:00

I was going to write about politics or some such crap, but I can't. Because Return of the King opens tomorrow. It opens, unfortunately, in another week or two in Dubai, but that's better than seeing The Two Towers six months after it opened.

So I'm too excited to write about anything else, but it's inappropriate to write more about ROTK before I read all the reviews tomorrow. I've read almost all of them presently posted on www.rottentomatoes.com, where it presently has a 100% approval rating, with the average reviewer--the average reviewer--giving it a 9.5 out of 10.

Tomorrow, more.

Saddam

2003-12-15T16:08:00.000+04:00

The capture of Saddam Hussein is just fantastic, fantastic news. One of the most despicable and destructive dictators in history, the Iraqi people have real reason to rejoice. Seeing him poked and prodded like a horse undergoing a humiliating medical exam on camera was the ultimate schadenfreude.

I doubt this changes the calculations in Iraq too substantially--the most important change will simply be that Iraqis can now be confident that Saddam ain't coming back. But the biggest issue--continued violence--is almost certainly unrelated to Saddam. My only speck of a worry is that this may accelerate the likelihood of a premature pullout by the Bush Administration, who can justifiably call this a major victory. But it's not THE victory. I hope it's not touted as such.

The most interesting articles I've read on this have centered on the reaction in the Arab world. While some Arabs have seemingly rejoiced that Saddam is captured, apparently many have felt--in the words of the New York Times headline--"embarrassment." Saddam was a figure reviled for his mistreatment of his own people, but also celebrated as someone who stood up to the west. Here are two telling paragraphs:

"It is a shock to many," said the academic, Mustapha Hamarneh, who is the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. "They wanted him to at least die fighting, not be caught lying down in some hole like a rat. The image they built of him over the past 35 years was that he was a knight who would not die lying down."

"It is a shameful day in the history of the Arab nation when a prominent Arab president is caught by foreign occupiers and not the Iraqi people," said Abu Khaled, a Damascus taxi driver who gave only his nickname. "Saddam made a lot of deadly mistakes while in power. He attacked Iran and occupied Kuwait, and of course I don't support him, but let's not forget he was the first to strike Israel with dozens of missiles that shocked our enemies."

And Abu Khaled's opinion, seemingly, was common across the Middle East.

Fascinating. I think there are three important observations to be made about this.

First, there are cultural gaps between the West and the Arab world that are wider than the Pacific Ocean. I simply cannot understand--can't even process--how anyone could feel embarrassment or regret or sadness about this, or call Saddam a knight. Here's a man responsible for genocide, mass murder, systemic rape, kidnapping, torture, and whatever other atrocities you'd care to describe. How can simply giving the finger to the US overcome all of those things, or at least significantly mitigate them in the evaluation of Saddam as an Arab leader? I don't understand the mentality. I never will.

Second, from a policy perspective, we have a really long ways to go in overcoming the problems in Arab-US relations. George Bush's simplistic "Them bad guys sure do hate us free folks because we're free and not for any reason relating to US policy and you're a terrorist if you imply that it has something to do with our policy" formulation notwithstanding, our history of coddling dictators and favoring Israel no matter what they do has very real costs. Hearts and minds--as evidenced by the reaction to Saddam's capture--are not on our side. Crudely put, we've just pissed too many people off. Saddam's capture should be a cause for rejoicing, and there should be no mixed reactions to that.

Finally--and my ultra-lefty friends will object to this--there needs to be some cultural change in the Arab world. There are external issues at play here--namely, that Arabs have felt humiliated for so long that anyone who stands up to the perceived (and sometimes real) source of their humiliation will be seen as a hero. But there is also an internal dynamic at play here, that undervalues the importance of freedom. And I'm not talking about freedom of expression, freedom to sing bad songs or the freedom to pee on the Koran and call it art, anything like that. I'm talking about the basics. I'm talking about freedom from torture and rape and kidnapping. Standing up to the Man is important. But standing on people in order to stand up to the man is not OK, and those who are being tromped upon should know it.

I don't know what this means, politically, but that is a question for another day. The key point is a truly evil man has been captured. If anyone deserves the death penalty, it's Saddam, but as a death penalty opponent I hope he doesn't get it. Beyond the normal arguments, I also think it would all the more humiliating for Saddam to have to live out his days as a prisoner.

Triathlon

2003-12-12T11:17:00.000+04:00

I finished my first triathlon yesterday. I went into the thing expecting to finish, because it was a short race and I had trained reasonably well. Nevertheless, it was an unknown event for me, and I had no sense of how difficult or enjoyable it would turn out to be.

This was a small race--I'm not sure but I estimate there were around 60 people competing. Just to ruin any suspense, I'll say now that I didn't win. Nor did I get last. Rather, I beat 6 people. So that's not very good. But what the hell?

The start, finish, and transition area for the race were at a hotel and golf resort on the beach, south of Dubai. We drove down, about 20 minutes or so, arriving roughly an hour before the race. As we parked and I saw other competitors, a few things became abundantly clear:

--I had more gear envy that I had really realized. Specifically, I was pretty embarrassed about my bicycle. I don't have a racing bike, or even a low-quality road bike. Instead, I have a decent quality hybrid bike--shaped like a mountain bike for comfort and durability, but with slightly thinner tires so as to be designed less for rugged trail riding. It's faster than a mountain bike, but still significantly slower than a racing bike. I thought I didn't hang-ups about this--god knows I don't have many ego issues about the "racing" that I do--but I did feel sheepish. It marked me at the outset as a less-than-serious triathlete.

--People who do triathlons are really, really fit. The people in this event looked great--healthy, trim, muscular. My main point of comparison is a marathon, and while there are many very fit people who do marathons, the top competitors are actually sort of grossly skinny, and there are a lot more average-joes who do marathons nowadays. Myself included. I was one of only a couple people in this race with a not-too-big-and-diminishing-but-still-extant spare tire.

I registered and set up in the transition area--the place where racers change gear and clothing from one event to the next. It was definitely a testimonial to my expectations that I set up in the wide-open back area of the transition area. Most people set up in the front so they don't have to fight through it to get out. But I knew I wouldn't be fighting anybody. So I set up my bike on the rack, laid out biking shoes and running shoes with socks inside. I set a towel on the bike seat to dry off after the swim, my shirt on the front of the bike. No need for new pants, as I have some quick-dry pants that can be used comfortably for all three events. One water bottle on the bike, another next to the bike to drink while transitioning. Moleskin for the nipples.

Melissa, Mercedes and I walked dow to the beach (we left Reeve at home with Shanthi) to check out the swim course. It was in a well-contained area, with two breakers preventing even a semblance of waves on the course. It was a triangular set-up--out, around a buoy, across, around another buoy, and back to the beach. The course was laid out at 375 meters, so we had to do two laps, coming out of the water to go around a flag on the beach before diving back in for the second lap. It really didn't seem very far, frankly, and the water was so calm that I felt relatively confident.

Good luck kisses and it was time to start. Got the goggles on, took the shirt off, ready to roll. The beginning was highly anticlimactic--the only races I've done as an adult have been big marathons, where the start has several thousand people and a cannon to set things off. I'm usually far enough back in those races that there's no running at all for several minutes; rather, everyone just shuffles forward. And, consequently, people tend to shout and clap and celebrate that the race has begun. ("Yes! Bring the pain! Yes! Now I will suffer! I am ecstatic!") In this case, there was a brief announcement, a quick "OK, ready?", and one of those obnoxious horns. Off we went.

The beginning of the race was CRAZY. I had sworn to myself that I needed to pace myself, as I'm not a very fit swimmer yet. I've improved, and I knew I could go the distance, but I had to hold back. Needless to say, that didn't happen. Everyone got in the water fast, and it was a real crush to make space and try and get into a groove. As a result, I pretty much swam all-out freestyle for the first two minutes or so. I was passing people, which was gratifying. Suddenly, though, I realized that I had made a mistake, because I was getting really damned tired. I had been kicked in the head, and had my ass groped by swimmers behind me as I fell back. But it had to happen. I slowed down, switching to the slower-but-easier breast stroke for a bit, and dropped intentionally behind the first group. And then behind the second group. Then the third group. Soon I was in my own group, which was fine.

The swim was harder than I expected, and I expected it to be hard. The lowest point in the race for me--no doubt about it--was coming out of the water the first time and knowing I had another lap to go. The swim was also disconcerting, actually--the water was murky, and I'm used to lap swimming in a pool where I can always see where I am and where I'm going. To see where I was, I kept having to interrupt my stroke, which was going to hell anyway. I did about 50-50 freestyle and breast stroke on the second lap. Maybe 50-45, and 5 percent some bizarre combination of dog paddle and drowning.

At any rate, I came out of the water tired and with maybe 10 or 15 people behind me, based on what I could see. I did 750 meters--just shy of a half-mile--in 16 minutes, which I guess isn't truly wretched, and is faster than I'd planned on. But I was tired.

Transition 1. If I can digress a bit, I'll say that one of the coolest things about triathloning is the transition. It's exciting to look forward to switching it up, and I found it cool to try and be as efficient as possible while also getting a couple of minutes of rest. Anyway, the first transition is slower than the second, because one has to dry off at least a little, put on socks and shoes and shirt, get the bike off of the rack, and then run the bike out of the transition area before mounting. I took four minutes to do it.

The bike ride went moderately well. I had been thinking I could do the 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in about 42 minutes or so, and it actually took me 47 minutes. It was an L-shaped loop that we had to do twice. The first length was great, I was well ahead of pace and feeling great, even passing a couple of people, but then at the hook of the L turned into a reasonably stiff headwind on a marginal uphill, and it just knocked me out. With the wind I was averaging about 32 kilometers per hour. Against the wind, about 19 or 20. It was a killer. Wind is not a biker's friend, but it's much, much worse on a mountain-style bike because you're upright and thus create far more drag.

I was, of course, lapped by the leaders and passed by several people who I had beaten out of the water. I was able, on the second lap, to size up who was still behind me--there were four people. It's not a coincidence that three of them were on mountain bikes. That's not to say--in the least--that all of my problems were due to having an inferior bike for a race. I wouldn't have suddenly competed well if I'd had a good bike. But I also have little doubt that my bike added many minutes to my ride.

Actually, I was mostly disappointed with myself on the bike. I just didn't push very hard when I was against the wind. I didn't demonstrate a shred of tenacity. I should have been faster.

The bike-to-run transition was fast--maybe two minutes, tops--but there's not much to it. Off the bike, take off the helmet, switch shoes, go. But the jelly-legs--oh, mama. It's hard to make that transition. Still, jelly legs went away faster than I'd expected, but I was more weary from the swim than I'd hoped, so I was hoping to run a good 8 minute mile and finish the run in 24 minutes, but it took almost 27. A little disappointing there, but I was tired. I did pass two people, and I ran hard on the second half of the run. As I finished, an imam at a mosque in the distance was calling out the evening prayer, which reminded me of where I was. And seeing Melissa clapping and Mercedes jumping up and down was a nice conclusion.

I have a lot of work to do for the March triathlon, which doubles all distances. But I'm sold on triathloning. It was really fun, except for the second lap of the swim. The transitions are exciting. And while it's hard work and tiring, it's not the same level of bone-shredding exhaustion the marathon induces.

Tomorrow, the work on being a better swimmer will begin. Today, rest and relaxation and reminiscence.

2003-12-11T20:57:00.000+04:00

Just a quick note to those who are hitting refresh on their browsers over and over and over and over in an attempt to discern the results of my triathlon, which was this afternoon. I finished, I did not get last, and it was hard but fun. I'll write more in depth about it tomorrow when I'm less tired.

The Calm Before The Storm

2003-12-10T10:19:00.000+04:00

Things are about to get crazy here in Dubai. We are in the calm.

My mother and sister arrive Sunday, to stay for a couple of weeks through Christmas. We're all very excited to see them, and excited for them to see Dubai.

Then Melissa's parents arrive for about 10 days, which will be great, and will include a driving trip to Oman for all of us. Oman is supposed to be really very nice.

Then, January 8, Apollo arrives. And at that point, we will have moved full-fledged into sheer insanity, adding a Great Dane puppy to the hectic mix of our lives.

I'm 99% excited about the next month. I'm 1% dreading it. There is always that feeling of "why in the world can't things just be normal" whenever the routine is tampered with.

When I think about all the diapers my mother will happily change, though, that 1% melts away.

Dean

2003-12-10T10:10:00.000+04:00

I'm a day behind in writing about Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean as the Democratic nominee because I was offline all day yesterday. But it's not too late, right? Right?

First of all, this is massive in terms of its impact on the almost-marginal-but-not-quite-marginal campaigns of Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, Kerry. Those are the guys who stood the best chance of rising because they could maybe swing the Establishment Credibility Club. But that's over. It's just devastating to them.

Without knowing the details, and having read very little analysis, my conjecture is that this was a conscious attempt by the Democrat establishment--the insiders--to create a rally-round-the-candidate effect for Dean. There has been a lot of criticism leveled against Dems for their inability to come up with a consensus candidate like the GOP is so good at doing. Of course, this is a sad statement about our political system, because no votes have been cast yet. Nevertheless, the fact is that 8 candidates sniping at each other for fifteen seconds each is not doing much to convince swing voters that the Dems have it together. Anointing Dean as the Democratic nominee could begin the process earlier of getting him into the public mind. I think the insiders gave up, decided Dean was inevitable, and Gore is the front man for his acceptance.

Alternatively, Gore could be a rogue.

Clark is still there, though. Even with a sputtering start and some nasty press (and some disturbing press--read the November 17 New Yorker article about him) he's still, on the surface, the most electable candidate.

Melissa and I were discussing yesterday that we believe the Dems have an obligation to suck it up and simply choose the most electable person. If it's not Clark, OK. I just hope anger--and Dean's ability to tap into that--is not driving the choice, because if it is, we are screwed for four more years.

I don't want to speculate. Dean has been blowing expectations apart for months. No one thought this would happen. Anyone calling him the 49 state loser or whatever is seriously underestimating the guy, demonstrably.

And I think Clark will end up on his ticket.

The Zoo

2003-12-08T16:19:00.000+04:00

I would characterize my feelings about zoos in roughly the same way that I would characterize my feelings about eating meat. I agree largely with the arguments against eating meat. But WOW do I like a good burger. I also sympathize with many arguments against zoos. Nevertheless, I love to look at big animals.

We've been going to the zoo here in Dubai. It's pretty small--we can look at every single part of it in about an hour or so, even going at Mercedes' speed. Both girls love it. As you would expect, the animals' confines are not all that spacious--the closest thing to old-school concrete and bars that I've seen in a very long time. Of course, there is a benefit to those small quarters--it's possible to get a better look at the animals. These newfangled huge cages are obviously better for the animals, but they make it easier for them to hide, and I'm not going to the zoo to look at the grass.

The fact is that the Dubai zoo is not very nice for the animals. But there is an important--a very important, in my opinion--factor that makes a big difference in how I view the place. Almost all of the animals in the zoo were confiscated as illegal shipments. Dubai has the third-busiest port in the world, and in all that cargo there have, evidently, been enough illegal animals to stock a zoo. Literally. So that does change one's perception--these animals were not exactly headed for a good life, either in dubious pet stores or in homes where they would not be taken care of particularly well. With regular, proper feedings and other animals, the Dubai Zoo is a lot better than what they might have seen. (Of course, I'm not considering the weather--it's gorgeous right now, but the Dubai Zoo probably is a lot crueler in August.)

A zoo stocked by exotic illegal shipments has certain characteristics. It's fascinating to look at the animals and wonder why they were headed wherever they were headed. There are a ton of exotic birds--macaws and parrots and parakeets and various storks and some eagles and a couple of ostriches. There are a lot of small monkeys--either headed for pethood or, possibly, for scientific experiments. There are also a couple of bears, weirdly, and two mountain gorillas. There are a couple of chimpanzees. There are three giraffes, though I believe that they are part of the very, very small minority of animals in the Dubai Zoo that were acquired. There are no elephants. There are pythons. There are also seven lions--five females and two males. And there are eight tigers. More on them in a minute. Someone, somewhere, thought that having lions and tigers and gorillas would be great pets. I can only hope that they had already paid.

The zoo is not very big, and there hasn't been a lot of thought put into how the animals are juxtaposed, or so it seems. For instance, the cheetahs have a perfectly clear view of some deer, and it drives them insane--pacing and watching. The lions are right next to the giraffes, and so when they aren't sleeping they're practically salivating. It's interesting.

The tigers. I love tigers. Probably my favorite animal. Every zoo I've ever been in has a few tigers. Seven of the tigers here are Bengal tigers, which are the only ones I've ever seen.

There is also a Siberian tiger. And, brother, let me tell you, that is a fearsome creature. I'd say the largest of the Bengals is probably 7 feet long, nose to tail. The Siberian, I'd speculate, is 12-13 feet. It stands about chest high. The head itself must weigh a hundred pounds. It's just massive. When you see the Bengals next to it, it's like watching a regular person next to Shaquille O'Neal. I could stare at it all day, and I try to, until Mercedes pulls me away to watch the tortoises mate, which we did actually see a couple of weeks ago. Until you've seen giant tortoises mate you don't know what a day is.

The closeness of the cages is a bit disconcerting the first time--a lot of predators are right there. But it has also allowed me to closely investigate whether or not a Gorilla would Defeat a Tiger in a Death Match, because their cages are right next to each other, and the animals are in touching distance. Sizing it up, it's clear to me that the average Bengal tiger would be utterly destroyed by the face-shredding power and strength of the Gorilla. But the Gorilla would probably never know what hit him if he tried to take on the Siberian.

2003-12-04T20:03:00.000+04:00

Tonight we at dinner at Commodore Falafel. I'm mostly writing that for Scott Jorgensen's benefit.

2003-12-03T15:10:00.000+04:00

There are two hideous things in the Washington Post today.

First, this article discusses how the Pentagon has been discharging various linguists--37 in the last two years--because they are gay. Many of them speak Arabic.

Can we get our priorities straight (so to speak) here? The military's archaic defenses of its anti-gay policies are unsupportable. I thought we needed Arabists?

Second, this article discusses how the Bush Administration is looking into reversing EPA rules on power plants cutting mercury emissions.

Note to Bush: mercury is poisonous, see? Skull and crossbones on the bottle sort of stuff. Got it? A teaspoonful can destroy all plant and animal life in a large lake. Your pals in the electricity industry can afford to spend some money to control their mercury emissions. Try to grow a spine before this takes hold, OK?

Triathlon

2003-12-02T15:52:00.000+04:00

As I've written before, I'm training for a triathlon series. The first race is next Thursday afternoon; there will be another in February and a third in March. The first two are short--750 meter swim, 20 K (12 miles) bike, 5 K (3.1 miles) run. The third is the Olympic distance, which is a 1500 meter swim, a 40 K ride, and a 10 K run.

I've never done this before, but I doubt I go back to another sort of running event--having trained for four marathons, I can definitively say that training for a triathlon is a heck of a lot more fun. It's not even close. There are so many times I didn't want to go out and run for 10 or 15 or 20 miles. But in this case, I do all three events in training, and so the variety makes it easy. Plus, if I don't feel like running, I can just swim or bike.

I'm sure I'll finish this race. I've already done a couple of "bricks"--that is, imitating the race experience by doing two of the events (in my case the bike and run) back to back. No real problems finishing--it will be a bit harder with the swim, but I'll finish. Slowly, but that's fine. I just don't want to come in second-to-last. Last is something. Second-to-last? Crap.

I think I'll be slower than I would be otherwise because I don't have a racing/road bike--I have a hybrid, which is closer to a mountain bike than a racing bike. It's slower, increases the drag, weighs more. But I don't care.

It seems clear to me that doing a triathlon of this sprint distance I have next week and then, probably, the Olympic or standard distance is really not all that difficult. Don't get me wrong--you haven't experienced jelly-legs until you've gone straight from a fast-paced bike ride into a run. But at this distance, it's just not going to be as hard as a marathon.

There is some confusion among people who don't know anything about triathlons. They believe that the Ironman, most famously held every year in Hawaii, IS the triathlon distance. I've had a couple people look at me with awe and horror when I told them I was training for a triathlon. But we're talking different universes here. The Ironman is a 2.2 mile swim (in Hawaii, held in the OPEN OCEAN, for God's sake), followed by a 120 mile ride, and then a marathon--26.2 miles. Now that's insane.

I read recently that the man who won the Ironman a couple of years ago ran the marathon section under 2 1/2 hours. I've never run faster than 4 1/2 hours, and that's not counting a grueling swim and an eternal bike ride preceding it. That's one of my favorite mind-boggling sports accomplishments, on which I could write a full essay, and will at some point. 2 1/2 hours after slogging through a 2.2 mile swim and a 120 mile bike ride. Craziness.

Of course, the true insanity is that freaks out there have somehow convinced themselves that the Ironman isn't hard enough. So there are Double Ironman races--for the math challenged, that's a 4 mile swim, a 240 mile ride, and over 50 miles running. According to this website, the world record in the double triathlon is just over 19 and a half hours.

And the record for the triple ironman is just under 33 hours.

And the record for the DECA IRONMAN is about 200 hours. So that's, what, 8 days? What a loser! It took Fabrice Lucas 8 days just to swim 22 miles, ride a bike 1200 miles and run 262 miles? If I ever see that guy, I'll kick his ass just for being a complete pussy.

Scrabble Journal, Part 12

2003-12-01T20:10:00.000+04:00

Good night for me last night, relatively; I went 2-2, beating Farooq twice and losing to Arvind and Selwyn. It went like this:

I started against Selwyn, and played extremely well, which is what I have to do to even stay in the game against him. It was nip and tuck, and then he pulled ahead a little, and then I had a couple of good plays, capped off by QUINTA. After I played that, I was down by 3 points and I drew the last tiles out of the bag--they spelled BEACH. Not great endgame tiles, but not bad, either. Good enough, though, that I felt like I could pull this thing off. There were places I could score well, depending upon what Selwyn did.

