Monday, September 24, 2001 (11:19pm)
I was reading Petrarch this evening and came across a quote from his essay "On His Own Ignorance" which I feel echoes a point I was harping on back on 9/12 - the transcendent banality of anti-American posturing. Petrarch was writing on the élite condescension of religious faith prevalent in 14th century Italy but the idea is the same. Read:
"By all faith in God and men, in the judgment of such people nobody can be a man of letters unless he is also a heretic and a madman besides being impertinent and imprudent.... No wonder my friends declare me not only ignorant but mad, since they doubtless belong to that sort of people who despise piety without regard to the attitude in which it is practiced and take diffidence to be a religious habit. They believe that a man has no great intellect and is hardly learned unless he dares to raise his voice against God and to dispute the Catholic Faith.... The more boldly a man ventures to attack Faith - for he will not be able to seize this fortress by the power of intelligence or by violence - the more these men think him highly gifted and learned. They act just as if the old fables they tell were not inconsistent and shaky and their silly talk empty and void; as if there could be had certain knowledge of ambiguous and unknown matters and not merely vague, loose, and uncertain opinions...."
Human nature changes little it seems. I suppose I'm inclined towards religious skepticism myself, but I try to be more tolerant than bombastic. Would that I could write like that here, though. A National Review Online article today continues the discussion of pathological anti-Americanism by linking it - rather plausibly - with pre-war anti-Semitism.
Yes, I know I promised I wasn't going to write any more on this, but that quote was too good to go unused. I have a few more ideas I've been tempted to put up on here, but, though I did promise that I would start posting more often on here, I think it would be better to hang onto them for a while.
Wednesday, September 26, 2001 (5:45pm)
I've finally got travel arrangements made to go home. I had my grandmother call her travel agent and book me a ticket instead of using Travelocity like I usually do. Gotta each of us do our part to keep the economy afloat, and goodness knows no part is hurting like the airlines and travel companies. I got a really good fare, though at semi-crappy times. The airlines cutting back their schedules has taken its toll. I'm only going to be home for a fast weekend - Homecoming in fact - but it should be wonderful anyway. I've been fairly homesick lately, reading about the patriotic outpouring and so on. I'm not sure if it's getting worse or not but I know that I've felt almost continuously crappy since I got back here: first weird personal trauma, then this. It's taken its toll on me: my complexion is awful, I haven't been able to concentrate on my school work, and getting out of bed each day has been getting progressively harder. So a trip home should be nice.
I bought luggage yesterday. It was not at all what I had intended to do with my lunch break, though I do need luggage (my last bag got ruined by Northwest Airlines coming home from summer French). I was wandering through the Eaton Centre and stopped briefly to look at a display at the luggage store. A Québécois salesgirl - Julie - came over and the next thing I know I'm giggling and blushing and handing over my credit card. That always happens, I'm so easy to take, it's pathetic. It was a good deal, though: it's certainly the nicest piece of luggage I've ever owned and at half price. So it's not all a sad story.
Friday, September 28, 2001 (1:25am)
I've been reading up on the happenings in Aghanistan. Not a single Tomahawk launched, not a single Marine crouched in a ditch in the Hindu Kush, not a single F-15 strafing their crappy second-hand Soviet radar installations, and they're already shitting their pants and coming apart at the seams (though I assume that we have spooks over there helping things along). It's really quite beautiful, and makes the peaceniks look somewhat loopy. Still and all, if we're going to keep our credibility, we are going to have to start blowing stuff up sooner than later. By the weekend, we could probably drop a neutron bomb on Kabul without taking a single civilian casualty by the sound of things. Then we can send a few B-52s over to the Pakistani border and unload a few hundred thousand pounds of fillet mignons, colour televisions, and copies of Simone de Beauvoir. Then on to Baghdad, and everyone will be home by Christmas....
OK, I know it's not going to be remotely as simple as that but one can dream. At any rate, the beauty of watching the Taliban twist in the wind will keep me going for a few weeks. I noticed that the McGill Women of Colour Forum is having some sort of anti-war thing this weekend. This amazes me on two levels: firstly because of the Taliban's monomaniacal misogynism, which one would think they would be happy to bid adieu to, and secondly, and more fundamentally, that there exists such an organization under that name. "Of Colour" seems to be thepreferred nomenclature for the non-European world majority I'm hearing lately. I have no idea if that is a continent-wide trend or if it is just a thing up here. Growing up in the United States, I understood "colored" to be only about a half step up from the N-word in terms of vicious insensitivity or just ignorance (think "Colored Drinking Fountain"), and I still can't bring myself to use it or its prepositional cousin. Of course, up here gays and lesbians seem to have quite gleefully appropriated "queer," which I've mostly heard used by rednecks elsewhere, as their designation, so who can tell. Most confusing; I do wish the P.C. crowd would make up their mind once and for all.
