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September 01, 2003
And, in Atkins diet news (related to comments in response to this post):
“U.S. hospitals would be wise to emulate Britain’s Norfolk and Norwich Hospital and protect their patients from the dangerous Atkins Diet,” says PCRM [Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine] nutrition director Amy Joy Lanou, Ph.D. “Hospitals that serve meat-heavy, fatty foods might be good at keeping their beds filled, but they’re doing little to improve patient health. Research has clearly shown that high-protein, meat-heavy diets increase the risk of osteoporosis and kidney disorders and that low-fat vegetarian diets help prevent heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, and other health problems.”
"Research" has shown lots of things, Doc. Until it shows something else.
If I thought that the PCRM's concern was just for hospital patients, I wouldn't object. If you're in hospital, you're sick, and there's no reason to get all nuts with the diet. Eat the bland food, get better, leave hospital, return to Atkins when you've healed up.
But I suspect that the PCRM's motive has more to do with nutritional orthodoxy than anything else. Just read the letter they've created. During the course of what length of hospital stay, exactly, and for what condition, should doctors be concerned with their patients developing colorectal cancer, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis? These are lifetime concerns, not daily, weekly, or even monthly concerns. It's as though the PCRM fears those on Atkins will turn into suppurating tumorous lumps right there in the ward.
The PCRM is clearly using the excuse of hospitilization as an opportunity to evangelize against the Atkins diet, and that's patently disingenuous. They even admit as much:
Hospitals play a vital role in helping consumers understand the importance of food and nutrition to individual health.
So, it's not about science, is it? It's about marketing!
When in hospital, you're under the doctor's care. You do what they say. If you're on Atkins and you demand protein and fat while you're in hospital for kidney stones or a bowel resection, you're being stupid.
But the PCRM is trying to establish anti-Akins practice in the hospital as a forced means of influencing patient behavior outside the hospital.
I say, do the research, do it properly, and present it to people when they're sitting on the couch watching TV or reading a magazine, not lying in the hospital with tubes in every orifice.
His family waited nearly two years for the call: We've found a part of Michael.
But they never found any of him at all.
Instead of remains, the Ragusas will bury a vial of Michael's blood, which he had donated to a bone marrow center. A coffin containing the blood will be lowered into the ground at Staten Island's Resurrection Cemetery, next to where his friend and fellow 9/11 victim, Firefighter Carl Molinaro, is buried.
His funeral is the last of the 343 that needed to be held for NYC firefighters killed on September 11.
September 02, 2003
Damn, damn, damn.
Sullivan:
"So far, I've been manfully trying to give the administration the benefit of the doubt, especially given the media's relentlessly negative coverage of Iraq. But they're beginning to lose me, for the same reasons they're losing Dan Drezner. They don't seem to grasp the absolutely vital necessity of success in Iraq. And I can't believe I'm writing that sentence."
Drezner:
"Until the administration renews its commitment to a free and stable Iraq, things will fall apart."
Singer:
"Let's face it: The war against radical Islam has bogged down. It cannot be unbogged until the U.S. regains the offensive."
McCain:
Americans must understand how important this mission is and be prepared to sacrifice to achieve it. Without an intensive campaign now to explain what is at stake and absent the necessary political and financial commitment, we raise the potential for a defeat that will deal a lasting blow to American interests and freedom's progress.
"Salam Pax"(in Baghdad):
"Anyway so my brother and father start talking to the medic and he tells them what this is about. They have been “informed” that there are daily meetings the last five days, Sudanese people come into our house at 9am and stay till 3pm, we are a probable Ansar cell. My father is totally baffled, my brother gets it. These are not Sudanese men they are from Basra the “informer” is stupid enough to forget that there is a sizeable population in Basra who are of African origin. And it is not meetings these 2 (yes only two) guys have here, they are carpenters and they were repairing my mom’s kitchen. Way. To. Go. You have great informers."
"River" (in Baghdad?):
"The looting and killing of today has changed from the looting and killing in April. In April, it was quite random. Criminals were working alone. Now they’re more organized than the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) and the troops combined. No one works alone anymore- they’ve created gangs and armed militias. They pull up to houses in minivans and SUVs, armed with machineguns and sometimes grenades. They barge into the house and demand money and gold. If they don’t find enough, they abduct a child or female and ask for ransom. Sometimes the whole family is killed- sometimes only the male members of the family are killed."
Me [back on January 18]:
"I have just enough faith in them [the administration] to give them the benefit of the doubt, to believe that they are morally serious men and women, that they are aware that they are beginning a historical, once-in-a-century endeavor that has great potential to make a real, valuable contribution to the world, to change it in a way that will have beneficial repercussions for many decades to come.
This is, of course, a hope. There is also the possibility that we will go in, topple Hussein, and pull out after 18 months, leaving the country in chaos and at the mercy of its tribal past. That would be a tremendous mistake, and would certainly cost the administration my vote.
We'll see...we'll see."
Well, we're seeing, aren't we? I'm desperately trying to be patient, here. Remember, Nazi holdouts were still operating in Germany two years after Berlin fell...supposedly. At any rate, I don't think the Germans were as keen to blow up other Germans as the Iraqi resistance is to blow up Iraqis, and that's a problem.
It comes down to this: either the administration has a strategy that they're being typically closed-mouthed about, or they're flailing. If they're flailing, they won't return to office in 2004. If they're not flailing, then I'm just being impatient and wilting under the constant bombardment of maybe-so/maybe-not stories from nearly all corners of the Media.
You can only wait so long for the rabbit to pop out of the hat before you leave the tent to go get some popcorn.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
"The notion that the Bush administration is wrong because 'the rest of the world' objects to its policies may just be a symptom of intellectual immaturity. 'Everyone thinks you're wrong' is the sort of argument you expect to hear from elementary-school classmates, not adult policy makers. But there are people who take very seriously the idea that national-security policy is some sort of popularity contest. One of them, indeed, preceded Colin Powell as secretary of state."
Taranto, in today's Best Of The Web.
September 04, 2003
So far, I've pretty much ignored the fracas over Frédéric Beigbeder's novel, "Windows on the World," mainly because I already know what happened in that skyborne restaurant atop the North tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and I didn't need to "make it up": everybody died.
