Ample Hills

Finance through the eyes of Jezebel

2008-03-25T08:46:00.001-04:00

New York risks losing as many as 20,000 finance jobs. I would be sad, but it's also sort of a "And at long freaking last they came for the bankers, and I didn't say anything because I had already spend much of my twenties unemployed kthanxbai" situation.

Anyone who ever listened to the "Today" programme will appreciate this

2007-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

British blamed for Basra badgers

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

"We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don't attack humans unless cornered."

The poverty of philosophy, the richness of blogs

2007-05-25T06:24:00.000-04:00

You should go read this comment thread at Crooked Timber, where various contributors are imagining the life of the young Marx a la Hollywood. For example:

OPENING CREDITS

SOUNDTRACK: Jim Morrison sings “The Internationale”. Fade into overhead shot of Karl lying flat on his back on his desk.

MARX: (V/O) Bloomsbury. Shit. Two weeks and I was still in the British Museum Reading Room. Every time I looked around, the political philosophy shelves moved in a little closer.
Everyone gets what he wants. I wanted an overarching critique of the modern politico-economic system. And for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.
…
ENGELS: (puts down dog-eared copy of “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”) It is clear to me that Herr Hegel has gone insane.

MARX: Yes, sir. Obviously insane.

ENGELS: And he is still out there, still discussing the nature of existence. We want you to go to Germany, and terminate his tenure.

PROUDHON: Terminate with extreme prejudice.

Life is short, the list of books long ...

2007-04-26T08:54:00.000-04:00

... but this article in the Guardian is worth reading. Topic: the representation of work (or lack thereof) in fiction.

The Kandy-Kolored ... huh? Oh, I'm back.

2007-04-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

Tom Wolfe tries to understand hedge funds, loses it:

...General Electric, which is part of the business world’s wholly rock-solid trinity, along with Otis Elevator and the Federal Reserve...

WTF? OK, I buy Wolfe's general argument that the hedgies are rude, crude, and socially ambitions; and yes, "two-and-twenty" is the "greatest business plan of all time." But GE, Otis, and the Fed? Huh? Oh, and Tom, the really interesting story, which you failed to report, but someone should: why are managers of big pools of money (pension funds, etc.) so willing to fork over the big bucks to the hedge funds, when not all of them are generating above-market returns at reasonable risk?

Anyway, I'm back. Sort of. For now. Still struggling with those commitment issues, as you can see. Baby Hart was born in Eleventh-Month and is still not sleeping well. Toddler Whit is two and is delightful when not mischievous. Work is a struggle. More soon.

"Equalizing contributions"

2006-09-27T17:16:00.000-04:00

From the WSJ:

General Motors Corp. is prepared to tell Nissan Motor Co. and Renault SA today its price for a three-way alliance: A multibillion-dollar payment from Renault and Nissan to compensate for the greater value the Detroit auto maker believes it would bring to any partnership.

The planned demand for an "equalizing contribution" is the latest sign that talks among the three auto giants are in trouble and could blow up./

You know, that has happened to me so many times? Like when I wanted to date Brad Pitt, but he wouldn't fork over the money to compensate for the fact that I am so much more famous and good-looking than he is. And when Tiger Woods wouldn't pay me for golf lessons. Damn.

Actually, if you want to feel Rick Wagoner's pain, follow this link at Nancy Nall's to read about GM's healthcare costs. But don't think too much about GM's "greater value" thereafter.

In which I read the New York Times front page

2006-08-16T21:45:00.000-04:00

OK, herewith my parsing of today's New York Times, all for your benefit.

Top left column: "For Now, Pluto Holds Its Place in Solar System." The lede: "Pluto dodged a bullet today." Dude, that would make a much better picture than the gloomy Lebanon pic you have featured.
Next: "New Lieberman Retooling Race as Independent." Heh. You said "tool."
Next: "Corzine's Attorney General Out in Ethics Breach." This is about the former NJ AG, Zulima V. Farber, and her boyfriend, Hamlet E. Goore. Both these people sound like they have made up spam-sender names, not real human being names.
In the interest of taste, I will skip the Lebanon a-hed....
"State Fairs, Sagging, Arrive at County Crossroads." Is it a coincidence that the second graf ends with the phrase, the "nation's midsection"? Just what is sagging here?

Google explains modern German literature

2006-08-16T10:16:00.000-04:00

I decided to search for Gunther Grass, and the first site that came up was "Brainy Quote." The second of the seven quotes listed:

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

Early, as in before or after your stint in the Waffen-SS?

Thank you, Making Light

2006-06-08T21:55:00.000-04:00

For this link from Bookslut:

Poets read their work on Minneapolis-St. Paul buses during rush hour yesterday, apparently on the theory that if there’s one thing that public transportation needs, it’s crazy people ranting loudly about things that make little to no sense. […] Who sponsored this program? A car dealership? A bicycling group? The Society to Make Sure Nobody Ever Gets on Another Fucking Bus Ever Again?

and this marvelous comment:

EXCUSE ME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

I AM SORRY TO INTERRUPT YOUR DAY

MY NAME IS JOSH, AND I HAVE BEEN AN UNPAID POET FOR NINE MONTHS

I DO NOT TAKE DRUGS, OR SELF PUBLISH

I HAVE THREE SMALL ANTHOLOGIES TO SUPPORT

ANY DONATIONS NO MATTER HOW SMALL WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED AND MAY EE CUMMINGS BLESS YOU ALL

Notes from the infield

2006-06-07T22:28:00.000-04:00

The NYT, on the minor league game in which Roger Clemens played with his son:

The most poignant father-son moment was also the most genuine. In the top of the third inning, Koby Clemens walked solemnly toward the mound at Applebee's Park. His father braced for words of advice about the next hitter. "One more strikeout," Koby Clemens said, "and everybody in the stadium gets wiper fluid."

James Wood, pro and contra

2006-06-07T22:02:00.000-04:00

OK, so we like James Wood around here. I am probably one of the very few people in my current profession who rushed out to buy his first book. And I mostly like reading him in The New Republic. But there are definitely some sticking points in the James Wood reading experience.

So, the examples I promised some time ago:

James Wood good: Berating Harold Bloom.

Bloom, in his late pomp, only orates, and so his critical writing now has the flavor of perpetual conclusion, as if each sentence were the slightly unnecessary, slightly rhetorically inflated terminus of its successor. And yet, dispiritingly, this convoy of eternal conclusions stretches out over desert pages!

The review is much more than snark: Wood creates an interesting link between Bloom's disdain for the New Testament and his theories of the "anxiety of influence," in which successor authors struggle with and "misread" their predecessors (in this case, the Hebrew Bible).

James Wood bad: Getting overly serious about Stephen Colbert; if you publish a famous takedown of George Steiner for being too apocalyptic, you've got to lighten up yourself some time.

It is time--it is always time--for some literary criticism.

No, no it is not.

If I had been drinking Diet Coke, I would have snorted it out my nose

2006-06-07T21:54:00.000-04:00

The Poor Man annotates the PBS daily program schedule. (Of course from his archives; I am seriously considering changing my tagline to "More than a day late and a dollar short").

12:00 AM - NOW with Bill Moyers Our civil liberties are vanishing, our unelected president is beating the drums of war, and kids these days with their rap music. When will it all end, because it’s late and I’m tired? Bill Moyers hosts a round table discussion with Gloria Steinem, Pat Buchanan, David Horowitz, and five other people who find events after 1973 seem to just blur together, and probably weren’t all that important anyway.
...
1:30 AM - Living Lifefully Well! Why can’t healthy people just calm the hell down about it? Good, you’re healthy, and full of vim and vigor. It’s two o’clock in the fucking morning. Relax, and stop bouncing all over the place. You’re going to give me a heart attack.

...

4:00 AM - Woozle Toozle Too Incomprehensible rubbish about a pirate captain and a dragon who sing awful songs about God knows what. When you let your kids get up at 4:00 AM, you have no right to complain. You are a terrible parent.

...

8:30 AM – Tai Chi for Fitness Some guy in a beard prances around. You might think he’s doing Tai Chi, but if you look closely, you can see he’s flailing around at normal speed and they broadcast it in slow motion. Feel cheated? You shoulda pledged.

9:00 AM - Exercise in Motion Like first period gym class in high school, except everyone’s like 40. So it’s like first period gym class on “The OC”. Rimshot. Lots of jumping jacks and sit up. Always remember to stretch! I’ve got $50 says no one watching this show gets up off the couch for five seconds. Useless.

10:00 AM – Get Off Your Dead Puckered Ass, Fatso!

...

11:30 AM – Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood It’s all fake. I think I was in second grade when I realized that his “neighborhood” was just a model, and that there were no neighbors. And if all that is fake, all a great big lie, what are the chances that he really liked me “just the way I am”? Not very good, if he’s like everyone else. And the Neighborhood of Make-Believe? Try: “The Neighborhood of Make-Believe It’s The Seventies And I Can Get Away With This Haircut and This Cordoroy Tasseled Vest”.