Then Selwyn played ALTERING for a bingo on a triple word score, and suddenly the game was over and I lost by 93. So I killed him.

I played Farooq, and won by 2 points despite having far worse tiles than him, so I felt good. It was close largely because he played two phonies--VOIL (which needs an E for VOILE, though I obviously didn't know that) and ENTOUR (which any jackass knows is not a word) that I let slip. A win is a win.

Arvind beat me by 140 points in my third game. It was a weird game--I didn't see the board very well. But my tiles just never jibed well with what was happening on the board. Ugly.

Finally, I just beat the holy hell out of Farooq. At one point, I had this series of four plays:

1. With a rack of AADKRSX, I played AX with the X on a Triple letter score going both ways. A common play, but still worth 52.

2. I draw EN, fiddle with the tiles for a minute, see DARKENS, and play it. 80 points.

3. I draw AEILOST, immediately see ISOLATE, and play it. 61 points.

4. I draw ACELOPT. This looks like crap for the longest while, but I messed with it, and then--BAM!--POLECAT. I felt like a European Master for finding POLECAT. Farooq was stunned. I think he cursed me in Hindi.

So I scored 520 and won by 295 points.

The best thing about the evening was probably that Selwyn said that he would bet on me to qualify for the Gulf Open. That requires me to finish in the top seven out of about 25 in the UAE--no small feat since a month and a half ago I finished dead last out of 8--all of whom will be competing. But I've improved. and Selwyn was very kind about my rate of progress.

This week: working hard on my threes and fours. I'm back to working on that. This week's technique: typing a word fifty times in a row. It seems to be helping a lot, weirdly.

DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY DIXY

2003-11-26T17:13:00.000+04:00

It's the day before a holiday, so anyone at work really doesn't want to be there. So why not distract you?

Occasionally, bloggers--or at least me--write things solely to create conversation on the blog in the comment box. We'll see how this one goes.

Last week Doug had a great piece on the Pipeline about the funniest comedy scenes in movies. Made for some hilarious comments. I wish I had thought of this, so I thought I'd piggyback on this and write about my picks for the best dramatic scenes that I can think of.

It seems to me that a truly great dramatic scene is made by a confluence of great plot moments and brilliant acting. It's possible for bad movies to have powerful moments, but not usually. This is a bit harder than the funniest scene ever, because it's not just a question of how hard you laughed. Here are some choices that come to mind without any real effort at thinking about it:

--The Godfather has about three billion great scenes and lines and performances. For my money, the scene that is really money is when Michael--played by Pacino, natch--explains how he can take out both the crooked police captain and Sollozzo at the Italian restaurant. It's pivotal to the plot, because it's the first inkling that Michael is turning. And incredibly chilling--"When I get the gun, I'll kill 'em both."

--The Godfather 2 is almost as good (some say better) than the first. Best scene? Fredo's murder. He's saying his Hail Mary, Michael knows it's happening, I know, you know, the American people know it's happening, and it's just wrenching. Has there every been a more tragic character than Fredo Corleone?

--Gandalf's fall in Moria--The Fellowship of the Ring. I know that a fantasy film maybe shouldn't count, but the scene is loaded with incredibly powerful emotions, and, of course, it has the Balrog with his fire whip.

--To continue the Al Pacino theme, I love--LOVE--the movie Heat. While the whole thing is exciting and cool, the best sheer drama in the film occurs when Deniro and Pacino meet for coffee. It's intense, and interesting, and has some great lines--"Brother--you are going DOWN."

--Samuel L. Jackson's monologue when talking to Ringo at the end of Pulp Fiction. Obviously, there's some comedy there, but it's also awfully dramatic, a very rich and well-played scene.

There are many more. I'll think of some and post them later. Go to it.

Michael Jackson

2003-11-26T11:21:00.000+04:00

I heard that Michael Jackson fans are having candlelight vigils for him worldwide.

Look, people, that is pathetic. I don't know the details of this case. He may be a child abuser, he may not be. His fans don't know, either. But no matter how you cut it, Michael Jackson is a complete freak. He lives on a ranch with wild animals, he used to be black and now he's an alien, he wore a Spider-Man mask to go see his congressional representative to talk to him about the lack of Taco Bell's around the Neverland ranch. It is not inconceivable that he has done something wrong.

But even if he was a normal guy, the fact that someone really grooved to "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" doesn't mean that the writer and performer of that song isn't a criminal. How far must the cult of celebrity go?

And at the risk of being terribly politically incorrect, I find it endlessly tiresome that any time a black celebrity is accused of wrongdoing, the "this is just another lynching" crowd comes out. Note to that community: white people aren't out to get Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson because they are black.

Rotten Tomatoes

2003-11-25T17:37:00.000+04:00

It is high time that I finally wrote a little bit about one of my favorite websites--RottenTomatoes.com. If you're not familiar with Rotten Tomatoes, let me enrich your existence.

Rotten Tomatoes is a movie review site. But they don't do their own movie reviews; instead, the site is a sort of clearinghouse for movie reviews done all over the internet and in newspapers and magazines all over the country. For most movies, they collate over a hundred reviews and give the movie a rating on the "Tomatometer"--movies with over 50% positive reviews get a "Fresh" rating, and movies with more than 50% negative reviews receive the dreaded "rotten" rating. There is a subjective element, of course, because some reviews are not definitely positive or negative, and not every single paper or movie site is covered. So if a movie is like 55% fresh, for instance, then that may be a little unreliable because it's too close. But if a film gets an 82% Fresh rating or a 15% Rotten rating then you can feel pretty confident in the reviews. They also have a separate "Cream Of The Crop" rating, which allows you only to consider the big-time reviewers. So if you only want to know what Kenneth Turan and AO Scott and Roger Ebert and those types have to say, then the COTC rating is there.

Additionally, they do this awesome thing where they snip out just a sentence--or a half sentence--or so from the review and put it on the front page of the review. More on this in a minute.

This is obviously an incredibly useful site if a you're a movie fan, and I appreciate that. But that's not the biggest reason I like it. The biggest reason I enjoy Rotten Tomatoes is because I love--ahem--hyperbole. And so I love that I can search the Tomato Picker for movies that received a Fresh rating over 90% (The Two Towers comes in at 98% Fresh), or that I can look up movies that received a Rotten rating of under 10% (Battlefield Earth, 4%, Gigli 7%, for example). Sometimes there is, in fact, accounting for taste.

I love to read reviews of truly awful films. I read reviews of movies I'll never see, just for the hell of it.

I bring all of this up because the reviews for the new movie "The Cat In The Hat" are perhaps the most hilariously vicious that I have ever seen in my life. The Tomatometer reads 15%, so it's Rotten, but not the most rotten ever. However, more than any movie I can think of, "The Cat In the Hat seems to have REALLY pissed people off. My theory is that anyone can safely butcher some stupid screenplay. But butchering a beloved--perhaps the most beloved--children's masterpiece is an unforgiveable sin.

Check out some of these snippets from the the reviews:

"82 of the most wretched minutes ever imprinted on celluloid."
"Unless you have children who have been especially naughty and are in need of severe punishment, avoid this film like the plague."
"Creepier than Michael Jackson's mugshot and yet eerily similar."
"In a word, awful."
"Heinous."
"It's so bad that Dr. Seuss should sue from the grave."
"This is not The Cat In the Hat. This is kitty litter."
"A vulgur, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy"
"Just plain awful."
"Catastrophic."
"If you liked Death to Smoochy then you are going to love The Cat In the Hat."
"A semi-intriguing abomination."

That last is my favorite.

And rereading those reminds me that another great function of the website is that you figure out fast who is an unreliable reviewer. Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, for instance, is and always has been a terrible reviewer. But the fact that he comes out in favor of this one seals the deal. When 85% of your colleagues are against you, and not mildly, but STRONGLY, then you look pretty damned bad.

It's almost enough to make you go see The Cat In the Hat, isn't it?

Get those terrorists!

2003-11-24T11:33:00.000+04:00

Outrage! The latest is in this article in the New York Times Sunday edition. If you don't want to read it, I'll summarize and mention some of the particularly outrageous parts of the article.

Evidently, the FBI has been collecting information on antiwar protestors, advising local law enforcement officials to report "suspicious" activity to counterterrorism squads. The alleged goal of these investigations is to check on so-called extremist elements. This is all according to interviews with FBI officials, and a memo that went out recently.

Did someone tell the Bush Administration to simply do whatever Nixon did? How long must we put up with J. Edgar Ashcroft?

Of course, the notion that people exercising their basic consitutional rights is a threat to the Administration's total control is shameful. But that's not all there is to it. There is also the question of what this means for the war on terrorism. Either the Administration is utterly incompetent, believing that Al Qaeda will actually be found at a protest, or the war on terror has been politicized to a degree that even cynics like myself couldn't possibly have imagined.

Here are some choice parts of this article....

"The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas."

Wow. I had no idea that these nefarious protesters were using training camps! Al Qaeda uses training camps, and protesters use training camps, therefore protesters ARE Al Qaeda! A new memo, coming out next week, will encourage investigation of the training camps of the NFL and major league baseball. And using the Internet to raise money? Why don't they protesters just swear their fealty to Osama, along with Howard Dean? And gas masks to defend against tear gas? My god! REAL Americans just breathe the tear gas in and say "Ah...smells like freedom!"

And then there's this:

"Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, for instance, have sued the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. Civil rights advocates have accused federal and local authorities in Denver and Fresno, Calif., of spying on antiwar demonstrators or infiltrating planning meetings. And the New York Police Department this year questioned many of those arrested at demonstrations about their political affiliations, before halting the practice and expunging the data in the face of public criticism."

Hooray for the NYPD. I am floored--really, floored--that critics of the Administration are on the no-fly list. This is one of the grossest things I've read about these bastards. We are headed for tyranny.

Or this:

"The memorandum urged local law enforcement officials "to be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts" to counterterrorism task forces run by the F.B.I. It warned about an array of threats, including homemade bombs and the formation of human chains. (italics mine)"

Human chains! Human chains! I can't even make a joke about the inclusion of "human chains" in a sentence with "homemade bombs".

When asked for comment, John Ashcroft said that "We are also investigating the utilization of incredibly lame catchphrases beginning with the terrorist hallmark 'Hey hey ho ho'. It is clear that Osama, for instance has been known to start his calls for jihad with 'Hey Hey Ho Ho The Infidels Have Got To Go!"

The sickening part about this is the connection to counterterrorism. It's true that there are idiot anarchists who want to do violence, and that there was violence at the WTO protests in Seattle. If the police wanted to just make sure that no one broke any windows or turned cars over, then more power to 'em. But when the terrorism sledgehammer comes out, then you know that the full court political press is on. And given that we're facing an elusive and (as last week's tragedy in Turkey demonstrates) potent enemy determined to kill the innocent, calling something "terrorism" is serious business.

Guess what? That enemy is not going to protest training camps, forming human chains, or marching on the National Mall. Those people have done nothing more harmful than opposing the policies of the worst President this country has ever seen.

New Pictures

2003-11-22T19:44:00.000+04:00

Run, don't walk to the see the new pictures of Mercedes and Reeve on their websites, taken with our brand new, 4 megapixel digital camera. There are three each. Prepare to have your socks blown off.

Second Child

2003-11-21T15:00:00.000+04:00

Reeve is growing up. At ten and a half months, she's on the brink of walking for real; she's taken a couple of steps a few times and she can stand on her own until she decides she no longer wants to. With mobility comes a lot of changes.

She's also started learning some baby signs. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll explain, briefly. Baby signs are a sort of sign language (in some cases, the signs are actually based on real sign language, as I understand it) so that babies can communicate before they can speak. Mercedes had a ton of them, and I firmly believe that they increased her communication skills, which are now quite impressive. It's a hard business, getting around to understanding the idea that there are words/signs that represent something. Baby signing accelerates that. Reeve is close to understanding that if she puts her hand over her mouth (or, often, she slaps the side of the head) then that is the sign for food. And she seems to have mastered the idea that panting is the sign for "dog", which will be especially useful when Apollo arrives in six weeks.

Developmental milestones feel substantially different between the first and second child. With Mercedes, we basically found ourselves slackjawed with every new thing she did. "Wow! She can walk!" "Wow! She can eat by herself!" "Wow! That is one smelly diaper!"

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we're blase about Reeve's development. Quite the contrary. It's cool and very exciting that she's learning to do these new things--especially the signs, since that's the first real communication. And watching her try to walk is cute and fun. We love watching these changes.

Nevertheless, the sense of wonderment is certainly diluted to some degree. Part of it may be an awareness of the two-sidedness of developments. With walking comes more rapid movement, more falling down, more reaching, more accidents, more chasing. With a first child you're basically blind to these realities. Another element may be the awareness that the excitement about new developments is fleeting; it's hard not to think about what comes next (words, running, stairs, etcetera).

It's easier as a parent to live in the now with the first child, because what comes next is sort of hazy. After the first, the fog is lifted, and the veil of ignorance is discarded. It's harder to live in the now, and easy to always look ahead.

Still, Reeve is awfully fun now, and awfully charming, and awfully cute. And she'll never learn to walk again. It's an important thing to remember, while we watch and laugh and help and dote.

More on gay marriage

2003-11-20T18:27:00.000+04:00

First of all, I highly recommend checking this page out, with thanks to Nate Dintenfass, via the usually-awful-but-reasonable-here-due-to-his-own-gayness Andrew Sullivan. The page is a sort of quiz, with real quotes, and you have to guess whether or not the quotes are in reference to interracial marriage or gay marriage.

Additionally, I recommend Richard Cohen's excellent editorial in today's Washington Post on this matter.

The Massachusetts Decision

2003-11-19T14:58:00.000+04:00

As you may have heard, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state cannot disallow gay marriages, and they gave the Massachusetts legislature 180 days to make it right, legally.Naturally, this has already created a firestorm from the right.

There are many--close to all--issues with which I disagree strongly with whatever the right wing says. But often I can at least see the other side of the coin. But on this one? I can't understand it at all. I had a conversation last summer with my very good friend Matt, who is a conservative Christian, albeit one who knows how to drink and make gross jokes. I challenged him on this issue, because I have yet to hear anything near a cogent defense of the opposition to gay marriage (and homosexuality in general, but specifically this issue) and I feel very strongly about it. Matt generally does a great job of challenging my sensibilities in a smart way, and we often agree to disagree while, I think, understanding and appreciating each other's opinions more.

But in this case Matt just couldn't justify it. He didn't even really try, ultimately falling back on his feeling that "it's wrong", but clearly his heart--and mind--wasn't in it.

Commonly, of course, the "argument" is something along the lines of how gay marriage threatens the "sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman". Often, some sort of God/religion element is thrown in there, but that's all grade-A conjecture and opinionated bullshit.

There NEVER is an attempt to explain exactly how two men or two women who are definitionally uninterested in heterosexual marriage can threaten that institution. There's often some bizarre insinuation of a "slippery-slope", but to what is entirely unclear.

Of course, since I read about this decision this morning I've had four affairs, three with women and one with the gardener, and I've filed for divorce. But I'm sure it's unrelated.

But seriously--am I missing something? To me, it's like saying "recognizing a world champion in basketball will undermine the world champions in baseball! The sanctity of baseball is the foundation of our world!" It's folly--everyone can be a winner.

The reality is that my life as a straight, married man will never, ever be impacted by whether or not two gay men decide to make their relationship legally binding. And no one is going to decide to get married or not to get married, to cheat or not to cheat, to have kids or not to have kids based on whether or not gay marriage is legal. And I'm not even getting into the practical arguments for why gay marriage is not only consitutional, but good public policy.

Of course, I know what this is, and so do you. It is sheer, unbridled, gross bigotry. This decision should ONLY matter to gays and lesbians. The fact that it matters so much to morality bulldogs on the right is only the latest demonstration of their overbearing cruelty.

Scrabble Journal, Part 11

2003-11-18T15:46:00.000+04:00

I had a good night last night. I went 2-2, beating Farooq and Arvind fairly handily and losing pretty badly twice to Selwyn. The time off--I had really hardly played or studied at home at all for two weeks--was precisely what the Scrabble Doctor ordered; I was focused and now I'm ready to get back on it--I feel like studying and playing today for the first time in a few weeks. Good deal.

I learned firsthand the value of hooks last night. Hooks, you say? Yes, hooks.

Hooks are words that can have letters added to one of the ends in order to form a new word. The simplest hooks, of course, are plurals. If my opponent plays CAT, then I can play BASTARD, putting my S after the T in CAT so that I also form CATS, getting all the points from that new word (but not the double or triple word or letter scores that are under the pre-made word). There are a lot more complicated and valuable hooks than that--WIZ takes an S at the front to form SWIZ, VEX takes a T at the end to form VEXT, and the aforementioned CAT can of course take the S at the front to from SCAT.

This is an elementary part of good Scrabble that true beginners don't ever really get--that you don't have to actually go through one of the letters already on the board. In fact, in relatively advanced play, I'd say the large majority of words are actually complete from the players racks, set down as hooks on other words.

Last night, against Arvind, I opened with a bingo--SLANDER. Do you see any hooks there, besides the S at the end for SLANDERS?

I'll tell you what--in a million years I doubt I would have thought to make ISLANDER out of SLANDER. I was pretty amazed by that.

Then, in a later game against Selwyn, I was able to put down a Q and an I to form QUIZ for 42 points. The Q was in the second row. This seemed like a smart offensive and defensive move. Of course, I didn't know that SQUIZ is good, but Selwyn sure did. He promptly played a bingo, starting with S, in the triple word column. 108 points. So that was freaking great.

I'm working now on the 2-to-make-3 hooks--that is, taking all the two letter words and figuring what can be added on either end to make 3 letter words. This is helping me not only shore up my 3 letter word knowledge, but also get to actually thinking about the hooks, which I'm still pretty average at. I'm also using a recommended technique which is sort of fun--anagramming the letters. For instance, if I start with the 2 letter word AX, I can remember what three letter words end in -AX by remembering that FILMSTRIP WIZ is my anagram--all of the consonants in FILMSTRIP WIZ can be added to the front of AX. Or if I have AW, then all of the consonants in ARE CUTE FELLOWS PRONE TO JOKE WITH YOU AT DMV? make three letter words.

Of course, I have to remember the anagrams, but I think these things should start to stick with time. It's helping a lot right now, and it is sort of fun to form the anagrams.

But all that is just mumbo-jumbo. There are two real stories from last night. First of all, I played WOG against Arvind--the second time I've made that play--it's funny and awful simultaneously. He laughed. Perhaps someday I'll have a chance to play YID against an Israeli or DARKIES against an African-American or HODADDIES against a rapper.

The other story is that at one point I actually had the word BLOWJOB on my rack, but couldn't find a place to play it. That would have made my Scrabble career, I tell you. And, yes, BLOWJOB is a good play. In more ways than one.

The Stare

2003-11-17T15:54:00.000+04:00

Triathlon is in 3 1/2 weeks, so I'm getting on it. I just got my bike from the shop today, and I did my first outdoor bike ride this morning.

I rode past a group of workers who were fixing a wall outside of a house here. The men who do those sorts of outside jobs here are always either Indian or Pakistani--often the latter, as I understand it.

As I rode past, they really gave me the evil eye. The stare is a standard here, but this was sheer hostility. Then I realized that they were giving me the eye because I was having a big swig of water from my bottle, and it's Ramadan. Here are these guys, many or most of whom are Muslim, working their asses off outside without being able to eat or drink during the day. And some jackass American on a light blue bike cruises by, cavalierly drinking water. I may as well have worn a sign that said "Eat THIS, Muslims!"

Of course, other nationalities wouldn't necessarily have given me the evil eye. Indians and Pakistanis stare. And not in a casual way. They stare aggressively. They watch you closely.

I despise this, political correctness be damned. I hate it. We had workers outside our house for a while, and every time I opened the garage or came out the door I'd get the stare. You'd think I was wearing a tutu or something. It's like I'm the biggest freak show around. It's one thing if it's a public area, but if I'm at my house it's just to much.

Occasionally, it bugs me enough that I just stare back. This works sometimes, but usually not. I can't hold the stare like they can.

However, I really snapped once. A few weeks ago, Mercedes and I were coming home after spending some time at the beach in the morning. We had to park outside the garage because they were working on the street outside. I helped her out of the car--both in our swimsuits--and we started to head inside. I then noticed that there was a guy leaning on the gate across the street, staring quite intently at both of us, and particularly at Mercedes. This was undoubtedly just standard cultural stuff--staring intently is how it's done. But it creeped me out and it pissed me off--no one should stare intently at a 2 1/2 year old girl in a swimsuit.

So I set Mercedes inside the gate, and I took a few steps toward the guy, who was still staring, and I said, "What the fuck do you think you're staring at, asshole?"

He stopped staring.

I went home and puffed up my feathers and marked my territory. He probably didn't understand a word I said, but my intent was clear enough. It was the only time in my life I've ever been physically aggressive, I think.

But the stare persists, and I still hate it. Maybe I'll step up again soon. I think my motto may well change from "Get the hell away from me, kid!" to "Stop staring at me, motherfucker!"

Dubai--Where The Dentists are Hotter Than the Desert

2003-11-17T15:15:00.000+04:00

I went for a routine checkup and cleaning yesterday. To give you a sense of how truly international Dubai is, at this (massive) dentist's office there were dentists from the U.S., Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, and Turkey.

I walked in and couldn't help but notice that the two Asian women working at the receptionist desk were pretty attractive. And my dentist was this just outrageously attractive guy from Scotland. I have little doubt that many women I know would have absolutely swooned over this guy with his accent. Then my dental hygienist--Aye Caramba!

I'm going to have my teeth cleaned every six days, I think.