Anyway, I am feeling in a rather better mood. Things have been going well and, best of all, Antipodean Matt reappeared last night on ICQ and we talked for an hour or so. I'd been quite worried he'd gone walkabout or some such thing after two months of radio silence. I shared with him my conspiracy to go downunder this summer and he thought it a mighty fine idea. Stay tuned.
Thursday, October 4, 2001 (6:38pm)
I'm sorry I haven't posted in a week or so. I guess by the old standards, that's not a very long time but I had gotten used to updating regularly on here, so it seems like it's been a while. I actually had typed up a fairly politically incorrect take-off of pacifism at the McGill Women of Colour Forum that I was going to put up, but I decided against it, since it really wasn't as interesting as it could have been. At any rate, I've been fairly busy with school stuff in the last week, so updating never really made it to the top of the list. I could have updated last night, but I ended up going out instead.
Things have been alright here lately. Three day weekend coming up grâce à Canadian Thanksgiving. I know quite a few people who are going home or other places, including one of my roommates. I'm going home next weekend and roommate #3 is going home the weekend after that, so it's going to be three straight weekends down a person here. I'm going home for Warren's Homecoming. I'm not exactly into the event, though I'll be home in time this year to take in the game if I want (I was on a train last year) but it is a pretty convenient excuse to go home since lots of my friends should be around. Seems like the thing to do, and I have to go home sooner or later. Getting airline tickets was a real hassle, as the schedules have been pared back a lot and they keep on changing. I've had three different itineraries now and I wouldn't be surprised to see another change before Friday when I leave, assuming of course that the whole airline doesn't just go out of business, which is always a possibility.
It's going to be weird to be home. I've only heard about the changes in moods and attitudes and abundance of flags from afar, so it all seems sort of abstract. I would imagine that my town will be fairly bellicose, being that nearly every house in town flies the flag year round regardless. Mark Steyn wrote an article for his English audience about the town of Warren, NH near where he lives (which, actually, is here in Montréal most of the time); I expect that my Warren, PA will be somewhat similar.
The last patriotic outburst of this proportion was during the Gulf War, I suppose. I was in the third grade at the time, though it remains an extremely vivid time in my memory. This is of course a much bigger to-do, but it does sort of seem all of a sudden as if the '90s never happened; here we are back poised to take up a fight for survival against a hostile civilization, or lack thereof in the present case. Deeply bizarre. Even the protests back in April seem like another universe away (speaking of which, the Wall Street Journal has two interesting articles on the fate of anti-globalization and left-wing post-colonialism in general; I think they are too optimistic though I hope not).
I've even been listening to lots of '80s music lately. Right now I'm playing - hold on - Men Without Hats' "Pop Goes the World," circa 1987, the year I started school. They don't make music like that anymore. It's pretty weird to be listening to. I'm a child of the '90s through and through (and, in fact, warts and all I rather miss the decade at the moment), but the '80s are for me what the '50s were to my parents: a sort of inescapable shadow cast over my worldview, even if I'm really more the product of another time indeed. I think I've gone into this before on here, but I really am a semi-strange age. I've discussed this with friends and well all think the same thing. We're young enough to be '90s kids to the core but at the same time old enough to remember a lot of things kids a few years younger wouldn't have any connection with. I'm thinking of my cousins Ben and Will here particularly, who are about middle school aged now.
My first memory of events outside my home was the Challenger explosion (now there's a shocker for a geeky toddler). For my first few years of school, we continued preparing for nuclear holocaust by crouching under our desks for five minutes once a month, and were all certainly keenly aware of the Cold War even if we had never known a world without perestroika. When I was in the 2nd grade the Berlin Wall fell and we celebrated most of the day in school (I can still remember my amazement at seeing my first hunk of the wall a couple years later); only by the 4th had the Soviet Union finished its long death rattle. I'm old enough to still be amazed by the Internet and new technology but young enough to not remember a world without personal computers. Thinking about the transitions startles me. When I started school, kids often brought knives and sometimes aspirin with them, my future high school still had a rifle team, and the worst you could expect from a schoolyard fight was a few whacks in the principal's office. Now kids are routinely sent to court for possessing fingernail clippers. Truly a different world.
I guess this really isn't that interesting, but it's a good reminder of how fast contemporary history is moving. Or is it? I'm the same age now as my grandfather was when Hitler invaded Poland. And, as I said above, now we're back very much to a New Cold War in some respects. The material and scientific advances of the last ten years have probably been the most sensational and important of any decade in the last century, but apparently the end of history hasn't quite come yet, and frankly I'm not at all holding my breath. To quote Virginia Postrel, "people who want to build walls never, ever give up."
