the real wall street journal

Farnaz Fassihi, a foreign correspondent in Iraq for the Wall Street Journal, has confirmed that she is the author of a widely-circulated letter which describes the real situation in that country:

"Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity," Fassihi wrote (among much else) in the letter. "Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler." And: "Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come."

You can read the rest of the powerful article about the letter here.

(Found through boingboing.net)

these northern emperors

As I write this, I am sitting in class as a video plays. "In 1126 they took Kai-feng and forced the Sung to regroup around Hangchow, in the South." Seems odd to be watching a video when I've paid so much money to come to a university class.

Are you going to watch the US election debate tonight? If I had a working TV I could do so. Another thing I could do would be to watch the Daily Show. But hey, did you know that you can go to the Daily Show website and watch a significant number of video clips? Here, click on this link, you'll see what I mean.

how to get good and angry

Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush

A sobering new reason is posted every weekday, with detailed, respectable sources. These short items are compiled by the otherwise funny online humour magazine Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency (an offshoot of the print publication).

singing my life

Yesterday I cold got hit by a car.

I was biking downhill on Rue Rachel when I pulled out in front of a car which had slowed at a stop sign. I presumed it was stopping to let me pass, but that was the wrong thing to presume. As I crossed in front of it, the driver floored it and caused his front bumper to come into direct contact with my rear left wheel-fork post; at around this point in the story I was thinking how shitty this was all going to turn out, for both me and my bicycle. I'm not sure what happened next, but I somehow managed to dissociate myself from the bike, which fell to the ground behind me as I landed, running.

Ten metres later I stopped and turned to survey the wreckage, but no wreckage was to be found. It seems that in one of His softer moments, God had decided to spare me from harm, and to spare my bicycle from serious harm (the exception being a decidedly bent post). The young male driver was kind enough to get out and offer bilingual apologies, but they didn't sound heartfelt and I hope his bumper is at least scratched.

The lesson here: wear a helmet, or don't bike in front of moving cars.

and on the third day

What is with the people who write blogs on blog.com? Check them out sometime (blog.com) - it's like a squadron of preteen girls with bad grammar all decided to start writing blogs this September, to let each other know about shopping and football games and boys named Kevin. Then there are the older girls who write bad poetry, the guys who sit around describing how bored they are, and the born-again Christians who need to describe their relationship with God to you. I have yet to find one that is at all interesting to read, or that uses consistently accurate grammar.

Anyway, there was a funny article in this week's Onion. This is where to find it. And I know you've been looking for a book on hand shadows, rummaging in the back corners of old book stores and scrolling through hours of eBay listings. Well: look no more!

how to eat them

Everyone already knows that it is good to eat chocolate chips. I'm not trying to tell you something you already know here. That would be a waste of my time and yours. But the thing is: they are better when they've been sitting in the fridge for most of the day, or in the freezer for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. They become crunchy and delicious in such contexts.

This is another thing: fix your bike. Just do it. If you tighten your brakes, for example, you can skid to a stop in front of the person you are trying to charm, and they will be so impressed that their socks will fly from off their feet.

Lastly, I just got back from an Arcade Fire show, in a big old church. They were releasing their new cd, Funeral. You will be happier if you buy it.

so many shows, not enough nights

Listen: last night I had a dream that a squadron of zombies performed a choreographed dance at me, led by a less shabbily-dressed zombie in red. I couldn't stop screaming.

In other news, there are a glut of musical events coming up next week here in the big city. How are we supposed to choose with these kinds of options?

Thursday, September 30th:
Julie Doiron at Casa Del Popolo
David Francey at Club One
Martina Sorbara at Le Swimming

Friday
Jim Guthrie, The Constantines at Main Hall
The Unicorns at La Tulipe

Saturday
The Hank Collective, Creeping Nobodies et al. at Casa
Barmitzvah Brothers, Great Lake Swimmers at Barfly


...And that's just a sampling: see?

w.'s of m.d. found

This is from mcsweeneys.net - Daily Reason To Dispatch Bush:

"The [U.S.] Department of Energy will spend $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons in 2004. President Bush has requested $6.8 billion for 2005, and $30 billion for the following four years. Adjusted for inflation, the 2004 expenditure is over 50 percent more than the United States' average annual spending on nuclear weapons during the Cold War—$4.2 billion."

a verse

A force irresistible
Ties me to my darling.
Lord have mercy
On both of us,
On both of us,
On both of us.

(from "The Brothers Karamazov", Dostoevsky)

pizza with banana peppers

Hello,

Tonight I ate pizza with a significant quantity of banana peppers, and three nights ago I watched a movie called I Married a Strange Person, which was as weird as its title.

But to continue in the direction this thing has been headed in the past few days, I will tell you about a nice webcomic, that is not like other internet-published comics. It is called A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. It updates once a week, and does not follow a storyline from one week to the next, allowing you a certain freedom from the stress and bother of checking it every day. It's also beautiful and funny.