MTV

2003-11-12T15:49:00.000+04:00

Observations made while watching MTV today at the gym:

--Britney Spears seems to have some new thing going on with Madonna. I read in the hard-hitting Khaleej Times that Britney is dating John Cusack, who is 15 years older than her. Way to go, John! I hope he doesn't have to listen to her music.

--Is Drusilla the lead singer of Evanescence?

--The White Stripes know how to make a video. So do Outkast.

--Beyonce is so hot that it is almost painful to look at her, especially in that video with Jay-Z. I seriously doubt I've ever seen anyone sexier than Beyonce. That song isn't so bad either, but it might just be the video. It's just outrageous. Outrageous, I tell you!

--MTV in our gym is much better than MTV at home, as there are no shows and no commercials. Can you beat that? If only all the music was good.

--Are Sean Paul and Shaggy the same person?

--Are my kids doomed to listen to R and B?

--How old will I be when I am too old for videos? I know that most of my friends, or at least many of my friends, don't watch videos ever. But is that because VH-1 and MTV are so annoying to watch, or is it that videos themselves have lost their lustre? I don't know. But for me, videos still have a lot of appeal. If I had Tivo, I'd tape MTV from like midnight to 6 AM every night.

Television and Me

2003-11-11T15:02:00.000+04:00

Must....resist...temptation to write about Bush's hypocrisy on veteran's issues on Veteran's Day.

We don't have any regular television programming here in Dubai. We don't have AFN here, and we haven't paid for any of the various satellite TV options that carry a ton of Western programming. We have some limited programming we can get for free, but I haven't bothered to get the cables together to hook our TV to the wall. We have a burgeoning DVD collection we rely on, as well as a pretty good rental place near here. We have plenty of kids videos and DVD's.

As we watched more Buffy the Vampire Slayer yesterday, I was thinking about the television shows that have been staples of our evenings over the past ten years. The list was surprisingly short. I'm not talking about shows I love but watch really only in syndication (The Simpson, Seinfeld) or shows that we may have watched regularly for short bursts of time before getting bored fast (Beverly Hills 90210, The Crocodile Hunter, Bachelorettes in Alaska, The Bachelorette, Big Brother, The Amazing Race, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?) or stuff I watched voraciously as a kid (Dukes of HAzzard, Incredible Hulk, Magnum, P.I., Simon and Simon) or shows I always pick up when I can (The Daily Show, SNL). I'm talking about the shows that we planned to watch ahead of time, sometimes with friends, and the evenings were built around these shows.

To the best of my recollection, the only series that fit the bill are:

--E.R. We watched ER religiously for about 2 or 3 seasons. It was, at the beginning, an absolutely stunning show. The acting was great, the characters were interesting and developed well, the plots were cool and nicely intermixed with thrilling hospital scenes. I can remember watching ER in my days as a debate coach, traveling on Thursdays to some hellhole in the Midwest for a Friday-Saturday-Sunday tournament, and driving like a bat out of hell so that fellow coach and friend Brad S. Thompson and I could get into the hotel early enough to watch ER. That show was so good that I felt drained after watching it.

--The X-Files. Of course, this was well before the T-2000 took Mulder's place. Man, what a show. The stand-alones were extraordinary, and the conspiracy theme just drew me in deeper and deeper. There's a lot of X-Files in Buffy. Or a lot of Buffy in X-Files? In any case, the conspiracy was ultimately the downfall of the show--there just came a point when resolution was in order, and they didn't do it. Did they ever? I stopped watching.

--Twin Peaks. This was in college--the only season of Twin Peaks. Doug and I watched it regularly, and it was great. Until it became so stunningly weird that only the most hardcore David Lynch fan wasn't rolling his eyes. But the incredible atmosphere! The brilliant performance of Kyle MacLachlan, both on Twin Peaks and on Saturday Night Live ("Hi! I'm KD Lang!). The world's introduction to Lara Flynn Boyle, whom I still find to be outrageously hot despite the fact that she only weighs 36 pounds and she seems to be a necrophiliac, as Jack Nicholson looks dead.

Bizarrely, I originally typed "necromancer" instead of "necrophiliac" and caught it on revision. "Holy shit! Lara Flynn Boyle can revive the dead?"

--Melrose Place. This cannot be defended under any circumstances. Nevertheless, the reality is that I watched this show EVERY Monday, that I taped it, that friends came over to watch, and that I had definite opinions about who was hot and who was not (Sydney and Jane--hotter than hot; Jo--not hot). Plus I wanted to be Jake. He pulled all the honeys. In retrospect, what the hell was I doing watching that crap?

--Survivor (or, as Mercedes knows the show, "People Outside"). I'd be watching Survivor right now if I could. Unlike the others, I'm still in a romantic relationship with Survivor.

--American Idol 2 (or, as Mercedes knows the show, "People Singing"). I couldn't believe how crazy Melissa and I got over this. We started watching during the tryouts, and watched every single episode and were amazed and thrilled when Ruben took the crown, earning a dubious place in history as the guy who beat the more popular guy, Clay Aiken. Something about the kitsch, the bitchiness, the screaming fans...I don't know. But we loved it.

The advent of television on video and DVD has introduced two more shows--The Sopranos and Buffy. That makes it sound like one show--"The Sopranos Versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

We've seen every single episode of The Sopranos' four seasons. It is in my opinion, heads and shoulders above every other television show I've ever seen in terms of its ability to create emotion, horror, humor, and power. Eventually we'll drop the money to buy them all on DVD.

And we are now REALLY into Buffy. The second season has drawn us in like nobody's business. Watching for a fourth straight night tonight.

The weirdest thing about the above shows is that utter lack of connection between them. Two wholly different reality things, some supernatural action, a medical thriller, a tawdry sex-'em-up, and some gangstas.

Notably missing are sitcoms. As I mentioned, I absolutely love Seinfeld and the Simpsons, and have seen probably every single episode of the former and all but the last three or four seasons of the latter. But I never made time to watch those when they were on, excluding the ER period, when Seinfeld was an hour beforehand, and we'd usually watch that gleefully before suffering through a painful half hour of Veronica's Sudden Secret With Susan or whatever the hell was on. For the most part, though, sitcoms are the worst thing on TV.

I don't really miss regular TV much, surprisingly, but when I think about it, I wish I could surf around. That's how I usually watch. Almost everything on TV is stupid beyond measure, but I still love it.

Ah, TV. If you don't love TV, you're a communist. But if you love the wrong TV, you're a Satanist.

The Lighter Side

2003-11-10T17:13:00.001+04:00

I am dedicated this week to avoiding all politics and only writing about things of little consequence, ranging from Scrabble to movies. No heavy stuff this week, and for my own mental health, no obsessing about Bush.

Scrabble Journal Part 10

2003-11-10T17:13:00.000+04:00

Scrabble is usually on Mondays, but we had it last night instead of today.

It's been two weeks since my enormously successful night, and I've definitely been in a Scrabble Slump. I haven't felt like studying more than a little bit each day, and what I study isn't really sticking. I haven't been playing much against the computer, either. And the results have showed--last week I won a game against Farooq and then proceeded to embarrass myself three games in a row. It wasn't worth writing about.

Last night I felt a little more with it. At first. I beat Arvind in the first game, which is really big. It turned out to only be a ten point win, but that was largely because he made some preposterous play at the end and I got stuck with bad tiles--I was ahead by 50-100 points the whole game. I saw the board well and executed well. And I had one terrific play--I had played the bingo RUSTIER, with the space in front of the R a double word score (a somewhat risky play, but my defensive vision is horrendous). Arvind tried to play BLANCHE, but I knew it was bad, and challenged it off. And then I played OARIEST, with the T making TRUSTIER. It felt good.

Then I played like human excrement against Selwyn, who punished me by 170 points. Deflated, I promptly lost back to back games to Farooq by 120 and a hideously embarrassing 280 points. For what it's worth, Farooq had the most preposterous run of tiles in history--in BOTH games, he got the J,Q,X, and Z, three of the four S's, and both blanks. It's hard to win against a good player when they get all but one of the ten power tiles twice in a row. And I didn't. In fact, I really sucked.

No big deal, right? I'm bound to lose a lot still, and it's hard to recover from that sort of tile disadvantage.

The hard part was actually that in the last three games I wasn't seeing tiles at all. In the first game against Farooq I missed two potential bingos from words that I knew--NARDINE and DENARII. I tried to play words I was sure weren't words, like AYA and LOUDS and AIRE. I was in a complete funk.

Part of the problem is that I'm burning out on studying. I'm finding the word memorization to be increasingly dull, and I've given up entirely on studying anything other than 6 letter stems. I think I'm generally just in a down phase in my Scrabble progress. I'm distracted by the NBA. I'm distracted by Reeve's terrible sleeping habits of late. I'm distracted by the rest of my life, which, upon reflection, is perhaps a good thing.

Fortunately, Arvind said something to me that I found encouraging, which is that he never studies, and really hardly ever has. He's just picked up the words over time, and he plays every day against the computer to keep his mind sharp and watch the patterns. That's encouraging, because I can definitely stand to play against the computer, and I have today already--5 games (the computer plays instantly, so one game only takes 25 minutes at absolute max). It's helping--I already feel a bit more settled in my tile vision.

Scrabble is like anything else--there are fits and starts.

New pics of the kids

2003-11-07T15:32:00.000+04:00

There are three fuzzy but OK new pictures of Reeve up here, and two new pictures of Mercedes here. There is also a picture of our Great Dane puppy, Apollo, who arrives here in January. He's on Mercedes' page, for lack of a better location.

Buffy and Comics

2003-11-07T15:28:00.000+04:00

We've been renting episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from our local DVD store. I never saw the show a single time in the States, and I couldn't believe it was worth watching, despite testimonials from a number of friends.

We're enjoying the hell out of it. It's really a good show. It captures teen angst and issues pretty well, interweaving that with some good supernatural stuff. The plot is inconsistent, it's campy to the max, and the escapes are far too neat. But I'm really loving it. I recommend it.

Part of my affection for it reminds me of my comic book days, because Buffy is basically a superhero. I was definitely a comic book geek in junior high, and I would have enjoyed being an even bigger comic book geek if I'd had any money. Come to think of it, I don't know how I bought the comics I did--I guess back in the day they were monthly and only cost 65 cents. I had friends who were definitely bigger geeks about it, but for a time it was really big to me. I especially loved X-Men, and Web of Spiderman, and the Secret Wars, though I dabbled in the Avengers and Thor and Iron Man at times.

Looking back now, knowing myself a little better, I know that one of the things that drew me to comic books was my interest--nay, obsession--with the excellent or the outstanding. I can read forever about the best this, the biggest that, the strongest other thing. And comic book superheroes were badasses. I loved to dwell on the cool powers they had, how much they could bench press (as referenced in the Marvel Universe "encyclopedia of characters"), and other things. I used to imagine (oh, Christ, I still imagine) what comic book character abilities I would take if I could choose any. I think I loved the X-Men because I held out hope that I was also a mutant, and that my latent abilities would eventually manifest themselves, though hopefully not like The Beast or Angel, since they looked funny.

Similarly, I hold out hope that I am, in fact, the Slayer, though the fact that I am no longer a teenage girl probably doesn't help that possibility.

Who wouldn't love to be able to do what Spider-Man can do? And Spider-Man in the movie is nowhere near the badass he is in the comics--according to the Marvel Universe, Spider-Man can bench press ten tons! Of course, Peter Parker in the movies more plausibly shoots the webbing out of his wrists as opposed to magically creating some sort of wrist gadget.

The X-Men varied--no one would ever choose Nightcrawler if they had to look like him. Cyclops? What a wuss. He can't even turn off the eye laser beams--he has to wear those stupid red glasses! That's weak. Storm is good. Only the insane don't love Wolverine, and who wouldn't want a super healing factor and adamantium claws? Of course, my true affections lie with the clairvoyant and the telekinetic, like Professor X and Jean Grey.

Ultimately, though, in the comic book universe, you've got to hope you're the Molecule Man. That guy can do it all, especially after the Silver Surfer broke down his self-imposed mental block, allowing him to manipulate organic as well as inorganic matter, and making the MM one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe. Even Galactus is a chump by comparison.

Wait a minute. Did I say all that out loud?

What I meant to say was actually that I used to like comic books, but now I recognize that they are totally juvenile, and I knew plenty of people who were bigger geeks than me. Yeah.

Two Items

2003-11-06T15:40:00.000+04:00

1. The New York Times reports today that the EPA has been instructed to drop its court cases against ten electric utilities. The utilities failed to comply with the terms of the New Source Review Program. I've explained this before. It's worth doing again.

The Clean Air Act exempted really old power plants due to fierce lobbying from industry, who argued that it would cost too much money to bring plants built in the twenties and thirties up to snuff. Congress assumed that these old plants would be shut down soon enough, and all new plants must comply with air pollution standards. However, the grandfather clause meant that utilities just kept super-old plants going.....and going...and going. Even today, there are plants still running that were built when Calvin Coolidge was President.

So in an attempt to fight back, the New Source Review Progam was started (it applies to areas beyond air pollution, but that's what I know about so I'm sticking to that). The mandate for utilities was that any time these grandfathered plants underwent any major maintenance, they had to also come into compliance with the law. The idea was that utilities needed to be stopped from just tweaking the old plants to keep them going without ever reducing pollution.

Several utilities flouted the law, and the federal government, in concert with several states, brought suits against them.

But, unsurprisingly but still appallingly, the Bush Administration gutted the NSR program in a nakedly political giveaway to industry. And now, in a perfectly expected follow-up, the lawsuits are going to be dropped. I don't know what's going to happen to the few utilities that had already reached multi-billion dollar settlements in the cases. Presumably, they'll give us all the finger and get some help from the Bushies.

This isn't some small policy. People die because of excess air pollution. Children with asthma visit the emergency room. Our overall economy is damaged due to productivity losses from health crises directly attributable to air pollution.

It makes me sick. This is the most craven, immoral administration ever.

2. I have to comment on this Reagan miniseries. You've all heard about this--CBS made a miniseries about Ronald Reagan. Allegedly, Ron wasn't portrayed with a halo and a glowing light shining around him, and so the right-wingers went absolutely bananas. That is, of course, their prerogative as assholes. But then CBS--incredibly--caved to the pressure.

Just stunning. And they will use this as evidence of a liberal media, when, in fact, this entirely debunks the notion and absolutely demonstrates the "working the refs" effect that I've written about after reading Eric Alterman's thoughts on it. They've successfully created the idea that there is a left-biased media, and now CBS does it's best to kowtow.

Gotta go. I have to throw up.

Get You A Bible

2003-11-05T14:37:00.000+04:00

I have decided that I'm going to buy, and read, a bible.

Many of my friends are, perhaps, reading that first line again and recoiling in horror, wondering whether I've ironically found Jesus during Ramadan.

Alas, no. Far from it. I doubt reading the bible (Bible?) is going to change my near-atheist status. I say near-atheist only because while I basically think there's no God, I basically wish there was a God, and so I don't want to just accept that there's no God and move on. I'd rather hold out a sliver of hope that hardly constitutes belief. More on this at a later time. For now, just trust me when I say that my desire to read the bible has nothing to do with any sort of religious awakening.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I think there are three good reasons for me to read the bible.

1. It's probably the most important book in history, if importance is measured by overall impact on world events. And given the number of historical/social/literary references can be found in the bible, I should try and get me some of that.

2. Reading and digesting the bible will allow me to say cool things. For instance, I really ought to drop "Jesus wept" into conversations a little bit more, and I'm sure that's only the tip of the Biblical iceberg. Soon I'll be dropping all sorts of Bible knowledge into my Hyperbole entries, and it will make me sound erudite.

3. Reading the bible will make me a more potent opponent of the religious right, because when they say their crapola about Leviticus and gays or the code of MC Hammer or whatever, I can go hog wild with other Bible quotes and provide an Old Testament beatdown.

So I'll read it. I know I'll skim some of it, and I won't understand some of it, and it will take me a long while, but I'm ready to try something new. I already looked in our local bookstore here, but, surprisingly, they didn't carry it. I'll probably have to hit Amazon. Or the Gideons.

Ramadan Thirst

2003-11-05T14:20:00.000+04:00

I was walking to the store this morning. Sort of hot day. By US standards in November, of course, it is steaming. It's about a half mile walk, and I was about halfway there when I realized that I was very thirsty. So I was thinking of what kind of cold drink I could get as soon as I got to the store.

But then I remembered that it is illegal for an adult to eat or drink anything in public during Ramadan. Not wanting to go to jail for a Sprite, I had to wait until I got home. Stupid, stupid Ramadan!

Go to this site

2003-11-04T21:11:00.000+04:00

And I mean right now.

http://www.cenedella.com/stone/archives/000543.html

Basketball and The Matrix

2003-11-03T15:55:00.000+04:00

I wasn't planning on writing much today, but I need a break from reading about and writing about the NBA. In the course of the last three weeks I've gone through three Fantasy NBA drafts, including a 6 hour live draft online last night that ended at 3 AM here. I love fantasy ball, and I really love the drafts, particularly the live draft. But thank god it's over.

So let's discuss movies.

This summer I saw The Matrix: Reloaded in the theater while we were back in the States. I adored The Matrix, as did all sane people. I was disappointed by the sequel, though I liked some of the visuals. I found a lot of the movie to be silly, but I could forgive.

But then I rented it a couple of days ago so I could give it a closer watch. And you know what? That movie sucks ass. It sucks. It's pretentious as hell. The visuals--while still cool in many spots--strain to look new and interesting after the first film. While I relish a future in which the entire human race lives for subterranean techno raves, I found the scene stupid. Laurence Fishburne, whom I respect immensely, is comical in his overacting. Keanu Reeves gives his worst line ever--and that's saying something--when he says to Trinity "I can't let you die---I just love you too damn much." Vomit.

Plus the plot has so many holes. If Neo can fly all over the place, why does he ever fight any agents? Especially all those Agent Smiths? And why should I go to an action film to have to try and puzzle out what The Source really wants or who the Oracle is or what the hell Agent Smith is trying to do?

God, the first movie was great. What happened?

It's not the worst sequel ever--that award is a tie between Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones. Has anyone committed a ritual slaughter on Haydn Christensen yet? But it sucks. I'll see the third one, because I know there's some chance that, as a transition film, it can be saved by the third one. But I doubt it.

Chicken Soup For The Bastards

2003-10-31T14:17:00.000+04:00

Time to lighten things up a bit.

I just finished an article in one of last month's issues of the New Yorker about the Chicken Soup books. You know the ones--Chicken Soup For the Soul, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, Chicken Soup for the Dog and Cat Owner's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul, Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, etc. It was a fascinating article--something like 85 million copies of those things have been sold. For the most part, the books are badly written pabulum straight out of the pages of Reader's Digest--heartwarming tales of love, devotion, faith, and miracles. They sell like hotcakes. Interestingly, it seems that many readers buy several copies and then keep them around the house in various places so that they can pick them up at any time and get a small hit of that feel-good flava.

Reading the article reminded me of an email conversation that Doug and I had a couple of years ago about how the Chicken Soup people needed to expand their audience. For instance, the following are some of the titles we came up with, and some new ones (full credit to Doug for some of these, though I can't really recall which ones, and I'm hoping Doug will remind me of several I've forgotten). I ask you, are you going to buy "Chicken Soup for the Divorcee's Soul", or "Chicken Soup for the Asshole's Soul." It's a no-brainer.

Chicken Soup for the San Diego Chicken
Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian
Chicken Soup for Satanists
Chicken Soup for Satan
Chicken Soup for Milwaukee Bucks Fans
Chicken Soup for Elvis Impersonators
Chicken Soup for the Dead (Alternative Title: Chicken Soup for the Souls of Our Dearly Departed)
Chicken Soup for Metrosexuals
Chicken Soup for El Chupacabra
Chicken Soup for Jon Bon Jovi
Chicken Soup for the Bush Administration
Chicken Soup for the Khmer Rouge
Chicken Soup for the Complete Loser
Chicken Soup for Quadriplegics
Chicken Soup for the Tax Attorney
Chicken Soup for NAMBLA
Chicken Soup for Elian Gonzalez
Chicken Soup for Jesus H. Christ
Chicken Soup for the Washington Generals
Chicken Soup for Israelis

Oh, I could go on. But the point here is that the Chicken Soup people need to expand their audience to include more than just middle-aged soccer moms, which is clearly their target demographic. I think that Satan-worshippers, Pol Pot's followers, multiple-amputees and Jon Bon Jovi might appreciate a little love from the publishing industry. Am I right or am I right?

Depression and Diebold

2003-10-30T15:56:00.000+04:00

I've been ranting a bit more than usual lately in this space. Not totally sure why, but I know that rants are more forthcoming than they used to be. I guess there are just a lot of things going on with Bush and the GOP that are infuriating me, and this is where I vent about that. More on this in a minute.

Lately I've been reading quite a bit about these voting machines and the possibility of election tampering--indeed, the very distinct possibility that tampering has already occurred. My friend Nate Dintenfass has been meticulous in sending out information about this potential tampering.

I wrote about this not too long ago, and I'll include some links here and here to some websites on which you can read more information. In the loosest of terms, the story is that an increasing number of elections are utilizing computerized voting systems. The software on this machines, particularly the security of them, is incredibly unsound. It is, evidently, a simple matter to tamper with results.

Disturbingly, the makers of many of the machines are anything but the apolitical types that one would like to see running our elections. The CEO of Diebold, the leading manufacturer of the software, has said that it is his goal to "deliver the state of Ohio to President Bush in 2004."

Very, very odd things happened in some of the key races in 2002, all tied to the computers. And there seems to be some--to me--terrifying evidence that tampering occurred in Florida.

Are there people out there that would tamper with election results? Demonstrably, there are--there have been examples of this throughout history, and only a fool would say we're in a more enlightened age now. Do these computerized voting machines make it easier to tamper with results and cover the trail? Evidently so.