But I was struck by quotes from Beigbeder in an Elle interview, via a breathless article in today's NYT:
"In the face of American self-censorship, I wanted to give form to this tragedy," [Beigbeder] said, adding that American television viewers saw "an asceptic, almost clinical" version of events. He said he wanted "to reinject colors, smells, noises, to reintroduce the human dimension that has been carefully removed," adding, "A novel should enter forbidden territory."
Now, speaking as someone who was there that day, I'm of several minds about this "self-censorship."
My first response is, What the hell are you talking about?
My second response is, Oh. You're French. And, France is...what, an entire ocean away from New York?
Then: Of course American television offered an "aseptic, clincial" experience. It's a piece of technology. A glass tube, coated with phosphors, illuminated by an electron gun. Or a plasma-pixel display, if you're into that, and can afford it. But wait...how did you get your experience? Oh, right...from television. Idiot.
Finally:I was there. So you can commence with the fucking off, right now.
What really interested me was the bit about "[giving] form to this tragedy," and, "[reinjecting] colors, smells, noises," and "[reintroducing] the human dimension that has been carefully removed."
To that end, allow me to reproduce for you here a brief portion of a note that I sent to Andrew Sullivan on February 6, 2002, in response to the USC Anti-War Conference's press-statement assertion about the sheep-like public's loss of "all sense of reality":
...reality, for me, is stealing a Mango Madness Snapple from the abandoned bodega at the corner of William Street and Pine Street, to clear the concrete and gypsum dust from my throat as I pedal my bicycle through the blizzard remains of 110 stories' worth of skyscraper, trying to get the hell out of downtown Manhattan.
I refuse to let some bunch of left-coast assholes who weren't there and don't still work three blocks from the site tell me that I've lost all sense of reality. Do they think that the Jerry Bruckheimer televised version they saw endlessly on cable for a week is all there was? They should try smelling it. They should try showering it off their bodies.
Sullivan's response was to send an e-mail to thank me for vividly reminding him of the reality of that day, and to to post my note in its entirety on his site on Feburary 7.
My response to Beigbeder is, You want to "give form" to something? Give form to this:
Fuck you, you pretentious prick. You weren't there, you don't know, and your profiteering grade-school prose is insipid and obscene.
Beigbeder is a near-perfect example of why Plato expelled poets and storytellers from his Republic: this Frenchman utters great and wise things which he himself does not understand. Despite his professed lofty goals, despite his supposedly selfless--but, in actuality, self-indulgent--desire to give form to that which needs no form given to it, his ultimate production is a pointless, ignorant and voyeuristic exposition of events about which he cannot possibly have any knowledge.
I know what the colors were, Beigbeder: midnight-black and ash gray. I wore them.
I know what the smells were, Beigbeder: when I opened the rack-pack on my commuting bicycle a week later, they wafted anew into my apartment in Queens...dry, dusty, full of jet fuel, burned metal, and death.
I know what the noises were, Beigbeder: I jumped from my office chair when the first tower fell with an all-encompassing rumble, knowing in my very spine that something even more atrocious than what I had seen fifteen minutes before from the asphalt of downtown Broadway had happened.
I know what the human dimension is, Beigbeder: I am, and so were those in Windows on the World, and so were the firemen, and so were the thousands who died, and so are the thousands upon thousands who knew them, and loved them, and even now are grieving.
We don't need you to "give form" to anything. I'd like to coat you in jet fuel, set you alight and toss you off the roof of my office building, which is--now--the tallest in downtown Manhattan. You'll get the colors, smells, and noises of the experience!
Is that territory "forbidden" enough for you?
September 05, 2003
After some martini-assisted discussion with my biggest fan (who happens to live with me), I'd like to present something to the nascent Astonished Head community, if I may be so bold as to call it that.
The Miserable Ovoid cartoon has attracted many new readers--as best as I can figure, daily readership is now double what it was.
I've always wanted Astonished Head to be the kind of place where people felt free to disagree, or to comment without being stomped on because they hadn't sat down and worked out every possible permutation of what they had to say or consulted the proper Philosophical Muses before posting.
I've also wanted Astonished Head to be the kind of place where people interested in a more formal, serious kind of inquiry could get down to it and roll around on the floor wrestling with premises and logic and Serious Things and so forth.
However, I've come to realize that these two goals of mine are somewhat exclusive: the folks who just want to say their bit in the Commentarium are generally not the folks who want to hop around and argue.
I don't want to give up on either goal. But I don't think that both goals can be satisfied with just one forum. I won't name names, but I'm sure you're all aware of the websites that are famous for the length of their discussion threads and the ferocity with which the dissenting or casual commenters are squashed. I don't want that to happen here. There are varying levels of commitment to the many different issues that are raised on this site. Some of those issues inspire more intensity than others, and some of those issues are so ethereal that they are, quite simply, not intended for raucous formal debate. I don't think it's productive to mix all of that together and hope that something good will come out of it.
So: I've got an idea. The Commentarium will operate as a lower-stress forum, where folks can say whatever, and not worry too much about getting involved in a knock-down drag-out debate. In addition, I will create a second forum for civil, but much more rigorous debate.
That way, those who just want to quip, say hi, express their feelings about a post or make a point or two can do so. Those who want to get into it further and engage in higher-energy debate can do so. And never the twain shall meet. Or something.
Sound good?
Please let me know your thoughts in the Commentarium.
Holy merchandising!
Because I was looking at the wrong data at the Astonished Headshop, I completely missed the fact that six--count 'em, six!--people have bought Proloxil Tees.
Thanks, guys! I truly appreciate it. As it turns out, the first round of excess bandwidth charges for the Miserable Ovoid cartoon wasn't so bad, but shirt sales have, to date, covered half of those costs...or, they will, when CafePress actually sends me a check...
September 08, 2003
Yesterday was our one-year houseversary: on September 7, 2002, we moved into Peapod Manor with all of our stuff and Bob the Cat. We celebrated this weekend by having some houseguests over. We picked apples, peaches and plums, visited the best of the local wineries, and ate wine-drenched London broil (grilled to perfection by me) and fresh apple cobbler (baked to perfection by Pea).
Now that I don't live in a New York Habitrail, I find that I like having guests, especially guests from the city. They remind me how very, very fortunate I am to live in a 940-square foot mansion and complain about the occasional boom-boom car stereos at the car wash beyond the backyard fence while sipping grappa made ten minutes from where I'm sitting on the deck. I own trees! Towering green growing things on my little piece of earth. I've got a shed full of bicycles!
