What I expected, was
Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake,
And I rest long.

What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch,
The fading of body and soul
—Smoke before wind,
Corrupt, unsubstantial.

The wearing of Time,
And the watching of cripples pass
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist,
The pulverous grief
Melting the bones with pity,
The sick falling from earth—
These, I could not foresee.

Expecting always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
Exempt from dust,
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all,
Like the created poem,
Or faceted crystal.

Stephen Spender, "What I Expected"

Clifford May:

When a natural disaster strikes as it did in Asia this week, does the UN have planning in place for a rapid response, to bring teams in from around the world, to coordinate efforts, to do anything?

Or is their only response to hold a press conference and to snipe at Americans?

A state you must dare not enter
  with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle
  that doesn't exist.
But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above
  the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.

Stephen Dunn, "Happiness"

Dennis Smith:

The greatest cliché in geology is the question, Can it happen again? Sure. Will it happen again? Well, nature is never overdue, and we simply don't know. The earth has had many configurations of land, water and living inhabitants over the ages, and if we think of an earth-changing event as being "overdue," we are failing to understand geologic time. It is mind-boggling to think that only 200 million years ago the earth was one gigantic continent, and one can only imagine the explosions that broke it into today's continents. The plates beneath these continents continue to creep, and they don't need an earthquake to move them along.

Read it all.

Mark Steyn, 12/18/04:

As in previous years, Planned Parenthood has been selling greetings cards for abortion proponents filled with seasonal cheer to send to each other: `Choice On Earth', they proclaim. I can just about understand being a proponent of abortion; I find it harder to fathom someone whose obsession with the subject extends to sending out holiday cards on the theme.

. . . 2004 was a good year for Jesus. He had the big box-office smash of the past 12 months with The Passion of The Christ, scorned by Hollywood but popularised by word of mouth, or word of tongues. And, a couple of days after His man won the US election, a couple of Democrat wags, in a widely disseminated Internet cartoon, renamed a big swath of the North American continent after Him — `Jesusland', stretching across the vast southern interior and pushing up along the Rockies to the 49th parallel. The godless coastal fringes, meanwhile, were joined with Her Majesty's Northern Dominion and rechristened (if you'll pardon the expression) the United States of Canada, a fate I wouldn't wish even on Democrats. And, while the thought of joining their own shrivelled redoubts in a grand union with the biggest `blue state' of all evidently cheers them up, they may be overestimating the blueness of the Great White North: large chunks of Alberta and the British Columbia hinterland would be happy to sign up with the Bible-thumpers, if only for the non-confiscatory tax rates. So Jesusland could well be even larger than its disparagers suggest.

. . . The Jesusland meme is so discombobulating to the secular elites of the western world that within a week it had become the prism through which they view every event in the great republic — even lousy movies. For as the Independent's headline put it, `Alexander the (Not So) Great Fails To Conquer America's Homophobes'. I don't think you have to be a homophobe to find Alexander a stinker; its stinker status does not primarily derive from its mild gayness, so much as from Oliver Stone's incoherent storytelling and a dull central performance by some Irish bloke whose efforts at characterisation start and end with bellowing every line. But, if the world's media want to conjure visions of stump-toothed backwoods knuckle-draggers stomping out of the Jesusland multiplex firing off verses from Leviticus as they demand a full refund, why get in the way of their illusions?

. . . Even if one accepts that the modern Euro-Canadian secular state is the rightful heir to the Enlightenment, it would seem obvious that it's got a lot less enlightened, at least in the sense of `freeing from superstition'. The ludicrous over-reaction by the elites to the US election results is at least as superstitious and irrational as anything the Bible Belt believes. And there's nothing very rational or scientific about refusing to engage with your opponents' arguments and instead dismissing them as mere `phobias' — homophobia, Islamophobia, Chiracophobia.... Whatever else may be said about the evangelicals, they don't sneer `theophobia' whenever they're criticised, even though in that case the lame trope may be almost plausible — when it comes to abnormal psychological fear of the unknown, blue staters' theophobia is more pervasive than red staters' homophobia.