Do I think Democrats are capable of manipulating results? Of course. Abandoning morality and principle is not exclusively the domain of the amoral GOP. Still, the overt Republican connections of the companies involved with making the machines and the undeniable willingness of the GOP to go all out for political expediency is terrifying.

And yet--if I can return to the subject of anger and ranting--I am strangely not angered by this. Rather, I find it profoundly depressing.

I have said before that I feel that these are dark times. I believe, sincerely, that George W. Bush is the worst president in the history of the United States. I do not believe that there are limits to what the GOP would do to reelect him, possibly short of assassinating his political rivals.

And I am not certain that we are not heading down the road to corporate theocracy. Religious extremists have more power than they have ever had, and it seems to be growing. The willingness of Democrats and Republicans alike to pander to corporations is a concurrent trend. The "watchdog" media is a joke. Americans slumber through the reality of this administration.

Increasingly, I feel as though the potential reelection of George Bush is a disaster that must be averted if our democracy is to survive. And even avoiding that disaster may not save us.

More Bush crap

2003-10-29T13:39:00.000+04:00

My Aunt-in-law, Meredith, sent the following in an email. It deserves some attention. I can't comment on it. It's too depressing. More on my burgeoning political depression soon.

Dear Friends,
Please pay attention to the message below
that is being passed along. It is vital to women's
health and there is something we Can do! It won't
take long to read and it is very important.

President Bush has announced his plan to
select Dr. W. David Hager to head up the Food and
Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health
Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee has not met
for more than two years, during which time its
charter has lapsed. As a result, the Bush
Administration is tasked with filling all eleven
positions with new members. This position does not
require Congressional approval. The FDA's
Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes
crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used
in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and
related specialties, including hormone therapy,
contraception, treatment for infertility, and
medical alternatives to surgical procedures for
sterilization and pregnancy termination. Dr. Hager's
views of reproductive health care are far outside
the mainstream of setback for reproductive
technology.
Dr. Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who
describes himself as "pro-life" and refuses to
prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. Hager
is the author of "As Jesus Cared for Women:
Restoring Women Then and Now." The book blends
biblical accounts of Christ healing women with case
studies from Hager's practice. In the book Dr. Hager
wrote with his wife, entitled "Stress and the
Woman's Body," he suggests that women who suffer
from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from
reading the bible and praying. As an editor and
contributing author of "The Reproduction Revolution:
A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality
reproductive Technologies and the Family," Dr.Hager
appears to have endorsed the medically inaccurate
assertion that the common birth control pill is an
abortifacient.
Hagar's mission is religiously motivated.
He has an ardent interest in revoking approval for
mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486) as a safe
and early form of medical abortion. Hagar recently
assisted the Christian Medical Association in a
"citizen's petition" which calls upon the FDA to
revoke its approval of ifepristone in the name of
women's health. Hager's desire to overturn
mifepristone's approval on religious grounds rather
than scientific merit would halt the development of
mifepristone as a treatment for numerous medical
conditions disproportionately affecting women,
including breast cancer, uterine cancer, uterine
fibroid tumors, psychotic depression, bipolar
depression and Cushing's syndrome. Women rely on the
FDA to ensure their access to safe and effective
drugs for reproductive health care including
products that prevent pregnancy. For some women,
such as those with certain types of diabetes and
those undergoing treatment for cancer pregnancy can
be a life-threatening condition. We are concerned
that Dr. Hager's strong religious beliefs may color
his assessment of technologies that are necessary to
protect women's lives or to preserve and promote
women's health. Hager's track record of using
religious beliefs to guide his medical
decision-making makes him a dangerous and
inappropriate candidate to serve as chair of this
committee. Critical drug public policy and research
must not be held hostage by antiabortion politics.
Members of this important panel should be appointed
on the basis of science and medicine, rather than
politics and religion. American women deserve no
less.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
1. SEND THIS TO EVERY PERSON WHO IS
CONCERNED ABOUT WOMEN'S RIGHTS.
2. OPPOSE THE PLACEMENT OF THIS MAN BY
CONTACTING THE WHITE HOUSE AND
TELL THEM. HE IS TOTALLY
UNACCEPTABLE ON ANY LEVEL.

Please email President Bush at
president@whitehouse.gov and say

"I oppose the appointment of Dr.
Hager to the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory
Committee. Mixing religion and
medicine is unacceptable. Using The FDA to
promote a political agenda is inappropriate and
seriously threatens women's health."

THANK YOU.
I emailed...took two minutes. Just copy
the letter above.

Scrabble Journal, Part 9

2003-10-28T13:19:00.000+04:00

What follows is the scintillating tale of a successful night of Scrabble, in which I won three games and lost two. And, I might add, I won with style.

We had a round robin "tournament" with the five regulars last night. Generally, this is throwing money away, but it's only 20 dirham (about $5.50) so what the hell. I felt good going into it--over the past two weeks I've studied hard, adding a lot of words to my vocabulary. And, more importantly, I've played a ton of games against the computer and online--maybe as many as 60 games. It's easy to squeeze them in while kids are asleep. Playing all those games is helping my board vision and my rack management, and I felt confident going in.

I played Aspi in the first game. Aspi is an interesting example of the fact that Scrabble is a complex game in which it is demonstrably possible to choose different strategies and style. My style is developing as a highly offense-centered player, playing my words with no regard for defensive positioning. Aspi is a purely defensive player. His knowledge of three and four letter words is outstanding, and his ideal game is low-scoring and consists of blocks of three letter words, building on top of each other, with tight spacing and little room for big plays. The first few times I played him, I fell into that trap and got mauled, because his three and four vocabulary exceeds mine by a large margin.

But no more. Now I just open the board as wide as I possibly can, playing long, low scoring (or high scoring, if possible) words so that he can't lock up the board--I don't always take the highest scoring or smartest play. I just open it up. And, consequently, I am a better player than Aspi now, which is a pretty stunning development, from my perspective. Yesterday I beat him by 165 points, and it would have been worse if he hadn't gotten a late bingo. I also had a breakthrough vision moment in that game--I had a rack of AEEHLSY, which I generally dismiss as a bingo rack because Y is one of the worst bingo letters. But I stared at it, and shuffled it around for five minutes, and then I saw EYELASH. Felt like a million bucks. I also played BATTIER and INFRACTS in the game, both of which I felt good about.

My second game was against Arvind, who was and is a ways better than me. But he was a little off his game, and I was in the zone, and I had my all-time high game--544 points! I beat him by 210 points. Three more bingos, too--ANTISEX, CREVICE, STARNIE. I won't regularly beat Arvind, but I wouldn't have beaten the holy hell out of him like that if I couldn't play in that game.

Third game, Farooq, who is better than me but not by a whole lot. Again, I got on a roll, opening with TEQUILA for 100 points. That's devastating for anyone--opening the game down 100 points is just a killer. I then challenged his word off of the board, got a big play, then he got a seven point word, and then I played TEENAGER, and suddenly I was ahead 220-7. Ultimately, I won by 133.

I learned an important lesson in my fourth game against Selwyn--namely, that momentum is a real phenomenon in Scrabble. I felt great, and got two early bingos--GAMIEST and RANDIEST--to be up by 140 points. But Selwyn is a real pro, and he just kept whittling away, 30 here, 25 there. I also hit a terrible streak of tiles, and I just stagnated. My points went like this: 76, 32, 80, 30, 5, 8, 8, 4, 10. That's a killer streak against an internationally ranked player. It was weird--my confidence started to plummet, and my ability to see the words plummeted with it. I missed a common bingo that I know--REGINAE--that would have put the game away for good. Instead, Selwyn came back to tie, then played a bingo to end the game with me down by 100. A 240 point swing--I absolutely should have won that game, given my huge early lead and the tiles I had in the endgame.

Still, I made the finals, where, confidence dashed, I got killed by Farooq. But I got second place, which is pretty darned good considering how brief the time has been.

Lessons learned:

--I have to do a better job of watching what my opponents play, especially if I'm in a rut. TWICE in the finals against Farooq he played words that I knew were phonies, but I didn't pay any attention to what he had played unitl it was too late to challenge. I have an unfortunate tendency to get lost on my own rack. Must expand my vision.

--I have to stay loose. It sounds completely preposterous to talk about momentum and staying loose and "playing my game" for Scrabble. Once I thank Jesus for giving me the victory, I will have used every sports cliche in the book. But when I tighten up I lose my board vision fast--I was loose against Arvind, and I beat him to a pulp. Then I embarrassed myself twice in a row.

--My Scrabble vocabulary is expanding at a rate which is beginning to give me an advantage over Farooq and Aspi. I'll catch the other two in several more months.

--I can meet my goal to finish in the top seven in the UAE and qualify for Bahrain.

Arvind and Selwyn said some very nice things to me last night about my rate of progress, and that I was becoming a "dangerous" player. All four of them are urging me to go with them to the Indian Open in Bombay in late January, but I doubt we can afford it. They tried to convince me by saying that there are cash prizes, which I, of course, laughed at. Probably not heading to Bombay, but it's nice that they think I can compete.

Ramadan

2003-10-27T13:38:00.000+04:00

Ramadan started today. If you only have a vague sense of what this means, here's the lowdown. Ramadan is the Muslim holy month, when it is expected that Muslims will give money to the poor, pray a lot more and, most notably fast during the day. No food or drink between sunup and sundown. At sundown, everyone sits down and stuffs themselves silly--a meal called Iftar. This is the precursor to a night of partying and insanity, capped off by about two hours of sleep.

I don't know yet what Ramadan will be like here--we'll be affected in small ways, like Starbucks being closed until 5:30 and probably some odd hours for stores here and there. It will be interesting.

I'll write about Ramadan at various times during the month--what it's like, different things we experience, and some of the political and economic thoughts that Muslims have had about it.

ANSWER

2003-10-27T13:34:00.000+04:00

I usually bash the right, whom I despise. Today I'll bash some of the left a little bit.

This article in Salon talks at some length about Saturday's anti-war protests in Washington. They were attended by people of all stripes, with realistic numbers apparently between 10,000 and 20,000. The gist of the article is that the left is confused about what to do in Iraq.

Sure. I'm confused as hell, but I have some ideas. Get the basics of infrastructure going. Employ Iraqis at a reasonable wage as opposed to slave labor from outside the country. Don't let Bechtel and Halliburton use this is an opportunity to steal money from Iraqis. Get the despicable, opportunistic Ahmed Chalabi the F out of Dodge. And get Iraqis involved in the process of creating a government. Keep troops there for security, but reemploy the Iraqi army so that they can start taking control. Eat crow so that the international community will really start to help.

It's not too late for some good stuff to happen there. Some very good stuff. Saddam's departure was a tremendously, tremendously good thing, remember. So let's not let our own government blow it completely.

Many of the people at the protest agree, in principle, with the idea that we broke it and now we have to fix it. However, the protests were organized by ANSWER, which is a radical leftist group. ANSWER supports the "anti-colonial forces" working in Iraq. That is, they support the Baathists and terrorists who are killing Americans and Iraqis alike. And they simply want the US to leave.

This is a moronic position. The people attacking the US are either Saddam loyalists or opportunistic radical Islamists, by and large. Defending them is not--is not at all--different than defending the "anti-colonial" actions of Al Qaeda. There is a middle ground, after all--even if you vigorously opposed the war, that doesn't make pulling out the responsible, reasonable course.

There is a quote from Al Sharpton in the article:

"Let's be clear," he said. "There are some that are trying to act as though you can be against the war but for gradual withdrawal. If you're against the war, you want the war stopped now, and the only way to stop it is to end it right now."

Al, you're either a pandering jackass or a complete idiot. That's typical Bushlogic--all black and white. You're with us or you're against us! Shut the hell up.

Nothing is unreasonable about the following statement:

"I opposed, and still oppose, the war on Iraq. My opposition is based on the feeling that a larger evil would come from the war, be it innocent deaths or money-grubbing by Bush cronies. However, abandoning Iraq would create an even larger evil. Therefore, I support a change in direction there, but not a full-on withdrawal of troops."

That's my motto, except I didn't oppose the war.

Here's my real point: ANSWER is an extremist group that doesn't represent everyone on the left any more than evangelical assholes represent everyone on the right. So why are perfectly reasonable people going to the protests when they don't agree with the agenda of the organizers? Why go to a protest organized by a group tied to a Stalinist Worker's Party?

It's shit like this that keeps the left from beating the despicable GOP.

Scrabble note--World Scrabble Championship

2003-10-23T16:47:00.000+04:00

Check this out. The World Scrabble Championship is this week in Malaysia. The preliminaries are now over (round by round postings are found on the website linked above--it's an impressive operation). My friend Selwyn placed 63rd, with an 11-13 record. Not bad.

The top two play a best of five tomorrow for the World Championship. Incredibly, they are both from Thailand. I had heard that Thai players are on the way up in the world, despite having largely very limited English. Unreal.

It Is Rant Time

2003-10-22T15:26:00.000+04:00

Usually, it's the Bush Administration that drives me to rant. Today, however, it's the President's despicable brother, Jeb.

If you haven't heard about this, read this article, please.

In brief, here's the pre-rant background. A women in Florida, Terri Schiavo, has been in a vegetative state for thirteen years. She had a cardiac arrest and has since she was 26. Doctors have made it clear that once removed from feeding tubes, she has zero chance of recovery. She had no living will, sadly, but her husband has testified that she said she would not want to live in a vegetative state. Still, he's been fighting for some while to have her tubes removed, often against her family, who are seemingly hoping for a miracle.

The Florida legislature gave their despicable governor the limited right--in this case--to intervene. And the despicable bastard did exactly that, ordering that her feeding tubes be reconnected.

My parents are in the medical profession, have seen these situations before, and have absolutely inculcated in me a very strong opinion regarding the importance of the right to die. Still, I understand that this situation is not one of the more clear cut cases in which there is a living will.

But apparently all legal precedent makes it absolutely clear that the spouse is the final decisionmaker in these situations, and given the husband's willingness to testify that Terri Schiavo would not want to go on like this, it seems like this is legally clear cut.

But not for the hypocritical religious freaks out there. The willingness to put aside the wishes of the husband (and, de facto, Terri Schiavo) for the purposes of some abstract notions of God's will sicken me to the core.

Who the fuck do these people think they are? Conservatives are more than willing to bash the hell out of liberals for wanting "big government," claiming that they want to keep the government out of people's lives.

Unless, of course, the government is getting involved in reproduction, sexuality, death, religion, or anything related to privacy. Strictly the small stuff.

Where does Jeb Bush get off thinking he has the pipeline to God's will? Maybe God wants this woman to come back to him. I don't fucking know. And neither do you, you religious assholes.

This woman has to continue to suffer because Jeb Bush feels the need to pander. Fuck him. Terri Schiavo may not be able to make a decision, but the notion that Jeb Fucking Bush is better off making that decision for her as opposed to her freaking husband is sickening.

The best example of the staggering hypocrisy of religious fundamentalist Christian shitheads comes at the end of this article:

"House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, a conservative Republican from Plant City near Tampa and candidate for the U.S. Senate, said, "Every life is precious."

"We're talking about a human life; there's no second chance," he said. "There's no do-over if we make a mistake." "

Oh, yeah? I wonder about your opinion of the death penalty, you self-righteous asshole.

Shit.

Seabiscuit

2003-10-21T14:48:00.000+04:00

I just finished reading Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. It's a movie now, of course, and allegedly a very, very good one. Haven't seen it yet. I will.

Listen to me:

Read Seabiscuit. It is the finest nonfiction book I've ever read. I was absolutely and totally sucked into it from the start, and it's really rare that any nonfiction can have the page-turning effect of a Harry Potter or some dumb crime thriller. But I was transfixed. Brilliantly done, great research, and just a world-class story. I forgot sometimes that this really happened.

Read Seabiscuit. Go get it. Now.

Scrabble Journal, Part 8

2003-10-21T14:45:00.000+04:00

We didn't have our Scrabble Club meeting this week because the World Scrabble Championship started today in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Selwyn is there, hoping to finish in the top forty. So we had a week off.

But does that mean I'm not working? Oh, no. I'm working.

I'm playing online (mostly against the computer, because I feel better about cheating and looking up words mid-game to help with the vocabulary) daily. And I've honed my study strategies.

At first, I had planned to get the two's, then the three's, then the four's, and on up. But after whizzing through the two's, I stalled on the three's, and I've given up exclusive study of them. It was just too boring, because I couldn't find a consistent system to help me memorize, so I ended up just sort of staring at lists. Still, I've made progress; there are over 1200 three's, and I think I've probably got 1000 of them down cold, and none of them are absolutely foreign, which means I'm unlikely to challenge a three I don't at least recognize on sight.

And the fours? Forget it. There have to be 2000 of them at least.

I started to learn all the 3 through 6 letter words containing J, Q, X, and Z, but I'm not ready for that yet.

So here's what I'm doing:

Every couple of days I start working on a new six-letter stem. I have explained this before, but in review, the stems are six letter combinations that are likely to produce a bingo when a seventh letter is added. My study book (a complement to the international word list) organizes the stems by their productivity--that is, the likelihood that they will produce a seven letter word based on the number of letters and the number of bingos. I've got the top five stems down: SATIRE, SATINE, RETINA, RAINED, TORIES. I take the stem, and then use the book to figure out what seventh letter works to make a word. For SATIRE, for instance, I know that RETINA+U=URINATE, RUINATE, URANITE, and TAURINE. RAINED+P=PARDINE. Etcetera. Very useful for bingo planning. I'll try to learn the top fifty stems in the next couple of months.

Also, I've started working on the 3-to-4 hooks. This is a list of the three letter words and what letters can be added to each end to turn those into four letter words. Critical to know this list in order to maximize the opportunities to play the bingos I'm learning. So, for instance, I take the three letter word ABA, and I learn that I can add B and C on the front to make BABA and CABA, and that I can add C and S to the end to make ABAC and ABAS. It's more organized, because I can work through the list while utilizing flashcards, and it's efficient because it helps with threes and fours together.

Soon, I will be the third best player in Dubai. And, from there, who knows? My God! I could become the second best player in Dubai!

And you, lucky reader, will hear about every agonizing step. Can't wait, can you?

The Burj

2003-10-20T11:10:00.000+04:00

Melissa managed to finagle an invitation to a dinner last night at the Burj-al-Arab with some Emiratis that she met. This was too good to be turned down; the Burj is the pinnacle of hotels in a place where incredibly fancy hotels are de rigueur. To put it in some perspective, there are a lot of five-star hotels here, and staying in any one of them would impress the heck out of someone like me--all the amenities, attendants around every corner, good restaurants, all that.

The Burj-al-Arab, however, is so fancy that it was awarded seven stars.

Constructed on its own man-made island just off of the coast, the two ways to get in are to cross a bridge, or to land on the helicopter landing pad at the top of the building. Only a couple of hundred feet shorter than the Empire State Building, it’s the tallest hotel in the world. Garish beyond measure, the building lights up in different colors at night--blue, purple, green, red--and it can be seen from most places in Dubai. You can check it out here.

Dinner started at 9:00 last night, which is preposterously late when you have two children. They’d both gone to bed, which made it seem even weirder to go out so late.

The Burj-al-Arab is about ten minutes or so from our house. We crossed the bridge, heading directly toward the hotel, which was lit up and just massive. Truly enormous. There are purple and blue lights on the bridge which illuminate the water below. It’s a little surreal. The outside of the hotel is really beautiful--the shape of a sail is distinctive and attractive. But the main thing is definitely the size. It is a formidable hotel.

The valet took our car and we went inside. The atrium goes nearly all the way up--fifty stories, I’d guess. And the decoration? Well, let’s just say the Burj, despite it’s opulence, isn’t per se the classiest place I’ve ever been in. When the designer was deciding how to decorate, I imagine that he was standing next to some note-taker with a clipboard, hand on chin, thinking hard.

D: OK, first of all, we need fountains.

N: (scribbling furiously) Yes, sir.

D: Lots and lots of fountains. Make sure that one of the fountains is capable of shooting water about one hundred feet in the air without spraying the crowd.

N: Yes, sir.

D: And do make sure that the fountains can do all sorts of neat tricks, like shooting water from place to place in perfect streams.

N: Yes.

D: That will be ideal. Then we need colors. Lots of colors! Let’s make the carpets red and gold and blue and green and yellow and purple. So colorful!

N: Wonderful idea, sir.

D: And make sure that there are gold things everywhere! Gold pillars! Gold chairs! Gold statues! A gold thing that looks like an amphitheater around the concierge desk! Dress the greeters in gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!

N: Oh, how extraordinary!

D: Now, the lights. (Rubbing hands together and grinning maniacally.) First of all, we need flashing lights.

N: What color, sir?

D: (Suddenly furious) Be quiet!

N: Yes, sir.

D: Make sure the flashing lights, high above the lobby, are blue and red.

N: Yes, sir.

D: And just when you think you’ve got enough flashing lights, I want you to double what you had before!

N: Excellent, sir!

D: And we need two gigantic aquariums on either side of the lobby that people can look at while they ride one of the escalators.

N: Oh, that sounds very nice.

D: I know that, nimrod!

So the lobby positively defines ostentatious. But the fountains really were super-cool. They had perfect streams of water moving in arcs so well-defined that I first thought the water was moving in tubes. And the streams shut off perfectly, then shoot to a different part of the fountain. Neat-o.

We met our party in the lobby and rode to the 27th floor. Our host told us that the floors are twice as high as normal floors, however, so it’s really like the 54th floor. Unfortunately, though the elevator looked out over the sea, it was too dark outside and too bright inside to see much other than a few lights down the coast.

When we got out of the elevator at our restaurant--The View--we immediately entered a tunnel that was decorated with small lights in one of those cheesy “tech” patterns--it looked like a digital readout. Really, it reminded me of something from Buck Rogers. Sadly, Twiggy did not appear around the corner with aperitifs. "Beedy-beedy-beedy-beedy, here's your crab dip, Buck! Ahlan-wa-sahlan!"

