So, I was doing my just-havin'-gotten-up scan of the Reuters feed, and I stumbled on an article about Shazia Mirza, Muslim comedienne. Headline: "Muslim Comedienne Triumphs with Veiled Humor"

Sample line: "My name is Shazia Mirza. At least that is what it says on my pilot's license."

Poking about a bit, I found her website. She has a fair number of audio files posted, and one video file.

Check it out.

Here's what I mean:

Orwell:


O'Brien:


Not exactly Separated At Birth, but very similar hair days. :)

(And, no, the coincidence of being named O'Brien in the Orwellian context does not escape me.)

Just for nomi, I've uploaded a picture to The Mirror Project. Here it is:



This was taken on Granville Island in Vancouver, at the Federation of Canadian Artists' gallery, on 2003-07-21. I just noticed this big honkin' mirror hanging from the ceiling, and decided to take a shot... as it, um, were. If nothing else, it's probably useful documentation of me with longish hair, as I got a haircut today (too damned hot!), and now look like George Orwell's red-headed nephew. Well, except for the Van Dyke in addition to the moustache.

(That image is actually on my own web space -- I'll probably point to the Mirror Project's specific URL once they approve the image.)

Have you wondered why Señor Arbusto has been sputtering in his reactions regarding Liberia? You know, sometimes forward, sometimes back?

Well, it may not be because of the sensible reason -- our troops are spread too thinly just now.

No, it may have everything to with... The Lord.

Kinda.

See, it turns out, according to Fortune magazine, that Pat Robertson has an investment in Liberia. A gold mine. Literally.

The idea is, Pat wants to be free from being dependent on donations... So, he's invested $8.4 million in a tract of land that definitely has some gold... and some say has as much as $1.7 billion worth. (Proof that Pat, unlike George, stayed awake during econ classes when each was at Yale.)

Here are some choice Robertsonian quotes from Fortune:

"This man Taylor (the President of Liberia, indicted for war crimes) is not the monster everybody makes him out to be... How dare the [U.S.] President say to the duly elected President of another country, 'You've got to step down.' ... I'm appalled."

"Duly elected," no less.

So, the question of the day -- Will breaking the rice bowl of one of the biggest "Christian Conservatives" get Dubya in hot water with his own party? Or is he just going to be forgiven for yet another stock anti-Republican fuckup because He's Our Boy, as he has so many times before?

artinnudity floated a proposal to go friends-only. This is what I posted... Two days after they'd already decided not to, because I caught the post proposing, but not the one disposing. Typical of me. :)

But it elaborates what I have in mind. So:

From Sprezzatura:

"Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined. Every one of these causes influenced the Crusades, and conspired to render them the most extraordinary instance upon record of the extent to which popular enthusiasm can be carried."

Charles MacKay, L.L.D., Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, "The Crusades," page 354.

Any reference to our own age is purely coincidental, of course. {cough}

I just put this on my profile, but people might have some ideas about it. So:

*^*^*^*^*

Statement up front: I think one of the biggest tactical errors made when LJ was being designed was labelling journals one frequently reads, "friends". Because a lot of people seem to take that term literally when there's no practical or functional reason to do so.

My own view: LJ is basically like a newsstand. It's a public place, with journals -- magazines, periodicals -- publicly available. When I add you as a "friend", what I'm really saying is that I find your writing or photography interesting enough that I would like to read or view your journal on a regular basis, and I want the convenience of having it on my friends' page. That's it.

The more LJs I see, the more I think "Friends Only" journals are not just inconvenient, they're actively destructive to LJ as a culture. Because LJ is a community, first and foremost. A "Friends Only" journal is like a walled, gated development with a "keep out" sign out front. The Internet is a Big Place. Pretending it's your private back garden leads only to frustration for everybody.

Your Mileage May Vary, obviously. But if you're looking at this page because I just added you and you have no idea who I am... That's why. I go through LJ communities, I go through the random links, I look at friends-of-friends-of-friends... I'm just looking for bright, funny, interesting LJs to read or view (the last because I like photography).

I don't know how long it'll be up, but you should see this.

