President's Remarks to the Unity Journalists of Color Convention

President's Remarks to the Unity Journalists of Color Convention:

Now in terms of the balance between running down intelligence and bringing people to justice obviously is — we need to be very sensitive on that. Lackawanna, for example, was a — there was a cell there. And it created a lot of nervousness in the community, because the FBI skillfully ferreted out intelligence that indicated that these people were in communication with terrorist networks. And I thought they handled the case very well, but at the time there was a lot of nervousness. People said, well, I may be next — but they weren't next, because it was just a focused, targeted investigation. And, by the way, some were then incarcerated and told their stories, and it turned out the intelligence was accurate intelligence.

I post the above because SadPunk has re-opened the subject of "sensitive" war. I looked for the speech he mentioned, and I believe it's this one — and I believe it's this quote.

Funny, Funny, Funny

A friend of mine sent me the following.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational [also here — I could spend days reading this kind of stuff] once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the 2003 winners:

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray painted very, very high.

7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

18. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Between Books

Oh my. Finished Everything is Illuminated last evening. What a ride.

One of my favorite passages:

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who has lost a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your grear-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

That's excerpted from a larger passage, which I won't quote here. That's not all — just a small sample.

So-Called "Baby" Carrots

VivaLaLesley disputes my information about baby carrots. The following is taken from Cooks Illustrated's E-Notes, April 2001.

"BABY" CARROTS

While researching our story on roasted carrots [. . .] we learned that the popular bagged "baby" carrots in the supermarket qualify as "babies" in terms of size only. The diminutive carrots are pared-down versions of a special variety bred for extra sweetness and color. The large carrots are forced through a machine that peels and trims them down to their perfect little size.

Books, Books, and More Books

Yes, Everything is Illuminated continues to be great — so great that I don't want to write here because I'd rather read.

However, I've been thinking about this particular subject for a while now and wanted to at least get started. I like lists, though they can be maddeningly frustrating sometimes. Here, then, are ten books I love — these books are on this list not only because I love them, but because they were world-changing as only a few books can be in any given lifetime. Order is not especially significant here; these are off the top of my head.

• Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. It's a close race between several C.S. Lewis books, as I adored the Chronicles of Narnia when I was only a boy. Recently having reread them, I discovered that they're even better than I remembered they were. Also on the short-list from C.S. Lewis are The Abolition of Man and The Screwtape Letters. But Mere Christianity wins out because of the luminous quality of its prose and because of my peculiar reaction to reading it. I was raised Church of Christ and went to private Church of Christ school. So I took Bible classes nearly every day until I was 18 or so. They were quite in depth, and yet encountering Lewis in Mere Christianity when I was 18 was life-changing — "oh, now I see what all the fuss is about!"


• The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. Absolutely one of the finest novels I've ever read. Other contenders from McCarthy include Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses (my first McCarthy novel, and so in some ways always the best), but The Crossing wins because of its sheer power. Reading it was like being run over by a train. Repeatedly. In a good way. I've never ever been so wrung out by a book.


• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. Friends of mine mock me for loving such a hippie book as this one, and suggest that I ought to shut up and read Walden. But this book is practically unique in my experience; it's a book about nature and God and death and life and all the other big issues. Somehow it's also about little things, specific things, and the human quest for understanding, knowledge, enlightenment, and maybe even perfection. Its prose is marvelously light but multifaceted like a poem; you think you're done with an image and then it returns in a new light where it can be seen differently. I have encountered few books as perfect as this one in my reading life.


• The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert A. Caro. I've never read a biography of anyone else that even comes close. Magesterial. LBJ rises up from the pages of these three volumes and breathes, shouts, berates, rejoices, struggles, steals, lies, cheats, and gets his way in his very own fashion. You may not like him, but he's never ever boring. Three volumes here, and Caro's not done yet. I for one can't wait for volume four.


• The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote. Dated, maybe, but for flat-out great storytelling, it can't be beat. A beautiful, tragic, and epic book. One of the crowning literary achievements of the twentieth century in any form.