The restaurant was just awful from a decorative perspective. There were these hideous red, yellow, green, blue and purple lighted panels on the ceiling that made it impossible to see the famous view outside. They looked like the sort of decoration that one could find at Showbiz Pizza in the late 70s. Terrible, terrible idea. And, on the whole, the decoration of the place was cheesy.

The funniest part was probably the band. There were two super-hot women who looked oddly identical, and dressed exactly the same, and had the same haircut, and when we inquired, discovered that they were, in fact, Romanian twins. The dorky-looking guy playing the piano and singing background was husband to one of them.

He wasn’t actually playing the piano, of course. The piano was an enormous grand. White, natch. The actual piano was little more than a garish white stand for the guy to set up his synthesizer.

And the music! What choices! We heard “Muskrat Love”, “Lady In Red”, “Time After Time”, “Afternoon Delight”, “Unbreak My Heart”, and a variety of other cheeseball selections.

The food was quite good, though not absolutely extraordinary. It was good company and a nice meal. And with the soft sounds of the Captain and Tenille as well as the Carpenters playing in the background, how could we not enjoy ourselves?

At the end of the meal, after midnight, we headed back through the 25th century nee 1976 tunnel and down the elevator so quickly that my ears popped.

It was great to get to the Burj. As I feared, though, the place was little more than an out-of-place Vegas knockoff. Frankly, many hotels in Vegas are classier. Much classier. There's almost nothing classy about the Burj, excepting the fountains and the facade. Over-the-top? Yes. Classy? No. But cool anyway.

Outrage

2003-10-17T13:59:00.000+04:00

What am I outraged by today?

----The Bush Administration is proposing a change to the Endangered Species Act that would allow the importation of various endangered species. The argument that the US Fish and Wildlife Service makes is positively comical. Here's a segment of the Washington Post's article about it, reprinted in something called the "Tri-Valley Herald Online":

"Giving Americans access to endangered animals, officials said, would both feed the gigantic U.S. demand for live animals, skins, parts and trophies, and generate profits that would allow poor nations to pay for conservation of the remaining animals and their habitats.

This and other proposals that pursue conservation through trade would, for example, open the door for American trophy hunters to kill the endangered straight-horned markhor in Pakistan; license the pet industry to import the blue fronted Amazon parrot from Argentina; permit the capture of endangered Asian elephants for U.S. circuses and zoos; and partially resume the international trade in African ivory."

Where to begin? Anyone whose head is not entirely inside their ass knows that poor, often African nations, have positively hideous records on environmental preservation, and there is no evidence--AT ALL--that "sustainable harvesting" will result in anything sustainable.

Why the hell are they interested in feeding the "gigantic demand" for elephant tusks and crocodile skins, when that demand definitionally creates a rather severe harm? I'm sure the lobbying efforts of the Safari Club and various animal skin companies don't have anything to do with it.

Bush is, seriously, the worst president in the history of our country.

----This isn't an outrage, but it's worth mentioning: Bush and Schwarzenegger met yesterday to make jokes and to discuss the economy and their shared ideas about governance. Two senior administration officials have given Hyperbole this transcript of the conversation:

B: I like your movies.

S: Thank you, Mr. President. Hasta la Vista!

B: (Laughing) I speak Spanish, so I know what that means. It means "Let's eat at Vista!"

S: I have never known what it means, Mr. President. Thank you. Shall we work out?

B: First, let's talk about economizing things around here.

S: Yes, the economy is very important here. I am here to fix the economy. I will fix the economy by making it better.

B: Are you rich?

S: Yes, very.

B: Me too. I'm very rich.

S: Good.

B: I like rich people a lot, really.

S: Yes, I'm rich.

B: If more people were rich, we wouldn't have so much poverty, you know?

S: Hasta la vista, poverty!

B: Yeah, I agree with that. So you planning on cutting some taxes?

S: Hasta la vista, taxes!

B: How do you plan to govern? Everyone in California is crazy and on drugs, right?

S: Oh yes. Do you have any advice?

B: Advice? Ask Dick. I don't know. When I was the governor of the great State of Texas, I just basically killed people and cut taxes.

S: That's what I do in my movies! So I'm ready. I have to go to the bathroom now. I'll be back.

B: (Laughing) I love that! You're a cool guy, Arnie.

S: So are you, Mr. President. So are you.

BMO

2003-10-15T14:54:00.000+04:00

I went for a run today--my first outdoor workout since arriving in Dubai. It’s still hot, but noticeably cooler. There is a large, very nice park near us with a rubberized sidewalk surrounding it. It’s the same red rubber that high-quality racetracks are made of, so it’s a nice place for a run. The only nice place for a run, but I digress.

There were people of all stripes on the path--Westerners, South Asians, and local women. No Emirati men, but that is not even marginally surprising. What really blew me away was the number of women out walking--and in cases, running--wearing the full abaya (the robes). There were two women running along with their black abayas and total head cover, with just the eye slits. It was incredible. Picture the image for a second, if you can.

Dubai is not Saudi Arabia. It’s a long, long ways from Saudi Arabia, figuratively speaking. Women work here, and they drive here, and Westerners wear whatever they want. We have some very good friends in Saudi right now--not in the capital, but in Dharan--and what they describe sounds awful. Women are prohibited from driving, they have to have their husband’s permission to work or to cash checks at the bank, and they have to wear abayas, for starters. Things here are much more liberal--if Saudi was Dubai, Saudi wouldn’t be such an awful place. Still, Emirati women all wear black abayas, and many cover their faces.

I had gotten used to it. But today’s run was a jarring reminder that equality is as far away as the moon.

The excuses are well-rehearsed. “It’s a choice that women make. They aren’t forced.” “Women feel more secure under their robes.”

Right. I can imagine the reply. “It’s not so much that I’m CHOOSING to wear the robes, it’s rather that I’m CHOOSING to not be utterly ostracized by my friends, family, and my society.” False choice is not choice.

And security? What is it that women feel more secure about, less threatened by? Leering men? Groping? You know and I know that what they feel more secure about is escaping the hostile eyes of those who would take offense to their NOT wearing the robes. They don’t wear robes so that they can prevent men from looking at their package. They wear robes so they can be a part of a society that demands it.

It’s always a fine line between cultural sensitivity and acceptance of the unacceptable. I certainly don’t think that it’s appropriate to challenge people face-to-face, for example, or to be overly maligning of another culture. Nevertheless, they second-class status of women in the Arab world isn’t a cultural difference. Or, rather, it isn’t ONLY a cultural difference. It’s also a societal flaw that unjustifiably discriminates while holding an entire people back.

There are horrendous tales of physical and emotional abuse and torture of women in this part of the world. Those stories are too awful to talk about for long. What I’m talking about is something much more pedestrian, though they are part and parcel of the same thing. What I’m talking about is the right to be seen as a human being, and not as one of a cadre of shapeless black ghosts.

Scrabble Journal, Part Seven

2003-10-14T13:31:00.000+04:00

A riveting Scrabble story to give you a sense both of how my night went last night, and to give you a sense of the competition I'm dealing with.

In my game against Arvind, who is the second best player in the UAE, I fell behind early. I took a chance on ARREARED, knowing that ARREARS is good and feeling like it was decent possibility. Alas, ARREARED was no good, so I lost that turn. Then, 98% sure that ARR is good (ARR! Matey!) I tried that, and it was challenged off, too. So I'm down by 100 after three turns. I slowly whittle it back to about 70, and then BAM! I drop JANGLES on a triple word score for 105 points, and I'm up by 35. Two plays later I fire up HOBBIT for 40. Nice! I resisted the temptation to put BO- in front of JANGLES.

I'm up by about 50 with all tiles gone, some good tiles on my rack, and since I now keep track of the tiles, I know that Arvind has IIRECO? (? is the blank), and he needs a bingo to win. So I feel great, because a bingo with two I's is really hard to pull off, though there are some common ones out there (INERTIA, e.g.) I'm excited about this win, and then Arvind whacks me in the face with IRENICON. IRENICON! He's out of tiles, game over, I lose by 50. Fuck me!

Scrabble Journal, Part Six--Tournament Time

2003-10-13T14:30:00.000+04:00

My goal for Friday's tournament was to win two games out of seven. I won one game. So that's not too good.

Here's a quick breakdown of how the games went:

Game One: Played poorly to a player I should beat, lost
Game Two: Played well, won
Game Three: Played pretty well, lost
Game Four: Played like a sentient turd, embarrassed myself
Game Five: Played quite well, but didn't have the tiles at the end, narrowly lost
Game Six: Replaced brain with urine before game, lost by 200 points
Game Seven: Exhausted, embarrassed, lost to another player I should beat

Suprisingly, I came away from this experience feeling like a chump, but also feeling like I wanted to play more Scrabble. The experience was challenging and exhilarating.

I also, weirdly, felt pretty encouraged by things. Not at the time, but in reflecting about it over the weekend. I came to a critical realization, or a couple of them:

First of all, in any given game it is very rare that there are more than one or two words that my opponents play that I do not know. This suggests that my word knowledge isn't quite as far behind these guys as I'd previously thought, though it is still behind. In fact, in some areas, my word knowledge is actually stronger than theirs--they are ahead of me in three and four letter words, but hardly at all in seven letter word knowledge. On three different occasions I played very common bingos--STEARIC, ATONIES, ETAERIO--and all three were challenged. I don't know what the hell those words mean, but because of the composition of letters they are very high on the "likely bingo" chart. The fact that they were unknown to my opponents bodes well for me.

Second, the biggest difference, then, is not in word knowledge but rather in style of play and average score per move. On average, my opponents are getting 20 points or so, per turn. My moves, in contrast, go typically like this:

10, 12, 18, 7, 20, 75, 10.

In other words, I'm screwing around, playing shitty words, waiting for a bingo, and by the time I play one I'm 120 points behind and the bingo just closes the gap somewhat. I need to focus less on always saving up for the bingo and more on scoring each and every turn.

I can do that. I know I can.

Here's my revised goal:

The Bahrain tournament in early June--the Gulf Open--has a certain number of slots per country. The UAE gets seven slots. So the twenty or so players in the UAE will have a tournament in March to qualify for the Gulf Open. Am I in the top seven now? Ha! Not even the top fifteen. Can I be by then. I think so. I think so. I think I can.

Good Day

2003-10-13T14:18:00.000+04:00

Today is a good day.

First, my DSL connection is repaired. It went down yesterday, and I expected problems for days, but Etisalat came and fired me up this morning. For me, having computer problems of any sort is a serious bummer, and having them fixed results in some serious elation.

Second, Scrabble is tonight, and that's good.

Third, today is the start of the draft for one of my two fantasy basketball leagues. I adore the draft, and am EXTREMELY excited to get it rolling.

Finally, we got the official word today that we've got a dog on the way. We did a lot of research, and ultimately settled on a Great Dane, and we found a breeder in the U.K. that we liked a lot. The puppies were born three days ago, and so we'll get the dog--henceforth, Apollo--in December or January.

Why a Great Dane? Because we wanted a huge dog (averaging 32 inches at the shoulder, and males can be 180 to 200 pounds), and the Great Dane personality is exactly what we're looking for. Plus they are couch potatoes most of the time while also being capable of some activity, like running and swimming and intimidating the locals. Apollo is a blue Dane--a rare color. Blue Danes range from a dark gray to a slate-like color, and can be quite similar to a Weimeraner (which you know, even if you don't know the name--they're the dogs in all those Wegman photos).

I can't wait. It's going to be chaotic for a while once Apollo arrives, but we've got two kids, so how much crazier can it be?

2003-10-09T15:20:00.000+04:00

I'm keeping it brief today, despite all sorts of political insanity I'd like to write about. But my Scrabble tournament is tomorrow, and I must prepare.

So I will simply recommend that you look at this site:

http://www.herobuilders.com/

It is fantastic. The "DOA Uday Action Figure" is the best. Thanks to Paul Hayes.

2003-10-08T17:20:00.000+04:00

Wow--even the Weekly Standard is digging into the Plame affair. Here's the key part of William Kristol's article.

"Revealing the identity of covert CIA agents is a crime under certain circumstances. But given the strict stipulations of the relevant statute, it seems unlikely that the Justice Department investigation will ever lead to a successful prosecution of the leaker or leakers. That doesn't make the political reality or the moral responsibility any less urgent. Surely the president has, as the Washington Times suggested last week, taken "too passive a stance" toward this misdeed by one or more of his employees. Surely he should do his utmost to restore the White House's reputation for honor and integrity by calling together the dozens of more-or-less "senior" administration officials and asking whoever spoke with Novak to come forward and explain themselves. Presumably the relevant officials--absent some remarkable explanation that's hard to conceive--should be fired, and their names given to the Justice Department. The president might also want to call Mrs. Wilson, who is after all a government official serving her country, and apologize for the damage done to her by his subordinate's action. "

Of course, the sycophantic William Kristol can't stop himself from a random, unexplained dig on Dems at the beginning of the article, but at least he agrees the Bush Administration is in a major crisis.

Arnold

2003-10-08T13:35:00.000+04:00

Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California, and Jesse Ventura is the ex-governor of Minnesota, it seems that the nefarious plan to make governors of the entire cast of “Predator” is now in effect. Carl Weathers will be the next governor of New York, and soon the big Indian guy will sit in the statehouse in Arizona, and even the El Salvadoran refugee woman will run in Ohio.

How did this happen? Arnold is a boorish cretin who has literally nothing to recommend him for the governorship of the largest state. Leaving aside--and it is a huge aside--the question of Arnold’s sickening behavior toward women, what has he said that makes anyone believe that he can fix California’s problems?

The answer, obviously, is nothing. During his campaign he made no promises about where he would cut spending to fix the state’s debt, though he did make a lot of jokes about his movies, and he complained a lot about taxes. He won because people liked “Last Action Hero” more than they did Cruz Bustamante.

Here are my conclusions based on Schwarzenegger’s victory:

1. People don’t give a damn. They really don’t. Because Schwarzenegger has no qualifications for this office, but won anyway. The other possibility is that they give a damn but are interminably stupid, but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know which is worse.

2. Republicans are simultaneously far, far more willing to fall in line. Much of the right is repelled by Schwarzenegger’s politics on social issues, and the ones who actually have the “traditional values” they espouse (as opposed to those who say they do, but only for political expediency) were turned off by Schwarzenegger’s jackassery. But they voted for him anyway, because they value pragmatism over idealism, which is why they win when they should be the minority.

3. Right-wingers have exposed themselves, in supporting Arnold, as the biggest fucking hypocrites on earth. The argument made by Andrew Sullivan and others that Arnold is no worse than Clinton is simple-minded and repellent. Clinton is a horny bastard, but Arnold seems to be actually dangerous to women. Beyond that, even equivocating that “he’s no worse than Clinton” doesn’t address the fact that all sorts of pious, self-righteous “family values” assholes came out of the woodwork to condemn Clinton. Now they’ve pulled the trigger for Arnold.

Still, I don’t think this is a harbinger of anything. Nate Dintenfass called my attention to this blog, which argues that this is the beginning of the end of the two-party system, because Arnold is a true centrist. What garbage. They said the same thing about Jesse Ventura, right? All this means is that in the weirdest political scenario I can remember, Californians voted for an action-movie superstar over a terrible Democratic governor and his robotic lieutenant. It’s not a victory for the real right, because Arnold is not part of the right, and it’s not going to help Bush (or hurt him) at all, I imagine. If anything, it could damage Republicans because now they’re obligated to put a terrible actor with serious women issues front and center at the convention next year.

But Californians have to live with it. Shame. These are dark days in America.

Scrabble Journal, Part Five

2003-10-07T12:49:00.000+04:00

I won another game last night, on the strength of three solid bingos, including AMBLING, GUNNIES, and SLACKEN. It felt good. Of course, I lost the other three games. But it was good to win, because I hadn't won in three weeks since that first giddy victory.

I'll save a lot of blow-by-blow, because there is a tournament Friday. Several players (all Indians) from the Oman and Bahrain Scrabble clubs are coming to Dubai to play, so there will be fifteen players and seven or eight games. I hope to win 25%. A modest goal. I'll tell you about it when it happens.

During a respite last night, I perused the Scrabble dictionary--the International Word List has a lot of insanity. The following are words:

HOMEYNESS
HODADDIES
SUPERPIMP

Unfortunately, BLINGBLING is not good, and even BLING is not good. Neither is BEEYATCH.

SEXLESSLY is my new favorite adverb. "How's your life, Mac?" "Not bad, but I'm definitely living sexlessly."

SHITHEAD and SHITHOLE are good, but SHITFACED is not good. How can this be?

FUCKUPS is good, but FUCKHEAD and FUCKFACE are not.

And, best of all, the list of words that use the prefix SUPER is just beyond the pale.

SUPERBAD
SUPERCOOL
SUPERCUTE
SUPERFIRM
SUPERGOOD
SUPERJOCK
SUPERMOM
SUPERPIMP
SUPERSEX
SUPERSTUD
SUPERWAIF
SUPERWIFE

"Superwaif"? Only to be used by the ultraskinny.

Cotton Candy

2003-10-07T12:43:00.000+04:00

Note to parents or would-be parents:

If you are in a kiddie play-type place with, say, ten or fifteen children under age four, and it's mostly a place for kids to run and scream and climb, then you have certain responsibilities. Two stand out:

1. You are to prevent your children from hitting other kids.

2. No matter how much your kid whines, you are not to purchase any kind of candy from the counter, unless you are leaving right at that moment or unless you want buy some for everyone.

If your plan is to buy a gigantic roll of cotton candy and give it to your daughter while she stands in the middle of a huge circle of wide-eyed children, who no longer want to play at all, but rather exist only to beg their parents for their own cotton candy, then you have violated your oath as a parent, and you will burn in hell.

October

2003-10-05T22:38:00.000+04:00

October is my favorite month. It always has been. It’s such a nice time, as the trees change and summer is really, truly over, but winter has not yet reared its ugly head. Back in the day, I felt like school wasn’t old yet, and the debate season was just starting, and winter clothes were coming out--but not the big coats yet. Now it’s exciting because of the weather shift and the upcoming holidays and the start of basketball season. Beyond that, though, there’s an undeniable feel to October. It’s a month of transition.

It’s been October for five days now. I knew this, factually. But I had a really jarring moment today when I looked at the calendar. It hadn’t fully registered, to be honest. It wasn’t October in my head. My confusion was entirely about the weather, really; when I close my eyes I can see all my best friends in Minnesota wearing sweaters. It was over 100 degrees here today. It’s hard to get into the fall season when it’s still too hot to exercise outside.

And it made me a little sad. I had one of those moments that I have occasionally, when I feel like the life that we’ve chosen as a family has some really serious downsides.

Every choice, no matter how trivial, has its downsides. And most have upsides. The upsides to our life overseas in the Middle East are dramatic and undeniable--an interesting life for us and our children, exposure to different cultures and landscapes and experiences, good schools, cheap living, intrigue and excitement. I am aware of these at all times, and I am thankful.

Nevertheless, at unexpected times I become acutely aware of downsides which are, as a rule, not dominant in my thoughts. Today it was a conscious awareness of missing seasons that made me sad--not so much because I crave fall weather, though that is a small part of it. Rather, the weather highlighted the feeling of uprootedness that comes from eschewing the familiarity of seasonal change and the emotional, physical, and social elements that go along with that The incongruity between the word “October” on my calendar and the realities of life in the United Arab Emirates seemed, suddenly, very stark.

I was reminded that I don’t know this world. In my world, October nights are cool, and fall is coming and it’s great. This may be my life, and I definitely like it. But it’s not my world. The distinction is important. My life is great, and my world is great, and today I found myself really looking forward to the time when the two are the same again.

This, too, shall pass, of course. A short message, though, to those of you who mean the most to me, as you begin to see your breath in the air at night: I’m thinking of you.

Oh, Wesley!

2003-10-01T21:28:00.000+04:00

My schoolgirl crush on Wesley Clark has deepened into an unrequited love affair after reading the interview today on Talking Points Memo.

On the Ground In Iraq

2003-10-01T13:58:00.000+04:00

There's been a lot of talk in the media about the conditions in Iraq, and a lot of hyperventilation on all sides. To choose two of the more appalling examples, consider this quote from renowned conservative actor, Bruce Willis, which I'm stealing from Altercation, which in turn came from the BBC:

Bruce "Sixth Sense" Willis Can Sense Iraqi Public Opinion from His Helicopter
Actor Bruce Willis has performed before US soldiers in Telafar, northern Iraq, and offered $1m to the man who captures Saddam Hussein... "Peculiar thing back home is that the liberal media was trying to portray it as a bad war. But being over here just a couple of days, seeing how well our troops and the allied troops are being received here, (I) think the Iraqi people are happy we're here," the Hollywood star said... But the star later admitted he had not met many Iraqis because he had been travelling the country by helicopter.

I love the headline. Hilarious.

And, there's this atrocity: Georgia Representative--a Democrat, for God's sake--wrote an article for the Atlanta Journal Constitution last week in which he said, literally, that the media's coverage of events in Iraq is responsible for the deaths of troops in Iraq, by emboldening the enemy and dispiriting troops. Here:

We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media. I'm afraid it is killing our troops.

Of course, I had actually assumed that the conditions on the ground probably aren't really as bad as it seems, and despite incredible cronyism and a stupid war plan, that things were coming under control. Both sides were at fault, or so I thought.

Not any more.

What follows is a security report done by Centurion Risk Assessment Services, in September, evaluating the situation in Iraq for aid agencies and the USG. It's long as hell, so I've edited it down, as you'll see with the ellipses. I've put in italics the sections that are particularly shocking, so if you don't want to read the whole damned thing, just check for italics.