I'm scared (and not just because of this sort of thing). Until next week.
Sunday, October 7, 2001 (1:38am)
It just occured to me that I only have three days of classes next week because Monday is Thanksgiving and Friday I'm flying back to the U.S. for the weekend to see the family and my friends. That's worth a note here I think.
Tomorrow (or, rather, later today) like eight or so people are coming over to my place and we're going to make the traditional Thanksgiving extravaganza. I called Mom this afternoon and got the scoop on turkey cooking since she's driving to Virginia tomorrow and won't be available for live technical support. My friends bought the bird this afternoon. Even though they are Canadian and so should know better, they mistakenly bought a 9.5 kg turkey instead of a 9.5 lb turkey, so we have like 20 lbs of bird to eat tomorrow. It's fucking enormous. Also, and this is our little secret, there's no way it's going to be ready to roast by noon tomorrow. It's frozen solid: it's like having a pink cinder block in my fridge. So that should be interesting....
Also, as a news flash, apparently the November Reason has started arriving in subscribers' mailboxes. Two letters to the editor about my article are included, as well as a 250 word response from me, so you might like to check that out when it reaches newstands and the web in a few weeks. It's nothing special really, especially since I found out yesterday that my friend Mercedes had a job writing boy crush quizes for a teeny-bopper magazine in the Philippines this summer, which is obviously way cooler. But you might still like to check it out.
Monday, October 8, 2001 (1:50pm)
Proelio commisso, cenavimus.
And glorious it was, too. Amazingly enough, we managed to get the turkey defrosted and into the oven by five yesterday. It was a college feast to end all college feasts, I'll tell you. (And the conversation even, by and large, kept away from politics.) The mess, however, is quite incredible. Shikha and I just did a walk-though, groaning and moaning with anticipation of the clean-a-rama coming shortly. Our house is easily messier than it was after our housewarming party, which had a lot more people and was a more ostensibly rowdy to-do. We did have a pretty good crowd last night; I think we counted 15 this morning. That's a lot of people crammed into one room eating turkey (and more). Typical Esplanade party, too: lots of Super Nintendo. I'm so glad I brought it up.
I don't know how Shikha and I are going to get this place cleaned up today and do schoolwork too. It was quite a late night. We didn't start eating until 11:00 and I think the last guests left around 4:00, though I don't remember very well because both Shikha and I were essentially inert on the couch at the time, overwhelmed by the hour and the triptophan/red wine solution in our veins. I think I finally managed to pull myself off to bed by 7:00 and yet I was up and at it before noon, my roommate even before. We're both gonna fuckin' die this evening. I'm glad I don't have class until 2:30 tomorrow.
The literal high point of the evening was when, around 2:30 I think, Shikha, our friend Jeff, and I decided to walk up the mountain, which is just across the street. We actually did, too, taking the rough and tumble path up to the big rock just above the east lookout off the Camilien-Houde parkway. It was phenomenally beautiful to look out across the city at night. I always forget how big Montréal is. What a wonderful world, events nothwithstanding.
Tuesday, October 9, 2001 (5:59pm)
Two observations today:
1) When I was walking to school today on du Parc, a Montréal firetruck went tearing past on Mont-Royal. There were two American flags up front on either side, sort of like on the presidential limosine. Professional solidarity? I read somewhere that more firemen died in the World Trade Center than U.S. military personnel around the world since the withdrawl from Vietnam. Say what you will about Clintonian budget cuts and soldiers on food stamps, that was a favoured generation to be in the military. Now, I think, everyone will have to remember what armies and navies are kept for. I wonder if this is actually what Nick and Kurt had in mind when they went to Annapolis.
2) The weather has turned cold and I noticed, as I have before, that capes are intriguingly popular in Montréal. I haven't spent a lot of time in winter in other North American metropolises, but I daresay they aren't quite the same fashion statement there. And they certainly aren't in Pennsylvania. What a great city.
I hate Radiohead. The person upstairs is playing OK Computer at a volume excessive for quarter to two in the morning and I'm about ready to gouge my eyes out or hang myself in the courtyard. I'm fucking depressed enough at the moment. Oh well, it'll pass by morning.
Almost the one month anniversary. Another thing to cheer me up.
Friday, October 12, 2001 (10:10am)
I'm sitting here at my gate at Dorval for my flight to Pittsburgh. All of the fearmongering about killer lines and rigorous inspections seems to be a lot of hot air, at least so far as things go here. I only waited in line for about five minutes to check in, clearing customs and immigration took about 45 seconds, including waiting in line (I don't think he read my declaration card because he asked why I had visited Canada even though it indicated I live here), and security was no more involved than usual except that they made me boot up my computer. I'd say I've been here for like ten minutes. My flight doesn't start boarding for nearly an hour and a half, which makes me wonder why I got here so early. But I am in a much better mood than the last time I wrote. I'm going home!
