So Rove isn’t going to be indicted. Oh well. Christy at Firedoglake reminds us that this isn’t over, but it’s still disappointing…and I’m not holding my breath waiting for a Cheney indictment. I’m just glad I was properly skeptical about Jason Leopold’s Rove indictment story.
[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]
The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book will be released September 30, not June 30.
I just found out about this. Literally, about 12 minutes ago.
The good news is that the book is huge, and lavishly illustrated, and meticulously typeset and has (as my publisher said) more charts than a Ross Perot presentation. The delay puts it closer to the movie release, which is almost certainly for the best (and which was the reason for the change).
Still, for those of us (me) who have been waiting breathlessly for the book, it’s a little disappointing. But mark your calendars, boys and girls, September is just around the corner.
Summer is the time of year when Pagan authors travel.
Tomorrow, congested head and all, I am off to Free Spirit Gathering. I’m there through Sunday, and Tom will once again be your guest-blogger.
In July, it’s Starwood for another full week.
They can’t believe how much vacation time I take here at the office.
All the President’s Men (1976) 10/10
Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) investigate the Watergate break-in and discover connections to the White House.
We live in a moment when we must be reminded of the importance of speaking truth to power. Further, we live in a time when the media (including Bob Woodward) behaves like the lap dog of the White House. In such a time, All the President’s Men is a powerful wake-up call.
But hey, it’s also a kickass good movie. » Read more..
The idea was to come back home and dazzle you with tales of Sao Paulo. Instead, I’m hacking up a lung.
So, while I’m spending a lot of time sitting up at the computer (when I can sit up) gathering my thoughts in a coherent manner such that they form sentences and then paragraphs may well be beyond me.
So sorry.
The poverty of Sao Paulo is astonishing. I saw so many empty, burned out buildings. Like Newark in the 1970s. Whole blocks of squatters making do in decimated structures.
And there is a bizarre sort of acceptance of it. The beggars are polite, even diffident, and people either give them money or say no, and the whole thing borders on civility.
We did some late night sightseeing, visiting famous parks and monuments and such. The homeless were very visible, but we weren’t approached. I also noticed the street cleaners. In New York, we have the street cleaning trucks that move through the city around dawn. But in Sao Paulo, there were also men walking through the streets with hoses, washing down statues, pavement, stairs. At the Municipal Theater, there were homeless people wrapped in blankets, asleep on the benches at the front of the theater. The street cleaners hosed the pavement anyway, coming within a few feet of the sleepers; close enough that some of the spray surely reached them.
I don’t know what struck me more; the cruelty of spraying them, or the nonchalance of accepting their presence.
In which I amuse you with cat stories
Mingo likes to suck his thumb.
Or would, had he a thumb. (I have no thumb and I must suck.)
Instead, he sucks his paw. He sucks his whole. gorram. paw. slurp…slurp…slurp.
He does this when he’s content. So if you pet him, and you’re all nice and cuddly and yum the cat he warmeth the lap, all of a sudden…slurp…slurp…slurp. Fuckin ew.
I’ve tried to stop him. I’ve put my hand between paw and slurpyface. He persists. He will either prevail, or depart the lap, or (heaven forbid!) suck something else. I fear this last. ‘tother night he started sucking a pearl on my beaded sweater. Suck the paw, fertheluvagawd!
He is, I should tell you, transfixed. Rapt. His eyes get squinty, and I’ve noticed that there’s a pause. A paw pause. He holds the paw up in front of him, and he squints, and slooooowly he approaches the paw, and then slurp…slurp…slurp. Leading me to believe there’s a profound sensuality to the experience, one so deep that he teases and prolongs it. Which is, y’know, a little gross.
slurp…slurp…slurp.
As a culture, America has become an astonishingly unforgiving place. The trend towards mandatory minimum sentences was perhaps when I first noticed it. But nowhere are we less forgiving than in regard to sexuality. In Tom’s post about Plan B, a commenter said:
Suck it up. Either have the kid, or have the abortion. Either way, George Bush was not in the bedroom…
Suck it up?
Would she who is without an impulsive moment please cast the first stone?
Plan B offers women a non-invasive, non-surgical means of preventing pregnancy. Our cultural answer seems to be, well fuck that. Can’t have it be easy.
And while perhaps this particular commenter isn’t a Puritan, doesn’t this attitude come from the idea that if we make mistakes we should suffer? If we have a sexually impulsive moment, it’s only right that we should “suck up” the most painful, expensive, and long-term consequences possible? Surely there should be no Get Out of Pregnancy Free cards!
Because none of us nice women have had sex on impulse. Without birth control. Just for fun. (And remember, the woman in this article had sex with her husband. I’m told even Puritans approve of that.)
What if we lived in a world where people sometimes behaved foolishly, smiled ruefully, and moved on? Without losing friends, respect, or having to undergo surgery? What if, when we hear of someone making a mistake, we all paused to reflect on our own mistakes?
I think I’d like that world.
I’m reading Dumas’s1 The Vicomte de Bragelonne (the Three Musketeers 30 years later, with the restoration of Charles II as historical background), and I ran across this passage:
As he approached, he heard the noise of the pulleys which grated under the weight of the heavy pails; he also fancied he heard the melancholy moaning of the water which falls back again into the wells – a sad, funereal, solemn sound, which strikes the ear of the child and the poet — both dreamers – which the English call splash; Arabian poets gasgachau; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only translate by a paraphrase – the noise of water falling into water.
Huh. French has (or had, as of 1850) no word for ‘splash’.
It seems such a basic word to me, such a necessary word, that of course it strikes me as strange that the French don’t (or didn’t) have an equivalent. That’s the nature of different languages, though. The Germans may well think it odd that we have no words meaning Treppenwitz or Schadenfreude; Spanish speakers may consider us barbaric for failing to distinguish picante from caliente, or chile from pimienta.
‘Splash’ appears to have its origins in onomatopoeia, which is of course a particularly rich source of linguistic differences. (Consider animal sounds, for example: French turkeys say glouglou, and their roosters say cocorico.) In French, onomatopoeia is less ingrained in the language than it is in English–it’s used more in comics than anywhere else–although apparently the word ‘cliché has onomatopoeic origins.
As for the ostensibly Arabic ‘gasgachau’, that’s either a bad transliteration or an invention of Dumas’s: a Google search brings up only the same passage (in English and French) from Vicomte de Bragelonne.
1Yeah, it looks weird. There has already been an extremely lengthy and ultimately inconclusive discussion about this sort of thing, and trust me–you don’t want to go there.
I leave for the airport in an hour. I am eager to be home although I have had a wonderful time here.
This internet connection keeps knocking out my WordPress connection although most other stuff is fine. It’s the anti-blog.
Portuguese punctuation is fun. Look what I have on my keyboard here: Ç~ç¨. Of course, I’m always hitting it when I mean to do something else, so…
See you soon!