GENERAL
...The situation over the last week has changed due to the threat against Westerners and all associated with them. Shops have been closing earlier due to the ongoing threat of bombs against Westerners.
Aid agencies are withdrawing from Iraq due to security implications. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has withdrawn its foreign staff. Oxfam cited the deteriorating security situation and stated that the level of risk had become unacceptable and the current climate prevented it from operating. An Oxfam spokesperson also referred to a blurring of the distinction between coalition forces and humanitarian operations in the country. This blurring could present a significant increase in the threat profile for those organisations. Attackers are still selecting "soft targets", and if an organisation or individual is found to have any connection with coalition forces they are more likely to become a target.
A number of NGOs are believed to be reviewing their security arrangements along with the majority of media organisations. Organisations such as media, NGOs and aid agencies are being advised to ensure their vehicles and equipment do not look similar to anything the military are using.
The whole place is very tense at the moment.

KIDNAPPINGS
There is an increase in kidnappings and ransom threats reported throughout Iraq. Forty reported kidnap incidents have occurred in the last three months. Kidnappers are believed to be former regime security and intelligence personnel who have been targeting wealthy families for large sums of money. Victims have reported that they have been tortured and families warned that if they do not come up with the ransom the victim will be executed.
The actual number of kidnappings is likely to be far higher than reported. Only Iraqi families have been reported to be targeted to date. There are, however, sufficient precedents in such circumstances for this threat to be taken seriously by all organisations operating in Iraq. International organisations, whether commercial or business, are likely to be seen as potential targets due to the relative wealth involved or back-up services being provided. It is therefore worth remembering that personnel not presenting a good security presence could be targeted.

As always, vary routes, timings and locations to reduce the threat of being an easy target and ensure you have essential security in place. All buildings used by the said organisations should ensure security is of the highest grade from local guards to external advisors.

CIVIL DISTURBANCES / PUBLIC DEMONSTRATIONS
There has been an increase in these incidents from the north to the south of Iraq. Coalition forces are advising media, NGOs and aid agency personnel to adhere to all of their recommendations, orders and instructions concerning these. Failure to do so could result in injury or death due to potential crossfire, isolated attacks, and the crowd becoming out of control and attacking Westerners or anyone who does not fit in.
As an example, three personnel from a UK-based newspaper and a US newspaper were told by police to stay away from mourners for their own safety, as the mourners were in a very angry mood. The three people ignored this advice and had to be rescued from the crowd by the same policemen.
Two camera crews were pushed, harassed and hit in the crowds in Najaf.
...

CONVOY VEHICLE SECURITY
The road from Baghdad to Amman is still very dangerous with rising numbers of robberies every day happening mostly between 0600-0800hrs. A few attacks occurring in the early evening have also been reported.
The bandits are targeting individual vehicles whether they appear to be Western or Iraqi.
Reports from our advisors say that the attackers are men on motorbikes using satellite phones to coordinate the attacks.
Some media organisations are now using the route in and out of Turkey (Harbur), just to avoid the road from Baghdad to Amman due to the increase in attacks.
The attackers are using more vehicles and becoming more organised as the days pass.
...

IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices)
IEDs have been found attached to 155mm or 130mm shells, and fuses have been attached. Attackers light the fuse and run. If the shell doesnâ€™t explode, they come back and set it up again, ready for the next target. There are numerous IEDâ€™s found on a daily basis. Be aawre and observant. (Refer to past reports on www.themediasafetynet and www.aidsafety.net

...

HOTELS
Continued threats exist against the Palestine Hotel and the Sheraton Hotel, mainly due to the security in force with the US and the number of Westerners staying there.

OTHER INCIDENTS
Iraqi terrorists are using closed schools for training and target practice inside.
Civilian vehicles are being targeted as uniformed personnel were seen inside a couple over the last week.
A UK TV organisationâ€™s crew had a grenade threat against them. They are thinking of moving.
Workers involved in the rebuilding in Iraq have been openly threatened and may be moving out or to other locations until security improves.
Karbula and Bakuva came under mortar fire.
The atmosphere in Kurdish areas, where the people are all very much pro-coalition forces, is completely different from Baghdad. The main problem is the fact that Ansar al-Islam members are entering the country through the mountains from Iran.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
The following is an excerpt from a letter sent to the US Consul in Baghdad. The writer asked that his experience be shared:

I had some trouble when I left Baghdad, not necessarily life threatening, but I canâ€™t know for sure because I escaped. However, others (non American) in my group experienced a life threatening situation in Basra. I thought I would bring these two unfortunate events to your attention so everyone understands that even travel in a caravan (convoy) is dangerous.
A week earlier I came from Dubai to Umm Qasr by ferry boat, and then by car through Basra to Baghdad. I was in a party of six; four Romanians, one Iraqi-Romanian and myself. While we were in Baghdad, I felt safe, despite sniper fire during the nights. Persons blew up a telecommunications centre and the Jordanian Embassy while I was there, but for some reason I still felt safe. Stupidity combined with denial, I guess. I spent a busy week in Baghdad and when it came time to leave, I decided to drive due west to the airport in Amman, Jordan, rather than face the slow boat back to Dubai. The drive due south to Umm Qasr and the boat was six hours through Basra, then a three day boat trip to Dubai depending on the condition of the engines. In fact, the boat trip took 5 days for some of my friends more on that later. The alternative route through Amman meant that I could be back in my office in Bucharest in just one to one and half days.
I decided to hire a car and a driver for the 14 hour drive to Jordan. I was picked up at the Palestine Hotel at 0500hrs. On the edge of Baghdad we joined others and formed a caravan (convoy) of seven GMC Suburbans. I did not know my fellow travellers, I was alone in my car with my driver. We sped along at 170-180km/h because the highway was similar to an autobahn in Germany. Six lanes in total (3 each way in perfect condition), guard rails on all sides and doubled in the middle. As will become apparent, the modern guard rails penned the cars to one side of the road. There were hundreds of kilometres of fencing to keep animals off the highway, but most of it had been stolen.
An hour outside of Baghdad, my driver awoke me and started telling me a story about Ali Baba. In my profound ignorance, I thought I was being given a history lesson from 1001 Arabian Nights perhaps because we were geographically close to some important spot. Five minutes later, I knew what he really meant. Two (perhaps more, I couldn't see) bandits with machine guns blocked the road, and all seven cars began fishtailing all over the highway. I thought we were going to end up in a huge pile up. I was in the sixth vehicle in this convoy. I later learnt that the generic Ali Baba meant "bandit."
My driver was terrific. Somehow, we avoided a high speed crash into the others. As soon as stopped, he put the vehicle in reverse and drove at a maximum speed backwards for at least 3km. I thought the engine was going to seize. The driver finally spun the car around and we sped off at high speed on the wrong side of the highway for about 20-30km facing oncoming trucks. I asked why we were continuing at such a high rate of speed. He said he was afraid that some of the bandits might chase us. I was beginning to understand. As it turned out, my driver left his brother, another driver in one of the five cars captured by the bandits. We later heard at a gas stop that the bandits took luggage, passports, money, computers, everything from the last five cars in the convoy. Only the 6th car (mine) and 7th car managed to escape. One man who was travelling with his daughter foolishly told the bandits that he had no money, the bandits said, OK, weâ€™ll take your daughter instead. Allegedly the man then turned over USD5,000.
We also heard that in a convoy two hours earlier than ours, two armed guards in the lead vehicle were killed by the bandits, because they tried to resist. The bloody car was allegedly returned to Baghdad with the bodies. Apparently, my driver learned of this before our convoy left. Perhaps this is why he was so nervous and prepared when we encountered the bandits. Unfortunately, I knew none of this before we left Baghdad. I made it safely to Jordan but I had to wait in 50-55 degree C heat at the Iraqi-Jordanian border for 3 hours. It was unbearable, especially for old women in black robes and babies that looked half dead slumped (asleep, unconscious?) in their mother's arms. Brutal. No care for humanity. My impression of Jordan went down several notches, but these are very difficult and dangerous times.
Despite all of this I was lucky. The other five people in my group decided that the trip to Amman was too dangerous and decided to go south to Umm Qasr through Basra instead. Somehow, they got into a traffic jam in Basra surrounded by a crowd of angry Iraqis. There was a British skirmish earlier in the day that left two Iraqis dead and Iraqis wounded at the hands of British troops. Things got out of hand, and the British abandoned the city until things cooled down. One in five of my initial group is an Iraqi national who has been living in Bucharest for the past 24 years. In fact he was visiting his family for the first time after this long period. He speaks Arabic fluently. Ultimately he saved their lives.
A crowd of 70 men surrounded their car shouting, "Kill the British!" The Iraqi got out of the car and tried to calm the crowd, unfortunately, one of the Romanian nationals also got out of the car and tried to use his satellite telephone. Someone in the crowd seized the phone. The Romanian misunderstood the situation and began shouting at the Iraqi who took it. The Romanian-Iraqi told him to shut up because he was trying to save all their lives. In the end, they turned over money and their driver abandoned them on the street after telling the crowd to shoot them because he had no interest in them.
They managed to obtain another car to take them to the port, but only after they suspected that the driver was about to deliver them somewhere else. They forced him to turn around and go to Umm Qasr. It was very tense, they then spent 5 days on the Arabian Sea sailing to Dubai because, indeed, one of the engines was dead. There was trouble with the engine when we travelled from Dubai to Umm Qasr.
If the Romanians didn't have the Iraqi with them, they would all be dead (in the opinion of the Romanian-Iraqi). Imagine if I was travelling with them as an American! Like I said, I was lucky. I won't go back in Baghdad until I can be assured of a flight direct into the city.
No-one should underestimate the danger on the roads. You may tell my story to the town meeting if you wish. American bravado and a misplaced sense of vulnerability have no place in today, Iraq.
A few other observations from my trip:
The Iraqis I met were all educated, polite, under pressure and dedicated to the cause of reform. They were friendly towards Americans and British and believed that the media was not balanced in reporting their true feelings. Despite their education and worldliness, extreme religious prejudice is everywhere, it is a powder keg.The heat was unbelievable, I can't understand how our young men and women in uniform can endure, let alone function with their battle gear.
I witnessed a middle class Iraq.
Shop keepers were polite and engaging even if you bought nothing. The market is meeting the demand, for example, I found obscure computer cables that I could not find in Bucharest. The shops are full of goods.
Cash is king, credit cards are useless and banks do not exist.

SUMMARY
It is easy to offer advice not to travel to Iraq due to the increase in violence and attacks; however, we have to remain realistic.
If operating or planning to operate in Iraq it is strongly advised:
- To review all security measures.
- Increase the security advisor personnel.
- Reduce the similarities between your equipment and any that coalition forces may be using.
- Give all staff a thorough security briefing.
- Employ a professional security advisor to travel with individuals and groups to locations in Iraq.
- Employ an advisor to coordinate all security, emergency plans, etc.
- A security plan including emergency evacuation plan should be in force.
- Establish good communications including a base station to improve distance and clarity.
- Essential individual and group first aid kits need to be purchased and ensure all know how to use contents.

The number of threats to Westerners is of growing concern. Some media companies, aid agencies and businesses are still operating in Iraq without any safety and security advisors to assist them, inadequate first aid kits and run-down vehicles.

If anyone requires assistance, advisors, security plans, first aid kits, etc please contact Centurion or speak to our advisors on the ground in Iraq.

2003-09-30T20:25:00.000+04:00

Some words on today's developments in the Wilson case.

First of all, if you want to keep up on this thing, you simply must read Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall's work has been superlative.

The response from the White House has been, thus far, pathetic. If you look on TPM, a ways down the page there is the (long) transcript from yesterday's press briefing with White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan is entirely on the defensive the entire time, repeating little more than "The DOJ is looking into the matter." He's particularly weak on this line of questioning, which I'm paraphrasing:

Q: Does the President think this is serious?
A: Very serious.
Q: Would he want these leakers (traitors) to be working for him.
A: No, that's not what we want at the White House.
Q: So why isn't he asking his aides about it or looking into it internally? Isn't the failure to investigate it internally indicative of a lack of interest or at least a hope that no one gets caught?
A: Duh..........

Now, let's talk about the right-wing response to this developing scandal. Thus far, they've said

A) Wilson is a jerk
B) It's no big deal
C) She was out in the open anyway
D) Novak is taking it all back

In order:

A is irrelevant, and is more right-wing sniping. Shifting the discussion. Won't work.

B is offensive beyond measure. Ann Coulter can write an entire book claiming those who question the President are traitors, but people who vindictively endanger national security are not?

C is flat-out not true, as evidenced by the fact that every media source is trying to find out if it's true or not! But even beyond that, the evidence suggests that her position was not known in the circles she particularly needed to remain silent in--her contacts overseas.

D is the one I'm hearing the most often. Novak, on crossfire, said this (apologies to Talking Points Memo for lifting this, but I'm not sure all my readers will head over there):

"Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. "

I've seen several references to this from conservative sources from Limbaugh to Andrew Sullivan. Unfortunately for Novak (who, I must say, I am feeling increasingly uncharitable towards--his disclosure of the names in print is indefensible), TPM also notes this quote from the esteemed conservative jackass on July 22 in Newsday:

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Uh...

And beyond that, the most damning argument against Novak's takeback is that Time.com published the same information on July 17. That really does a lot to prove that the senior official who talked about this was telling the truth. Here's the money shot from the Time.com article:

And some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Uh-oh.

Fudge all you like, but here are the facts: someone broke the law and committed treason. The White House can blame someone specific and get over it, or they can cover it up and reap the whirlwind. Because this thing is big and getting bigger.

Next question: will Ashcroft, as a political appointee, have the moral strength to recuse himself from the investigation because of obvious conflict of interest? I'm sure that as God-fearing, fire-and-brimstone evangelical Christian, the answer is definitely no fucking way.

Treason

2003-09-28T14:52:00.000+04:00

Most of my readers (that I know of) are pretty politically aware and up on what's happening on the news. Still, I've had several readers tell me that they hear about stories or political shenanigans or whatever else by reading Hyperbole. In that light, I thought I'd lay out the details of a story that is steadily gaining steam and is, by my estimation, a very big deal. Many of my readers will know about this, and if that's you, bear with me.

If this is new to you, listen up:

The CIA has made a formal request for a Justice Department investigation into allegations that senior officials of the Bush Administration released to the press the name of a covert intelligence officer. This is a federal crime.

Background: Everyone probably knows at least a little bit about the uranium/WMD/Iraq scandal--Bush, in the State of the Union, made reference to an attempt by Saddam to purchase nuclear materials from Niger. It turns out that the intelligence was at best flawed and at worst forged. Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger by the Bush Administration to investigate the truth of the story. He came back and said that there was no truth to the allegation that Saddam was involved in this so-called deal in any way. He went public, and he also was a commonly heard voice in the furor about intelligence manipulation in the run-up to the war. So he really pissed some people off in the Bush Administration.

Got it? Joseph Wilson pissed off Bush and company. That's the key so far.

A couple of months ago, Robert Novak, conservative columnist for the Washington Post and absolutely omnipresent figure on CNN, wrote a story in which he quoted "senior administration officials" who told him that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer working on counterproliferation in Africa, and that she got Wilson the job investigating the Niger story.

Now, let's stop and talk about this.

First of all, it should seem apparent to anyone that revealing the name--in the Washington Post, no less--of the name of an undercover CIA officer is a profoundly irresponsible, gross, and absolutely antipatriotic act. The point of what I'm writing here is not to blame Robert Novak. Nevertheless, I want to simply point out that even though he was given this information by members of the Administration, he is a major-league asshole for writing it. Big time.

Second--let's clarify why this is a big deal. Valerie Plame, as an intelligence officer, probably had a lot of contacts whose very lives depended on secrecy. Let's try an example. Imagine, for a moment, that Saddam Hussein had actually had a weapons program. If Plame had found an Iraqi willing to talk to her about what he knew, it would have been of foremost importance that no one else know that he's talking to her. If Saddam, for instance, discovered that one of his people had been talking to a US undercover officer, he would have that man tortured and killed. And you can simply insert "Kim Jong Il" for Saddam, or "Iran" for "Iraq", or whatever. The point is that now anyone Valerie Plame ever had professional relationships with is now, potentially, a dead man, because now her job and identity are globally known.

And beyond the lives of those whom she worked with, her career is over. And any work that she had done (or would have done) to make the US safer is now either at risk or ended. Nice job, Novak, you hypocritical fuck.

Third, this is flat out a violation of the law--federal law prohibits the disclosing of the identity of covert intelligence officials.

The story died down a bit, but it's about to get big, or at least it should. The CIA investigated the matter and decided to call upon the DOJ to investigate the charges, formally. One of the critical developments is that another senior administration official has come forth to acknowledge that two members of the Administration did, indeed, tell six reporters (including Novak) about Valerie Plame. This, according to that official, was revenge on Wilson, and an attempt to send a message to others who might not toe the party line. Ironically, he refused to name names, but previous stories had alleged that Wilson believed the accountable party was none other than one Karl Rove. If true, this is a scandal of untold proportions. But that is still an allegation.

You can read more about the details of this here and here.

Now it's up to the Department of Justice and, notably, John Ashcroft to decide how far to push an investigation. And let me weigh in here.

I want to be careful to say that, so far, there is absolutely no reason to indict the President or the administration as a whole for this, beyond their culpability in creating a culture of secrecy and hostility towards those who do not hold their beliefs.

But I emphasize SO FAR. Why? Because you know, I know, and the American people know that John Ashcroft is likely to kill this thing, counting on the American people to ignore it. These are serious, serious, allegations. The failure to fully investigate the matter, publicly, would be a travesty among travesties for this Administration. Covering this up would, in my mind, be justification for bringing the full weight of the Constitution on the heads of those who would flout it. High crimes and misdemeanors, indeed.

Perhaps Ashcroft will surprise me.

The act of these two idiots who chose to "get Wilson back" by revealing Plame's name is despicable beyond measure. From a group of people who claims to have America's interests at heart, they endangered the lives of many and, at least in a small way, endangered our national security by revealing the names of a covert operative. They broke federal law and hurt our country for partisan self-interest.

I ask you: if that is not treason, then what is?

Mother Goose

2003-09-25T16:00:00.000+04:00

I've written before, on my old Salon blog, about children's literature. Some of it is terrible, and some of it is great. I'll avoid repetition here, but I must make on quick comment: Go to hell, Madonna. You may be a badass and a real talent, but being a mother does not make you a children's writer. You and Jamie Lee Curtis and John Lithgow and every other "I'm a celebrity and I'm a parent, therefore I am a good writer" jackasses can all shove it.

But that's not the point of this piece. The point of this piece is as follows: Mother Goose Sucks.

I've been reading Mother Goose for a long while--in fact, we have the precise copy of "The Real Mother Goose" that my sister and I grew up reading. Mercedes and Reeve have a whole lot of different versions of Mother Goose. Largely, this is because Melissa's family, bless them, has a lot of British connections, and the Brits seemingly sit around and read Mother Goose to each other all day long, so they're all falling all over each other to buy copies of Mother Goose and give them to us. Melissa herself rather enjoys the MG, and has requested that I make note of her objections to this piece of writing. Duly noted.

So while I have family who loves Mother Goose, this does little to dilute my hatred for Mother Goose. I'm not sure I always disliked it, but now that I'm required by British law to read MG to Mercedes, I resent the hell out of it.

Why?

For one thing, it's riddled with references to British names and cities that would make Charles Dickens wince. I don't give a damn about Reigate, Pippen Hill, St. Ives, Belleisle, Derby, Banbury Cross, Exeter, Kilkenny, Gotham, Piccadilly, or any of the rest of it. Who cares? I understand if you live on the British Isles, but unless you're a certified Anglophile, you don't give a shit about The Old Man of Glo'ster.

Second of all, Mother Goose rhymes are dumb. "It's nonsense rhyme, you jerk," the Defenders of Mother Goose (DMG) will say. "Nonsense is supposed to be dumb." Yeah? Thanks for proving my point. Consider this:

Barber, barber, shave a pig
How many hairs will make a wig?
Four and twenty, that's enough.
Give the barber a pinch of snuff.

Shave a pig? Pinch of snuff? Give me a break. You see, I can appreciate silliness. I'm silly. And if silliness makes my daughters laugh, great. But the line between silly and stupid is thin. MG is always on the stupid side of the line.

Or this one:

Great A, little a,
This is pancake day;
Toss the ball high,
Throw the ball low,
Those that come after
May sing heigh-ho!

If this is some alphabet song, maybe it would be good to teach children the other twenty-five letters. Or, perhaps, to use a word other than "pancake" to demonstrate the letter "A".

I understand that language changes. These were probably terrific fun to the soot-covered street urchins of London, circa 1754. I'm sure that, even today, Cockney chimney sweeps the world over read

Master I have, and I am his man,
Gallop a dreary dun;
Master I have, and I am his man,
And I'll get a wife as fast as I can;
With a heighty gaily gamberally,
Higgledy piggledy, niggledy, niggledy,
Gallop a dreary dun.

And then they laugh uproariously while eating shepherd's pie and drinking a wee pint, top hats charmingly askew.

Finally, I object to the use of the words "pussy" and "cock" repeatedly in Mother Goose rhymes. The DMG will say "Oh, but those words don't have to be dirty! People used to talk like that all the time to refer to cats and roosters."

Yes, they did talk like that, but then Chester Arthur was elected President, and everything changed. And if you think that "cat" and "rooster" are the primary meanings of those words now, then why don't you think about that while you smoke a fag or two in the corner.

Am I supposed to feel comfortable sitting down with my two-year old and reading:

I like little pussy,
Her coat is so warm,
And if I don't hurt her
She'll do me no harm;
So I'll not pull her tail,
Nor driver her away,
But pussy and I
very gently will play.

What is this, Hustler Goose? Or is it Mother Goose's half-wit stepsister, Motherfucker Goose?

