Sleeper

I've been conducting an experiment wherein I'll fill my head with thoughts of dogs right before going to sleep in order to encourage canine dreams.



It's not working.



The other night, I invented a new kind of soy milk that was pre-packaged with cereal. The dream kinda fell apart when I couldn't figure out why the cereal was still crunchy.



Still, that was more coherent than the one where I got invited to a taping of the Clint Eastwood Show. It was more dinner theatre than anything else and Clint wasn't even there. Instead, I sat next to Matthew McConaughey and tried to convince him that I thought Reign of Fire was a legitimately great movie. "No, really ... when you jumped at the dragon with the axe! Man, that was heroic."



And then everyone got up and started line dancing ... I felt pretty excluded.

Boo!

Do you see what happens when you walk Barry in the bottom of the 9th?

Sublime

Since destroying a statue and thereby winning the war, some journalists have been touched by the poet ... Shelley in particular, and his poem Ozymandias in specific.



The use of the poem is not really surprising as it seems readymade for the occassion. Even the part about "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone" recalls the broken pipes that remained attached to the pedestal after Saddam's body had been pulled away.



Ozymandias came about as the result of a sonnet writing competition (ESPN2) between Shelley and Horace Smith. Smith's version concludes with:

We wonder, -- and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The theme in both is the impermance of all things, not just the reign of a dictator or pharaoh.



In this case, the pharaoh is Ramses II (Ozymandias is his greek name) who built lots of temples, defeated all his enemies and was generally well loved by his people ... well, except for those who Moses asked to be let go. Still, the 'works' referred to in the poem truly were great and emblematic of the last great period of the Egyptians.



So, rather than self-congratulatory triumphalism, the real message in toppled statues is that 1) the Jews are probably involved somehow and 2) all empires end up buried under lone and level sands.

'Swounds

"It's finished. It's finished!" the renegade commando screamed on this week's episode of 24. He'd been shot and the doctorfolk at the MiniMed couldn't save him. He knew he was dying and cried out to reveal the location of the secret evidence. Altho' he died one sylable too soon, Kiefer quickly figured out that the microchip was implanted in his side.



Here's the relevant part. Kiefer whips out a scapel and starts rooting around in the dead man's body cavity ... using his fingers to probe the side wound.



And that's how we know that Kiefer's going to eat it at the end of the season.



The 'it is finished' dialogue combined with the wound probing is clearly meant as an allusion to Jesus and Doubting Thomas (with Kiefer as Thomas). And, as everyone knows, Thomas got speared to death in India. Ergo, Kief's a dead man.



(Okay, he's not gonna die next week. But it's him or Kim, I guarantee. And, they could kill him and still do another season ... just set in the past.)

Reach out and touch someone

I had to call QuickBooks the other day and was chatting with support as we were waiting for my request to process.

"Are you down here in Mountain View," I asked.



After a long pause, the support guy replied in a conspiratorial tone, "Did they tell you that?"



"They? Uh, no. It's just I'm at Google which is right across the street from the Intuit HQ ... if you were down here, maybe I could see your office."



"No," he said. "You can't do that ... I mean, we're in Reno."

It's hard to make friends sometimes.

Doom

Elizabeth Stanley-Mitchell points out that regime change doesn't work too well unless you have something else to change into ... and, coincidentally, that's precisely what's lacking in Iraq.



Fortunately, we've got the benefit of experience on our side. Twenty years before this photo-op took place, the US engineered the last regime change in Iraq when, in 1963, the CIA helped oust Gen. Abdel Karim Kassem by aiding the anti-communist Baath Party. And the Baath Party brought peace and freedom to Iraq, turning the country into a model of liberal democracy.



You know, all of this is making the Bay of Pigs look really sensible.

And hear the lamentations of your women

The RIAA is going after a Princeton student for contributory copyright infringement. Not for building a peer-to-peer community or for creating a file downloading tool, but simply for indexing an already existing file-sharing network.



Indexing: enabling more effective search means enabling more effective terrorism.

Ecstatic Vision

I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.



And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.



And upon her forehead was a name written: Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.



Revelations 17: 3-5

Dog: the anti-cat

There comes a time in a young man's life when he must open up his heart and home to a lady. Even if only for one night.



Mabel's owner, Elizabeth, is out of town and I took over dogsitting responsibilities from her roommate, Meredith. Actually, that's not fair. Mabel could have stayed at home for one night ... it was more like she watched 8 Mile with me and then stood guard against the weird noises in the night.



Pretty good deal considering all Mabel wanted out of it was to be pet and taken around to see the smells of the Mission. I mean, I know I had a good time ... I think she did, too.


I promised to call later this week.



.:more:.

Cincinatti sucks in the winter

"They got lifestyle figured out in Spain" I said. "It's like CaliforniaPlus"



"Where are you from," I was asked.



"The midwest."



"Figures. No one actually from California would say something like that."

(Once, I was in Paris for all of 18 hours. I flew around the city, tracking down all the sites I'd studied in 4 years of high school french class - I didn't go up the Eiffel Tower ... that's for tourists.



I was wearing a brown leather jacket that was 10 years out of style and I think that's why I got asked for directions a couple times. Still, my missourian french gave me away as just another American and all the Parisians I met would quickly switch to english rather than hear me butcher their native tongue.)

I laughed and said, "You know, I've found with some native Californians that they don't realize how good they have it. And then, one day, they figure that what they really need to do is move to Boston or something."



"Then," Sutter rejoined, "they get run over by a car."