I particularly like the double-check that one has spelled the name of the address sought correctly.

From the Reuters feed at Yahoo:

"Well we still don't exclude that they can find things but the longer time passes, the less possibility perhaps," said Blix, executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC).

"But I think we were vindicated in the prudence that we showed. We consistently maintained that unaccounted for is not the same thing as saying things exist. They might exist, they might not exist and I think everything shows that that was wise," he said.

Blix believes Iraq may have destroyed most of its dangerous weapons (note that this doesn't say when -- hal) but questions why Saddam Hussein did not produce data showing he had disarmed.

He speculated that Saddam might have wanted to create the mystique that he still had weapons of mass destruction -- on the theory that big boys like big toys.

Yesterday, June 28, was my 40th Birthday.

It is, as they say, a milestone, but to me the bigger one is coming later, in the fall. On Sept. 25 I will have lived longer than my dad, according to his official birthday. (As in many things about my dad, there is some dispute as to how accurate his official birthday is.)

I've been taking many pictures obver the weekend, and would love to share, but I take them at full resolution (3MP), and I haven't found a quick tool for both scaling them down in bulk, making thumbnails, and rotating the portrait ones the right way up. You'll just have to use only my words for now, poor though they may be.

Up, as Mr. Pepys says, at noon(-ish. Ulrika had already been playing Bounce Out, and we lingered a bit over my presents, which were two books: Moab Is My Wapshot, by Stephen Fry, and Celebration, USA: Living in Disney's Brave New Town by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Fry's always been interesting to me, and Celebration raises some real questions about architecture and urban planning.

Then it was off to Jack's Fish Spot, in the Pike Place Market, for fish'n'chips. (This was a day I was off-diet.) I took photos in black & white, which just seem to work better there -- it's very 1940's somehow, with its tight booth in stainless steel and stools.

Next, we wandered over to Schmitz Park. It's really more of a preserve these days, containing as it does some of the last old growth forest in Seattle. It's a great place to hike around, and Sarah-the-dog had a lot of fun sniffing up everything.

I like boats. I like being out on the water. So we took the ferry from Fauntleroy to Vashon Island. It's only a 15 minute ride each way, and it was done more on the spur of the moment than anything else.

Vashon Island was interesting to drive around. It very much feels like rural countryside, and was one of the inspirations for the novel Snow Falling on Cedars by Guterson. Poking about the small town in the center of the island, I went into Vashon Bookshop. I was browsing over Gordon Parks' autobiography, Voices In the Mirror, and recognized his third wife, of whom there were many pictures -- Genevieve "Gene" Young, who Helene Hanff writes quite a bit about in her more autobiograhpical pieces. I just never knew Gene had been married to Gordon Parks, is all. The shop owner and I got into a conversation about this. I ended up buying Noel Perrin's book, A Reader's Delight, which the blurb tells me is about how the author, "...thinks it's a shame that serious reading is generally limited to the recognized classics even though there are countless literary gems that, for one reason or another, have fallen from view." He then goes on to champion them. Great stuff, can't wait for the movie, but still, a book that fairly screams Hal all over it.

Taking the ferry back to West Seattle, we then went up to Mashiko. We were extremely lucky -- we were asking the hostess how long we might have to wait for stools at the bar in front of Hajime, the owner/chef, and she was politely telling us there was no way to know... when a couple got up and left. "How about those two?" I asked.

Hajime did his sushi jazz thing that he does so well. Ask for octopus, and instead of getting octopus slices on rice, one gets a pile of various sized chunks with tiny whole octopi, lightly covered in a sauce. Or a skipjack tuna, this time in slices, yes, but on top of a dungeness crab salad with a salsa-like salad/sauce on top. And much else, besides, including banter with Hajime and the two sets of other patrons seated next to us (in series).

And so, home.