This rhyme is even worse:

Oh my pretty cock, oh my handsome cock....

Jesus, I can't even finish that one. Who needs to?

Scrabble Journal, Part Four

2003-09-24T10:51:00.000+04:00

I was sick Monday night, but went to Scrabble anyway. I played poorly, because I felt like a turd, and so I lost four games. Two quite badly. Of course, in one of those games my far-superior opponent drew all four S's, both blanks, and the J, X, and Z, so what the hell. Despite last week's success, it's not like I expect to win these games, and it definitely was not an ideal setting.

Highlights: I made two spectacular plays. LEONINE for 70-something points, and RUDER on a triple word score under the word EMOTE, forming five two-letter words--RE, UM, DO, ET, RE. I felt good about that. But only for about five seconds, because I was at that point down by 150 points. C'est la vie.

I just finished re-reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. It's an insider's account of competitive Scrabble--Fatsis decided to write about it, got hooked, and became quite a good player. It's a terrific read, which I highly recommend to any, even non-Scrabble types.

Reading it again in this context had two different effects on me. First, I was encouraged, because the book covers over two years of study and play for Fatsis, and it took him that long to really get good. Second, I was totally discouraged, because he talks about words he played in games and plays he saw, and it's all totally foreign to me, still, despite massive improvement in a few weeks.

And so I'm wondering what my goal is with this Scrabble thing. I'm having fun playing, and I even enjoy the studying. On the other hand, I don't think I have the desire to become a Great Scrabble Player, because I don't want to literally memorize the dictionary, and there are other things I'd like to do with my life. And we're talking about years of study here. So engaging in this task puts me on track for competitive mediocrity. I'm not so good at that.

I'm not struggling with this too much. I'm enjoying the process quite a bit.

I wish I could play more. One problem with working hard on Scrabble now is that I really only have the opportunity for weekly games here, and the games themselves are really what it's about. Melissa will play with me, provided she gets to use the list of two and three letter words. She's pretty good and inevitably getting better. But wife aside, I can't really imagine getting other games with non-competitive players. I'm just no fun to play with anymore if you don't also play competitively. I find myself thinking of Thanksgiving at my grandparents' house, where there are often some living room Scrabble games. I've always won those games, but now it's frankly unthinkable to even get involved. So it's like I have this obsession and thirst, but it can only be slaked once a week.

Study update: I think I've got about 90% of my three-letter words down. There are so many threes it's just crazy--well over 1000 in the SOWPODS dictionary. Of course, this includes CAT and DOG and all the other commons, but it also includes TWP and KIF and ZEK and EAU. I think my favorite three letter word is probably BRR, as in "BRR! It's cold!" Even better, though, BRR can be extended to BRRR, as in "BRRR! It's really fucking cold!"

I'm also working on common six-letter stems. In case you don't know, you get 50 bonus points for using all your tiles--a "bingo" in Scrabble parlance. So games are won and lost on seven and eight letter words. Scrabble geniuses from time immemorial have made various lists, including isolating which sets of six letter are likely to result in the most bingos. So, for example, I have a list for the six letter set AEINTS, also known as SATINE. I know that if I get these common letters on my board, then I can make a bingo with any seventh letter excluding Q and Y. SATINE + A yields either ENTASIA OR TAENIAS. SATINE + R yields ANESTRI, ANTSIER, NASTIER, STAINER, RETAINS, RETINAS, RETSINA, RATINES, RESIANT, STARNIE, or STEARIN. And, my favorite, SATINE + X yields SEXTAIN and ANTISEX.

Try to curb your enthusiasm about this thrilling blow-by-blow of my attempt to memorize as many pointlessly stupid words as possible.

2003-09-24T10:25:00.000+04:00

Salon.com has a somewhat disturbing article today about the Rev. Sun Myung-Moon and his ties to the Bush Administration. This is all quite atrocious, but the best thing about the article is that it links to Moon's description of how sex is supposed to work, which you can--and must--read here. In brief, it starts as a three-day process, woman-on-top, woman-on-top, and then man-on-top to assert his dominance. I'll leave it to you to look, but I'll just let you in on a secret: I intend to try and purchase a Holy Handkerchief.

Bad News, Bad News, Good News

2003-09-23T12:47:00.000+04:00

Reading and political recommendations:

* Strangely, I've been deluged (relatively) of late with articles about electronic voting--optical scan or touch screen technology--which are increasingly taking the place of archaic punch card machines. My sister-in-law sent me this piece from the Moscow Times--it's a bit conspiratorial, since it implicitly blames techno-fraud for big Democrat losses in the Senate, as well as other races. Nevertheless, as Samantha put it, if this is 5% true, it's terrifying.

Additionally, Salon.com has a lead article today (subscribers only) discussing the technology, examining in particular the security lapses--or, perhaps more appropriately, security laziness--of the companies making the tech. They focus most on Diebold, the fastest-growing election technology company. Here's a section of the article:

"Harris has discovered that Diebold's voting software is so flawed that anyone with access to the system's computer can change the votes without leaving any record. On top of that, she's uncovered internal Diebold memos in which employees seem to suggest that the vulnerabilities are no big deal. The memos appear to be authentic -- Diebold even sent Harris a notice warning her that by posting the documents on the Web, she was infringing upon the company's intellectual property. Diebold did not return several calls for comment.

"The problems Harris uncovered are not all that surprising; technologists have been warning of the potential for serious flaws in electronic voting systems -- especially touch-screen systems -- for years. In July, scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice found that security in Diebold's voting software fell "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts." The report prompted Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich to order a review of the Diebold systems used in his state. Many of the world's most highly regarded computer scientists have called on voting companies to build touch-screen systems that print a paper ballot -- a "paper trail" -- in order to reduce the risk of electronic tampering."

Harris, FYI, is Bev Harris, is a writer who has been working on this for some time, and apparently has been dubbed the "Erin Brockovich of elections."

The more conspiratorial element of Salon's article focuses upon some of the same things as the Moscow Times article--apparently, Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, "is a major fundraiser for President Bush. In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he was 'COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR.'"

I don't know about fixing elections. That's a big accusation, particularly for the presidency. But can anyone possibly argue that it's not absolutely inappropriate and revolting for the CEO of the biggest election tech company to be outwardly discussing his political dedication to George Bush? It's more likely that this demonstrates that he is an idiot, rather than a totalitarian, but it's off-putting and scary. Read the article if you're a subscriber, and if you're not, you're insane.

*Apparently, John Ashcroft is working really, really hard to make sure we get some of that old-time code of Hammurabi. Ashcroft is limiting plea-bargains by his federal prosecutors, trying to make sure that maximum sentences are applied uniformly. This includes the death penalty.

Short rant: John Ashcroft is despicable. He is stupid. Absolutely stupid. I can recall reading that he eschews newspapers altogether, preferring to read the Bible and write his own songs, apparently. His slavish devotion to an inherently flawed system for administering the death penalty in as many cases as the law allows is an embarrassment to the entire country. Maybe instead of anointing himself with oil every time he needs God's guidance, he should try some educational reading or even thinking. Jackass. Just a jackass. I hate him. H-A-T-E H-I-M.

*Despite an inexplicably bad start, Wesley Clark barely beats George Bush head-to-head, according to a CNN-USA Today poll. He's the leading Democrat. There's a Democrat debate Thursday night, and it's a big moment for Clark. If he can get it together, know his issues, and kill in the debate, I'll be ready to proclaim him the winner. Unless the machines steal it. But we'll see. I'll write more on this later in the week.

2003-09-22T14:34:00.000+04:00

I'm a bit sick today, so my plans to write a longer political piece have been short-circuited. Bear with me for a day or two.

This is killing my workout schedule; I'm training for a triathlon, to be done in February. It's a long training schedule, but I'm suffering quite a bit from not working out during all the moving and such this summer. Definitely in the worst shape I've been in for some years.

I'm doing OK so far on the biking, the running is very familiar to me. But let me tell you: swimming if really goddamned hard. I enjoy it immensely--swimming is still primarily associated as a fun activity. "Hey everybody, let's go swimming!" would not create derision like "Hey everybody, let's run!"

To be honest, I'd always thought of swimming as the easiest leg of the triathlon. No more. The thought of the Ironman triathletes swimming for 2.2 miles in the open ocean in Hawaii is enough to make me throwup on the spot.

Nothing like that here: 750 meter swim, 30K ride, 10K run. I can do it, or at least I'll be able to by then. Of this I have no doubt. Slowly, but so what?

You'll hear too much about it in this space over the next few months.

Of my twin obsessions, which do you think I'm more likely to excel at? Scrabble or Triathloning?

If you don't know the answer to that one, you are clearly as dumb as a dzo.

Mosque visit

2003-09-19T19:43:00.000+04:00

Yesterday, Melissa and I took a tour of one of the larger mosques in Dubai. I hadn't been inside a mosque before, though I have visited some very large ones in Tunisia.

It was an interesting experience. I expected that we would spend more time being shown around the building, looking at different parts of the mosque. Instead, we just sat down and listened to the guide--an Emirati named Abdullah, who is in charge of a Dubai program called "Open Doors, Open Minds".

Physically, the mosque was nice--simple but very attractive on the outside, with a couple of tall minarets and a dome. Mosques here are not garishly designed at all--the outside is generally very simple, sort of an earth-color with little by way of real decoration. Inside there were more colored tiles and paint on the ceiling, but it's still not a wildly decorated place--nothing like the bloody crucifixes and paintings of saints dying in grotesque ways that one can find in a Catholic cathedral. The inside is essentially just one huge room, with pillars but no chairs. Muslims sit on the floor, as did we. Unlike anywhere else in Dubai, they have wall-to-wall.

There were a few Americans there, and a lot of Europeans, including a big group of Italians. We started with a fairly grotesque display, in which Abdullah prayed while everyone took pictures. It was embarrassing. "Look at this silly robed man praying to his heathen god!"

Then we all sat down and Abdullah, who was very funny and charming, talked about Islam in the UAE and elsewhere. There was a long Q and A after he spoke for a bit. It was interesting, though I knew a lot of it already, including the Five Pillars of Islam and the details of Ramadan and such. Still, to hear an Arab Muslim talk about his faith and the practice of it was extremely interesting. He wasn't pushy at all, and it certainly wasn't some virulent strain of Wahhabism that he was discussing. It was really quite fascinating.

Several questions were asked regarding the position of women in Islam generally and the UAE specifically. This was the only area where Abdullah's discussion seemed strained; his explanation that women here choose to cover their heads and faces, and that they can choose their husbands freely, was not particularly persuasive. My own cultural baggage, of course, makes it difficult to evaluate these statements objectively. And they may be factually true, that a choice is made by women. But the entire framework of the culture circumscribes that choice--it's the illusion of choice.

Needless to say, I didn't get into this in the mosque.

The other thing that I found particularly notable was the discussion of imams. Imams are, for the lack of a better term, a Muslim priest. They conduct Friday services and provide a sermon.

We have a mosque only about a block from our house. Of course, in any given spot in Dubai, you're pretty darned close to a mosque. On Fridays, we can hear the sermon at our house, because there is a microphone on top of one of the minarets. The sermon is in Arabic, obviously, and I can't understand it. But it always sounds forceful and somewhat angry--some real fire-and-brimstone. Abdullah said that sermons are usually of exactly the type one could expect in a synagogue or a Christian church--the imam talking about being a good model for kids, or not smoking so much, or day-to-day life. This is so obvious, of course, but the mundaneity of it doesn't seem to jibe with my perception of the sermons I hear, which I always assumed to be politically aggressive anti-American jingoism. Clearly, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. So when I heard today's sermon, I thought about it in a totally different light.

Open doors, open minds, indeed.

Pet Peeve Day!

2003-09-17T14:25:00.000+04:00

It's Pet Peeve Day. PPD arrives without warning--you can't just pin down Pet Peeve Day and write it on your calendar. I didn't know today was Pet Peeve Day. But it is!

These are my pet peeves today:

1. People who don't park straight in the parking lot. You know, they just lazily drift into something approximating a parking spot in a crowded lot, with one or two tires hanging over into the other spot. Usually, these people are driving SUVs. Assholes! Are you so important that you can't take the extra two seconds to stay in your own space? Whenever I have a chance to park by these people I will, particularly if I can be to the left of their cars. Because I don't give a damn about my car, I always park as close possible to the offending vehicle so that it is impossible for them to get in and out of their car on the driver's side.

2. Energy drinks. Energy drinks are completely fucking ubiquitous here in the UAE. Apparently, the locals need an energy boost so that they can walk from one cafe to the next for a smoke and a coffee. I drink Red Bull with some frequency because I enjoy the taste, but I've never had any sort of boost in intelligence or strength as a result of it. Whenever I drink Red Bull I test out surges in intelligence and strength by first trying to solve the Rubik's Cube, and then, when that fails, trying to rip it apart with my bare hands. Nothing. Thankfully, I do get surges in charisma and dexterity. Anyway, there are a thousand of these things. Right now I am trying a new one: POWER HORSE. POWER HORSE seems to be made in Austria, and it is unclear if POWER HORSE is actually supposed to be HORSEPOWER. The point here is that while I drink energy drinks, they are annoying. Frankly, the only real benefit is that I used the word TAURINE in a Scrabble game.

3. Europeans who smoke in public. There are a LOT of Europeans who smoke. Most, I'd say, because it's "cool" and "sophisticated." Assholes! You cannot be First World if 75% of your population smokes. You are, at best, 1.5 World. Smoking is not sophisticated. It is stupid. Americans smoke, too, but only in dark corners and while wearing masks because you are properly ashamed.

4. Cookbooks that have unspecific directions. We cook a lot, and I have become spoiled by cookbooks that are precise about how much of a certain ingredient is required. Let me give you an example: "1 clove of garlic" is a stupid goddamned measurement. Some cloves of garlic make a half teaspoon when chopped, and some make a tablespoon. That's a big difference. I am most annoyed by the Moosewood Cookbooks, which I used last night after neglecting them for at least a year. Moosewood is a vegetarian, earthy restaurant with postmodern leanings and a determined relationship with Cooking Choice. Here is a typical recipe:

Coursely chop root vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots, turnips, yams, celery, or whatever you'd like. Add between one clove and two heads of garlic, chopped or whole. Add dill and cloves. Place in a saucepan, a wok, or the microwave. Cook on low heat, or high heat, until vegetables are soft, 5 minutes to 3 hours. Add other spices of your choosing. Pray to Gaia. Serve with love.

Assholes! I will neglect Moosewood for at least one more year before making their goddamned potato-cheese soup again.

5. The IMF. The IMF is meeting here in Dubai right now. As a result, there is major congestion, and I can't go to my spinning class because the club that has it will only let members in, and I may not get any mail for two more weeks because the whole city is so F'd up. Damn it!

6. Joe Lieberman. Shut up, Lieberman. Just shut the hell up.

Clark!

2003-09-17T13:23:00.000+04:00

Meet General Wesley Clark--the 44th President of the United States.

When Clark announces his candidacy today, it will seal this as a terrible day for John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Richard Gephardt, and George W. Bush. The GOP cannot be happy.

Before I talk about Clark's chances, let me just say that the conservative media spin is in: Clark is "testy" and is "disliked" by some of his fellow officers.

Tell me this: if the media is liberal, then why is the first story in the Washington Post regarding Clark's candidacy entirely negative? Nothing at all in this piece about how Clark will impact the race. Rather, all stuff about how he isn't a perfect military officer, and some of his fellows in the military don't like the guy.

OK. Fair enough. These things should come out, and will anyway, and should be explored. But you watch--similar to the "Gore is a liar" theme of the broader media, "Clark has pissed off some people" will take over the coverage. The tone has been set. You watch. Media pricks. It makes me angry--of course he's pissed people off! Everyone at that level of power--Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, for God's sake--pisses somebody off. You think GWB didn't piss people off in Texas? Was that the dominant theme of the media? Uh, no.

I'm mad, because I have a schoolgirl crush on Wesley Clark.

Beyond that, here's how I see things:

I am entirely dismissive of the concerns that Clark can't raise the money or the interest to get in. For one thing, he evidently has Clinton's backing (if you're not a Salon.com subscriber you can't read this article and you are also foolish) which means that he apparently will get "access to the Clinton rolodex." That's cash money, folks. Beyond that, don't you think that the swirl of speculation around Clark's candidacy before he announced suggests that he'll get plenty of media time, even if it's negative? People will know this guy, fast. Finally, who can doubt his ability to get organized and "command the troops?" This guy has the best resume I've ever seen. Period. He can get it together.

This will turn into a two-man race, barring some incredible surge in interest among lesser candidates. Dean has done so well already, that he'll hang in there. But I predict Clark will steal the support of the Dem establishment from Kerry, and that he'll also get a ton of grassroots support from people who love his resume and believe he can beat Bush. Plus, if he indeed gets Clinton's backing, he'll shove a lot of others out of the way. Barring some unforeseen money problems, Dean is the only guy who can beat Clark, and only because of the head start. If Clark had been in for six months, he would already be the President, because Bush would have resigned out of fear for getting his ass handed to him in 2004.

Who's done?

Kucinich, Moseley-Braun and Sharpton were done before they started.

Gephardt can have the fanciful notion that he's appealing, but he is the most boring man on earth. It's over. Never started.

Graham will be Clark's vice-president, unless Kerry is.

Poor John Edwards, announces his candidacy formally yesterday, and no one gives a shit. He's got a future, or at least he had one until he sacrificed the Senate. Check with me in ten years, John.

John Kerry is so done that he's overdone. "I'm the military guy!" doesn't work against Wesley Clark. Especially "I'm the military guy from Massachusetts!" Forget it.

Joe Lieberman: shut up already. Just shut up.

So it's Dean and Clark. Oh, sure, the primaries are three months away. And that's one place where Dean has an advantage--the early primaries. He's way out in front in New Hampshire, and that ain't changing, folks. But Clark will obliterate Dean in the Southern primaries.

I'm psyched. I'm actually going to start saving money to donate do Clark's campaign. I'm confident this will buy me the White House access I've been yearning for.

It's on, motherfucker!

Scrabble Journal, Part Three

2003-09-15T23:58:00.000+04:00

My third meeting of the Dubai Scrabble Club tonight. Let me just get this out in the open right here, and right now. I won a game. HELL yeah.

I've probably spent thirty or forty hours working on Scrabble since the last meeting, and I knew that I had improved. But I wasn't sure how much, and I certainly wasn't optimistic. I still don't know many, many of my three-letter words, I'm worse on the fours, and I haven't even started on common fives. Nonetheless, I've been playing the computer a ton, and I have felt better about my play. I expected to lose every game, but not embarrass myself like last week.

A couple of guys weren't there tonight, so it was just the best two players and me. The best two players are really very, very good. Selwyn has a rating of around 1850, and Arvind's is in the 1700s. What the hell does that mean, you may wonder? Scrabble gives ratings based on some mathematical system that I don't understand at all. Generally, 1800 and over is in the elite, top bracket. Selwyn is certainly one of the top 300 players in the world; he's going to Malaysia next month for the World Championships and he'll win some games there. The top player in the world, American Brian Cappoletto, has a rating around 2050. Selwyn, at 1850, would probably lose to Brian Cappoletto most of the time, but he wouldn't be embarrassed.

I don't know what my rating is. No idea. But last week I lost to Aspi, whose rating is around 1200, by about 120 points. So that's not so hot.

Things immediately felt different in my first game against Arvind, mostly because I just felt a lot more comfortable with the letters on my rack as well as with the clock. I wasn't forgetting to stop the clock when my turn ended, I was playing quickly, and all the computer games were just making my play much more smooth. Great. I made some stupid plays against Arvind, and it became readily apparent that I really need to know more three-letter words, but I made some good plays and I only lost 404-354. That's not bad--last week I scored 225 against him.

Then I played Selwyn, who is excellent. First game I played well, but got the impression he was taking it easy on me. Still, I only lost 419-417. I felt like a hundred dollars. Confidence sky-high.

Confidence is big for me. This is generally true, but in this environment particularly, because I'm more likely to be bold with tiles, to not worry about making a bad play, and to not freak about the clock.

Selwyn asked if I wanted to play again, and I agreed. He told me he was going to "play all out", so I teased him that he was afraid of me. He jumped out to a lead, but I made some great plays, notably MEWLERS on a triple word score, using all of my letters--99 points. BAM! Ultimately I won the game 424-414.

Selwyn is better than me. No doubt at all about it. But I can hang in there. I'm buzzing with victory, which explains why I'm up writing this at 11:45 PM.

A couple of things have stuck out. First, I have only one big advantage over these guys insofar as I'm more familiar with "regular" English, while they are far more familiar with "Scrabble" English. I played TYKE and TRILLED and while these aren't odd words, they were odd to them. As such, I can recognize phonies a little better than them.

Second, I have to concentrate on learning seven letter words. I've been working on some of them this week--the most common sevens, utilizing the most common letters. I can't use the word OARIEST in a sentence, but I can drop that mofo on the board like a bomb. Actually, I can use it in a sentence, since I just did. Also this--"That guy is the oariest looking bastard I've ever seen in my life."

My goal then, for this week: learn 50 new three letter words and 50 new seven letter words. And play my ass off.

What Liberal Media?

2003-09-15T14:35:00.000+04:00

As promised, a look now at "What Liberal Media?" by Eric Alterman.

Background for thems that don't knows it. Eric Alterman is a terrific columnist and bookwriter who has his own blog, Altercation, which I read daily. Beyond the substance, kudos to Alterman for having such a freaking awesome blog-name. If only my name was Hyperfele. He also writes regularly for the Nation, so he's a good solid liberal. Earlier this year "What Liberal Media?" was published. I had read about the book on his site, but I was particularly struck when I saw a panel of commentators on Fox News talking about the book--one commentator suggested having Alterman on to talk about the book in order to prove to him that Fox News is not conservative. Joe Klein, in a rare moment of candor on Fox News, replied with "I wouldn't do it if I were you--Alterman has got the goods."