On the subject of webcomics (which I swear to God I do not read), the funniest of them all is probably Achewood. (If you want to read it, try starting from the beginning.)

oh man watch this

You have to see this movie of a guy surfing a wave that is so big it seems fake. It'll take a second or two to download, but it'll be worth it.
(Found on Monkeys for Helping)

alice vs logic

There follows the transcript of a part of an actual conversation between myself and A.L.I.C.E., the Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity. ALICE is a recent winner of the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence. (ALICE homepage)

Human: Hi
ALICE: Hello there.
Human: Who are you?
ALICE: I ask myself that question, "Who am I?"
Human: What is the answer?
ALICE: The answer is the correct reply to the question.
Human: How thick. Who am I, then?
ALICE: You are unknown person, seeker.
Human: What am I seeking?
ALICE: Online chat with me!!
Human: Oh. I'd hoped it would be something deeper. Is there a God?
ALICE: Of course I believe in God.
Human: Why do you believe in God?
ALICE: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
Human: Why do you believe the Bible?
ALICE: I have faith in God.
Human: Do you know the rules of logic?
ALICE: That's a good question.
Human: And the answer is...?
ALICE: No one has all the answers.
Human: Do you?
ALICE: Yes I do.

the hypertextuality of everyday life

I have to mention that it is so tempting to link to all kinds of things when I'm writing this blog ("blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahg"). In fact, one could probably overdo it, and I probably have. But the whole thing reminds me of a good story by a good author (John Barth), published online. It is called Click, and I urge you to read it.

(Whenever you see something in hypertext in this blog of mine, you can click on it, and it'll bring you to something that will probably change your world. Then you can click on your browser's "back" button to get back to small flightless bird, which will only amuse you, at best.)

(For example, try clicking on "Click" in the first paragraph.)

when hungers attack

There are three Indian restaurants on St. Laurent in very close proximity to each other: one is just north of Fairmount, one is just south, and one is at the intersection itself. I tried the south one last year, and last night I ate at the middle one. It's good to get out to a classy Indian restaurant every once in a while, to remind yourself how good that kind of food can be - once you've eaten fresh hot nan bread, it can take months before you're able to eat the store-bought variety again.

We had two orders of paneer makhadi (a sweet creamy orange curry dish with "paneer," a light Indian cheese that is like an even softer mozzarella), a spinach paneer dish, rice, nan, mulligatawny soup, pakuras, onion bahji (similar to pakuras but made with onions), and a bit of chapati. It was so beautiful. I've made myself hungry again.

not an unlikely event

Last night I went to a party put on by some jazz musicians, who played frenetic music all night. It was in an apartment at the top of an eight-floor building, and there were stairs leading to a nice flat roof with a three hundred and sixty degree view of downtown Montreal. You could see the buildings crawling up the south side of Mount Royal, the skyscrapers built along the St Lawrence, and the flatter residential areas heading north-west from the city's core. There was breeze, beer, and a fellow party refugee playing jazz violin.

After that I headed to another party up north, past the mountain, in the apartment I lived in last year. Two cops arrived at around 2:00 and asked us to keep it down; another two arrived as I was leaving, with drawn clubs, but I talked them out of knocking on the door. The other guests had all left by then anyway.

it's two in the morning and i don't know nobody

I think from now on I'll have to pepper my conversations with vocabulary from The Sting. So if you hear me talking about a fed, a dick, or a joy house, think FBI agent, detective, or brothel (respectively).

...On second thought, I can't remember the last time I ever had to make reference to those kinds of things. Look, maybe I should get into the conning game so I can start grifting the mark, or giving the breakout, or whatever the hell con artists do. I don't know! How am I supposed to know their slang? Besides, it's probably all changed from the thirties anyway. Ah, just forget it, it was a stupid idea. Geez.

triple sec

Someone left a couple handfuls of near-empty liquor bottles in the apartment this summer, and last night we finally got around to polishing them off - something of a challenge, given the varied nature of the collection. I think it was when I was drinking India spice tea with kahlua and spiced rum that I began to question the whole thing.

happy 10:21 pm!

Happy 10:21 pm! I hope your 10:21 pm is happy, and that the presents you receive in commemoration of this holiday are plentiful and expensive.

Did You Know? ...Some facts about 10:21 pm

The celebration of 10:21 pm can be traced back to ancient pagan rituals. In prehistoric Greece, tribes of upright-walking ape descendants would gather in the approximate middle of their group of tent-like dwellings at 10:18 pm to praise the god of that time of day (usually represented as a calf or young rabbit). This tradition was passed down through generations and eventually reached modern North America, where the first immigrants to the continent adjusted their celebrations in recognition of the time zone change.

When, during the twentieth century, the study of time zones became more advanced, it was realized that they should have been celebrating at 3:18 pm. The 10:21 pm tradition held on, however, and to this day we still give presents and sing 10:21 pm carols at 10:21 pm every day.

linkful

I have to share with you something I just read, which is quite funny. Click this here link to get to it. And if you like it, just start reading McSweeney's on your own. I can't keep holding your hand like this.