...

3:30 PM – Clifford the Big Red Dog The people who drew He-Man make fun of this cartoon. What are there, seven frames of animation a minute? Is it being drawn in real time? I know this is PBS, but really.

...

6:00 PM - Super Boring Business Hour Today a lot of boring things happened and now you’re out of work. Remember how we said you should mortgage your house to buy AOL stock? Good times, good times.

7:00 PM - News Hour With Jim Lehrer Peter Jennings whips through this same stuff in half an hour. What’s Jim’s problem? Everyone take notes, because this is what socialism’s like.

8:00 PM – Antiques Roadshow This is porn for the middle aged. This and the real estate channel are like porn with crack on top as far as they’re concerned. “Oh, can you believe how much they want for that?” “Oh, I’d like to have one of those!” And then they scrape around the attic, and wonder aloud if their old Ricky Nelson records might be worth something. I don’t want to get old.

A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun

2006-05-22T09:21:00.000-04:00

While otherwise estimable bloggers freak out about the film of the Da Vinci Code (said Esme the erstwhile Episcopalian), Anthony Lane has the situation well in hand:

There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” With that one word, “renowned,” Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers—nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: “Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee.” What is more, he does so over “a half-eaten power lunch,” one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.

Should we mind that forty million readers—or, to use the technical term, “lemmings”—have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text? I am aware of the argument that, if a tale has enough grip, one can for a while forget, if not forgive, the crumbling coarseness of the style; otherwise, why would I still read “The Day of the Jackal” once a year? With “The Da Vinci Code,” there can be no such excuse. Even as you clear away the rubble of the prose, what shows through is the folly of the central conceit, and, worse still, the pride that the author seems to take in his theological presumption. How timid—how undefended in their powers of reason—must people be in order to yield to such preening? Are they reading “The Da Vinci Code” because everybody on the subway is doing the same, and, if so, why, when they reach their stop, do they not realize their mistake and leave it on the seat, to be gathered up by the next sucker? Despite repeated attempts, I have never managed to crawl past page 100. As I sat down to watch “The Da Vinci Code,” therefore, I was in the lonely, if enviable, position of not actually knowing what happens.
...
Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, except at Columbia Pictures, where the power lunches won’t even be half-started. The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith. Meanwhile, art historians can sleep easy once more, while fans of the book, which has finally been exposed for the pompous fraud that it is, will be shaken from their trance. In fact, the sole beneficiaries of the entire fiasco will be members of Opus Dei, some of whom practice mortification of the flesh. From now on, such penance will be simple—no lashings, no spiked cuff around the thigh. Just the price of a movie ticket, and two and a half hours of pain.

Things are looking up

2006-05-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

Fortunately I did not share with you all my resolve to make this blog less focused on the "love love love" messages ... because this week's online New Yorker table of contents mentions an article on Patrick Leigh Fermor (love) by Anthony Lane (love). So, vitriol will have to wait (James Wood will be involved, both as exponent and victim). 'Kay?

Love for Anthony Lane

2006-05-08T17:43:00.000-04:00

On Mission:Impossible III:

The reported budget for Abrams’s film was a hundred and fifty million dollars, but it looked to me as if, somewhere in Shanghai, the director ran out of cash. We are primed for Ethan’s retrieval of the Rabbit’s Foot, but all we get is his spectacular arrival, not the theft itself: out he hops with the booty in his paw, and that’s that. And the grand finale? A fistfight, after which somebody gets run over. Listen, if I want to see that kind of action, I don’t go to Shanghai. I don’t even go to the movies. I go to the South Bronx and stand outside a bar. Roll on the climax of “M:i:IV,” in which, rumor has it, Agent Hunt will stumble out of bed to feed the baby, trip over the stroller in the hall, and break his nose.

Department of "Huh?"

2006-05-08T17:41:00.000-04:00

Hey, let me grab the spotlight some more before I get locked away in silence for a long, long time:

Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says he lied on the witness stand about being involved in the plot and wants to withdraw his guilty plea because he now believes he can get a fair trial.

In a motion filed Friday but released Monday, Moussaoui said he testified March 27 he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."

If we did not laugh at the Turkmenbashi we would have to weep

2006-04-28T11:10:00.000-04:00

Good David Remnick in the New Yorker:

Of the fifteen states of the former Soviet empire, Turkmenistan, just north of Iran, is the one that has turned out to be a cruel blend of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea and L. Frank Baum’s Oz. Not long after the Soviet collapse, in 1991, a former Communist Party hack named Saparmurat Niyazov became President-for-life, dubbed himself Turkmenbashi—Leader of All the Turkmen—and commenced building the strangest, most tragicomic cult of personality on the Eurasian landmass. Doctors there now take an oath not to Hippocrates but to Turkmenbashi; the month of January is now called Turkmenbashi; and in the capital, Ashgabat, there is, atop the Arch of Neutrality, a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot gold statue of Turkmenbashi that, like George Hamilton, automatically rotates to face the sun.

It is extremely difficult to get a visa. Journalists can visit only rarely. But imagine a society in which the ubiquitous, inescapable leader’s image (on the currency, on billboards, on television screens night and day) is that of a saturnine frump who resembles Ernest Borgnine somewhere between “Marty” and “McHale’s Navy.”

Niyazov is a leader of whims. He has banned opera, ballet, beards, long hair, makeup (for television anchors), and gold-capped teeth. He demands that drivers pass a “morality test.” At his command, the word for “April” became Gurbansoltan eje, the name of his late mother. Evidently, he prizes fruit: there is now a national holiday commemorating local melons. And, as if the shade of Orwell were not sufficiently present in Turkmenistan, Niyazov has established, despite an abysmal human-rights record, a Ministry of Fairness.

Rahim Esenov, a veteran of the Second World War, is unlucky enough to be a novelist and journalist under the reign of Turkmenbashi, and in February, 2004, he was placed under house arrest by the Turkmen security police. He was accused of smuggling eight hundred copies of his novel “The Crowned Wanderer” from Moscow to his apartment in Ashgabat. When the novel, which is set in the Mogul era, was first published, in 1997, Niyazov denounced Esenov for “historical errors.” After suffering a second heart attack, Esenov, who is seventy-nine, was taken to the hospital, but three days later he was removed for interrogation. The security police charged him with “inciting social, national, and religious hatred.” And Esenov had undoubtedly given further offense to the regime by sending periodic reports to the U.S.-funded Radio Liberty.

Esenov had every reason to believe that, like so many other members of the Turkmen intelligentsia, he would suffer for a long time. But when PEN American Center, the writers’ organization, sent word, through the American Embassy in Ashgabad, that Esenov had won its Freedom to Write Award and invited him to its annual dinner in New York, the regime, sensing an international scandal, relented and let him go.

Love, love, love

2006-04-21T12:42:00.000-04:00

As an erstwhile early riser when we lived in London, I spent an alarming amount of time listening to the first half-hour of Radio 4's daily programming (well, the first quarter-hour, in any case). So I was pleased to read Simon Jenkins's appreciation today, even as I lament the passing of the UK theme:

It may have been a device of British intelligence. It is still a work of genius. Radio 4's opening half hour schedule defies definition or explanation, but the BBC meddles with it at our peril.
...
The 5.30-6.00 slot has always been a scheduling black hole, defying definition or explanation: the shipping forecast, Prayer for the Day and Farming Today. A Broadcasting House sage once told me that it dates from when the BBC was penetrated by MI5. The spooks noticed that nobody above the level of office cleaner ever listened at that time of day, so they quietly colonised it as a sort of Voice of Britain. It would be dedicated to "olde English values", patriotic fare put out before the commies arrived at 6.00.

Core values were duly identified as folk music, the sea, the countryside and the Church of England. [Fritz] Spiegl, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, was commissioned to write the theme, evoking the empire and Rule Britannia. This was followed by a weather forecast for sailors, morning prayers for Her Majesty and something for our valiant farmers. Strong evidence for this conspiracy thesis was the shipping forecast. It still goes out in an unknown tongue and is of no obvious use in the age of sat nav and online 24/7 weather intelligence. The shipping forecast evokes an image of some windjammer caught in a gale in South Utsire, its first mate buried in the fo'c'sle straining through crackling cans to hear some BBC boffin incanting: "Backing Rockall fair moderate veering good falling slowly occasionally poor ... Scilly automatic very moderate 10 miles ... Cape Wrath one thousand and eight mainly fair rising more slowly." He is probably on the rocks in minutes.

I had always assumed the language to be a lost St Kildan dialect used by the army to communicate with agents on enemy submarines in the North Sea. It should be preserved in the Imperial War Museum. Last month the forecaster broke cover by briefly lapsing into English. He said he would repeat a line of incomprehensible text as "that was rather confusing".

After that comes Prayer for the Day, an Alan Bennett "sardine tin of life" anecdote plus an imprecation to the Almighty (possibly of help to the wrecked windjammer or the submariner). Finally we get Farming Today. This is the Archers on speed. An industry comprising just 2% of the population is given 15 minutes each morning to demand more public money. It has been doing so for as long as I can remember - with never a BBC slot for carmakers, hoteliers or hedge-fund salesmen.