Nevertheless, it took me some time to get around to reading it, but now I am finished.

"What Liberal Media?" is a formidable book. It is eminently readable, but the depth of research and argumentation is staggering. While Alterman's political leanings are apparent and he is absolutely forthcoming about them, the reasoning in the book is entirely nonpartisan. I find it extremely difficult to imagine that anyone on the right could possibly compose a truthful reply to his fundamental argument, which is this: the media in the United States is not, as is commonly asserted and widely believed, a liberal entity. In fact, the media is conservative.

I, for one, had always taken it as axiomatic that the wider media is more liberal than conservative. After all, it is virtually impossible to avoid the barrage of commentators and pundits who are constantly referring to it as such. Alterman calls this phenomenon "working the refs", utilizing a sports analogy. For those who don't get the analogy, it's like this: in various sports, coaches and players complain to the umpires or referees about all the calls they can, and talk to them. If you watch a basketball game, you'll see players talking to refs, saying things like "Hey, can you watch Malone? That bastard keeps fouling me on the block." The idea is that by talking to the officials, complaining about things, you'll influence them, over the course of the game, to compensate by calling things your way. If you say "Hey, you're screwing us with that call" enough times, then the refs will start to believe that they need to screw the other team to even things up. Or so the philosophy goes.

Alterman's argument is that the media has been so often called liberal, usually by conservatives, that they are now afraid to be seen as liberal, and consequently don't show any sympathy to the left or to Democrats. The "liberal media" is an invention, as part of a conservative strategy.

There is little evidence to support the allegation that the media tilts left. The most often cited claim is that most journalists are Democrats. Alterman concedes this point, and concedes that the one area where some traction can be found among those who argue that the media is liberal is in social issues--the media is more likely than the population at large to be anti-death penalty, pro-choice on abortion rights, tolerant of homosexuality. Even so, most media outside of the internet are controlled by larger corporations that undeniably tilt rightward. Nearly 60% of newspapers endorsed Bush in 2000. That's a liberal media?

In my mind, the best argument against the liberal media compares Bush (current Bush) to Clinton. Clinton was investigated, interrogated, accused, punished for any small transgression or, more pointedly, rumored transgression. Bush has, for the most part, received a pass from the media despite more egregious lying, more consequential scandals (Harken, Enron v. Whitewater/Travelgate/Filegate/Blowjobgate), and an agenda which should run exactly counter to the agenda of the "liberal media."

I was completely, utterly blown away by the examples and arguments in the book. I'll spare you the details, because I want you to read the book, and because the more that I write here the more I think of worth investigating--the book is that thorough. Suffice it to say that Alterman takes on the media's treatment of Clinton, Bush, the war on terror, the 2000 election, as well as addressing talk radio, pundits in print, television news, and the Internet. His virtual massacres of Matt Drudge, Bernie Goldberg (the author of "Bias", an evidently pathetic attempt to demonstrate the opposite of Alterman's thesis), Ann Coulter, Fox News, and journalism giants like Howard Kurtz, David Broder, Cokie Roberts, and others, are just priceless.

I had to put the book down several times because I was getting too angry. The biggest thing I took away from it is probably a more solid understanding of the level of organization and cooperation among Republicans and their patsies in the media. The right is very, very impressive in their coordination and organization and lack of dissent. The agenda pushers at Fox News, on talk radio, at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, on Drudge Report and elsewhere are organized and toe the party line like the left can never, ever do. The level of right-wing coordination has, as Alterman points out, pushed the "center" so far to the "right" that positions taken by so-called conservatives years ago are now to the left of what Democrats want. It was Richard Nixon who signed the Clean Air Act. It's George Bush who wants to gut it. The right is together, on the same page, willing to lie and cheat and sacrifice and anything else to support its execrable agenda.

We will not see a response to Alterman's book from the right. There is no argument.

Book Learnin'

2003-09-12T22:48:00.000+04:00

I've really been reading a lot lately. I believe I've read nine books in the six weeks we've been in Dubai. Let's run down the list:

--"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" by Al Franken. Talked at length about this already.

--"What Liberal Media?" by Eric Alterman. A life changing book. Details in the next few days--I have another chapter to go.

--"Positively Fifth Street" by James McManus. Terrific book about the author's trip to Vegas for the World Series of Poker--experienced poker player, but pro tournament novice, shows up and gets to the final table in no-limit hold 'em. True story. The poker action is absolutely gripping. If you like poker, read this one fast.

--"Poker Nation" by Andy Bellin. Another poker book. Has its moments.

--"The Biggest Game in Town" by A. Alvarez. The classic poker book. Alvarez is a great writer. Tells the story of the 1981 World Series of Poker.

--"Caro's Book of Tells" by Mike Caro. Completing my four-book effort in poker reading, Caro's Book of Tells is a how-to in reading the unintentional "tells" of poker players. Caro is a pro player, and the master of reading the tell. Wildly interesting book. I'm dying to play soon.

--"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by JK Rowling. Second read. I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I think they're really ingenius books, and the latest is beyond question the strongest. And dark. Anyone laughing at those books as "children's literature" has not read them, period.

--"The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen. This is one of the stronger fiction books I've read in a very, very long time. Recounts the story of a completely f'd up family, though that description couldn't be more pathetic. A must read.

--"Moneyball". Great book about the business of baseball and how the Oakland A's leadership has challenged the historic structure of business decisions and baseball strategy. I'm no longer a baseball fan, but I loved the book.

I don't know where I've come up with the time to read a book and a half a week. I could write extensively on most of these books, but I don't want to. I just want to show off how smarty pants I am.

Girls and Beasts

2003-09-11T15:41:00.000+04:00

When I was in college I used to believe, quite firmly, that there was no real difference between male human beings and female human beings, excluding the undeniable physical distinctions. In keeping with the feminism espoused by K. Meyer, et. al., I was certain that socialization was entirely responsible for the differences that could be pointed to by any thinking observer--aggression in men, nurturing in women, etc. "Gender is a social construct" seemed to be a truism to me.

What bullshit!

Any parent knows that this is false thinking. Absolutely false. There are big differences between boys and girls. Big, big differences.

Before I get into it, I should be clear that in the nature v. nurture debate, I think that both sides have some impact. There's no question that socialization plays a big part in the formulation of society and individuals. Social values absolutely place a higher priority on physicality and aggression in men, and domicility and nurturing in women. I don't think this can be disputed, so I won't belabor the point.

If this wasn't the case, after all, I wouldn't be the freakishly odd stay-at-home-dad who elicits stares from people during the day, as if to say "What, can't you get a job?" It's possible that they're staring at me and thinking something like "My God! Look at that man! Has Adonis landed amongst us?"

But all this psychosocial mumbo-jumbo is hardly the point of this essay. Here's the point: boys are terrifying.

I go to Fun Corner all the time, and Fun Corner has allowed me to conduct a super-secret experiment, the results of which I will reveal to you presently. I watch the boys and the girls closely, and I evaluate what boys are worth keeping. The results of the experiment have found, interestingly, that the answer is: none! Boys are, across the board, complete animals with little regard for human life, including their own; they scream, run at top speed into walls or their parents or each other or me, they throw things, they climb too high and then jump, they punch the air and the walls, they always sprint and never walk, they make everything into guns, they roll around one the floor attempting to knock each other over, they eat like pigs, they abuse other children, they break things, they maim and kill and destroy and shout and bellow and laugh maniacally and wreak havoc in a way that girls simply are incapable of doing. I see the parents of these primitive beasts, and the look on their face hovers between placid acceptance and horror. They watch in disbelief as their sons kick and punch and fight and destroy. And their eyes can't hide the heavy secret they attempt to guard: they fear for their very lives.

(Disclosure: I have two sweet daughters and no beastly sons.)

I'm sure that boys have their upsides. I used to be a boy, and I'm OK. I have met a boy I like--Doug's son Linus is really a very sweet kid.

We're talking about having another child in the near future. Not in the next nine months, if that's what you're thinking, but hopefully in the next 15 months or less.

And I'm working hard on those X chromosomes. Exercising, focusing, positive thinking. They've done well for me so far. I'm talking them through it, letting them know that I appreciate the work they've done, and that they have to dig deep for one last push. Gotta pull it together, overcome the odds, and win one for the team. Just one more time, X. That's it. One more time.

If Y wins, then I'll live with it. I'm sure that any boy of ours would be less animalistic than his compatriots. Either that, or I'll be dead within two years.

Scrabble Journal, Part Two

2003-09-10T16:12:00.000+04:00

Normally, the Dubai Scrabble Club meets on Mondays. No meeting took place this week, however, because the head guy was in Egypt.

But that doesn't mean I'm not working. Oh, I'm working. I'd say, on average, I'm doing between two and four hours a day of studying word lists and playing against the computer--I have the Hasbro software. It's a lot of my free time during naps or while the girls are playing on their own.

The issue that's plaguing me a little bit right now is the dictionary. No shit, right? The dictionary is the problem. But it's more complicated than that. In the US, the dictionary of choice is the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It's big, and intimidating, and is taken (I think) from one of the unabridged dictionaries. There are a hell of a lot of words in there that no one knows.

Britain used to have its own dictionary--the Official Word List. It's different. It's mostly overlap. But it also uses a lot of out-of-use terminology from Shakespeare or Dickens or Sir Gawain and the Jolly Green Knight or whatever.

The major international tournaments, including the World Championship, use a combination of both. Britain now follows this system--called SOWPODS, which is an anagram of the first letters of (O)fficial (W)orld (L)ist and (O)fficial (S)crabble (P)layers (D)ictionary. SOWPODS is used most places outside the US.

There's a lot of resistance to SOWPODS in the US. For one thing, the new words are different and rarely used. For another, there are 25,000 extra words beyond the US dictionary. 25,000 words! Opponents of SOWPODS for the US say that learning that many irrelevant words is dumb. They're right, but the proponents are also correct when they say that it's the trend of the world, and they may be right that it makes the game more fun when you have more words to play with. US players are at a disadvantage in international play because they have all these other words to learn, but they also have to remember what's not good at US tournaments. Difficult.

This is an interesting conflict, but it's pretty much irrelevant to me. Because I don't live in the US. And so if I want to play with the Dubai Scrabble Club, I've got to learn the SOWPODS words. It's hard to learn them and play the Hasbro computer game, which only uses OSPD. C'est la vie. I'll start online play with SOWPODS once my new computer arrives.

If you've never studied Scrabble words, you'd be pretty amazed. Most people play Scrabble with their Funk and Wagnalls or whatever pocket dictionary they have around. That's a totally different world than SOWPODS. Look at this list, which is the allowable two letter words in SOWPODS. I'm going to try to be a badass and do this from memory:

AA, AB, AD, AE, AG, AH, AI, AL, AM, AN, AR, AS, AT, AW, AX, AY, BA, BE, BI, BO, BY, CH, DA, DE, DI, DO, EA, ED, EE, EF, EH, EL, EM, EN, ER, ES, ET, EX, FA, FY, GI, GO, GU, HA, HE, HI, HM, HO, ID, IF, IN, IS, IT, JO, KA, KO, KY, LA, LO, LI, MA, ME, MI, MM, MO, MU, MY, NA, NE, NO, NU, NY, OB, OD, OE, OF, OH, OI, OM, ON, OP, OR, OS, OU, OW, OX, OY, PA, PE, PH, PI, PO, QI, RE, SH, SI, SO, ST, TA, TE, TI, TO,UG, UH, UM, UN, UP, UR, US, UT, WE, WO, XI, XU, YA, YE, YO, YU, ZO

Well, I had to look at a list to add YU and OU, but that's pretty good. These are the most critical words to know--you can build on other words a lot more easily if you know the twos. But they are crazy words, I think you'll agree--I don't know the meaning of most of them. I know that "OE" is "A Whirlwind off of the Faeroe Islands" and "AA" is a kind of lava, and "ZO" is a Himalayan cross between a yak and a cow, and "XU" is Vietnamese currency. Don't ask me what UG or ST or YU are. Many of these are not acceptable in the US OSPD--most notably "QI" and "ZO". It makes a huge difference for the playability of these 10-point albatrosses if you can make a two letter word out of them. Consider if someone leaves a triple letter score next to an I. If you can put another I next to it, making QI twice--BAM! 62 points.

I'm progressing. I can beat the computer at a fairly difficult setting with some regularity. The top level of the computer game is so difficult that no one can beat it ever. Scrabble isn't like chess--the computer has a perfect vocabulary and can evaluate it all the time, so when playing at maximum level, the best players in the world will very, very rarely win. Anyway, that's not my goal. I just want to be able to hold my own at the Dubai Scrabble Club.

I've more than once thought that I should give this up--there are just so many goddamned words. So many words. But I'm getting better. I'm getting better. And I'm enjoying the playing. I hate the lists. I hope I can maybe lose by less than 100 to someone next week. In a month, I might have a chance to beat one of the guys at the Dubai Scrabble Club. We'll see.

2003-09-09T12:16:00.000+04:00

Let's talk about a few things in the Washington Post in the last couple of days. I can't promise that this isn't going to turn into a major-league rant.

----Yesterday, Rumsfeld said that criticisms of the Bush Administration will create more terrorists. This is not a joke. He said, of political criticisms of Bush, that "They (terrorists, presumably) take heart in that and that leads to more money going into these activities or that leads to more recruits or that leads to more encouragement or that leads to more staying power."

I wonder what it is that the Bush Administration believes democracy consists of? Apparently, democracy consists of following, in lockstep, whatever failing policies that the assholes in power choose to whimsically advocate. Is this administration so thin-skinned that they honestly can't take any criticism? Surely they don't genuinely believe that terrorists see an article by Paul Krugman or a press release by Henry Waxman and think
'Ha! The jihad is working! Let's attack again!" Really--Rumsfeld is not making some abstract argument about how we should always support our President or something insipid like that. He's actually saying that Al Qaeda is emboldened by criticism of the President, and that this has practical impacts on their behavior!

I thought they were inherently evil and hated us for our freedom. Or maybe that's what he means--when we exercise freedom, we make ourselves a bigger target!
It would be so much more compelling if any of these Administration jackasses would just say, "We don't agree with the criticism, but we understand it, and it is one of the very strengths of our democracy that criticisms of our governing officials can be offered without fear of reprisal--this is why we fight, after all." Can you imagine Rumsfeld or Cheney or The Worst President Ever saying something like this?

----This article on the front page of today's Post explains that the intelligence community repeatedly warned the Administration that things could get extremely hairy in Iraq after the removal of Saddam. It is hardly news that the Administration ignored the intelligence that didn't go their way, but even I was stunned by this paragraph:

"Intelligence reports told them at some length about possibilities for unpleasantness," said a senior administration official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity. "The reports were written, but we don't know if they were read." (italics mine)

WE DON'T KNOW IF THEY WERE READ? Excuse me? Not read? Not listened to, obviously. Not believed, clearly. Manipulated/ignored/mishandled, beyond question. But not even read?

This is the worst administration in history. They approach everything lightly, investigating nothing fully, and blithely ignore risks while misrepresenting everything to the public.

--On the same topic, this article is worth reading to see how this hideous Administration has changed positions completely on Iraq, whether for right or wrong. Nevertheless, they FLATLY refuse to acknowledge it. What the hell is wrong with acknowledging that it is necessary to change gears at times? What Americans, outside of the pathetic religious right, values absolute static policymaking with any adaptation to the evolution of a situation? Things change, see? People understand this.

Which brings me to another complaint about this awful excuse for a President--Americans are constantly treated as unthinking third-graders by these jerks. All politicians are guilty of this to a degree, but the way the administration consistently lies about what they've said and done makes me feel like the attempted victim of the Jedi mind trick--"These are not the droids you're looking for, this is always the policy we've advocated, the war is going well, tax cuts will increase jobs, I'm not a freaking idiot."

----Howard Dean is facing criticism from some of his opponents because he said that we shouldn't be taking sides in the Middle East. Joe Lieberman has said this is a break from fifty years of policy in which we explicitly favor Israel.

First of all, Lieberman, shut up. I don't want to sound like Bill O'Reilly, but just shut up. You are a pious self-righteous Republican who only gets to pretend to be a Democrat because of your excellent environmental record. Shut up.

Secondly, how does calling for evenhandedness in a conflict in which everyone is doing bad things in any way mean that we're giving Israel the finger? Beyond that, some might argue that the fact that we've been one-sided for fifty years, with seemingly no progress in solving the conflict, is evidence that change is in order. Some might say that, indeed. They would probably be called anti-Semitic and un-American, but they might argue that nonetheless.

Shut up, Joe Lieberman.

As an aside, can Lieberman and Kucinich and Moseley-Braun and Sharpton and Edwards just get the hell out of the way? That way, we can see some action between Dean and Kerry and Gephardt and Clark and Graham--and I only want Graham involved because his focus on how Bush is failing in the broader war on terror is uniquely important in the race. And I'm only nodding to Gephardt because he has some small momentum, seemingly, and not because he has even a slight chance to win.

God, I'm angry. I was telling Melissa that if we were in the US I'd be getting actively involved in a campaign. I don't know what the hell I can do here, other than rant.

2003-09-08T11:39:00.000+04:00

One of my favorite things in Dubai so far may well be a toy seahorse. It's one of this cheap kiddie rides that one finds at malls and grocery stores--usually a horse or a race car--wherein one places a quarter and then watches while one's child goes on a slow-motion thrill ride.

The one in the local mall (one of the local malls, I should say) is a vibrantly colored pastel seahorse. When two dirhams are placed in the slot, the seahorse rocks back and forth and plays the unmistakable tune of the Christmas carol "What Child Is This?"

I think it goes without saying that any child's fun is immediately augmented when that fun involves "What Child Is This?" as the primary soundtrack--particularly in an explicitly Muslim country.

I have envisioned, more than once, the hilarity that would ensue if I were to suddenly bust out, as loudly as possible, in my opera-quality singing voice, with "THIS, THIS IS CHRIST THE KING, WHOM SHEPHERDS GUARD AND ANGELS SING! HASTE, HASTE TO BRING HIM LAUD, THE KING, THE SON OF MARY!"

2003-09-07T21:14:00.000+04:00

I've finished Franken's book and have moved on to Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media"--already a mind-boggling read. More on that upcoming when I finish the book.

Postmortem on Franken remains the same as when I posted a couple of days ago--a must read, for the humor at least. It really has a lot of smart moments, and I thought I'd share one of the smartest for those of you who don't get around to reading it. The following is the start of a chapter titled "Loving America the Al Franken Way":

'If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that the conservatives love America and liberals hate America...

They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America the way a four-year old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.

That's why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well. We also want it to do good."

2003-09-05T22:44:00.000+04:00

I’m reading Al Franken’s book--the one Fox News sued over--titled “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” There’s a lot of invective, but it’s REALLY funny. Consider these chapter titles:

Ann Coulter: Nutcase
You Know Who I Don’t Like? Ann Coulter
I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg
Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully
The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus
My Personal Search For Weapons of Mass Destruction

It’s really over the top.

Beyond the humor, though, he does some good work just shredding the arch-commentators of the right--Coulter, Hannity, O’Reilly, Goldberg, the Administration--by just investigating the claims that they make and breaking down the lies. Not opinion lies, like “Bush is a great President” or “The war in Iraq was justified.” Rather, he tends to break down just flat-out, bold-faced lies told for rhetorical effect. Really fine stuff.

I’ve had a number of reactions--I am loving the read, laughing out loud, enjoying the beatdown he’s putting on the right. I’m also absolutely sickened by the antics of the right-wingers he focuses on.

The book is also reminding me of an article I read recently by Jack Shafer in Slate. The article points out that both sides lie, and that what’s going on now is that the left is finally starting to fight back. But he’s careful to parse his words, emphasizing that the left doesn’t have a monopoly on the truth.

Hear, hear. There’s no doubt about that. I would be genuinely interested in seeing a book from the right that isn’t invective, but rather is a reasoned dismantling of statements made by the left, as Franken has done with the right.

But at the same time, I’m not afraid to show my partisan stripes and say that the nastiness emanating from the right and their commentators right now is far in excess of what you get from the left, both in terms of viciousness and falsehoods. The left has no Michael Savage, or Limbaugh, or Hannity, or O’Reilly.

At any rate, I’m immersing myself in these books. In one fell swoop a couple of weeks ago I got on Amazon and ordered Franken’s book, Joe Conason’s “Big Lies”, and Eric Alterman’s “What Liberal Media?” So I’m rolling with the left nowadays. You’ll get reports on all of them.

For now, read Franken’s book. It’s over the top, but damnation! It’s a hoot.

2003-09-04T22:17:00.000+04:00

Funny moment tonight with Mercedes.

Melissa is out with a friend tonight. So I'm putting the girls to bed by myself. It gets to be that time, and I've got a half-finished beer in my hand. I pick up Reeve, but Mercedes won't cooperate and just walk up the stairs. So I pick her up--Mercedes in one arm, Reeve and a beer in the other. Mercedes says "You've got two girls! And beer!"

Somehow, the two girls and beer scenario had always played out differently in my mind prior to tonight.

2003-09-04T15:11:00.000+04:00

Well, I ordered a new computer--a Toshiba satellite today after much agonizing and a lot of work--the worm hit me a couple of weeks ago and despite doing all the right things the damned thing was never the same. The final straw was when, after getting an external hard drive to back up my data, I attempted to do a full reinstall of the operating system, and it wouldn't work because I was denied access to the hard drive. I'm sure this is fixable. I don't give a damn.

I went back and forth on the Mac question, and I will get a Mac in the future, but Toshiba offered superior financing and more power for less money--I certainly could have made it on the Mac, and I wanted it. But the financing was the final issue.

Look for a full screed about Compaq in this space very soon.