A year or two back, I attended a lunch for a minister from California who was applying for a pastor's gig at a New Hampshire Congregational church. My friend, the aptly named Faith, cut to the chase and asked the minister whether she believed the Bible was the literal truth. `Well,' she said, somewhat condescendingly, `I believe these are useful narratives that we tell each other.' Even if that's so, is it helpful to give the game away? As it turned out, the minister was a lesbian who'd been joined in what she called `Holy Union' with her partner back at their church in Berkeley, since when she'd become an enthusiastic marrier of gay couples across the Bay area. Proclaiming the Bible a series of `useful narratives' is invariably a first step towards proclaiming many of them useless — the relevant portions of Romans, etc.

. . . Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative the other week that George W. Bush won 25 of the 26 states with the highest fertility rate. On the other hand, John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest. If I were a Democrat looking 20 years down the road, I'd be very alarmed by this trend.

But then not many Democrats do look 20 years down the road: radical secular individualism is a present-tense culture, in America as in Europe. `In the long run we are all dead,' as Keynes said. There speaks a childless homosexual. Those Old Testament big begetters knew better: a celestial afterlife is something we have to take on faith, but our afterlife on earth is the children we beget and the children they in turn beget. `How many divisions has the Pope?' scoffed Stalin. Demographically speaking, Jesusland has more divisions than Eutopia. Pace Timothy Garton Ash, you can't defend the Enlightenment if you're too enlightened to breed. Americans remain mystified about one of the landmark events of this year: the terrorist bloodbath in Madrid that changed the result of the country's election. Why, they wonder on this side of the Atlantic, wouldn't the Spaniards stand firm? But what's to stand firm for? To fight for king and country is to fight for the future, and a nation with Spain's fertility rate — 1.1 children per couple or about half `replacement rate' — has no future.

In that sense, the Bible, beginning with God's injunction to go forth and multiply, is a lot more rational than the allegedly rational types at Planned Parenthood. I'm not an absolutist in these matters. I'm a red stater when it comes to God and guns, but I like European art-house movies where Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert take their kit off. It's a question of balance.

. . . It's easy, in an otherwise wholly secular West, to mock the religiosity of Jesusland. But if eternal salvation remains unproved, the suspension of disbelief required of Eutopian secularists grows daily. If you were one of those `redneck Christian fundamentalists' the world's media are always warning about, you might think the Continent's in for what looks awfully like the Four Horsemen of the Euro-Apocalypse: Famine — the end of the lavishly funded statist good times; Death — the self-extinction of European races too selfish to breed; War — the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest — the recolonisation of Europe by Islam.

But it goes without saying that Europeans are far too rational and enlightened to believe in such outmoded notions as apocalyptic equestrians. If there is `choice on earth', I'll bet on Jesusland. Happy holidays.

It's hit and miss, as any such survey's likely to be, but I found a lot of it funny:

In lifestyle news, the hot trend is ''metrosexuals'' -- young males who are not gay, but are seriously into grooming and dressing well. There are only eight documented cases of males like this, all living in two Manhattan blocks, but they are featured in an estimated 17,000 newspaper and magazine articles over the course of about a week, after which this trend, like a minor character vaporized by aliens in a Star Trek episode, disappears and is never heard from again.

* * *

[T]he nation -- already troubled by bad news from Iraq, coupled with a resurgence in terrorism and a slow economic recovery -- is traumatized by something that leaves a deep and lasting scar on the fragile national psyche: Janet Jackson's right nipple, which is revealed for a full three ten-thousandths of a second during the Super Bowl halftime show. This event is so traumatic that the two teams are unable to complete the game, with many players simply lying on the field in the fetal position, whimpering. It is a moment reminiscent of the JFK assassination, in that virtually all Americans can remember exactly where they were when it happened.

''I was on the sofa,'' they say. Or: ''I was in the bathroom and missed the traumatic moment, but fortunately we have TiVo.''

* * *

With more bad news coming from Iraq, and Americans citing terrorism and health care as their major concerns, the news media continue their laser-beam focus on the early 1970s. Dan Rather leads the charge with a report on CBS's 60 Minutes citing a memo, allegedly written in 1972, suggesting that Bush shirked his National Guard duty. Critics charge that the memo is a fake, pointing out that at one point it specifically mentions the 2003 Outkast hit Hey Ya. Rather refuses to back down, arguing that the reference could be to ''an early version of the song.''

* * *

If you like those, read it all.

James S. Robbins:

The truly motivated terrorists will be immune to any engagement on the level of ideas. Those who are driven by deep and irrational hatreds, a monomaniacal quest for power, or some form of social-psychological pathology are not likely to be reformed. . . .