Still more reasons to read Scott McLemee!

2006-03-15T10:59:00.000-05:00

The start of a recent Inside Higher Ed column:

As a kid, my favorite book in the world was E.T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics (1937). I must have read it dozens of times by the age of 14. One afternoon, coming home from the library, I could not resist opening the book to a particularly interesting chapter — and so ended up walking into a parked bus.

A nice rejoinder

2006-03-15T10:57:00.000-05:00

Somehow this tickled me, as I was reading Seth Stevenson's retort to imaginary interlocutors about how long baseball competitions should be:

These people ... have a point. But they should also shove it.

Economist love

2006-02-24T08:47:00.000-05:00

Because their blurb for this week's issue lists the following teasers:

* Starbucks * Wal-Mart * Bird flu *Ageing * Prince
Charles * Trashy magazines * Harvard * Frozen non-dairy toppings *

Introducing (and then retracting!) the "Oh, please" awards

2006-02-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

And our first winner is:

Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.

"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.

Edited 2/24/2006: OK, Tim Burke says that she was misquoted, so the award is retracted. Sorry 'bout that.

The wealth of babies

2006-02-21T12:17:00.000-05:00

Babies make crappy economists, because their concept of diminishing marginal utility is so different from adults'.

Oh, so many reasons to love the non-editorial-page WSJ

2006-02-17T11:46:00.000-05:00

Like this, for example, on hedge fund investment letters and their literary pretensions:

[starting grafs]Struggling to find just the right words to explain a run of bad luck to investors, money manager Michael Roth looked to literature for inspiration.

He found his muse in Edgar Allan Poe.

That is why Mr. Roth, who helps run Stark Investments, a Milwaukee hedge fund with $7.6 billion in assets, recently wrote one of his periodic letters to investors as a takeoff on "The Raven":
But the silence was unbroken,
and the stillness gave no token;
And the only word there spoken
was the whispered word, "Bernanke?"

....

[ending grafs]Still, the siren song of literary allusion exerts a powerful tug, and few novels -- read or unread -- seem to have captured the imagination of hedge-fund managers quite like "Moby-Dick." The story of Ahab's obsessive quest to harpoon the great White Whale shows up as brief asides in investment letters -- "You don't need to call Ishmael to know that results can be fishy" -- and as digressions that go on for pages.

The Melville novel is particularly popular, says Mr. Reiferson of Americus Capital, because money managers like to give the impression that they are being Ahab-like in "maniacally pursuing their goals" of making money. Mr. Reiferson says he planned to name his fund after Bildad, a character who helped finance the whaling expeditions. But in the end, he felt the reference was "too obscure, unless I could raise money from Melville scholars."

More than a day late and a dollar short ...

2006-02-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

I enjoy reading Paul Berman's pieces in TNR; I remember reading one by Joschka Fischer in late August - early September 2001 that I particularly liked. His piece on French Americophobia (in the November 28, 2005 issue, and sorry, you'll have to find it yourselves) was frustratingly ill-organized, but nonetheless had a big payoff at the end:

Over the centuries, the United States has gone to
war and defeated every one of the Western European powers -- Britain, Spain,
Germany, and Italy -- with France the lonely exception. France is the only
Western power that America has never opposed in war, the only country around the
world for which America has repeatedly sacrificed itself, and on the hugest of
scales .... It might even be suspected that French anti-Americanism owes
something to the scale of France's debt to America .... Yet there is
something more than a debtor's resentment here ....

Roger recalls the history of French grievances
against America, the actual hard-fact history -- the history that Americans know
nothing about and can hardly even imagine, though its statges are easily
identified. ....

Then came the struggles of the Napoleonic wars,
and the French nvay seized a great many American ships .... And the United
States demanded compensation afterwards, and not n a small amount.
President Andrew Jackson pursued this demand, and the French eventually agreed
to pay .... [T]he argument over compensation to the United States aroused
a tremendous anger in France -- tremendous because the French had aided the
United States in the past, and America ought to have allowed its feeling of
gratitude to linger a little longer. And the resentment was owed to
something more. For what was the meaning of France's revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars?

France suffered. France's army was
destroyed. France ended up under European occupation. Huge portions
of the French population were killed. The defeat was spectacular and
enormous. And there was the United States in the wake of these tragedies,
demanding a money transfer from a somber and defeated France to the cheerful
shores of a prosperous United States. ....

The Franco-American debt crisis in the era of
President Jackson ... was re-played in the years after World War I, this time on
a bigger scale. The United States demanded repayment of France's
debt. And yet the United States, out of an ex-post-facto wish to unto the
excesses and errors of the Treaty of Versailles, also gazed in Germany's
direction and felt a tender concern, and expressed a willingness to restructure
Germany's obligations. A good many French people viewd this as a ghastly
and unjustified American tilt towards Germany. For what had happened to
France during the war? Germany had inflicted death on so massive a scale
that France could never be the same afterwards ....

After World War II, the great French socialist
Leon Blum demanded that the Americans treat the French with a little more
graciousness and compassion .... And the United States, in a fit of
atypical sensitivity ... not only canceled the war debts but offered the
Marshall Plan. In the French psyche, however, the Marshall Plan appears to
have come too late, and for reasons that ought to be easily understood.
Americans recall the role of France in World War II ... as something shameful,
as the role of a country that barely fought, and surrendered too easily, unlike
noble Britain.

And yet, in 1940, when the Germans invaded, the
French did fight, for a while. France lost 100,000 soldiers in May and
June of that year -- a staggering number, and simply unbearable after the losses
from World War I. France surrendered in 1940 because it was impossible to
fight anymore -- surrendered because France had been defeated, not just in those
terrible months but in one war after another for nearly a century and a half,
and above all in the catastrophe of 1914-1918. French society was
simply not going to subject itself to yet another round of mass
slaughter.

Endorsement

2006-02-13T22:33:00.000-05:00

I agree with Harry at Crooked Timber.

"The greatest act of cultural vandalism since the destruction of the library at Alexandria"

2006-01-30T09:40:00.000-05:00

That was my reaction to the rehang of early Modern Art at the MOMA, anyway. Now Jed Perl, a more noted and nuanced critic, is saying much the same at TNR:

The new building, which I admired for its refined details and suavely balanced volumes in the weeks before the grand opening, when it was nearly empty of people, has pretty much proved to be a fiasco. The more people there are in Yoshio Taniguchi's spaces, the less poetic those spaces feel, which is just about the most devastating thing that you can say about a work of public architecture. The fault, though, is not Taniguchi's alone. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, and Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, those landmarks of twentieth-century art, look lost in the new museum, because they have been torn from the moral landscape that they inhabited, with its visionary fervor and its progressivist ideals. While the curators at the Modern would have us believe that they are currently engaged in the perfectly legitimate task of rethinking that landscape--of giving its modern perspectives a postmodern overhaul--[museum director Glenn] Lowry has in fact turned the whole damn landscape into a mall in which Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian are merely what happens to be available, as interchangeable as H&M, Target, and the Gap.

Meme for the new year: 7 x 7

2006-01-17T22:28:00.000-05:00

1. Seven things to do before I die: learn Chinese; (finally!) read Dostoevsky in the original; spend an extended period of time in Paris; write a book; organize all my old photos and mementos; fill in all those reading gaps that nag me; raise baby Whit to be a good person.

2. Seven things I cannot do: ski; remember to-dos from my husband on a regular basis (!); get things done ahead of time; cozy up to strangers at cocktail parties; get our tv to work properly; stick to an exercise program; forgive easily. Damn, it feels depressing to write those all down.

3. Seven things that attract me to Brooklyn: the bridge; the views from the Promenade; Jacques Torres!; a borough president who stands at the end of the bridge with a bullhorn welcoming people during crises; Prospect Park; general child-friendliness; being just the right distance from Manhattan.

4. Seven things I say most often: "I love you, baby Whit"; "What do we have here?"; "Well, I got interrupted"; "I love you, dh"; "Sorry I'm late on this one"; "Someday, when I get all this stuff organized"; "Hmmph." Actually nonsense rhymes for the baby lead the list, but I'm reluctant to list them here.

5. Seven books I love: Well, there is the whole "Unrequired Reading" list, you know. But if I had to choose: A Time of Gifts; Auden's Selected Poems; Keats' letters; The Magic Mountain; Franny and Zooey (sorry!); The Snow Leopard; Anna Karenina.

6. Seven movies I (could) watch over and over again: Groundhog Day; Un condamne a mort s'est echape; 8 1/2; Master and Commander; The Usual Suspects; Casablanca; Singing in the Rain.

7. Seven people to tag: I am *way* too shy to do this. (If I weren't, Scott McLemee and Julie of A Little Pregnant would be on the list, though.)

