Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”
“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”
His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.
Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”
I saw the future of soul music last night at Neumo’s in the form of pasty-faced Brit Jamie Lidell. In a performance that made D’Angelo and other neo-R&B lovermen seem quaint and obsolete, Lidell nonchalantly reinvented the genre for the new millennium. Everybody in the house seemed to be really feeling it. I’ve been clubbing for 26 years, and this show ranks in my top 10 of all time.
Overheard @ the Columbia Tower food court:
Two Seattle fire fighters sat down at a table and started talking about the mayor’s office.
One of them asks the other: “What do you think of Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis.”
The second fire fighter answers: “Oh, I love that guy. He once recommended a book to me called Warrior Ethics that says you have to put away your morals to get stuff done in politics. It’s a great book. I love that guy, Tim Ceis.”
An amazon search brings up a book called Warrior Politics. Perhaps this is the book they were talking about:
Robert Kaplan’s Warrior Politics is an extended, willfully provocative essay arguing that the bedrock of sound foreign policy should be “comprehensive pragmatism” rather than “utopian hopes.” Kaplan calls for a reestablishment of American (primarily) realpolitik, one distanced from Judeo-Christian (or private) virtue and closer to a “pagan” (public) one. He aligns himself with America’s Founding Fathers, who, he says, believed good government emerged only from a “sly understanding of men’s passions.” His book is a mix of aphoristic pronouncements, brief contemporary political analyses, rapid-fire parallels between conflicts ancient and current, and copious quotes from historians and thinkers through the ages (Livy, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes among them). Though its historical gleanings are often too summary and suspiciously convenient, Warrior Politics promises to generate controversy among students of global politics—just as it was designed to do. —H. O’Billovitch
The urinals at the Atlanta airport are so close together you have to link arms with the guys on your left and right to take a leak. Oh, and there’s no drug stores in Ann Arbor - I went out looking for some pain killers, and couldn’t find shit. Ann Arbor is a college town - don’t the kids here get hangovers?
From a reader, via email:
Uh…have you guys seen this? The Army National Guard is offering 3 free downloads from iTunes for every person that signs up for a recruiting call… Certain death in Iraq…or a $2.97 music credit. Hmm…
36th District/Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia, Regrade
1) Mayor: Al Runte
2) Monorail: Build It
3) Council Position 4: Jan Drago
4) Council Position 2: Richard Conlin
5) Council Position 8: Dwight Pelz
46th District/North Seattle
1) Mayor: No Endorsement Made
2) Monorail: No Endorsement Made
3) Council Position 4: Jan Drago
4) Council Position 2: Richard Conlin
5) Council Position 8: Dual Endorsement of Dwight Pelz and Richard McIver
The French ethnologist Philippe Descole describes an aspect of the world-view of the Achaur, a tribe that lives in Amazon region, in this startlingly beautiful way:
“[For the Achaur, in nature there are a] set of things with which communication cannot be established. Opposite beings endowed with language, of which humans are the most perfect incarnation, stand those things deprived of speech that inhabit parallel, inaccessible worlds. The inability to communicate is often ascribed to the lack of soul that affects certain living species: most insects and fish, poultry, and numerous plants, which thus lead a mechanical, inconsequential existence. But the absence of communication is sometimes due to distance: the souls of stars and meteors, infinitely far away and prodigiously mobile, remain deaf to human words.”Passages like this make my life happy.
In last week’s New York Times Magazine there is a photo essay about the new and old citizens of globalized Amsterdam. Two of the subjects profiled make a living by fucking each other a lot. It’s utterly amazing that a couple can have so much sex, night after night. Udi and Erica, their names, have achieved the closet thing to human perfection; indeed, they are hardly human anymore but have become what all want to be: sex machines.
On Wednesday, after Tom DeLay was indicted, I said that it seemed a season of indictments might be upon us. And now, just in time for indictment season, New York Times reporter Judith Miller has agreed to testify before the grand jury that is investigating the CIA leak case.
The agreement gets Miller out of jail and, according to media reports, clears the last big obstacle to concluding the investigation into who in the Bush administration may have illegally outed a covert CIA operative as an act of political retribution.
One lawyer said it could become clear as early as next week whether [Special Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald plans to indict anyone or has negotiated a plea bargain.
When she testifies before the grand jury today, Miller will talk about conversations she had with her secret source on matters relating to the outed CIA operative. And who is that source? Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