Those are the books I knew would be on the list when I started. Now, I'm going to have to do some thinking to flesh out the ten.

Everything is Illuminated

A good friend recommended that I read Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated. Having just started the book — I've read about five pages — I am already compelled to mention it here.

It's not thus far an easy book to explain, but it is hilarious; the first part of the book is narrated by a Ukranian translator writing in English, and the effect is riotous. A sample:

Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper. If you want to know why so many girls want to be with me, it is because I am a very premium person to be with. I am homely, and also severely funny, and these are winning things. But nonetheless, I know many people who dig rapid cars and famous discotheques.

I'd like to quote more, but to do so would be to give away too much — I'll simply say that this book, so far, is inventive, original, and one of the funniest things I've read in years.

CNN.com - Cheney blasts Kerry over 'sensitive war' remark - Aug 12, 2004

CNN.com - Cheney blasts Kerry over 'sensitive war' remark - Aug 12, 2004:

The Kerry campaign Thursday said that the senator's comment was being 'taken out of context' and the 'meaning twisted' by the Bush/Cheney campaign.

Kerry spokesman Phil Singer told CNN the Democratic candidate was referring to cooperation with allies. President Bush himself, Singer said, used the word 'sensitive' in a similar context in March 2001, when he said the United States should be 'sensitive about expressing our power and influence.

Since nobody over at the Kerry campaign has posted this speech, it's difficult to say, based on the one sentence, whether Singer's correct or not. But, based on the one sentence, "fight" does not equal "cooperation with allies." Yeah, Kerry mentions allies in the same sentence, but that's about all.

CNN.com - Cheneys Go After Kerry - Aug 11, 2004

CNN.com - Cheneys Go After Kerry - Aug 11, 2004:

[Mrs. Cheney] was responding to an audience question about Kerry's remarks last week to the Unity 2004 conference in which he said, "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side."

I have looked for the rest of that speech, the one Kerry gave to Unity 2004, but it's not posted online — at least, not at the John Kerry site. And not at the Unity 2004 site.

The reason I've gone to the trouble of posting that quote is that Kerry campaign staffers are now practically denying that he said it. Grammatically, there's no question that "more sensitive" there modifies "fight."

I'll post an example from Kerry's folks soon.

VP's Remarks in Dayton, Ohio

VP's Remarks in Dayton, Ohio:

But a good defense is not enough, and so we have also gone on the offense in the war on terror — but the President's opponent, Senator Kerry, sometimes seems to object. He has even said that by using our strength, we are creating terrorists and placing ourselves in greater danger. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world we are living in works. Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. (Applause.)

Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a "more sensitive" war on terror. (Laughter.) America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. President Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive warfare — nor did President Roosevelt, nor Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. A "sensitive war" will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more. The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity. As our opponents see it, the problem isn't the thugs and murderers that we face, but our attitude. Well, the American people know better. They know that we are in a fight to preserve our freedom and our way of life, and that we are on the side of rights and justice in this battle. Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed. (Applause.)

I listened to what Senator Kerry had to say in Boston, and, with all due respect to the Senator, he views the world as if we had never been attacked on September 11th. The job of the Commander-in-Chief, as he sees it, is to use America's military strength to respond to attacks. But September 11th showed us, as surely as anything can, that we must act against gathering dangers — not wait for to be attacked. That awful day left some 3,000 of our fellow citizens dead, and everything we have learned since tells us the terrorists would do worse if they could, and that they will even use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons against us if they can. In the world we live in now, responding to attacks is not enough. We must do everything in our power to prevent attacks — and that includes using military force. (Applause.)

All Geeked Out

Today was my second sick day. Again, I slept a lot. But in between sleeping episodes, I've been contemplating what I'm going to do about my new home theater room. The plans have been drawn up, and construction should commence soon, so I'm becoming very concerned about what equipment is going into that room and how I'm going to get it there.

My big dilemma is display technology. I used to sell high-end A/V, but DLP and LCoS and LCD displays are all technologies that simply weren't available a few years ago.