Today, we went to St Edward State Park, for the Midsommarfest put on by the Skandia Folkdance Society. This was much fun, and as Ulrika put it, I earned much Swedish street cred by being one of the brawns participating in the majstångresningen... which is to say, leveraging the 55-foot-high May pole up into place. In fact, as I look at the pages I just linked to, I see they've already turned the Midsommarfest page over to announcing the one for 2004, and the picture on the splash page for Skandia features the effort we made earlier today. I can barely pick out my red hair at the base of the second klykor support pole on the left... I leave it to you to see if you agree. :)

We then went home-ish, and went out to see Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Which was fun, in a comic-book-ish way, and pretty much argued that Drew Barrymore may have a future as a producer. Cool.

So, books, movies, fish'n'chips, sushi, boats, photography, forest primeval, Swedish phallic symbols, admiring flickan... pretty close to an ideal birthday weekend.

I was flipping though this week's Fortune magazine when I spotted this offhand citation, in an advice column to a worker with a demanding boss:

"Realistically, you probably can't change your boss, so you have to ask yourself whether you want this job badly enough to tolerate the long hours," says Roseanne Badowski, who has worked nonstop as Jack Welch's executive assistant for 13 years and wrote a book called Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You."

Yikes. That gives a whole new spin on the Welch era at GE. Perhaps Jeffery Immelt isn't doing as well as he might not because he's being compared to Welch, but to Badowski?

Like I say, a kremlinologist kind of moment.

From today's radio address by the retired Governor of Texas:

" For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world. And in the regime's final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned. Yet all who know the dictator's history agree that he possessed chemical and biological weapons and that he used chemical weapons in the past."

True.

On the other hand, Jorge, the last known use of such weapons by Iraq was in Halabja in 1988. In 1988, you were a coke-snorting drunk.

Perhaps, using your logic, the DEA should raid the White House, just to see what they find? There was that suspicious choking-on-a-pretzel-while-kegging-in-private incident of yours, after all...

So, I was looking at something, which reminded me of Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation and their project to make an open source PIM that'll be both a challenger to MS Outlook and a modern-day follow-on to Lotus' late, lamented Agenda. And I was reading Mitch's blog, and I saw his entry about how he's converted over to Mozilla for his browser, and I thought about the good press Mozilla's been getting lately...

So I gave it a try.

{phht!}

I am less than whelmed.

Plug-ins don't install automatically. That's a nuisance, but I know some developers think IE's ability to use (programs from other {gasp!} developers) ActiveX controls to just seamlessly install plug-ins is Pure Evil from Planet 10. This strikes me as the usual programmer way of disdaining things that make life easier for the customer while adding any effort at all for the programmer.

But, even so... I went to CNN's web site. Saw the headline story, the derailment down in Commerce, Calif., on the very tracks I used to walk down between the Commerce train platform and Gallo Wine's LA distributorship when I worked there. Saw a link to a video clip. Cliquez-ici. Got told I needed to re-install RealPlayer, because it didn't "see" the copy already installed for IE. Downloaded, re-installed, re-loaded the page.

RealPlayer freezes.

I go to Task Manager. Kill off RealPlayer.

Things are still moving like slush in liquid helium.

Call up Task Manager again. Take a look at the Processes tab.

It's not RealPlayer that's hogging the CPU as a runaway process -- it's Mozilla, at 95% of a CPU locked at 100%.

I shut down Mozilla.

Still sludge.

Mozilla-the-app is gone, but Mozilla-the-process is still 95%+.

{le sigh}

Kill the process, uninstall Mozilla. I'm sorry, an app that refuses to actually stop when I tell it to just offends me.

Slogan of the day: "Open Source: Still Worth Every Penny You Pay!"

I've been meaning to share more photos here.

So, for your amusement, or something, two very different ones.

The first is our dog, Sarah, curled up on the couch at our old apartment in Costa Mesa, Calif.

The second one is Anthony Perkins, who was in the peanut gallery with me in 1988, at a campaign rally for Dukakis at Pauley Pavilion, UCLA, the night before the 1988 election.

Me: Ha-ha. (spoken just like that. ha. ha.) My post has a picture.

She: Mine has a link.

Me: Mine has two links.

She: Mine is witty and clever.

Me: True. {beat} I would never do that.