But we have a competitive advantage — people innately want to be free. Our natural audience is among the emerging middle class, the liberals, the young, those rising progressive groups against which the reactionaries are desperately fighting. . . . Our mission, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, is to "place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent." We seek not to convince but to inspire. This is not a battle of ideas but of ideals.

Read it all.

Ralph Peters:

Next year begins with elections in Iraq. Terrorists will do all they can to disrupt the balloting. Iraqis will die for the crime of casting a vote. There'll be local corruption, religious influence, ethnic division, tribal bullying and polling boycotts. After all of our sacrifices, those Iraqis who manage to vote may favor parties whose agendas frustrate us.

But the Iraqis will vote. Not all of them. But millions. Despite the ferocious efforts of the terrorists and insurgents, the Arab world is about to see the first truly free election between the Nile and the Euphrates.

Global pundits will find endless flaws, and many a Washington apparatchik may be troubled by the election's outcome. But the Iraqi elections will be a milestone that no demagogues, America-haters or instant revisionists will be able to wish away.

Democracy works. It doesn't work all of the time, and it doesn't work everywhere instantly. Sometimes the largest tribe wins and believes it has a mandate to oppress minorities. Sometimes the people choose the hater, not the man of hope. Sometimes the thugs get away with stealing the election.

But consider where this world of ours stood 50 years ago. Or 15 years ago. Or even in 2003. Democracy's march is long, hard and painful. But humankind stepped forward in 2004.

George Will:

Among the many things that ``everyone knows'' that just are not so is that the 2,400 men of the Continental Army won the Battle of Trenton, an operation that began on the night of Dec. 25, 1776, because the Hessian mercenaries had partaken too vigorously of Christmas drink. According to David Hackett Fischer, whose ``Washington's Crossing'' was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, the Hessians were weary from a week of constant vigilance against attacks by local insurgents, but fought well.

Not well enough, however, to prevent what Fischer, a Brandeis historian, says was -- combined, over the next eight days, with a second battle of Trenton and the Battle of Princeton -- the most important victory in U.S. military history.

Read it all.

Jonathan Rauch:

Republicans' continued control of Supreme Court nominations makes it nearly unimaginable--and it was always unlikely--that the court will overrule the states on gay marriage. The Supreme Court recently sidestepped an opportunity to intervene in Massachusetts' gay marriages, and the election returns will give lower federal courts second thoughts about butting in. The enactment of those 13 state amendments demonstrates that popular sovereignty is alive and well in the states. I am dismayed by the amendments' passage, but I can't complain about the process. Nov. 2 showed that our federalist system is working exactly as it should, and it made the case for federal intervention weaker than ever.

Read it all.

Caroline Glick on Israel's proposed evacuation from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip:

More than 5,000 rockets and mortar shells have now fallen on Israeli communities in Gaza since the Palestinian terror war began. In anticipation of the proposed expulsion of their 8,000 Jewish residents, the Palestinians have dramatically increased their attacks. They want to make it look like they are driving Israel out. And the IDF is doing little to dissuade them. . . . Like Hizbullah in Lebanon, the terrorists in Gaza will be viewed by the entire global jihad network as having defeated Israel. The price Israel paid for its precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon was the Palestinian terror war. What should Israel expect after its withdrawal from Gaza enables Hamas, Fatah and Hizbullah terror cells to operate openly five kilometers from the power station in Ashkelon?

. . . The security implications of the planned withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and the northern West Bank are entirely separate from the moral dimensions of the policy for what it means for Israel to be a free and secure Jewish state. But they share a common root. This root is to be found in those who are shooting off the mortars and rifles and rockets. It is found in Abu Juyad; it is found in the murder of Ariela Fahima whose throat was slashed by a Palestinian terrorist outside her home on the outskirts of Jerusalem this week; and it is found in the attempted murder of an Israeli motorist who accidentally drove into Ramallah Monday night and had to be saved by the IDF as a lynch mob gathered around him. This common root is Palestinian rejection of Israel.

Read it all.

Victor Davis Hanson, 12/10/04:

Turkey's proposed entry into the EU has become some weird sort of Swiftian satire on the crazy relationship between Europe and Islam. Ponder the contradictions of it all. Privately most Europeans realize that opening its borders without restraint to Turkey's millions will alter the nature of the EU, both by welcoming in a radically different citizenry, largely outside the borders of Europe, whose population will make it the largest and poorest country in the Union — and the most antithetical to Western liberalism. Yet Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the "other" coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values. . . .