With the advent of DLP, especially, the cost of actually installing a projector has become -- dare I say it -- almost reasonable. It's still going to cost a fortune, of course, compared to what normal people would consider sane. The point is that high-end TVs cost nearly the same as high-end projectors, and you avoid the problem of the enormous box. Of course, with LCD and Mitsubishi's new DLP displays, the problem of the big box is all but gone anyway.

Too many choices to make, really. But I'll muddle through.

Two Weekends and a Sick Day, Part Two

Last weekend, a good friend of mine got married. After his first date with her, he called me up in the middle of the night to let me know that he was going to marry her. That was about two years ago. Lo and behold, he did just that on Sunday.

I was at the bachelor party on Friday night, where the groom was injured by a fairly nasty fall and the best man got a black eye. I merely got tackled by the groom, but otherwise made it through unscathed. This particular bachelor party ended about 1 a.m., but I would have gotten worried had it gone on much longer.

The oddity of the evening was capped by the groom's asking me to be a groomsman. I had previous plans that I couldn't break, so I missed the rehearsal dinner. Now, I've never been a groomsman before, but this was an especially casual wedding, so there was no tuxedo rental involved or anything like that. The bride and groom decided to have the wedding in their back yard, which turned into something like the mosquito coast during the ceremony; there were so many mosquitoes buzzing around that I kept seeing groups of them flying around my eyes. As a groomsman, I couldn't exactly swat them, though there were a few occasions where brushing them away from my face was, though uncouth, the only thing to do. They'd sprayed the yard before the ceremony, but I think the spray just made the mosquitoes angry.

After the ceremony the groomsmen escorted the bridesmaids out of the improvised chapel, and — wouldn't you know it — my escort took a dive, stepping into a small hole in the yard that was covered by the white fru-fru runner. She didn't fall, prompting a friend to say, "Not only are you a competent groomsman, you're a damned hero."

Indeed.

I was also unaware that the groom has a younger sister who ought to be a supermodel. Another friend said she was "twice my height," and that's true. The sister, however, informed me that she "played me" at the rehearsal dinner I missed. I asked her if she'd done a competent job. She assured me that she had.

In between all the wedding events, my parents and I cooked dinner for some family friends. That occupied most of the day and night on Saturday. Wound up being a relaxing and pleasant evening.

And that pretty much catches you all up to date.

Now, if I can only get rid of this stupid cold.

Two Weekends and a Sick Day, Part One

It's been busy lately, and the level of busy-ness has apparently caught up with me. I took a sick day from work today due to a cough and sore throat incident, and so now I'm on some pretty powerful antibiotics and a narcotic cough syrup.

Whether I'll be back at work tomorrow is an open question; all I wanted to do today was sleep.

But that's following two eventful weekends. Weekend-before-last I saw, and was terribly disappointed in and offended by, The Village. It's quite simply one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Its dialogue was pretentious, its acting workmanlike and uninspired, its script and story so dull and predictable that reading the side of a cereal box holds more shock and surprise. I say the movie offended me because its secret surprise ending was as silly and trite a thing as could be imagined. Someone said about something, there's no there there. That's how I feel about The Village.

Seeing that movie made it incumbent on me to see another, to cleanse the movie palate. I saw Before Sunset that same weekend, on Sunday night. The difference between a good movie and a bad one has never been so apparent to me as when seeing those two movies back-to-back. In Before Sunset, you see good acting combined with intelligent writing and un-showy directing, and the cumulative effect is one of making you forget that you're watching a movie. Which, of course, the best movies always do. Before Sunset is small and confined, but that allows it to probe and prod in a way few movies do anymore.

In between the two movies, I went to the Botanical Gardens for another concert — this time, Lyle Lovett. Worth every penny. Lyle is not only a great performer, he's a great songwriter, and some of the songs he performed I'd not heard before. I was struck by the quality of the Large Band as musicians, and equally struck by the economy of word and phrase in many of those songs. It was a good show on a beautiful night — worth the trip.

I can't say the same for Antiques Roadshow, which was also on that Saturday. That was hours of standing in line as part of a huge crowd, all of us carrying heavy boxes of stuff, not enough of it on wheels. The two-and-a-half hour wait in line was capped by about ten minutes of what seemed like perfunctory and dismissive appraising. It wasn't an experience that I'd want to miss, but I'm not sure I'd do it again.