When we first moved in, we noticed large piles of old furniture, busted air-conditioners, and has-been televisions in front of many houses on our street. That, as it turned out, was the town's Annual Large Item Trash Pickup Day. Needless to say, we missed it. And so, for the past year, we've had to store all of the atrocious paneling that I yanked off the walls, the cheap old doors, the mold-musted crap-carpeting, the flimsy molding, the miscellaneous wood scraps, the two-ton pressboard filing cabinet I discovered in the basement and against which I wielded my mighty Tiger Saw so that I could haul it out in easy-to-carry pieces, and the flimsy dresser that the previous owners thoughtfully left for us in the upstairs closet.
Yesterday, after our guests had gone--stuffed full of marinated beef and cobble and local produce, with cheerfully-induced wine-related headaches--I carted all of the aforementioned krep! out to the curb in my Trusty Wheelbarrow, finally claiming the Shed as property of the Peas, thank you and goodnight. All that's left now is the extra gas dryer in the basement and--having discovered that a major appliance and a hammer makes for marvelous stress relief--I think I may discretely dispose of that item, piece by piece, along with the household trash.
By this time, Peapod Manor was supposed to be a blue, white-trimmed, copper-roofed cottage bedecked with cedar bloom-filled window-boxes and graciously landscaped with fruit trees and trellis-climbing roses.
My office is still full of boxes. Pea scraped some of the peeling wallpaper off the dining room walls, and we decided that it would be much better to smash the walls and replace them. Last week I finally got the new ceiling fan in the bedroom to stop wobbling by acquiring a certain screw from a helpful Lowes person, to replace the one I dropped into a heating duct last winter while installing the fan. The house is still covered with dingy concrete/asbestos siding (It's heavy! It's brittle! It's mesotheliomal!). The front porch is still the the rotted remains of a decadent ant-banquet. The basement smells funny and turns anything that was once organic into a thriving colony of parti-colored mold (it's true--even rubber and nylon).
But it's ours.
And we probably wouldn't be here if a certain group of villains hadn't knocked down some tall buildings two years ago this week. We had been looking for a new place to live, sort of, for a couple of months...maybe we'd rent a place, we thought, in the town we so enjoyed visiting on long weekends. Then the world changed, and it suddenly became Very Important for me to leave the enormous bull's-eye that I had always known the city to be. Five days before the first anniversary of the attacks, we did just that. We spent September 11 unpacking and refinishing floors and attempting to grasp that we had just bought a house.
We still have trouble with that, sometimes.
But much less trouble, I suspect, than we would have trying to grasp that one of us went to work one Tuesday morning and never came home.
Our blessings are many, and we are thankful.
Now, I must go downstairs and be nice to the person who had wonderful dinner waiting when I came back from my night ride, because I've been a curmudgeon while I finished this.
My blessings are many, and I am thankful.
September 09, 2003
Back in March, I wrote about Major General David Petraeus, who used to live next door to me and now commands the 101st Airborne.
I've been wondering what he's been up to, lately. Now, courtesy of Max Boot, I have some news:
Like the Marines, the 101st is living in one of Saddam's palaces. Its accommodations are slightly more posh; the troops have access to running water, the Internet, satellite TV, even two swimming pools. But only a sadist would begrudge them a few creature comforts. The Marines are heading home in September; the 101st will be here until February 2004, a whole year. One of its brigades, the 3rd, came here after spending most of 2002 in Afghanistan; now the "Rakkasans," as they're called, are deployed in the wasteland between Mosul and the Syrian border.
The 101st faces many thorny problems unique to its area, such as land disputes between Arabs and Kurds, and a porous border with Syria. But its approach is similar to that of the Marines. In their combat operations center, the division commander, Major General David Petraeus, has posted a sign that proclaims, "We are in a race to win over the people. What have you and your element done to contribute to that goal today?"
They have done a good deal--almost all of it without the help of the CPA. On his own initiative, General Petraeus decided to open the Syrian border to increase trade, and to strike deals with Turkey and Syria to swap Iraqi oil for badly needed electricity. The division has also restored telephone service and is taking bids for cellular service.
Like [Marine Major General James] Mattis, Petraeus preaches respect for Iraqis. Politeness and restraint are the order of the day. And when his troops do have to use strongarm tactics, they take pains not to leave hurt feelings behind. After they killed Uday and Qusay Hussein on July 22, the division spent more than $100,000 to repair damage to the neighborhood where the intense firefight occurred.
One of the 101st's brigade commanders, Colonel Joe Anderson, hopped in a humvee to take Bing West and me on a whirlwind tour of Mosul. Projects underway range from training the Iraqi police to providing medicine for a local hospital to painting schools to refurbishing an Olympic-size swimming pool to building houses for refugees. The list seems endless--and the 101st is doing all of it with its commanders' own discretionary fund, much of which comes from seized assets of the old regime.
It's too bad, though, that all Iraqis hate us so much, and that we're sinking ever-deeper into a quaaagmire from which there will be no escape. Read the whole article; it's a welcome contrast to the daily missives of misery from the myopic journalists holed up in their hotel in Baghdad.
September 10, 2003
The Things I Gathered
I have a transparent blue Tupperware-style box, made by Sterilite. It's about 16" by 14" by 8", and it cost $5.99. I bought it in December of 2001 from the Spida general store up the street from my apartment in Astoria, Queens. Here are the things that are in it, now:
An unsigned paycheck. The week before September 11, I received a paycheck that my employer forgot to sign. We were going to meet at 9:30 AM on September 11 in front of 155 Broadway, which was about three blocks due East of the World Trade Center towers. Needless to say, we didn't manage to meet up that morning. I couldn't find him in the crush of people watching the towers burn, milling around, working their cellphones. Eventually, I hopped back on my bike and rode to my office building at about 9:45. I learned later that he took shelter in a building lobby when the first tower fell, and then hitched a ride across the Brooklyn bridge to reach home and family.
If I had not gone to meet him that morning, I would have taken my usual bike route, which crossed the West Side Highway at Liberty Street, directly in the shadow of the South tower. Only God knows what I would have seen on the asphalt there.