Back when akirlu was living with her ex-, John, they had some wind-up sushi on the bar. Pretty neat toys. And when they broke up, one of the things Ulrika had to leave behind was the sushi.

That was over 15 years ago.

Since then, we've always kept an eye out for wind-up sushi. During those years, they became surprisingly difficult to find. Even with the Galaxy's Largest Yard Sale that the Internet can sometimes be.

But... I found some. They arrived today. Here's the pic of them from that page:



I think they're better quality than the originals. I don't know if you've ever seen the plastic food re-creations some Japanese restaurants put in their windows, but these sushi are like that. Kinda glossy, but real despite it.

And they roll and spin the way they should... Vastly superior to the walking variety of wind-up sushi we've been making do with for the last few years since the last time I went out hunting.

Transcript of Ayad Futayyih Khalifa al-Rawi's 1st Interrogation.

A very funny parody, with some absolutely dead-on points to make,.

I've been reading a lot of web comics, lately.

My favorite, unexpectedly, is Ozy and Millie. Yes, it's "just" a funny animal strip, but there's frequently more there than meets the eye... Like the week about weapons of mass destruction. Or the week about copyright law, and fire.

I also like Something Positive, just for its sheer cussedness.

And then there's Scary Go Round, which doesn't always make sense to me, but almost always looks so damn cool.

It goes back to Elizabethan times, but Gresham's Law -- "Bad money drives out good." -- holds up under all sorts of contexts.

Take counterterrorism.

Paul Krugman had a typically no-nonsense column today in the New York Times, but the most fascinating thing in it was what he made reference to:

Randy Beers' interview in the Washington Post, from yesterday, 16 June.

Some choice quotes:

Five days before the war began in Iraq, as President Bush prepared to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, a top White House counterterrorism adviser unlocked the steel door to his office, an intelligence vault secured by an electronic keypad, a combination lock and an alarm. He sat down and turned to his inbox.

"Things were dicey," said Rand Beers, recalling the stack of classified reports about plots to shoot, bomb, burn and poison Americans. He stared at the color-coded threats for five minutes. Then he called his wife: I'm quitting.

A revisionist historian, no less. Or so says Mr. Bush. Here's the full report, from the Reuters feed:

"Now there are some who would like to rewrite history; revisionist historians is what I like to call them," Bush said in a speech to New Jersey business leaders.

Referring to the ousted Iraqi president, Bush said, "Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted."

The problem with this, of course, is that it implies that somehow some of us are singing a different tune than we were when the war started, or during the long buildup. It implies that no one called Mr. Bush on his lack of credibility.

Well... Here's what I posted back in October, newly found because of the site indexing I'm using from FreeFind:

A few impertinent questions from this self-identified conservative:

* Yer right, Mr. Mouthpiece-of-the-Cabinet Man -- Saddam Hussein has ruthlessly killed lots of people. So, umm... what may we infer from the fact that he hasn't used weapons of mass destruction since the Gulf "War"? If he had them, wouldn't he be using them?

* Remember the Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor, back in 1981? The nuclear reactor that to this day doesn't work because of that bombing... which is why if Saddam does get nukes, it'll because he purchased fissile material, and not made it on his own? Right. So... what may we infer from the fact that the Israelis haven't made one move toward bombing Iraq for over two decades? Why is Israel's biggest worry about Iraq the possibility of being hit as a proxy -- as a substitute for direct retaliation against the US -- should we attack Iraq?

* Why is it the US Cabinet seems more afraid of letting inspectors into Iraq and finding nothing, than the Iraqis appear to be afraid that said inspectors will find anything? In other words, why is the US more resistent to the idea of inspectors than Iraq is?

* When Bush is directed by the Cabinet to say, "We will disarm" Hussein... shouldn't at least some evidence be presented that Hussein has the relevant arms? And wouldn't that evidence best be gathered by, um... inspectors? Wouldn't it be embarrassing to send the Army to Iraq, and find nothing? Or is the Army going to be directed to borrow a few prosecutorial techniques from the Rampart Division of the LAPD?

Yes. Wouldn't it be embarrassing, indeed?

October. I was saying this in October 2002.

"Revisionist", my ass.