Privately, most Americans grasp that with a Germany and France reeling from unassimilated Muslim populations, a rising Islamic-inspired and globally embarrassing anti-Semitism, and economic stagnation, it is foolhardy to create 70 million Turkish Europeans by fiat. Welcoming in Turkey will make the EU so diverse, large, and unwieldy as to make it — to paraphrase Voltaire — neither European nor a Union. . . .

But gut-check time is coming for Europe, with its own rising unassimilated immigrant populations. . . . The radical Muslim world of the madrassas hates the United States because it is liberal and powerful; but it utterly despises Europe because it is even more liberal and far weaker, earning the continent not fear, but contempt.

(Via Melanie Phillips.)

This piece by Anne Applebaum appeared yesterday before the results of Ukraine's election were known:

But there are Russians who understand what happened in Kiev, Russians who no longer believe their government's propaganda, Russians who understand that this really was a popular movement, and not a Western conspiracy. It is precisely those Russians whom the Putin administration now fears the most. . . .

Ukraine is big, it is close, and it is ethnically, historically and linguistically close to Russia: If it happened there, it could happen here too. Whatever the result, expect this Ukrainian election to be followed by renewed surveillance of Russia's tiny democratic movement, increased control of the media, and even louder anti-Western rhetoric. And - in spite of all that - expect at least a handful of Russians to feel inspired.

Read it all.

Really:

The team have developed a prototype device, named the Bioloch Ist, which imitates the undulating motion of the ragworm, also known as the paddleworm.

. . . Paolo Dario, who led the research, said: "The basic concept is to develop a replacement for the current colonic endoscope, which is quite large and stiff, and has to be pushed inside a patient.["]

Ouch ouch ouch. Read it all, unless, you know, it disgusts you.

(Via Fark.)

I have no idea whether it works, but it looks like it might be an interesting project to try with a kid.

(Via Newmark's Door.)

First, this piece on Iraq:

The terror war in Iraq was not improvised, but carefully planned by the four great terror masters (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia) during the infuriatingly long run-up to the liberation. They made no secret of it; you have only to go back to the public statements of the Iranian mullahs and the Syrian Baathists to see it, for top Iranian officials and Bashir Assad publicly announced it (the mullahs in their mosques, Bashir in a published interview). They had a simple and dramatic word for the strategy: Lebanon. Assad and the mullahs prepared to turn Iraq into a replay of the terror war they had jointly waged against us in Lebanon in the 1980s: suicide bombings, hostage-taking, and religious/political uprisings. It could not have been more explicit.

Second, this post on Ukraine:

Yushchenko seems to have won, big big bigtime, in the Ukraine. Big turnout--around 78%--and big margin, about 15 points. It's a dramatic and important moment, and the winning forces of the "orange revolution" are right to talk about democratic revolution. Here is yet another case where the forces of repression seemed to have all the advantages, including the reconstituted KGB and the full, cynical, support of a nasty Russian tyrant. Yet freedom won.
For those of us who have long preached the power of democratic revolution, it's a happy day, and I hope that our leaders draw the appropriate lessons[. . . .]

Read them both.

[A]ll societies contain a composite image of the "normal" person that is actually embodied, as a whole, by more or less nobody. . . . People who lack any of those desirable characteristics are made to feel shame; so more or less all of us feel shame about something.

Martha Nussbaum, "Danger to Human Dignity: the Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law"

Thomas Sowell:

Do the Iraqis themselves want a democracy? More important, do they have the prerequisites for sustaining democratic government? After all, Western democracies emerged slowly, over the centuries, through trial and error. Is it realistic to expect Iraq to make that leap in a few years?

. . . It is one thing for the Shi'ite majority in Iraq to want to be free and something very different to expect them to want -- or even tolerate -- the consequences of that country's Sunnis or Kurds being free. An enduring democracy requires tolerance and it is hard to think of any place more intolerant than the Middle East.

Read it all.

Paul Johnson:

Christmas is a time of goodwill and I must, as usual, suspend my dislikes for the season. What are they? The list lengthens every year. . . .