Memos from the Brooklyn HQ, Tuesday, December 20

2005-12-20T07:34:00.000-05:00

Dear Transit Workers Local 100: You suck.
Expanded version: It's always great PR when your striking workers reply to a reporter who asks, "Do you believe in what you're striking for?" with a resounding "No comment."

Dear MTA management: You suck.
Expanded version: Who are your accountants, the former Enron treasury department? The whole "deficit - surplus - deficit" game is getting a little old.

Dear Governor Pataki: 90% of life is showing up.

Snippet: On the English novel

2005-12-11T20:19:00.000-05:00

Michael Kinsley, in Slate:

Today Britain doesn't matter much. But who the new vicar will be in some fictional village 200 years ago still matters a lot. It is history's consolation prize. Nineteenth-century English village life will always loom large in the world's imagination, like Greenland in a Mercator projection map.

Train wreck of a sentence

2005-12-11T20:18:00.000-05:00

I don't think the AP meant this last phrase literally:

Richard Pryor startled audiences with his foul-mouthed routines, but his universal and frequently personal insights propelled him into one of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Excellent headline

2005-12-11T20:15:00.000-05:00

In Slate, re the Narnia controversy: "Whose Lion Is It Anyway?" (That's the front page teaser for this article, actually.)

"Adam Smith rewritten as Letters to Penthouse"

2005-12-05T10:23:00.000-05:00

Go ye forth and read Daniel Davies on Freakonomics. The book bothered me, as I kept on feeling as though "the real falsifiable claims here are all embedded in some econometrics models, which you all aren't telling me about." The inimitable D-Squared has much more to say on the topic.

Other people's unrequired reading

2005-11-15T21:53:00.000-05:00

At Slate. Chris Hitchens and Neal Pollack both cite George Eliot as college faves - who knew?

No, seriously: Thomas Pynchon, call your office

2005-11-14T17:35:00.000-05:00

As a rubbernecking spectator of l'affaire Deignan, I keep thinking this: Dude, this has got to be fodder for the 21st-century rewrite of The Crying of Lot 49. Angry academic bloggers could interpret comment boxes instead of Jacobean revenge plays, and who needs obscure stamps when one can trace down IP addresses instead?

Also, Alexander Pope.*

* I mean the second line, not the first!

Snippet: On poetry

2005-11-13T16:19:00.000-05:00

David Orr, in today's NYT Book Review, reviewing an anthology by Garrison Keillor (generally favorably):

The most obvious problem with "Good Poems for Hard Times" is that it proposes that "the meaning of poetry is to give courage." That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch. The meaning of poetry is poetry.

Talk about burying the lede

2005-11-10T09:59:00.000-05:00

In Wednesday's NYT, a story about the organ at St. Ann's and the Holy Trinity church had this amazing nugget buried deep down:

Time was unkind to Mr. Skinner [the organ's designer], who lived to see much of his work destroyed as orchestral organ music fell from fashion. Holy Trinity Church was closed in 1957 after accusations of Communist plotting in the rectory. (The case went to the United States Supreme Court, but the real climax was the spectacle of two ministers shouting dueling services one Sunday morning.) The building fell into disuse.

Commies on Montague Street, one block away from the current sites of a Chipotle, Garden of Eden, and MAC Cosmetics store? Now that's a Metro story I'd like to read.

Unrequired reading

2005-11-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

I'm going to edit this as I go along; I won't be noting additions, but I will let you know if there are any significant deletions.

W. H. Auden, Selected Poems (especially "At the Grave of Henry James" and "In Sickness and in Health")
Malcolm Bradbury, Rates of Exchange
A. S. Byatt, "The Chinese Lobster" (in The Matisse Stories)
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (nothing to do with Tom Cruise!)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water
Jack Gilbert, Monolithos (especially "The Abnormal is Not Courage")
Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga
Gustav Herling, Volcano and Miracle
Henry James, The Ambassadors
John Keats, Letters
Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Anthony Lane, Nobody's Perfect
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Gita Mehta, A River Sutra
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita and Speak, Memory
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (and maybe V.)
J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
W. B. Yeats, any anthology that includes "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," "Meru," and "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"

Meanwhile, this is awesome

2005-10-27T18:13:00.000-04:00

The Lord of the Rings (1954)
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”

Excellent page of one-star Amazon reviews of famous novels. Via The Bandarlog.

Hating Blogger

2005-10-27T18:12:00.000-04:00

There's supposed to be some more unrequired reading below, but Blogger keeps telling me that this blog doesn't exist. Pfft.

More seriously

2005-10-11T08:52:00.000-04:00

A sad day: Wayne Booth has died. Having spent some of my happier teenage hours reading The Rhetoric of Fiction, I mourn his passing.

Economists of America, ready your Cliff Notes

2005-10-11T08:48:00.000-04:00

In a frenzy of ongoing bearishness, Morgan Stanley's Steve Roach gives in and quotes from ... Silas Marner. I am so fired up by the possibilities: I want to see Brad deLong on Middlemarch, David Roche on Daniel Deronda, David Wessel on The Mill on the Floss ....

Provocations

2005-09-22T12:57:00.000-04:00

To argue that Adam Smith was to previous concepts of distributive ethics what Darwin was to previous concepts of humanity's origin.

The offense of compound interest against a "conservation of matter" view of value distribution.

Thomas Pynchon, call your office

2005-09-20T13:34:00.000-04:00

An article in today's WSJ (sorry, paid subscribers only) calls out for the master of paranoia to revisit an old theme.

Spanish-born artist Remedios Varo was an important 20th-century surrealist painter and a cultural icon in her adopted Mexico. She painted vegetarian vampires and other strange inhabitants of a world where logic was turned inside out.

Now, four decades after Ms. Varo's death, 39 of her best works are on a journey through the surreal corridors of Mexican justice.

Although the Mexican government has declared the collection a "national treasure" in order to keep the paintings in Mexico, a court here recently ruled that a Mexican museum must hand over the works to the artist's Spanish niece, whom Ms. Varo barely knew. Why? The longtime owner of the collection, Walter Gruen, a 91-year-old Austrian émigré who was Ms. Varo's lover, is missing some sales receipts.

The fight over the paintings highlights an uncomfortable fact for Mexicans and foreigners who live and invest here: Anyone who steps inside a Mexican courtroom enters a world of unpredictable consequences. In the country's Napoleonic code, technicalities often override overwhelming evidence.

Mexican courts ruled that Mr. Gruen was not close enough to Ms. Varo to be considered her common-law husband, even though the two lived together for 11 years prior to her death. The courts have also dismissed some 2,500 pages of evidence that back up Mr. Gruen's ownership claim, including affidavits from prominent collectors who sold Varo works to him.

Compare and contrast

2005-08-23T09:42:00.000-04:00

The New York Times, August 2005:

Although no one seems to talk publicly about the problem, Josh is only one of dozens of men who have confided to me that witnessing the births of their children has made it difficult for them to be attracted to their wives, at least in the short run.

They seem to have trouble seeing them as sexual beings after seeing them make babies, trouble reverting to a mind-set in which their wives' sexual anatomy is just that - not associated with images of new life emerging through the birth canal.

...
And not every man gets over it. Several men have confessed to me that they never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children.

Jonathan Swift, 1732:

I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the charms of female kind.
Should I the Queen of Love refuse
Because she rose from stinking ooze?
To him that looks behind the scene
Satira's but some pocky queen.
When Celia in her glory shows,
If Strephon would but stop his nose ...
He soon would learn to think like me
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.

Oh, bliss (part two)

2005-08-18T16:39:00.000-04:00

Kid #1: Paper beats rock. BAM! Your rock is blowed up!
Kid #2: "Bam" doesn't blow up, "bam" makes it spicy. Now I got a SPICY ROCK! You can't defeat that!

Ghetto guy #1: Who do you think is better, Bernie Mac or Mr. T?
Ghetto guy #2: Obviously Mr. T. He uses pronouns more efficiently.

Dumb teen: Hey, look at this! It says 'Train for jobs in beeyotch.'
Smarter teen: Fool! That word is biotech. Why you gotta be ignorant all your life?

Slate has a great summary of quotes from Overheard in New York. These are some of my favorites.

Oh, bliss (part one)

2005-08-18T16:31:00.000-04:00

What are the plot-threads that clutch, what subplots grow
Out of this pulpy rubbish? Son of James, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
Your third-person limited perspective, where your adverbs breed,
And the caps lock gives no shelter, the chapter no relief,
And the seventh book no sign of surcease. Only
There is a horcrux inside this dark cave, 25
(Come into the waters of this dark cave),
And I will show you something different from either
Your battles fought previous where someone did help you
Or your battles to come which you must face alone;
I will show you fear in a cupful of juice.

Great, great happiness. Via Eve Tushnet (who cites the best single line, "I had not known Death Eaters had undone so many").