A burned piece of blank, 8 1/2 x 11 pale blue paper. When I reached my office building, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I knew by this time that we had been deliberately attacked--somehow, it wasn't as immediately obvious from the ground as it might have been on television. I stood for a while in the plaza of the HSBC building with my bicycle, in full view of the South tower. After a few moments, I realized that I was shuffling through piles of paper. It blew against my ankles and into my bicycle spokes, it mounded against curbs and benches. For a moment, I thought that it was the remains of some ticker-tape parade I didn't know about, pehaps held the previous day...when the World Series parades were held, people tossed all sorts of random paper out of their office windows, and the streets downtown had looked the same as they did that morning. Then I saw paper still swirling in the air, and my eyes followed the shimmering column up, and up, until I saw its source: the burning maw of the black hole in the South Tower. It was pouring out of the building as though driven by a fierce wind, a thick tornado of paperwork. I picked up a blue piece of paper from the ground at my feet, and saw that it had been flash-burned on all its edges. I tucked it into my bike's rack-pack: a memento, I thought, of the Great Trade Center Fire. At that point, my befuddled reaction was still, "That will take forever to fix." I've got the paper in a certificate frame, now, fastened down under plastic. I affixed a label to the back of the frame, as though it was an artifact in a museum. It reads,
World Trade Center
September 11, 2001 9:45 AM
from the HSBC building plaza, Thames St.
and Nassau, 1/4 mile away
Later, I heard someone on the television describing a mysterious shimmering cloud she had seen in the distance at the Pentagon after the plane had exploded there. She said that she suddenly realized that it was the shiny "aluminum skin of the aircraft," puffed into bits and flung into the air. But I knew that she was mistaken--it was a cloud of paper, white paper glittering in the sun as it poured from the burning office building.
A Progresso marinated Artichoke Heart jar 1/4 full of dust. I wasn't able to return to my office until two weeks later, and the air downtown was still stenched with burnt metal and ash. The Pile at Ground Zero still smoked. Everything was filthy: the windows of the buildings were grimed, the streets, though swept, were pale and gray, shop awnings and windowsills were still caked with inches' worth of the omnipresent remains of the towers. I scooped up a portion of these remains from the deep marble window ledges of Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated as our first President. Interspersed with the dust is a curlicued piece of pink paper, with a row of small holes punched into it. It's from the edges of tractor-feed computer paper, used for printing out multiple copies of forms in some office that no longer exists.
Two days ago, as I walked along behind the wounded Deutsche Bank building, I caught a sudden, brief hint of the odor of that day. It stopped me cold, and I looked around, trying to source it. There is a building next to the Deutsche Bank, empty now, and I stood by its now-chained loading dock doors. The odor had come from inside of that building...perhaps trapped there, for two years, or perhaps it was just a mixture of new welding and old must, evocative enough to ring my memory like a bright brass bell.
When I got home, I pulled out my blue Sterilite box, carefully opened my artichoke-heart jar of dust, and cautiously sniffed: nothing. It was old dry gypsum powder, evoking no memory...no memory, at least, that could be prompted by scent alone.
A splotch of melted metal. For a year afterwards, Liberty Park--a small park with some trees, benches and chess tables, between Broadway and Church streets--was fenced off, and filled with mobile construction offices and equipment. Many months after the towers fell, I saw large pieces of twisted structural steel through a hole in the green-wrapped fence. The debris was tucked away in one corner of the park, near the bronze man that used to sit on a now-vanished bench, forever checking his briefcase. The statue had been uprooted, and someone had put a gasmask on him, tucked an American flag into his patinaed briefcase, and perched him behind a mobile office. The girders next to him were sheared and malformed, and the half-inch rivets that had once connected them to their fellows were bent and protruding. Using my camera as an alibi--"I was just taking photos of the statue, officer!"--I slipped through the hole in the fence one afternoon, intending to grab one of those rivets. But it was not, as it appeared to be, laying free on the girder. It had merely been bent at a right angle, and was still firmly attached. On the ground beneath the girder was a gobbet of metal about the size of three flattened marbles. It was puffed full of bubbles, as though it had flown through the air while molten. I pocketed that instead.
Photographs. I took many pictures of the area around my office, including the view of Ground Zero from the 39th floor of my office. Someday, I will scan them, and share them.
A block of stamps. In 2002, the Post Office issued a stamp bearing the now-famous image of the three firemen raising the American flag against a backdrop of wreckage. The net proceeds of the stamp sales were transfered to FEMA, and were intended to provide assistance to the families of the emergency personnel who were killed or disabled in the line of duty as a result of the attacks. I bought a full block of twenty, and I keep them neat and safe in a Priority Mail envelope.
A subway map. I put this in the blue plastic box because it still has the words World Trade Center printed in downtown Manhattan. The new ones don't.
Postcards. A dozen or so postcards of the Financial District, the way that it was, plus one of the twin towers rebuilt as a giant hand giving the bird to bin Laden. The guy who cut my hair gave that one to me. It was titled, "New York City 2005."
I don't think we're going to make that particular deadline.
A sticker and a refrigerator magnet. "United We Stand" and "United We Stand in Remembrance Sept. 11, 2001" respectively.
Two video tapes. One is of "9/11," the CBS program that aired on March 10, 2002. The other is an edition of Nightline from March 12, 2002. I don't use a VCR anymore, but they'll stay in the box.
New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers. I bought this book at the remaindered bookstore up the street in Astoria, and threw it in the box without really looking at it. It's full of large, full-color pictures of disaster. I knew I'd want it, someday, if only to show some young person and say, "I was there that day, and here's what it looked like."
Newspapers and magazines. There wasn't a New York Times to be had in the city on September 12. My therapist received the September 12 Philadelphia Inquirer at his house in Cape May, which he later gave to me. Eventually I collected issues of the Daily News, Newsday, and the New York Times from that week, plus a couple of Greek-language dailies from my neighborhood in Queens. There are also Special Double Issues of Newsweek, and copies of of U.S. News & World Reports, People, and the Economist.
Several newspaper headlines stand out. "IT'S WAR" and "ACT OF WAR" from the Daily News and the New York Post. Many people still haven't grasped that.
From the September 14 New York Post: "New York's tragic face." The front page photo is of a young woman, her face a painful mask of grief. It's the kind of face many people wore for so many months. That expression feels like all of your facial muscles are being savagely pulled down towards the ground by heavy weights, or by strong, tiny demons. It's an expression that happens to you. I know because I wore that face a few times as well, although never with such cause as the woman on the Post's front page. She's clutching a flyer that reads, "Missing from 2 World Trade Center 104th fl.," and bears a picture of one James Andrew O'Grady...a boyfriend, perhaps, or a relative.