So that was weekend-before-last. Next up, a week of work, followed by last weekend's events.

Ride of the Valkyries....Really?

So, I watched the post convention blowout for Kerry. John Williams and the Boston Pops, fireworks, and so forth. Nice display. Kind of grating to hear John Williams music (like Superman, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc.) against that scene.

I kept wishing for Born on the Fourth of July. No dice, but what I got may have been better. It was certainly more...odd.

Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." You know the one, with the blaring french horns and all. The problem is that its most famous use in the last several decades was as source music in Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

We all know that Kerry, by the way, served in Vietnam.

But we also know that the scene in Apocalypse Now that Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" overlays is one in which American soldiers in helicopters massacre Vietnamese civilians with machine guns.

Kerry's admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Perhaps few people know that, but the collision of John Kerry, Vietnam vet, with "Ride of the Valkyries" is most unfortunate because of the reminders that it dregdes up from our collective movie-going past.

The Night Owl Strikes Again

Finished Motherless Brooklyn. Great book. Am excited about the prospect of the movie. If nothing else, it'll be a tour de force for Norton.

Also, need to mention that I have to be at work in seven hours. Ick.

Lyle Lovett and Antiques Roadshow coming up this week, both on Saturday. Should be fun, but maybe a bit hectic.

Sunday, Laundry Sunday

As is usual on Sunday, I'm doing laundry. I actually prefer to do laundry on Friday night or Saturday, but sometimes it gets put off a day. Yesterday, I went with my cousin and my mom up to Ripley, Tennessee, to an estate sale. Pretty stuff, some of it, but I wound up with more questions than answers about some of the more expensive items there, so I didn't buy anything except a couple of ceramic bowls that will be ideal for proofing bread and the like. You can never have too many giant mixing bowls.

I'm hungry. I'm also feeling vaguely sociable tonight, but it's too late, really, to call anyone and instigate anything.

So perhaps I'll just dry my clothes and try to finish Motherless Brooklyn. I'm close, but I think I may be just far enough away from the end of the novel so that finishing it will keep me up later than I ought to be.

I did see two great movies over the weekend, The Magdalene Sisters and City of God. The former I may never watch again, but it was a brilliant piece of work about a chapter of history of which I am completely ignorant. The latter also concerns a place about which I knew little, but cinematically it was reminiscent of De Palma, Scorsese, Tarantino, Coppola, and Soderbergh, to name a few. I was expecting depression from City of God, but it wasn't depressing; the violence, poverty, cruelty, and corruption present in City of God were assumed to be the norm and thus were not questioned, just stated. Alternately, The Magdalene Sisters has a moral tone; implicitly, a place outside the asylum exists from which actions inside it are judged. Judgments, if any, in City of God are more tenuous, because the only world present in the film is that of the City.

That's not to say that City of God doesn't view what goes on in the City as being wrong and horrific, but the two films deal with violence and depravity in completely different ways.

An Amazing and Slightly Terrifying Photograph

The Drudge Report posts a photo of a storm that must've hit Miami this evening. It's truly an amazing photograph. 

Another Book on the Reading List

Dang. It's always something.

First it was William F. Buckley's new autobiography, which awaits my perusal following Motherless Brooklyn.

And now, it's Roger Kimball's The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art.

Q&A with Kimball is available on the National Review's Web site. I read the article looking for excerpts to post here and found that exercise to be fruitless, primarily because I enjoyed it all and don't feel like quoting out of context.

I am not currently a subscriber to either The National Review or The New Criterion. I have a feeling I ought to be a subscriber to both.

All that comes before in this post is an example of what a little late-night Web surfing can do; I was going to link to Rich Lowry's Tuesday article, "W.'s Double Binds," which begins:

Sometimes a political figure becomes so hated that he can't do anything right in the eyes of his enemies. President Bush has achieved this rare and exalted status. His critics are so blinded by animus that the internal consistency of their attacks on him no longer matters. For them, Bush is the double-bind president.