Boy, am I out of it (part two)

2005-07-18T16:08:00.000-04:00

I missed the Sunday NYT and was thus not prepared for the uproar over the "fired blogging nanny in Brooklyn" article. I (fortunately) know none of the parties involved. But I'm just feeling so, well, out of it over my nanny concerns versus Ms. Olin's. She worries about the nanny's sex life and posting habits? And here I am, just wondering if I've made the right choice in going back to work, and whether Baby Whit is happy and well in my absence. Ah, silly old-fashioned me.

Boy, am I out of it (part one)

2005-07-18T16:06:00.000-04:00

It wasn't until this morning's WSJ, in a front page story about a raucous bachelor party thrown for Dennis Kozlowski's future son-in-law, did I know this:

"Some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment," says the 4-foot-2 Danny Black, a part-owner in Shortdwarf.com, an outfit that rents dwarfs for parties starting at $149 an hour.

A small but poignant aspect of America's health care crisis

2005-06-28T12:51:00.000-04:00

There is a state program in Wisconsin to cover the "poor-but-not-poor-enough-for-Medicaid," which is good.

Its name is BadgerCare, which is ... not so good.

* * *
And while we're at it, why do participants in the US health care system get so enthused by the "capital in the middle" style of nomenclature, anyway? UnitedHealth? WellPoint? WellChoice? LifePoint? Anyone? Anyone? BuelLer? BuelLer?

Excuses, excuses

2005-06-09T19:27:00.000-04:00

Why I have been gone so long: Baby Whit, born in Fourth-month. Now healthy, thriving, and sounding his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of Brooklyn.

Good stuff

2005-04-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

From Brad DeLong, who expands on one of my favorite passages in literature, Machiavelli's letter from exile in which he writes about the course of his days:

When evening comes Niccolo Machiavelli enters his personal library. There he talks to his friends--his books, or rather those who wrote the books in his library, or rather those components of their minds that are instantiated in the hardware-and-software combinations of linen, ink, and symbols of Gutenberg Information Technology. They are 'ancient men' who receive him 'with affection,' and for four hours he 'ask[s] them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and... I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death...'
Remember: Machiavelli lives only two generations after Gutenberg. He is thus one of the very first people in the world to have had a personal library. Before printing, libraries were the exclusive possession of kings, sovereign princes, abbots, masters of the Roman Empire (like Caesar and Cicero). The idea that a mere mortal--a disgraced ex-Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence--might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century earlier. To him, therefore, his personal library is not something he takes for granted, but something new, something he has that his predecessors did not. And so he can see clearly--more clearly than we can--what his personal library does for him, what his books are.
In disgraced semi-exile--when many he would talk to are afraid to be seen in his company, and where he is afraid to be seen in the company of almost all the rest--the ability to read and reread his personal copies of Publius Ovidius Naso, Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Titus Livius, Plutarch, and the rest makes them his friends....

John Paul II, RIP

2005-04-04T18:12:00.000-04:00

Okay, I know the press is all over the story, and I am a lapsed Catholic (and well-nigh lapsed blogger), so my words are belated. But if nothing else, I love the Pope for what he did for Poland, as recorded by Timothy Garton Ash in 1983:

They have come as pilgrims from all over Poland, marching softly through the nght. Now at last they are massed on the meadow before the red-brick fortress walls of Jasna Gora monastery, which is for the Poles at once Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle. ....
Suddenly he is with them, high up on the white-and-gold dais erected before the monastery battlements. For minutes they drown him in wave after wave of emotional applause. Again and again, now from one corner, now from another, you hear the rhythmic chants: "Long live the pope, long live the pope"; "The pope with us, the pope with us." ....

Finally, his voice booms through the loudspeakers: "I want to ask you if a certain person who came today from Rome to Jasna Gora may be allowed to speak." ....

And then, as suddenly, the crowd is silent, reverent, half a million people listening with such attention that you could hear a rosary drop. It is a great and simple homily, not a political speech. He preaches a love that is "greater than all the experiences and disappointments that life can prepare for us." He shows them that he knows and shares their disappointments, without having to mention martial law directly. He tells them what they can do: to begin with the reformation of themselves, which must precede any social or political reform; to listen to their consciences; to "call good and evil by name." "It is up to you," he says, "to put a firm barrier against demoralization." Then and only then does he mention, for the first time, the word solidarity, letting it drop very quietly into the silent crowd, not Solidarity the outlawed movement, but "fundamental solidarity between human beings."

This sounds like a job for ... the Underground Man

2005-03-15T12:13:00.000-05:00

The NYT is rockin' the passive aggression today:

Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: "Not at this address. Return to sender." But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had "or current resident" on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he said.

Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the "business reply" envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. "That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me," said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany.

After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.

"You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh," said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.

Stupid but irresistible

2005-03-10T13:22:00.000-05:00

Look, I find blogs that habitually bash the French (culture, politics, whatever) annoying.

Still, this is funny:

Paris strike hits Olympic visit

France is in the grip of a one-day general strike, just as Paris hosts a team of inspectors from the International Olympic Committee. They will tour the city to assess its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. The strike has brought much of the public transport system to a halt, while tens of thousands of protesters are due to stage rallies.

Headlines

2005-03-08T12:53:00.000-05:00

What we saw in the business press yesterday (roughly speaking):

"Boeing CEO forced to resign over affair with colleague"

The follow-up story we should be seeing:

"Airbus execs laugh their asses off at US puritanism"

The secret life of cows

2005-03-01T09:23:00.000-05:00

[C]ows have a secret mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited over intellectual challenges, scientists have found.

Cows are also capable of feeling strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety — they worry about the future. But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness.

...
[C]ows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They will also dislike other cows and can bear grudges for months or years.

From the London Times, via Arts and Letters Daily. The long-standing grudges part is what worries me, personally.

Cherish free speech

2005-02-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

Today is Free Mojtaba and Arash Day.

Residents of Red Hook, beware!

2005-02-10T11:27:00.000-05:00

There's already a big debate in that somewhat neglected Brooklyn neighborhood about whether an Ikea should be built (pros: jobs; cons: traffic and loss of local charm). Well, now we can add this news to the mix (from a Guardian article, 'Slowly but steadily, madness descended)':

At one minute past midnight last night, Ikea's new flagship store opened in north London, and managers expected that around 2,000 bargain-hunters would quietly file in. The British, after all, have a reputation for being decorous queuers. But Ikea had not predicted that up to 6,000 people would descend on the new store, in Edmonton, with a stampede to get in resulting in a frightening crush.

Thousands had been lured by bargains - some of which were only available until 3am even though a 24-hour opening was planned - such as 500 leather sofas for only £45. Cars were abandoned on the roadside as shoppers attempted to reach the store in time to secure the best offers.

Six people were taken to hospital, including a man in his 20s who was stabbed nearby at around 1.30am. He was said to be in a stable condition, and it was not clear whether the incident was related to the opening.

The chaos meant the new store - the 12th and biggest to open in the UK - had to close just over 40 minutes after opening because of what Ikea described as the "unforeseen numbers".

The Swedish furniture giant was this morning attempting to limit the damage caused by last night's events. In a statement, it said it was "deeply shocked and overwhelmed" and "could not apologise enough".

Snark alert (New York Fashion Week edition, sort of)

2005-02-08T18:26:00.000-05:00

The editor of British Vogue, in the Telegraph, comments on a report that 97% of women are dissatisfied with their bodies shortly after giving birth. She notes that women are particularly unhappy when they compare themselves with famous moms such as Gwyneth Paltrow who have got quickly back into shape after childbirth. She retorts:

Duh. And in what other ways are these ordinary mums not like Elizabeth, Gwyneth and Catherine? Why should they suddenly feel pressured to look like them in their post-natal state when they almost certainly didn't look like them to start with? Nor, I imagine, do most of their lives bear much resemblance to those of the above. Do they have an army of nutritionists, acupuncturists, personal trainers, nannies and stylists working overtime to whittle them back into shape? I would hazard a guess that they probably don't.

Blaming glamorous women has become such a cliché.

OK, fair enough, perhaps. But I canceled my non-existent subscription when I read this follow-up:

If, shortly after giving birth, a woman is obsessed with looking skinny and can't differentiate between herself and the celebrities who earn their living from their appearance, she shouldn't have become a mother in the first place.

Ah, yes, why blame the glamorous women when the non-glamorous ones are such easy targets?

Gratuitous snark alert

2005-02-07T14:20:00.000-05:00

From today's NYT article reviewing the Super Bowl ads, this gratuitous slam at an ad saluting U.S. troops returning from overseas:

A gauzy valentine to American troops, which ended with the Anheuser-Busch corporate logo superimposed on screen, was touching, but some viewers may have wondered whether "Busch" had been misspelled.

Sorry, I don't buy it. I thought this was a moving, well-done ad, not a "gauzy valentine." More importantly, one doesn't have to endorse the war to respect the troops for the risks they take; nor does the nastiness of Abu Ghraib negate the bravery and decency of others in the armed forces. So give us all a break, already, snarky media types.

What is to be done?

2005-02-03T17:22:00.000-05:00

Scott McLemee (post of February 2, no permalinks) speculates that "[Ayn Rand's] worldview resembles a Soviet era socialist-realist novel with the word 'communism' scratched out and 'capitalism' written in."