When Pea and I cycled into the city on the night of September 12, we passed by Bellevue hospital on First Avenue on the way back to Queens. The walls, the streetlight posts the telephone kiosks--even the news vans--were covered with the faces of the missing, flyer after flyer of husbands, wives, lovers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. So many. An endless white patchwork of photocopies and color printouts.
It broke our hearts.
That's what the box is all about, I think. Tomorrow, I will be home at Peapod Manor, and I will put up some new bookshelves, and I will grill something out on the deck. But upstairs, in my office, will be that blue plastic box...full of grief, and death.
Unlike so many others, I can close that box, and tuck it away, or even ignore it, for as long as I want.
I'm a fortunate man. Tomorow, I will remember those who were not so fortunate. Who didn't escape. Those who went inside, instead of running out. Those whose loved ones never came home again. Those whose lives were ended or forever scarred on an ordinary, cloudless, blue-sky morning two years ago.
Remember.
---
[Deb at must be nice writes about grief, and the things the lost leave behind when they go...]
September 12, 2003
Rabbik
I spent four days in a cave fronted by a deep, dry, pink wadi. The sun vaulted and descended, vaulted and descended, and I watched it from the mouth of the cave, covered by a thin blanket and lulled by the whirring of my ceramic heart.
On the first day, I shouted at God for many hours, and I was thirsty.
On the second day, God shouted back at me, and I was hungry.
On the third day, I discovered certain knowledge of the All that is, and I was proud.
On the fourth day, I fell asleep, and woke up with bat guano on my head.
I decided that it was time to return to the world of men, and made my way on foot to Las Cruces Airport. At first, they wouldn't sell me a ticket, because of my unkempt appearance. But eventually, I prevailed.
In ages past, prophets came out of the desert with locusts and honey in their beards.
I came out with a credit card.
--Rabbik
Over the past seven days at Peapod Manor, I have:
- Installed 16 shelves in various rooms
- Put up two towel bars and a bathrobe hook, each with wall anchoring systems designed by a one-handed monkey that has been neurologically experimented upon in a desperate attempt to find a cure for Demented Chinese Engineer disease
- Repflaced the kitchen pfaucet with a new one (by Pfrice Pfisfterf, of course)
- Installed the first of three brand smackin' new basement windows. This involved shattering glass, smashing concrete, building a window frame, smashing more concrete, breaking some stuff, pounding on some other stuff, lots of sawdust, some brandy, some billion-year polymer adhesive, some Great Stuff expanding foam, and a big tub of Quickcrete. Rinse and repeat twice more.
Doubtless, this handyman's frenzy has much to do with the recent two-year anniversary. This time last year, I was refinishing floors with a vengeance, fixing up walls, painting rooms, and generally wreaking home improvement wrath upon the unbelieving structures of my new domicile. It took my mind off of...well, everything.
Thus, and so, this year. An unexpected bonus arrived in the form of a mortgage escrow overage check, some of which will go for a new stove (if and when Lowes gets the stove that we've been wanting for the past year back in stock...as soon as we got the money for it, poof, off it went...), the rest of which went for the basement window project. Thus we improve the economy and defeat terrorism...or something.
Next up will be the long-awaited Utter Devastation Of The Dining Room. Having discovered in the bedroom that some walls are better smashed and replaced than patched, spackled, sanded, spackled again, sanded some more, primed, and painted, I will avoid the same mistake. This will also give us the opportunity to add insulation, if missing, or replace it, if crappy.
We've been here through one cycle of the seasons, now. A descendent of Hortense, the tiger-striped Araneus cavaticus spider who guarded the Manor during the Fall of last year, has made an appearance. The Hortense species must be of the autumnal variety, and territorial, to boot: there was only one Hortense last year, and I suspect there will be only one Hortense II this year. She will get big and fat and then, sometime in December, will grow pale and slow, and will finally die in her big orb web, leaving Hortense III somewhere, hidden and unseen until next Fall.
This year, we will rake the leaves as they fall, instead of letting them pile up. Last year, we let them pile up, and then the snow came and stayed until March, leaving us with earthy black slabs to peel off of the suffering lawn instead of fluffy crunchy brown flakes to toss into the compost pile.
Some things are altogether new, this year: I've got wildflower patches to mow after the first frost, thereby sowing next year's small colorful meadows. There's a grill on the deck, for winter blackening of meat...deer, and mastodon. We know when to put the plastic over the windows, and when to turn up the heat, and when to break out the Insanity Salt for the serious ice melting.
Fall officially begins in a week or two, but it's already here...the final ripening in the air, the incipient harvest, the apples, and--just behind it--the turning inward, the long sleep, and the clear, muffled air of winter.
I'm so pleased to be in this place. It's a refuge for both of us, and Peapod Manor represents what we did for ourselves following the devastation of two Septembers ago: nothing less than a complete reordering of our lives together. At a time when the worst was suddenly all too possible, other things--good things--seemed less impossible.
And so, here we are: building windows, smashing walls, greeting familiar arachnids.
If not for that day...
It is too strange a thing.
September 13, 2003
Recently, someone (I won't say who, but it's no one I know personally), purchased no fewer than five Proloxil Tees.
(ahem)
Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou
thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.
You are truly royalty among readers of my site and/or viewers of cartoons made by me.
Billy Fidget
Man I got the big heebie-Jeebus! I got sacred wine and blood and guts and gore and veins in muh' holy teeth, man! I got serious hoh-lee warrior syndrome, folks, and y'all better get with it!
There's eeevil afoot, saints!
And it's comin' for you...again!
--Billy Fidget
September 15, 2003
Last week was stranger than it seemed at the time, a fact of which I became acutely aware at the bottom of 1500 milliliters of Fat Bastard Chardonnay on Saturday. You don't slug that much vino without something being awry, somewhere.
This morning on the way in to work I passed by twenty or so floral creations: wreaths. And not just any wreaths...there were the Twin Towers in petals, three-dimensional, rising like flowery cake-toppers. There were giant Port Authority badges, fire department badges, police shields, Park Service credentials executed in carnations. There were at least three languages on display in the gray morning light. They've all been there for a few days, now, so they're a bit damp, a bit browned and drooped. In front of Ten House, a small collection of candles, flags, and handwritten notes.
I had forgotten they'd be there.
Of course they'd be there. While I was busy building shelves and adding another story to the house, others came here to mourn and hear names read.