Let me assure readers I am totally without prejudice. I do not prejudge. I have formed my dislikes on the basis of long experience. I tried explaining this once to James Baldwin, who complained to me that it was sheer race prejudice and homophobia which made people dislike him: `No, James, it is not prejudice, it is actual experience of how awful you are.' He said, `What experience have you had of prejudice?' I replied, `Listen, old sod, if, like me, you were born in England red-haired, left-handed and a Roman Catholic, there's nothing you don't know about prejudice.' At this point he stumped off in a rage.

Read it all.

Former CIA officer Thomas Patrick Carroll:

Even as we speak, Jacques Chirac and his foreign ministry are putting the finishing touches on their latest diplomatic masterpiece — the tragically botched operation in Côte d'Ivoire. Watch and learn, as they say.

. . . Unlike the case with the United States and Iraq, France has no opposition among the great powers to its thrashing about in West Africa. When Paris asked the UN Security Council for an arms embargo on the Gbago government, for example, the United States graciously voted in support of Chirac's request. There was no attempt by Washington to subvert or embarrass the French, even though doing so would have been very easy and lots of fun.

Read it all.

I dreamed that Super Soldiers from The X-Files were coming to kill Suzanne Pleshette.

I know where the elements of the dream came from, but why they combined as they did I can't explain.

Deroy Murdock:

The drug industry "needs to moderate its prices and make them more Transparent and equitable," Harvard Medical School lecturer Marcia Angell, M.D. wrote in the Financial Times last July. "In short, it needs to curb its greed."

Liberal columnist Molly Ivins has decried Big Pharma's "greedy, bloodsucking, murderous behavior all over the globe."

. . . AIDS is wiping out Africans due to "the genocidal action of the drug cartels who refuse to make the drugs affordable," according to Father Angelo D'Agostino, a Jesuit priest and founder of the Children of God Relief Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.

These caricatures completely ignore the fact that major drug companies donate enormous amounts of life-saving products to poor third worlders.

A recent Hudson Institute study illustrates this prescription philanthropy. In "A Review of Pharmaceutical Company Contributions: HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Other Infectious Diseases," Carol Adelman and Jeremiah Norris document the value of drugs that this industry handed out to some of Earth's most desperate people.

Last year alone, nine major drug companies donated $2.135 billion worth of products and services to combat HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and other tropical ailments. This sum, Adelman and Norris write, "remains a conservative figure since it does not include cause-related marketing or philanthropic contributions by overseas affiliates."

. . . So, what are the pharmaceutical sector's motives? Drug executives simply could have huge hearts and, literally, boatloads of compassion. Perhaps this largesse is a coldly calculated business technique designed to appease angry activists and assuage regulatory busybodies. Maybe it is a mixture of both. That hardly matters to vulnerable third worlders. America's supposedly villainous drug companies stand shoulder to shoulder with these human beings as they battle disease.

If the pharmaceutical sector can be faulted for anything, it is for being so bafflingly bashful about publicizing their great works around the world. The simple fact is that without the drug companies' ten-figure philanthropy, millions of destitute Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans would spend this Christmas Day face-down in the dirt.

John J. Miller:

8:45 am: Grandparents arrive, with more presents.
9:15 am: Children discover that Santa secretly set up a brand-new PS2 in the middle of night and it's ready to go. There is much rejoicing.
9:30 am: Breakfast is served.
9:55 am: Seven-year-old son announces, "I'm bored."

Read it all.

Poignant piece on Mike Tyson:

Quietly, the once-great fighter observes: "You look at old pictures and then you look in the mirror and you don't even know who that person is."

Overweight and on prescription drugs to fight depression and keep him calm, Tyson is still carrying a leg injury from the pounding he took from Britain's Danny Williams, who knocked him out in July.

Contrary to what his adviser Shelley Finkel claims, he is not planning a comeback fight in March. Maybe there will never be one. "I'm just training," says Tyson, who hasn't worked on his bad knee for more than two months. "I don't know if I still want to box. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I feel I don't more than I want to. I'm just tired."

Read it all.

(Via The Corner.)

John Derbyshire, 12/23/04:

It would indeed be a great thing, to lift up Iraq to a merely Tunisian level of political civility.