I would challenge that: Ayn Rand is no Soviet-era novelist.

Ayn Rand is the capitalist Chernyshevsky.

The who? Well, you could read Nabokov's The Gift for some background on Chernyshevsky. Or you could read Notes from Underground, which Dostoevsky wrote as a direct challenge to some of Chernyshevsky's utopian ideas. Or you could even read Chernyshevsky's own What is to be Done? - though I wouldn't, if I were you. (I think Lenin's later pamphlet was a deliberate tribute.)

But, anyway, why is Rand the capitalist Chernyshevsky? Let's look at the points of comparison.

Utopian beliefs? Check.

Characters with a tendency to deliver very long philosophical speeches? Check.

Other characters who apparently find this a normal form of dialogue? Check.

Authorial tendency to divide characters into good and evil with no in-between? Check.

Authorial hope that their novel(s) would change the world? Check.

Actual existence of intense devotees of the novelist's philosophy? Check.

Nomen est omen

2005-02-03T09:44:00.000-05:00

From today's WSJ:

On July 16, a senior Citigroup Inc. executive in London told traders on the European government-bond desk they weren't making enough money for the firm and ordered them to come up with new trading strategies. About two weeks later, six bond traders pushed the button on a huge bond-trading strategy dubbed "Dr. Evil," taking its name from the "Austin Powers" spy-spoof movies, according to a report by a German financial regulator.

Later in the article, this poker-faced note:

Citigroup said the traders had made "inappropriate, unrealistic, and, in certain instances juvenile remarks about the trading strategy before it was executed."

Um, yeah.

Tuesday pop quiz

2005-02-01T16:17:00.000-05:00

Biology

Which of these statements best describes the last months of a woman's pregnancy?

a) "Third trimester: a miracle in progress"

b) "Third trimester: amazement and anticipation"

c) "Third trimester: your skin is going straight to hell"

Economics

In his NYT op-ed today, Paul Krugman passes on a challenge to readers to "make a projection of economic growth, dividends, and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years." You decline, on the basis that

a) Krugman equivocates between his first and last grafs about whether this is supposed to be a nominal rate of return (which could be plausible, actually) or a real one (which would be tougher)

b) to hell with it, you just want to be able to exercise stock options worth $110 million plus, like UnitedHealthcare's Bill McGuire

c) to hell with McGuire, you'd like the $150 million package Jim Kilts just got for selling Gillette (described by the WSJ as "more than $153 million, including gains on his Gillette stock options and stock rights, a one-time sweetener from P&G valued at an estimated $23.9 million, plus a "change in control" payment of $12.6 million")

So the dictatorship of the proletariat hasn't come to Alabama yet?

2005-01-26T13:22:00.000-05:00

From the NYT, on the trial of disgraced HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, for allegedly committing huge accounting fraud:

[The judge] emphasized that the jurors should not be influenced one way or another by Mr. Scrushy's wealth. "Mr. Scrushy is not on trial for making and spending money," she said.

Found poetry

2005-01-25T13:49:00.000-05:00

In a blurb in the online WSJ, after a cheerful commentary on today's market action:

"Traders were pensive as the final hours of trading lately have been tough on stocks."

Ah, those pensive traders! Ah, long-suffering stocks!

And you thought the WSJ had no sense of drama

2005-01-19T08:02:00.000-05:00

But consider this opening.

FORT WORTH, Texas -- As dusk fell here one evening recently, an armed team spread out over the corporate campus of RadioShack Corp. and waited.

Suddenly, high above the downtown skyscrapers, the electric-blue evening sky darkened with a huge swirl of black dots. Soon, a screeching cloud of birds descended, settling on the trees around the building.

One of the armed men pointed his pistol and fired, sending a special noise-making cartridge into the trees, where it exploded with a loud boom. Then the rest of the team opened fire. For the next 45 minutes, this normally quiet place sounded like a war zone, echoing with explosions and screaming missiles as the birds boiled back into the sky in a graceful, fleeing mass.

It's grackle time in Texas.

The closing is pretty good, too:

Fort Worth -- which spends up to $60,000 a year dispatching crews to "power wash" its downtown sidewalks -- also favors the gun approach. Last year, city workers began training employees of downtown businesses to use pistols with cracker shells to drive off the birds.

Now, city park officials are asking the city council to approve a much more ambitious plan. The goal: to train a citywide corps of residents and business owners who would fire coordinated blasts from shotguns to drive the birds beyond city limits.

"The dailiness of life"

2005-01-18T20:38:00.000-05:00

At first I was going to quote this poem and give a reference to Jo's post, about her unexpected pregnancy while waiting to adopt. But I really think you should read the whole post, for lines like this:

I value my tiredness. In it I feel my mother and my grandmother and my next-door neighbor, now 34 weeks; I feel every woman who ever felt it, proximal, as though we were working in a vast kitchen together, kneading bread in a contrapunnel rhythm together, watching the tenuous work of yeast at the right temperature with the right food, no less miraculous than pregnancy, conscious of how everything is really just the same thing, just one thing. I feel in my bones the wanting and ache of every woman waiting for an adoption, too, and those women just waiting to see what might happen, which miracle to teach themselves to see. We are all in the kitchen, working, waiting, talking over busy hands. All of them rest inside me, and I can never separate myself from any of them, no matter which way opens itself to me, no matter whether each group can see the other, in that kitchen.

Dispatches from the world of hair (1)

2005-01-13T13:24:00.000-05:00

From Wednesday's NYT:

The [North Korean] government is telling men to keep their hair short and visit a barber twice a month, saying that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy, according to the BBC, citing broadcasts from Pyongyang. The drive is being led primarily by state television with a series called "Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle."

Dispatches from the world of hair (2)

2005-01-13T13:20:00.000-05:00

And from today's paper, at the end of a way-too-long front page article on the commercialization of Donald Trump's wedding:

[E]ven stars who are less than press-shy or freebie-averse have their limits. Mr. Trump, for instance, will handle at least one important wedding-day service himself.
"I'll do my own hair," he said, adding wearily, "unfortunately for the world."

Your sports update (with a highly tangential Long Island twist)

2005-01-07T17:50:00.000-05:00

I don't really do football (hey, I'm waiting for all those golden Pedro quotes starting this spring). But I did relish this commentary on a recent Monday night game from Skot at Izzle Pfaff!:

Where to start? Well, maybe the quarterbacks, who in this instance I hope are named for the amount of money they earned for their efforts. Luke McCown? AJ Feeley? These are not the names of quarterbacks. They are the names of residents of West Egg. Then again, the hottest quarterback in football is named Peyton, so what do I know?

I feel good, but not that good

2005-01-07T17:40:00.000-05:00

Amazon has just kindly sent me an e-mail offering me the chance to buy James Brown's memoir, "I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life in Soul," at a 32% discount. I feel baffled, though I suppose I should feel flattered: clearly their recommendations engine hasn't grasped how square I really am.

* * *
Meanwhile, despite my pre-Christmas angst, I had a very nice vacation. I'm now back at work, where the prospect of my approaching leave sometimes fills me with relief, but more often with worries about the amount of work to be done.

Too late for the holidays

2004-12-22T09:54:00.000-05:00

Not like I'm looking forward to Christmas anyway, given my ongoing health problems and other sources of unhappiness, but oh, if only this had been published in time: Scott McLemee (post of 22 December) has an advance copy of From Ike to Mao, the memoirs of Chairman Bob Avakian. Damn. How am I to rise above the false consciousness of my bourgeois existence without some revolutionary guidance?

This made me laugh

2004-12-21T14:06:00.000-05:00

Fontana Labs is grading philosophy finals:

"It's 106 miles to the kingdom of ends, it's dark, and I'm wearing sunglasses."

This made me cry

2004-12-21T14:00:00.000-05:00

Getupgrrl on her surrogate's most recent ultrasound.

Some wisdom for this holiday season

2004-12-20T11:35:00.000-05:00

From Dave Barry:

"Running away is never the answer, unless you are a teenage boy who has just blown up a mailbox."

What da fa?

2004-12-02T18:11:00.000-05:00

Why is New York suddenly filled with supporters of Falun Dafa (aka Falun Gong)? On the sidewalks and in the subways, Falun Dafa adherents hold up posters and pass out leaflets protesting their persecution by Chinese authorities. I also assume that a new, free newspaper called Epoch Times is part of (or at least supported by) their movement. Prior to this influx of protesters, I was always sympathetic to Falun Dafa ... but now I'm more freaked out and confused.

Story of my life: Pregnant, hungry, and thwarted

2004-11-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

I don't think I shop (or fail to shop) at the same Key Food as Sars does, but the experience is roughly the same.