Which I knew, at some level, and studiously ignored. But it didn't work. It made last week strange and manic, as I determined to build build build! to counteract others' determination to crush squash burn!
So, now I'm a little damp, a little brown, a little drooped. But no less determined to build. I like building things; I'm good at it. The ancient crusty wacko-plumbing sprung a leak on Sunday, so while Pea and a guest went off to the Renaissance Faire I recovered from being a fat bastard and soldered a new section of shiny copper into place. There's satisfaction in hearing the water rush up into the new pipes, followed by silence...no dripping, plop-plop, no hissing stream splashing from a poorly soldered elbow-joint. So much satisfaction, in fact, that the ancient crusty wacko-plumbing will be replaced by new shiny groovy-plumbing made from nice white PVC that costs 80% less than its equivalent in copper, which I will install with glue and a pair of PVC-shears. The basement will be the domain of black plastic drains and white plastic water supply piping, all very modern. If I can just convince all the spiders to die, it would stay pristine forever.
I still feel the mania...must do, must fix, must go go go! It's akin to the flight-response I remember so well from to years ago: I'm leaving Manhattan Right Now, go go go! Only now I get to go home and mix up Quickcrete or prime the window frame I built or put up a shelf.
That's much better, I think, than going back to the apartment-hole and wondering if I'd have enough time to flee the city on my trusty bicycle in the event that terrorists hijacked the International Space Station, filled it full of smallpox and crashed it into Madison Square Garden, or some such thing.
Clearly, though...the day remains with me. I'm not one to blame massive alcoholic indulgence on anything but my own predilections, but it seems to me that I was not too keen on feeling whatever it was that kept wanting to pop up and say hello last week. The fermented grape is good for that sort of anesthesia, but it's still the same game of Whack-a-Mole: smack it down this day, it'll squeak up another day, daring you to either look it in the eye or smack it again and win the prize of a day lost recovering from liver abuse in the curtained dark.
Still, and yet again: better than it was. Before the 11th, nothing remotely similar had ever happened to me, and yet I still wore a deepening ass-groove in my recliner, putting away bottle after bottle of anything even slightly fermented.
Now, my problems seem fairly insignificant, on most days. And, when they swell up into buck-toothed plastic mole-creatures, popping up and down, it usually doesn't take much to just leave that carnival game, and go get some cotton candy or watch the elephants.
I think that's called perspective.
September 18, 2003
I have been laid low by histamines and general malaise. Posting will be sparse.
--IAW
Actually, I misspoke. I have not been laid low.
I have been hammered eight inches beneath the surface of the asphalt by a pile driver as big as my entire body. The very meat of the front of my head is in utter rebellion. If you were to measure the Discomfort Zone, it would extend from the tip of my nose to a point a full six inches inside my skull.
I've got snotness
I've got mucous
I've got my nose
Who could ask for anything more?
Who could ask for anything more?
I've got Orlando Bloom (score!) on tap for the lead and a well-repaired Bebe Neuwirth for the love interest: An Allergist in Baghdad.
This is Baghdad. And I'm an American who lives here. My name Jerry Mulligan. And I'm an ex-GI. In 2004, when the Army told me to find my own job, I stayed on and I'll tell you why. I'm an allergist. All my life, that's all I've ever wanted to do.
If anyone at all gets that, I'll be duly impressed.
Allergies, for those who are fortunate enough not to be subject to them, are like being stoned without the actual stoned-ness. There are red eyes involved, and the munchies, believe it or not...cravings for things like Krispy Kremes and boxes of rock salt and loaves of bread and so forth. For the unstoned, allergies are like having dryer-lint stuffed into all of your rhinoid cavities followed by an application of thick water, which makes the lint swell until your eyes pink up and bulge out. This is accompanied by bleariness and general misery.
Histamine, the principle evildoer in allergic reactions, isn't just involved in swollen eyeballs and sneezing--it rates an entire chapter in basic neurochemistry texts. It's a neurotransmitter that's utilized throughout the body, both inside and outside of the central nervous system. That's why Benadryl, the famous allergy drug, got its start as a psychiatric medication. Drugs that target the histamine receptors in the brain are being developed to treat obesity, sleep disturbances, epilepsy, various cognitive disorders, and chronic pain.
Thus, allergies--the big, nasty kind, not just occasional "hay fever"--affect not only the nose and eyes, but the entire body, producing all manner of ill effects.
Hence: the body-sized pile driver.
And now, to bed.
*snort*
September 19, 2003
This morning, I braved eighty-mile and hour winds and torrential, Biblical rain to get to my Stamford office. I saw a flying cow. I was slapped by bucketloads of airborne fish! I--
No, that's all wrong.
This morning, I drove at eighty miles an hour to get to my Stamford office, saw a cartoon cow on the side of a refrigerated beef truck, thought about having fish for dinner, and stepped in a puddle.
As Easterbrook wrote this morning, CATEGORY 2 STORM, CATEGORY 5 HYPE. [via Reynolds]
On the plus side, the winds at Peapod Manor were significant enough to knock over the tomato plants on the deck, so we stashed them in the stable with the horses. The plants and their bountiful crop of very green tomatos are safe.
Now: into the lab!
September 22, 2003
Ah, the eco-fascists have struck again.
Well, not really again...they're just sorta confirming that yeah, some ELF activists did, in fact, burn down a $50 million apartment complex a couple of weeks ago, and left a banner behind that read, "If you build it, we will burn it."
Hmmm....ELF activists. Sounds so harmless, doesn't it? As though they're a group of wispy, fair-haired beings, campaigning for the right to wear ethereal garb and live among the treetops in well-crafted wooden cities.
Gives all the other Mythical Creatures' Rights groups a bad name, it does.
Man, I got nothin'.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've got something on the futility of attempting serious debate online, based on Plato's Phaedrus; I've got Evil: Part Deux cooking, with liberal spoonfuls of the Enneads...but I haven't got the brain-juice to pursue any of it to completion and subsequent posting.
Ah well. Chalk it up to...something.
See?
No juice.
September 23, 2003
Max Cleland, former U.S. senator, former head of the Veterans Administration during the Carter administration, has written an open letter to the Bush Administration, in which Iraq slides south and east a couple thousand miles or so and becomes Vietnam.
He writes:
If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington.
Oh.