But, even assuming it is possible, why should we bother? A chaotic, road-warrior culture in Iraq would be just fine, so far as I can see. In what respect would it not be fine? (Fine for **us**, I mean. It would of course be hard on the Iraqis, but that is not America's problem.) Because "chaos breeds terrorism"? What environment does NOT breed terrorism? The 9/11 hijackers were mainly products of Saudi Arabia, one of the least chaotic societies that ever existed. 1960s Belfast was not the least bit chaotic, but it produced a crop of terrorists that plague it to this day. Hamburg, Madrid, Paris, have all turned out plenty of terrorists. The Japanese "Red Brigades" were some of the most vicious terrorists of modern times. Is Japan "chaotic"?

Chaos is no enemy of ours. The five-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed three million lives, and has sunk a vast region into unspeakable chaos. Where are the Congolese terrorists? What's that you say -- Afghanistan? The problem with Afghanistan was not that "chaos was breeding terror" but that we didn't bother to do anything about it when we should have done.

We are fighting a war on terror. The goal of that war, as surely everyone really knows, is to prevent atom bombs going off in US cities. Since no terrorist group by itself will be able to erect the infrastructure needed to make nuclear weapons, the real peril is not actually the terrorists -- who will always be with us, though of course we should kill them when we can -- but terrorist-friendly states with the kind of serious physical assets and political organization that will get them to nuke status. The solution is to go into those states, smash up their assets, and destroy their political organization -- which is what we did in Iraq. If this leaves "chaos" behind, I just don't see that as a problem. You can't make an atom bomb out of "chaos."

The management of barbarians is not that difficult. You keep them scattered and disorganized -- "chaotic," in fact! -- while watching their developments carefully to make sure no threat is building. The danger only comes when, absorbed in your own affairs, you take your eye off the ball and let bad things develop in the barbarian hinterland. The history of China illustrates this many times over.

If the barbarians were to switch to a civilized style of life--which has sometimes happened in history--hey, that's great! But it can't be depended upon, and is not essential to US national interests. And I really don't believe we know how to bring it about.

But I have to like David Letterman for this:

Although they couldn't be home for the holidays, Marines in Iraq received a timely Christmas gift when David Letterman performed a Christmas Eve edition of "The Late Show with David Letterman" here.

. . . The crowd roared and hands flew in the air when he asked for a volunteer to help deliver his opening monologue.

"Isn't that how you got here?" Letterman asked.

Read it all.

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.
"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"
is another one, or just
"On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
"In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel--Moved, I Wrote This Poem."

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like "Vortex on a String,"
"The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall"
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors"
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner,
cross my legs like his, and listen.

Billy Collins, "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles"

Theodore Dalrymple:

I asked him whether he worked.

`Do you mean work work?' he said.

`Is there any other kind?'

I thought about it for a second. In a way he was quite right, of course. There's work (what my patient called work work) and there's make-work. At a rough guess, I should say that about half the people in paid employment in this country do make-work, whose only end product is difficulties in the way of the other half, the half that does work work.

He cast around for faint traces in his memory of work of any description, but could find none.

`No,' he said decisively. `I've never worked.'

Read it all.

An interview from October "by Carlos Baroni, Oriana d'America, Italy." I hope he could tell when she was joking:

Q: Why do Europeans prefer liberals than conservatives?

A: Because you're all a bunch of atheists, humanists and moral relativists. Love the food, though! And don't get me started on the shoes you wonderful people make! They're to surrender for!

Q: Do Europeans love Kerry more or hate Bush more?

A: Hate Bush. No one loves John Kerry, including John Kerry. Europeans are wrong on policy, not clinically insane.

Q: Who will win the elections 2004?

A: That's for the Supreme Court to sort out, you ignorant foreigner.

Read the whole thing, starting about halfway down this page.

This story has everything:

PARIS (Reuters) - Police suspect a French prosecutor of paying a prostitute with a stolen credit card just hours after addressing a conference on ethics, a Justice Ministry source says.

The source said the prosecutor could be suspended and might face disciplinary procedures.

He gave no further details, but Le Parisien newspaper reported on Monday the prosecutor from southwestern France presented a paper on the ethics of his profession at a conference in Germany in May before visiting the brothel and paying with a credit card which investigators suspect was stolen from a colleague.

(Via Fark.)

Did you catch the way I used the word "home" in the title of each of the two preceding posts, as if the posts were somehow related, when in fact they weren't? Oh, the fun this'll be.

I'm trying to decide between Typepad and Powerblogs as my hosting service. Until I do I'll be posting at both my sites, which thrills me, because it means I can double my mistakes with very little additional effort.