[L]et's talk about how the Key Food overhaul is lasting months. Let's talk about how store management has elected, instead of just closing the whole store for three days and finishing everything in one mildly inconvenient shot, to use a one-aisle-at-a-time strategy while leaving the store open for business, which is taking forever. The contractors can't really get anything done because the store always full of shoppers, the shoppers can't find anything because the contractors just heap everything up higgledy-piggledy without regard to common sense (salad dressing in the dairy aisle, cheese in the cereal aisle, no frozen-foods aisle at all for two weeks while they moved the cases -- no shit -- a foot and a half to the left, and no coffee filters at all because they just put them away, and nobody else in the neighborhood sells #2 filters, because who has a coffeemaker that small? I DO DAMN YOUUUUUUUUU), they shuffled the aisles like a deck of cards for no reason so everyone is bumbling around…and what that particular Key Food needs is not "more bumbling around." "Fewer customers who will whack a three-gallon container of apple juice down onto your bread," sure. "A better cheese selection than 'cheddar or mozzarella,'" definitely. "Livelier lettuce," you can bet on it. It does not need more bumbling around.

So what's Key Food's problem, anyway (besides the fact that they run out of obscure items I might want, like, say Diet Dr Pepper)? Well, I just looked them up on Hoovers. Lo and behold, there is a listing for Key Foods Stores Co-operative. "Founded in 1937, the co-op helps about 115 independently owned food retailers in the New York City area compete with major supermarket chains by pooling buying power." So I'm starting to feel bad about kicking poor Key Food.

What to do? Surf to their own website. And lo, again, my urge to snark on Key Food is renewed. For they are boasting about their store brand, called - wait for it - KEY FOOD PRODUCT. They claim, "Our store brand, KEY FOOD PRODUCT, is of the highest quality, comparable to the national brands, and is offered at lower prices." I'm sorry, that's just too Repo Man for me. I'm sticking with my snooty online grocer.

Story of my life (post-collegiate version)

2004-11-23T16:55:00.000-05:00

From The Onion. Oh well.

The unattached, freewheeling, consequence-free years following Frank Anderton's graduation from college are being spent in "one of the coolest offices in all of Seattle," the 24-year-old reported Tuesday.

"Man, it's the greatest feeling in the world, knowing that I could do anything right now," Anderton said, sitting at his desk at 8:30 p.m. Friday. "I don't have any kids to worry about or a mortgage to pay. If I wanted to pick up and backpack through Europe, I could leave in two weeks, no questions asked. Of course, that would set me back a little, career-wise."

Notes from the corridors of power: 2

2004-11-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

And from The Wall Street Journal, this spectacular lede to a story about the management crisis and ensuing lawsuit at Disney:

On a witness stand here Tuesday, Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Michael Eisner summarized a harsh 1996 letter he wrote to then-Disney president Michael Ovitz as meaning: "You were rotten to begin with, you're rotten now, go away."

Notes from the corridors of power: 1

2004-11-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

From this morning's New York Times, a story that pictures of Kim Jong-Il have mysteriously been disappearing in North Korea. However, not everyone thinks it's true:

There has been no official reaction from North Korea to the reports. But a North Korean diplomat in Moscow was quoted Tuesday by Itar-Tass as saying: "This is false information, lies. Can the sun be removed from the sky? It is not possible."

Beggin' to diffah

2004-11-10T09:48:00.000-05:00

"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is the worst song ever? Surely not. In a world that has given us "The Lion Sleeps Tonight?" Or "I've Never Been to Me?" And besides, our understanding of late capitalism has been totally summarized in the phrase, "Happy ever after in the marketplace," right? Oh well.

A view from a broad

2004-11-02T15:30:00.000-05:00

My favorite "blogging of the president" so far. Writing from Scotland, American expat Barren Mare notes:

You'd think that the election was taking place in Britain, since the news coverage is so intense, and everybody here is taking such an interest. ... I think the thing is, people recognise that the results of today's election will have a long term and significant impact on Britain. The Americans are not just electing a president, they are choosing Tony Blair's new best friend.

Advertising death wish

2004-11-01T08:59:00.000-05:00

The always-horrible Citibank "oh money is not really all the important" ads have struck a new low. I saw this on a billboard this morning:

Live as though your next purchase was going to be the farm.

Halloween in Brownstone Brooklyn

2004-11-01T08:58:00.000-05:00

Ben H. explains it all for you.

Congrats...

2004-10-28T11:22:00.000-04:00

... to the Red Sox, from this wobbly Yankees fan. Who am I to argue with the evident will of the gods? And there was something inspiring about how perserverance and team spirit turned these talented goofballs into champions. Enjoy yourselves, New England!

Forget your daddy. Who's your shrink?

2004-10-14T10:05:00.000-04:00

Some interesting rationalizations by the always-quotable Pedro Martínez:

While Martínez was in the game, thousands of Yankee Stadium fans serenaded him with a singsong "Who's your daddy?" It was a reference to his bizarre statement after a September game in Boston that the Yankees were his daddy.

"It actually made me feel really, really good," Martínez said. "I actually realize that I was somebody important because I caught the attention of 60,000 people.

"Today I was the center of attention of all of New York," he added. "I don't like to brag about myself, but they did make me feel important."

Preach it, Tim Burke

2004-10-13T17:08:00.000-04:00

The most sensible commentary I've read on Derrida so far. My favorite part:

In some ways, this is yet another way we can see how much of postmodernism is less “post” and more the fall of a religion from its faith, the bitterness and lingering of a frustrated modernism. Derrida was oddly empiricist, in his way. Frequently, he would enter an ongoing discussion about a text, a turn of speech, a political regime, a sociological construct not by polymorphously opening up meanings and possibilities but by insisting that the one meaning that should be completely and utterly denied to us is that meaning which we are most commonly accustomed to seeing. Counter-intuitively, Derridean deconstruction was not a permissive practice, but an inhibitory one: it’s favorite word was, “No!”: no, this saying does not mean what we think it means; no, this book does not mean what it is said to mean; no, this government does not act as it says it acts; no, there is never male and female alone, always there is much more. You may have any meanings save those you are familiar with, trust in, assume: those are denied to you, because they are untrue.

This back-door empiricism, this authoritative negation, was one component of the interior absolutism of Derrida’s critical method. The other was the cry of all or nothing at all, that if communication could not be perfected, then there was no communication, if texts could not have a correct meaning, they meant everything, anything, nothing in particular. ... If meaning cannot be guaranteed with finality, then there is no use to talking about it at all. If interpretation cannot be absolute, it cannot be done save as a negation of all positive acts of interpretation. The massively excluded middle: that texts are more likely to mean some things than others, that some interpretation is more right than other interpretation, that communication is subject to some but not infinite slippage, that other subjectivities are not perfectly knowable but neither are they perfectly mysterious: all this was not so much denied as evaded by Derrida.

Adventures in moral hazard

2004-10-11T22:06:00.000-04:00

From an insurance newsfeed:

China’s Ping An Insurance has launched a wedding protection policy in association with the Shanghai Association of Wedding and Ceremony Industry. The insurance covers cancellation and mishaps during the wedding, such as food poisoning.

The devil's in the details with those "mishaps." Can one get cover against the bride and groom shoving cake into each other's face? Against bad bridesmaid dresses? Or really bad choices of music at the reception?

Stickin' it to the man (corporate sarcasm edition)

2004-10-11T15:42:00.000-04:00

The first phrase in the Hoover's profile of a certain insurance company:

"Like an enormous corporation, State Farm is
everywhere."

Herzen! thou should'st be living at this hour!

2004-10-11T10:30:00.000-04:00

Via Brad DeLong, I find Chris Bertram quoting Alasdair Macintyre*:

For those who intend to write about Lenin there are at least two prerequisites. The first is a sense of scale. One dare not approach greatness of a certain dimension without a sense of one’s own limitations. A Liliputian who sets out to write Gulliver’s biography had best take care. Above all he dare not be patronizing…..The second prerequisite is a sense of tragedy which will enable the historian to feel both the greatness and the tragedy of the October Revolution. Those for whom the whole project of the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation is an absurb fantasy disqualify themselves from writing about Communism in the same way that those who find the notion of the supernatural redemption of the world from sin disqualify themselves from writing ecclesiastical history.

More than almost anyone else on the Web, Chris Bertram lives up to the aim on his old blog: "with luck and judgement, no bullshit." But I think he's missed it with this Macintyre quote. Macintyre seems to be arguing, "Well, fine, you may argue with various practical consequences of Lenin's actions, or with subsidiary premisses B, C, D; but if you don't accept the basic premiss A (re the inherent nobility of the Communist project), you're disqualified from the argument altogether."

Now let's leave aside for a moment the inherent seductiveness of "the argument from inherent nobility."** Since when is it a good argumentative move to say that people who don't agree with your major premiss aren't allowed into the conversation? Sure, there were/are some really dumb critics of Communism. But there were/are some subtle and interesting ones as well. I would cite Arthur Koestler, and his revelations in the Spanish jail in The God That Failed; but I realize that some might dismiss him for his (admittedly weird) misadventures in later life. So instead, I'll cite one of my heroes, Alexander Herzen. Yes, he was a critic avant la lettre; and no, tragically, the book I want to quote, From the Other Shore, isn't on the Web anywhere that I can find. Nonetheless, Herzen, who managed to combine an ardent loathing of Tsarism with a deep skepticism of projects based on a Rousseau-like optimism regarding human nature, is remarkably illuminating on the revolutions of his time and of ours. (Oh, and he's nicely scathing as well. I believe he says that Rousseau's claim that "men are born free and everywhere they are in chains" is like saying "fish are born to fly and everywhere they swim." His cynicism is subverted by his real-life actions - devoting his inheritance to publishing The Bell, an anti-Tsarist newspaper, overseas).