He must mean troops like Josh Ingram, 3rd Battalion of the United States Marines:
I was in eight or nine cities in Iraq. Starting from Kuwait, we saw pretty much every city along the river on the way to Baghdad. People absolutely loved us everywhere we went. There were big parades. We'd just roll down the streets, or sometimes be on foot patrol, and kids would run out of their houses just to wave at us, just to get a wave back from us. People would give us flowers; they'd give us flowers and gifts and Pepsi -- all kinds of stuff.
Or maybe Major Michael Callanan, First Marine Division:
"Ninety-nine percent of what is going on over there is a good story," said Callanan.
"There were a lot of reporters over there who overlooked the good stories, which may have been the only frustrating part of being there," he said. "From media reports, it may not seem as though things are going well there but they are. There are a lot of changes taking place which will eventually pay big dividends."
Or this, relayed by a family member of a 4th Infantry Division soldier:
The province of Diyala continues to evolve from an oppressed to a free state. We have councils established in all of our cities and the tribal leaders are stepping up to the plate to take responsibility for their people’s actions. The road has been rough, but the people are beginning to embrace their liberty. There are several patriots that I deal with to solve problems in the province. Like our forefathers, these men are standing up to those that oppose freedom in order to make Iraq a better place to live.
Or maybe something from Pfc. Jacob Cristea:
"All you hear is negativity. Ninety-five percent of the population in Iraq, in my experience with the locals -- they had nothing but good to say about us.
"A lot of them would come to us with information, a lot would come to thank us."
Kids jumped up and down when they saw his convoy, Cristea said. In Baghdad, Iraqis would crowd the barbed wire perimeter of his unit's compound and call out "USA! USA! Bush! Bush!"
"Whenever we drove anyplace, it was like we were in a parade," he said.
Then there's this: the 158 troops who re-enlisted in Major General Petraeus' 101st Airborne while on duty in Iraq, standing on the steps of Saddam's palace in Mosul.
I could go on, of course...picking, and choosing, the way partisan folks do...plucking out the quotes and accounts that support my worldview.
Among other things, former U.S. senator Cleland claims that "the media [will] become more suspicious" if truth is not "the first cause of war" instead of "the first casualty of war."
Please.
Sit through one 30-minute segment of your local news program. What are the lead stories?
Murder. Fire. Corruption. Scandal. With, perhaps, a heroic mom-cat saving her kittens from a burning apartment building after the weather report.
The media needs no cause whatsoever to be "suspicious;" rather, it seems to thrive on failure, defeat, and misery. In the case of Iraq, the heroic mom-cats are ignored entirely, in favor of death, destruction, and incipient catastrophe...the usual fare that Standard Media believes we, as Americans, crave.
Cleland makes reference to yellowcake, the now-infamous "16 words," and so forth. He trots out all the usual tropes, makes them do their little dance, and then moves on to his Devasting Conclusion:
Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.
Let's see. Vietnam: 1954-1973. We had about 362,000 total casualties, of which 58,000 were killed, and 304,000 were wounded. That's about 52 casualties a day, for 19 years.
In Iraq, we've had 1,616 wounded and 357 dead. That's ten casualties a day...for 187 days.
At what point, I wonder, did Vietnam become "Vietnam!(TM)"? At what point did it begin its transformation from a merely unpopular war in Southeast Asia into the ideal template of failure against which all subsequent American adventures would be compared or--if no real comparison could be found--into which they would be forced? A little later than six months into the conflict, I think.
Even Democrats are starting to protest:
Lawmakers charged that reporters rarely stray from Baghdad and have a “police-blotter” mindset that results in terror attacks, deaths and injuries displacing accounts of progress in other areas.
Comparisons with Vietnam were farfetched, members said.
Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee’s ranking member, said, “The media stresses the wounds, the injuries, and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. [Dave] Petraeus has 3,100 projects — from soccer fields to schools to refineries — all good stuff and that isn’t being reported.”
But it was Gene Taylor--a Democrat from Mississippi--who nailed it:
“In fairness, the war is neither going as well as the administration says it’s going or as badly as the media says it is going,” Taylor said.
Being the partisan plucker and chooser that I am, I am forced to wonder: which worldview, exactly, is Standard Media seeking to reinforce with their plucking and choosing? How is it that the same provincial mentality that treats a house fire as a lead story for the 6 o'clock news remains unchanged and unchallenged in the most critical theater of war since Normandy?
Among the Bush/Hitler crowd, Standard Media is a tool of the Bushneyfeld Axis Of Ultimate Evil, mere putty in their nefarious, skilled hands. So, this constant reporting of failure and American death, coupled with a lack of interest in anything constructive, means that the Axis is...what, managing our expectations? Creating the illooosion of dissent, so we all feel comfortable while they work out their plans to implant chips in our heads and make us dig for oil shale on Dick Cheney's estate? I must confess that I am baffled by the brilliance of this propaganda campaign.
Or is there something else at work here, independent of any government cabal, perhaps within the subculture of Standard Media, itself...the subculture where news and entertainment merge onto the same screen, and where entertainment often means viewing humiliation, failure, and violence? This is the common theme of almost any reality show you care to name, expressed even more viciously in the new crop of mean-spirited, bastard children of "Candid Camera," such as "Scare Tactics" and "The Joe Shmoe Show." COPS has been a perennial favorite for a decade--crime, violence, and wasted lives, presented for your viewing pleasure.
However, they wouldn't make those shows if people didn't watch them. I don't. Maybe you don't, either. But enough people do. And that same warped sensibility has crept into what is supposed to be our window on the world outside our borders. They're feeding us what they think we want to see, apparently unaware that war is reality...not just another show.
There's an adage: bad news sells.
This begs the question. Why do we buy it?
---
AS I WAS SAYING: Read the second paragraph, from today's NYT article on Bush's UN speech:
But despite the almost daily guerrilla-style attacks on American forces in Iraq — the scope of which many officials have privately acknowledged was unexpected — Mr. Bush has made it clear that he is not prepared to give the United Nations the broader authority that it seeks in Iraq.
...and compare it with this minor acknowledgement, buried in Danielle Pletka's Op-Ed in the same edition:
...the number of engagements in Iraq have declined from roughly 25 a day in July to about 15 a day today — and each lasts for an average of two or three minutes.
Near-daily guerrilla-style attacks are news.
A steady decline in the number of those attacks isn't.
Why?
