Revelations
Obviously the big news today was the release of new prisoner abuse photographs by the Washington Post, but the Post also has the translated sworn testimony of some of the Abu Ghraib detainees. It's truly appalling stuff -- somehow I was more affected by these firsthand descriptions of what went on than I was by any of the photograps that have been released. This is probably because the the testimony of the prisoners themselves very overtly juxtaposes the cultural background of the victims against the sadistic acts of their American captors.

By the way, the administration is making a huge mistake by not releasing all the photos, videos, and other materials at once. The justification they've given is a legal one -- somehow it will help guarantee the relevant MPs a fair trial. But this is a political scandal, in America of course, but even more importantly abroad. The standard Bush administration approach of secrecy and denial will not work here; the stakes are too big. They should get out in front of this and take sweeping action to bring those responsible (at every level) to justice. Only then can they get on with their mission in Iraq.

Publish or perish
Todd Price of Frolic has a freelance piece over the Chronicle of Higher Education about the job market for humanities PhDs outside the academy. It's a good read, albeit a lttle depressing. I hope the article opens new doors for him...

Obama blog
The Barack Obama campaign has a new blog up, and it appears to be spearheaded by Rick Klau, the same evil genius who got Howard Dean's pathbreaking blog up and running. Rick recently came to one of my classes to give a fascinating and inspirational talk about the Dean campaign's organizational innovations and his pivotal role there. I'm thrilled to see Obama has tapped him for this.

Automated grouping process
Whoa. I was flipping through Google News and a link to this came up on the main page. I don't think I've ever seen a blog entry come up before, even if it is part of a magazine. Did this just slip through, or has Google News classified Shane Cory's blog as a legitimate news source?

I hadn't thought about it before, but there's nothing quite like Google News for blogs, is there? Google should do it... it wouldn't be too much of a departure from what they've already done, and it would add a lot of value for bloggers.

Some new sort of twisted form of constant irony
Here's a nice short history of American semiotics (in the academy, at least), with juicy details about the education of Ira Glass, among others. I like the idea of blaming my "problematic relation to practice" on those damn semiotics classes...

Moral equivalence
I haven't had a chance yet to comment on the despicable treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but I'm seriously disturbed by the comparison with Nick Berg's beheading at the hands of purported al Qaeda operatives. I don't want to minimize the latter tragedy, but the torture at Abu Ghraib is far worse and far more important in the scheme of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the whole American project.

On the one hand, you have the execution of an American by terrorists, which is hardly surprising given what they've been doing for the past few years. On the other hand, you have the American military abandoning the high moral ground. The fact that you could compare the events at all is a statement about what the American reputation is abroad. Do we really want to be comparing our actions with the atrocities perpetrated by al Qaeda?

After 9/11, many proclaimed the death of moral relativism. Let's hope they were wrong -- because otherwise, we're on the side of evil.

Coffee abuse
Scientists have confirmed what caffeine users already know: that to maintain caffeine levels in the blood, it's important to keep consuming it in small doses (or large doses, as the case may be) throughout the day. But at the same time, I'm not sure it's surprising that people go for a big dose in the morning. Rsearch on users of more ilicit drugs suggests they like two things: a relatively small, constant dose, as well as occasional spikes. There's no reason to expect caffeine users to be any different.

Non-verbal communication
Michael Thaler's new verbless novel, (in French and untranslated) Le Train de Nulle Part, under review over at Language Log. And the reaction: copycat posts with no verbs, no nouns, no prepositions, no adjectives, no articles. But the irony of it all! In French and English grammar at least, such a wealth of adjectives, nouns, and adverbs, all direct descendants of verbal forms -- verbs, those queens of language. So now, only the shadows of verbs; presence through absence, the theme of the novel.

Any of you translators up to the challenge? Easier, probably, than Gilbert Adair's bizarre achievement, his e-less translation of Perec's La Disparition, but still amusing, no? Some young upstart translator's future tour de force, no doubt.

Dearth
Sorry of the lack of posts. The past three weeks, starting with my week in CT, have been extremely busy and disorienting. It's not over -- the quarter is approaching its end -- but hopefully I can get back to blogging now. I have to admit that it's felt somewhat liberating to be focusing on other things for a while, but only I think in the temporary way that a vacation is liberating.

Just because you are a character...
Keywords has an interesting post up about diacritics and other special characters and how they work with unicode. He's looking at it from a discrimination standpoint (ie we're discriminating against those poor Czechs by not putting the diacritics on their names), but it's interesting that in at least some of these cases, the linguistic groups themselves might be making things more difficult. In the case of Tatar, for example, the past few years have seen major decisions about precisely which alphabet to use. Basically they were using a modified Cyrillic alphabet during Soviet times and are in the process of switching to a Latin alphabet. But as I understand it, they ultimately chose to go with some characters that aren't in unicode, even though part of their stated rationale for switching to a Latin alphabet in the first place was to better meet international typography standards.

Wordly wise
DrFrankLives over at stinging-nettle points out the idiocy of something Bush said about race. I didn't hear the particular statement he references, but I was horrified during his press conference when he referred to "brown" people. It makes me wonder if the term is in regular use around the White House. I guess this kind of talk would be scandalous if it came from anyone else, but the expectations are so low with Bush that people seem to give him the benefit of the doubt: he misspoke.