It's an interesting article and kind of fun, even if you're not a rabid right-winger like I am.

Weekend Parties & Photos

This weekend was full; Saturday night I hosted a grill-out party; it was fun, and it went late, but I think the mosquitoes ate more than the people did — and the people ate a lot. In fact, the party spilled over into Sunday morning. Folks went home, and then some of them came back tonight for round two. Too bad that work beckons in the morning for everyone.
 
I've decided that a digital camera is in my future. As well as a Mac. I've wanted one for a while now, but the lure of iPhoto and the other iApps is too strong to resist once one's actually considering a digital camera. Plus, OS X rocks.
 
I don't know that I'll take the G5 plunge now or wait for the new G5 iMac. I'd rather have the pro machine with the 23" HD monitor, but justifying it in terms of hobby-like photography is tough.
 
But the real problem is with the camera. I'm conflicted; I'd like a small and portable camera, because I figure I'll get more use out of that type of camera; I have an old Eos Rebel that I love, but it's big and bulky and difficult to travel with. Not the kind of camera you can take with you and snap photos any old place. It's what I might call a "destination camera." The sort of camera that requires constant planning for its use. You take it with you when you're going someplace where you're sure you want pictures. So I'd like the portability of something smaller.
 
I'd also like, however, to get the resolution and picture quality that's available from nice lenses and mondo-megapixel cameras. Additionally, everybody and his brother is making digital cameras nowadays; sifting through all the different models to find one that's appealing may take some serious time.
 
I've looked at cameras from Canon and Minolta, and I've read good and bad things about both. But that's just scratching the surface. I've used a Kodak EZShare, but it's a couple years old.
 
Several of you out there have digital cameras, I'm sure. Your comments are welcome and would be of some assistance as I begin the trek into the wilderness of digital camera-buying land.

A Dark and Stormy Night

After a day of agonizing heat and humidity, a cold front is in the process of coming through tonight; it's brought thunderstorms with it, and some relief from the sauna-like weather of earlier today.

Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler.

Motherless Brooklyn continues to be an enjoyable read, though I've not been able to devote as much time to it as I'd have liked. On the way from Amazon.com is William F. Buckley's newest book, his autobiography, Miles Gone By. Buckley, whatever one may think of his politics, is a consummate stylist; and I've heard that this book contains a number of essays that don't deal with the political; I'm anxiously awaiting this book's arrival.

I've been agonizing about my own writing; part of my job involves editing, and the writing I'm seeing because of that is in every sense atrocious. I know that reading poor quality writing negatively impacts my style. I'm concerned about this issue because I'm to write a paper on Suttree for the 25th Anniversary Celebration of same that's to be held in Knoxville, Tennessee, this October.

Finding time to reread Suttree and write a coherent, cogent paper about it is not going to be an easy job between now and October. I still have plenty of time, but I need to get to work soon.

Summer Colds & Weddings

I've spent most of the day, at work and after, battling what seems to be a summertime cold. I'm not bad off yet and hope not to be. This is a cold that apparently arrived on the plane with my sister, who was here last week. My mother's had it, and I've felt poorly all day.

There's nothing worse than a cold in the summertime.

Got an invitation from an old friend to his wedding, which is in August. The quest for someone to accompany me has now officially begun. Going to weddings alone is horrible.

Also talked to The Girl tonight. She's as happy as a clam. This, of course, was after a week of phone tag. I heard a brief report on the radio today that mentioned the pope's saying (and I'm not Catholic, despite my Italian last name) that sometimes life was so hectic that it made it impossible for people to pray and think about things. (I am sure the pope put it better than that, but his basic sentiments I won't disagree with.)

In fact, I read an essay by Mark Helprin, "The Acceleration of Tranquility" an eternity ago, and I thought then it was an epoch-making essay, in that it summed up nicely the problems with the age we're living in. Most of what he said then is more true now than when he wrote the essay.

That, in fact, is one of my favorite Helprin essays. Another, which was the first Mark Helprin I ever read, is "Against the Dehumanization of Art."