Billy Fidget
So I was like, 'Jump back, you alien mutant fucktard!' and he was all like, 'Yo, I got the Word from God on High, dickcheese!' and I was all like, 'Oh no!' and cowering and grovelling and shit, and then he farted and disappeared, and I was like, 'Yo, did anybody else see that?' and everybody was like, 'Uh, no.'
That's when I knew I had a problem.
--Billy Fidget
September 24, 2003
First [Hephaistos] shaped the shield so great and strong, adorning it all over and binding it round with a gleaming circuit in three layers; and the baldric was made of silver. He made the shield in five thicknesses, and with many a wonder did his cunning hand enrich it.
He wrought the earth, the heavens, and the sea; the moon also at her full and the untiring sun, with all the signs that glorify the face of heaven - the Pleiads, the Hyads, huge Orion, and the Bear, which men also call the Wain and which turns round ever in one place, facing. Orion, and alone never dips into the stream of Okeanos.
He wrought also two cities, fair to see and busy with the hum of men. In the one were weddings and wedding-feasts, and they were going about the city with brides whom they were escorting by torchlight from their chambers. Loud rose the cry of Hymen, and the youths danced to the music of flute and lyre, while the women stood each at her house door to see them...
This morning, I listened to Derek Jacobi read from the Fagels translation of the Iliad. The passages above are not from the Fagels, unfortunately, but it is from the same scroll I heard this morning. This portion partly describes the shield made for Achilles by the bandy-legged blacksmith of the gods, Hephaistos, at the behest of Thetis, Achilles' mother. Achilles, who until now has raged against the Argive king Agamemnon, sulking by his beached hollow ships and withholding his godlike arm from aiding the king's cause, has been brought around by the death in battle of his noble friend Patroklos. Achilles' mother, a sea nymph, hears his grief from the depths of the ocean, and commissions the new shield and armor to replace Achilles' old battle gear. Patroklos had worn Achilles' gear into battle in his stead, and it was stripped from his corpse by Hektor, the Trojan hero who killed him.
The shield that Hephaistos forges is a wondrous thing, depicting in worked bronze, tin, and silver the entire civic life of the Greek civilization that was, to the Iliad's dark age heroes, the future. It is a microcosm in metal, containing two cities, their citizens, their fields, their conflicts and their judges. The workmanship is so fine that the light glinting off the furrows in the golden wheatfields makes it seem as though they are being harvested, right before our eyes. The stars wheel in the forged sky, the sun and moon circle the shield's shining rim.
And while I listened to Jacobi's sonorous rendition of Homer's description, I sped along in my metal box towards the train station. I drove down from the mountains and onto the faster highway on the valley floor, and before me the rising sun conspired with trees and morning mist to send shafts of white light through the upper branches and across the road. It was a perfect moment: a few minutes later and the sun would have crested the trees, drowning the mist with its light; a few minutes earlier and the light would have been lost behind the crest of the hill and among the thick dark trunks of the shrouded forest.
A commute of two and a half hours via car, train, and ferry, with this as its start, far surpasses forty minutes in the subway.
It's mornings like this that make me love my life.
And now...to work.
September 26, 2003
Ahhh.
Now, I rest from my labors with a glass of Black Pearl, made from grapes grown and vinted not three miles from my house by Francesco Demarest, former coal miner, former grappa-fueled bicycle racer, now gracing his hillside with newly planted vines and producing the best of the local wines.
Downstairs, dinner is cooking on the 4.5-cubic foot fruit of said labor: a new gas stove, replacing the sparking, flame-belching, broken-down electric behemoth with the faux-wood trim and the black and white "digital" clock that came with the house ("all applicances sold AS IS," said the description in the real estate listing). One burner coil was cold and dead, one was on its last lukewarm legs, and the other two were wobbly and dangerous. I just set a pot of 'fridge-chilled filtered water for my Reishi mushroom tea on the new stove, and it was boiling in four and a half minutes. With the old electric, I would compose clever three-act plays while waiting for the water to bubble.
Bless you, rotted ancient ferns and decayed former dinosaurs, whose ten-thousand-millennia decomposition produced blue-flamed gas with which to cook our lamb steaks! And blessed also be teflon tape, which allowed me to properly pipe said blue-flamed gas into my new appliance with very little in the way of anoxia. And, of course, eternal blessings and the burning of the choicest fat-wrapped bits of prize bulls to Lowes, from whom all nifty home improvement products and appliances flow.
Downstairs, now, Pea coaxes her fresh-from-the-shelter kitten Julep, encouraging her to be be less afraid of Anything Taller Than She, which is everything. Bob the Cat--no longer the Cat, but merely a cat in the house--is outside on the deck in the dark, sulking and stalking the night chickens from up on high.
Yes--we have chickens. They're not ours. They escape periodically from a neighbor's coop up the street, and wander around free and dumb. Not ordinary chickens, mind you...they're of a mildly fancy sort, with odd neck-ruffs and strange wattles. Not quite show chickens, but certainly fowl interesting enough to an apartment-raised cat whose greatest prey is the vicious and terrible Stray Moth.
Bob, having become master of her new domain as she settled into comfortable, rotund middle-age, is now about to be saddled with a four-month-old who already adores her based only upon her pawprinted scent throughout the house. So far, their encounters have been limited to earnest approaches by Julep and hisses, growls and unmitigated hatred from Bob. But that will pass. Soon, there will be amusing acrobatics and wrestling matches.
Ahhh.
The weekend. Tomorrow: the installation of basement window number two. A new batch of concrete to complete the installation of basement window number one. Perhaps a bike ride.
As someone recently commented here, the best revenge is, indeed, living well.
Even more enticing, then, to realize that you don't have to be wealthy to do so! 940 square feet becomes a mansion, local wine produced by an eccentric retired Italian surpasses the rarest Bordeaux, a fat calico cat becomes a sleek prize hound, random fancy chickens in the yard become red foxes in the brush, and the humble bicycle becomes a noble hunting steed. All out for a weekend of rich leisure!
All we need now is a household staff...oh, wait.
That's us.
Ah, well.
I'm still an absurdly, undeservedly happy bastard.
September 27, 2003
Damn. I wish I'd written this: 20 Questions the Media Will Not Ask Concerning Iraq.
If you read Reynolds, you've already read this. If you don't, go, now, and read.
September 30, 2003
I've got percolations...
IN MY BRAIN!
I'll tell you all when they're done.
Mmmm...neurocoffee...
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