* Disclaimer: I have not read Alasdair Macintyre in the original. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

** Which would be a good subject for another post, particularly if I were to write more than 3 a month. Teaser for the next time: my favorite statement of this argument is from an old George Steiner book review in the New Yorker:

Those who were wrong, hideously wrong, like the Bolsheviks, the Communards in France in 1871, the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, the millions who died proclaiming their fidelity to Stalin, were, in a paradoxical, profoundly tragic way, less wrong than the clairvoyant, than the ironists and yuppies, than the Madison Avenue hype peddlers and the jobbers "bellowing" on the floor of the bourse.... It is better to have been hallucinated by justice than to have been awakened to junk food.

A lesson in geopolitics

2004-09-30T17:11:00.000-04:00

From this week's political news summaries in The Economist:

Taiwan's prime minister said the island might acquire missiles to counter a growing threat from China. China called that a provocation. Singapore's foreign minister accused Taiwan of pursuing a dangerous course towards independence. Taiwan's foreign minister deplored criticism from "a country the size of a piece of snot".

Great life truths, brought to you by Ample Hills

2004-09-24T09:04:00.000-04:00

1. An advertising consultant on NPR this morning, talking about the difference between an ad for a product and an ad for a candidate:

"Rice Krispies don't commit sexual indiscretions."

2. Career satisfaction, as described by a guy outside Fenway Park:

On the pavement of Yawkey Way outside Fenway Park on Thursday night, amid the smells of grilled sausages and many other foods, a young man on stilts wore a Red Sox uniform that said "Big League Brian" on the back.

He walked steadily, in a practiced way, next to the Hot Tamale Brass Band, which was serenading fans with "Besame Mucho" as they filed into the game between the Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles.

The temperature was 66 degrees, the clear sky was streaked with the reds of autumn's setting sun, the wind and humidity were low and a bright half-moon rose in the backdrop between buildings. The working conditions were not too shabby. "I love my job," Big League Brian said. "Nothing like walking around a bunch of drunk people on stilts."

3. Etiquette advice, this time from a big-league player:

[F]ighting Barry Bonds, mooning the media, and winning the pennant didn't come close to [Jeff] Kent's greatest moment of the year. One spring day, he strolled into the clubhouse with a cast on his left wrist. For veteran Kent-watchers, the possible causes were endless. Had he brawled with the pitching machine after getting buzzed during batting practice? Injured a tendon from excessive bird flipping?

The answer, Kent said, was that he had simply slipped and fallen while washing his truck. But witnesses soon came forward who claimed to have seen Kent fall off his motorcycle while popping wheelies on the day in question. Despite the fact that it's hard to confuse washing a truck with riding a motorcycle, Kent stuck by his story. "People are having fun with it, but it's not funny to me," he scolded. "I can't play a game I love to play, and am paid to play. When you make fun of someone washing his truck, that's sad."

The Zen of Fafblog

2004-09-21T10:08:00.000-04:00

"It's not so bad bein lost," says Fafnir. "Bein lost is like takin a vacation from knowin what you're doin."

News quiz

2004-09-21T09:58:00.000-04:00

Okay, so which event is going to have a greater, longer-lasting effect on the lives of hundreds of millions of people?

a) Ziang Zemin steps down as army chief, leaving sole power in the hands of Hu Jintao, and thus effecting the first orderly transfer of power in the history of Communist China, or

b) Dan Rather blows a story on President Bush's National Guard service.

Which event is getting more column inches / air time?

Advantage: Big media or blogosphere? Um, I'd say neither.

"Baseball been very, very good to me"

2004-09-16T11:47:00.000-04:00

No doubt I should be more diligent in reading the headlines these days: but I'm sick of bad news from Iraq, disgusted with the low tone of the presidential race, worried about my relatives who live in the path of Ivan. So it's with relief that I turn to the sports pages for stories like this:

From Section 203, Row 16, the top of the right-field bleachers at Miller Park, it is hard to imagine any place on earth with more grown men wearing baseball gloves.

Seats are available behind home plate, over each dugout and down both foul lines, the prime real estate in most major-league stadiums. But this week, at this ballpark, the real action is 450 feet from home plate.

When Barry Bonds sets up in the batter's box, the fans in right field take their feet. They pound their mitts. They gauge the strength of the breeze blowing behind them. And, inevitably, they visualize home run No. 700 flying into their Rawlings.

So far, they have left empty-handed. The first pitch Bonds saw on Wednesday night, he skied to right field, and the stadium went silent. After a few anxious seconds, Milwaukee's Brady Clark caught the ball at the warning track, his back to the fence.

The Giants won the game, 8-1, and Bonds finished 0 for 4 with a walk.

"The Brewers are probably 800 games out of first, but it's a playoff atmosphere out here," said Steve Peeples, who drove from Stevens Point, Wis., for the first two games of this series against the San Francisco Giants. "Everyone's up, everyone's hollering, and we're all thinking, 'He could hit it right at me.' "

And this story, from a few days ago, was pretty good too:

As the public address announcer bellowed a high-decibel greeting to everyone in attendance Monday afternoon - "Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to U.S. Cellular Field!" - not a soul was in the stands.

The Florida Marlins and the Montreal Expos looked at one another in complete bewilderment, as if they had gotten lost on their way to a ballgame. Just when they seemed ready to pack up and leave, several teenagers came skipping down the aisles as if they had the hottest tickets in town.

They were followed closely by a couple of buttoned-down businessmen playing hooky, a number of Cubs fans from the other side of town, and a pack of White Sox season-ticket holders determined to defend their turf. No one was walking into the stadium. Everyone was running.

They came to see two teams play in a city that neither calls home. They came to help those affected by the hurricanes that forced this game to be relocated from Miami in the first place. But more than anything, they came for baseball, under a pale blue sky the likes of which South Florida has not seen in a while.

As of Monday morning, only 400 tickets had been sold, and by early afternoon, 4,003 fans were in the lower bowl. Florida Manager Jack McKeon waved to the gathering and cupped his right hand to his ear. The Expos must have felt as if they were playing for a crowd at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, only rowdier.

By the time the first pitch was thrown, U.S. Cellular Field had been transformed into a high-school football stadium. Half the crowd sat behind the home dugout, chanting, "Let's go Marlins." The other half sat behind the visitor's dugout, chanting, "Let's go Expos." The division was clearer than the border between the North Side and the South Side of Chicago.

Cubs fans railed against the Marlins for beating them in the National League Championship Series last season and battling them for the wild-card berth this season, and White Sox fans cheered them for those same reasons. When the Expos committed four errors in the eighth inning, handing Florida a 6-3 victory, the fans behind the Marlins' dugout stood and celebrated, as if they had adopted a new team. "We gave them all free passes," McKeon said.

Belated Turkmenbashi update: "In Xanadu..."

2004-09-16T11:42:00.000-04:00

An August 11th story from the BBC:

President Niyazov of Turkmenistan has ordered the construction of a palace made of ice in the heart of his desert country, one of the hottest on earth.

It is the latest in a series of colossal building projects instigated by the all-powerful president that seem to defy the country's environment.

"Let us build a palace of ice," said President Niyazov, "big and grand enough for 1,000 people."

Redefining the "near abroad"

2004-09-07T17:17:00.000-04:00

I love this quote that Emma Jane found in The Guardian, though no doubt I do so for all the wrong reasons.

Russia was interested in a political solution in Chechnya, [Putin] insisted. It was going to hold elections to a Chechen parliament there shortly "and we will try to attract as many people as possible with different views to take part".

"We will strengthen law enforcement by staffing the police with Chechens, and gradually withdraw our troops to barracks, and leave as small a contingent as we feel necessary, just like the US does in California and Texas," he said.

Ils regrettent beaucoup, aussi

2004-09-01T17:35:00.000-04:00

22-0. And in a little more than three hours. Yikes.

Moi, je regrette beaucoup

2004-09-01T17:28:00.000-04:00

So The Economist thinks it's so cute this week with a cover line, "Je ne regrette rien," above a picture of a cowboy hat-waving George Bush. So I want to know:

Is this mild sarcasm (i.e, "Let's juxtapose a French phrase with a picture of notable xenophobe George Bush")?
Is it serious sarcasm (i.e., "Let's see how many people associate this lyric with a retreat after a disastrous war against guerilla forces in the Near East")?
Is it just an invitation to free associate Edith Piaf lyrics with George Bush? Me, I'm going for "La vie en rose," myself.