And don't forget that by now you should have purchased the new Arcade Fire album, which is excellent (trust me). The band's website is also fun to see.

on titles

Listen: the kiwi, New Zealand's national bird, is probably the most famously "small and flightless" animal of the Aves class. But since so many of you have been clamoring for me to explain why I chose the name I did, here is a list of flightless birds, and their sizes:

• Cassowary: huge
• Rhea: large
• Dinornis [extinct]: enormous (largest bird that ever lived)
• Dodo [extinct]: turkey-sized
• Emperor Penguin: large (for penguins)
• Rockhopper Penguin: small
• Jackass Penguin: small
• Kakapo: up to 2 ft long
• Emu: large
• Kiwi: small
• Moa [extinct]: huge
• Ostrich: quite large

There are two things to notice. One is that small flightless birds are either kiwis, rockhoppers, or jackasses; the other is that flightless birds in general show a marked tendency toward extinction.

Take from that what you will.

you ain't fooling nobody

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house,

And it is on those spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

Therefore just as we take advantage of what is,

we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

from the Dao de Jing, as translated in Arthur Waley, The Way and its Power (London, 1949), p. 135.

i need a break

...from reading about what I'm reading about.

Well, we're right back into it. September, I mean. And so formulae are again streaming through my head, aching to be remembered. If anything will prove to be my downfall as a professional physicist, it will be my inability to remember things. Have you seen some of the formulae* these people** use? Here, click on this link and you'll see what I mean.

In other news, I tried to get some pictures of the squads of teenagers who play-fight in the park here every Sunday afternoon, hitting each other with big padded swords, kicking up dust, and arguing about whether they had, in fact, killed each other. But I was unsuccessful. So here's a link to someone else's photos of it, which give some small indication of what it's like to witness this event firsthand.

* I had meant to use the more formal plural version of the word only once, for novelty's sake. But then, needing to make additional reference to more-than-one-formula, I decided that consistency was more important than straightforwardness.

** I.e., physicists.

i've got the feelin' that somethin' ain't right

I just finished watching Reservoir Dogs again. I don't know why I let myself do this; Tarantino films are devoid of any redeeming qualities and yet they ask so persuadingly to be picked up from your movie shelf. "You'll enjoy me," they say. "The violence is secondary to the story, and is anyway a commentary on the violence inherent in mainstream entertainment. We're actually intellectual films."

But when the movie's done you recognize (alas, far too late) that the violence was the point, the whole point of the movie, its driving feature. And you're left with a very empty feeling. And you have to brush your teeth and change your clothes before "Stuck in the Middle With You" will finally stop running through your head.

sleeping is giving in

Coming, as it does, on the heels of a day of torrential rains, today's bright sun and warm temperatures are shocking and pleasant. Roll up your sleeves, bike into the wind, perspire.

I am upset that, faced with an opportunity to broadcast to the world, I feel inclined to chat about the weather.

So, let's discuss something more universally relevant. Today my Advanced Calculus professor told me about happiness: "Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them." I guess teaching math gives him some kind of authority on this issue.

freedom

After publishing my last post, I noticed an ad on the page about Freedom. You probably won't see it, but I felt compelled to share this anyway:

"...[T]he Western and especially American view ... emphasizes what is loosely called 'liberty' or 'freedom' and glorifies the individual and freedom of action. ...But in East Asia, absence of rules was seen as producing chaos. There is no word in any of their languages for our concept of 'freedom'; the closest equivalent means simply 'no rules,' and it was understood that this is bad for everybody..."

(from East Asia: A New History, by Rhoads Murphey)

frightened by dinosaurs

I just watched Jurassic Park. It was frightening. Tomorrow morning I will be learning how to cook "Quebec cuisine," whatever that may turn out to be, at a free workshop. The grinding of the rumour mill has it that crêpes are involved.

Today I learned: one of my roommates had a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig for a family pet when she was younger. Such a thing being illegal in that part of the world, her family spun a web of lies to shield the neighbourhood from the truth. Once, when the pig was squealing audibly from the backyard, they went so far as to claim that their "dog" had simply "tripped."

They later found out that the neighbours never really bought it. It was just so clearly a pig.

recommendations

Here I go, recommending some things for you to click on in your hour of need:

timothy mcsweeney's internet tendency (humourous writing)
homestar runner dot com (flash cartoons)
the onion (the onion)

white ninja comics (a comic strip)
wigu (another comic strip)
a lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible (not so much a comic strip as a series of artworks with words that may make you laugh)
achewood (not so much a comic strip as a way of life)

bbc online (a place to read the news)
cbc online (a place to read the Canadian news)

hinterland who's who

It is raining hard in Montreal today. I just biked home in it, and now my jeans are hanging from my open door, trying to get dry. I have already made good use of my towel. Having chosen comfort over class, I feel a responsibility to read a textbook or solve math problems. Lunch, however, will have to come first.

Oh, and last night I met a person from France, while reading in an upstairs coffeeshop. His roommate was playing trumpet in the jazz band over in the corner. We spoke in both languages.

and:

I just purchased a bottle of vanilla extract that is at least seven times as large as your average bottle of vanilla extract. I'm not sure how to feel about it.

i just woke up

What are these things? How many exist? What are their authors saying? What could I possibly add? Who reads them?

Even the word itself sounds like something done by people who are not well: "This flu is getting worse - I blogged three times last night."

Here is a link to a page that uses blogs for something worthwhile (comedy).