Sunday, October 14, 2001 (1:00am)
I'm writing tonight from my "new" room at Mom's in Warren. She got rid of my bed and some of the other old furniture and replaced them with a futon and small desk. I was not particularly consulted about this, though I've probably only slept two dozen nights in this room in my life, so it doesn't really matter. It certainly looks very nice in here now anyway.
Friday night I ended up going to the game. I met up with my friend Paul around eight o'clock when he got into town and we went over. It was about the middle of the third quarter when we got there, so we didn't have to pay. I saw a pretty big proportion of the people I know in the world within a pretty short space of time. We just wandered around running into people. By the time we had exhausted that, the game was over. Just as well, it was raining by then and I didn't much feel like sitting on cold, wet metal bleachers. As a matter of fact we won, 41-36 if I recall. Interestingly enough, former NFL coaching great and perpetual loud mouth TV commentator extraordinaire Mike Ditka was evidently in attendance (he sat about five people away from Paul's dad). His nephew is a starter and, for the first time in my memory of giving a crap about Warren football, we're actually pretty good this year. We have a lot of good - and young - talent.
It was sort of unusual to be there. I didn't go last year, as I mentioned before, so it was the first time I had seen many of the people there since graduation. Not the people who are my friends or whom I knew fairly well, of course, but just the other people, mostly agreeable, whom I only happened to go to school with. It was amazing to see how they'd changed. A lot of people have put on weight. I've actually lost about 10 lbs. since starting to cook for myself this year.
I also felt, and Paul agreed with me on this, rather old. Kids still in high school, though I have a few friends there yet, are mostly noticeably younger than me now. The cheerleaders in particular looked incredibly baby-faced to me - definitely not Mena Suvari. (Either that or I'm just turning into a pervert.) I think it is probably because at school I'm mostly around people older than me or at least my same age; in that stadium, I was definitely well within the older 50%. How unsettling.
I came across two more hints - in addition to playing with my young cousin, who can walk now - at advancing age today. For one, I was reading the first issue of my new subscription to Nintendo Power and noticed that the cover story was on the new GBA version of Mario Kart. It was issue number 148. I remembered, in the depths of my mind, having subscribed to Nintendo Power back in the early '90s when the originial SNES version was reviewed, before many of the magazine's current subscribers were born or at least playing video games. In fact, in all liklihood I have the issue still, in my (other) room. I think it was about number 85 or so.
Secondly, watching CNN this afternoon (for the first time since before the current crisis began), it all of a sudden dawned on me that, by amassing our forces in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, we are carrying out a real, honest to goodness military build-up on former Soviet soil. Stalin must be rolling in his grave, the son of a bitch. This interesting added significance, which harkens back to my 10/4 entry, is in its way utterly amazing and something that I can't say I had ever expected to see, least of all by the time I was in college. I'm not sure why that makes me feel old, but it does. Talking to Paul about such things last night, we noted that never at any other time in our lives would we probably be as free as this; why aren't we making more of it? A good question, and one I have no answer to.
It was nice being at my grandmother's today. Relaxing as always. In this interlude of marvelous weather, there was a massive ladybug hatch and it reminded me a bit of the invasion of the locusts from Little House on the Prairie. They are benign little things, of course, but having thousands of them flying about is still disconcerting. I'm going back down tomorrow in the afternoon, before I have to fly back to Montréal in the evening. How fast these weekend trips fly. I spent half the day today laying on the couch watching CNN but, as much as this was probably wasted time, it was nice. Being back is good. I got over my bout of homesickness about two weeks back, so it's not so significant to be here, but still nice.
A word, though, about CNN, before I go. They had some coverage today of anti-war marches and protests around the world. Most of the footage was from Berlin and I at once recognized a large part of the crowd as being members of the International Socialists, having spent a lot of time around Chris and Mere and their comrades. I've seen IS members protesting on CNN before, like last summer at the biotech conference in San Diego. It seems to me that it is sloppy journalism that they didn't identify the group(s) they were showing. It couldn't be that hard for them to track them down (they can do every smalltime wannabe movie "star" at a Hollywood weiner roast or congressman D-Bumfuckegypt, after all), and it would put things into some context for the folks back in Iowa if they said, "And those thousand people there shouting 'down with U.S. racist imperialism' are communists, so you needn't pay them much mind, being washed out has-beens bearing the standards of a throughly bankrupt and irrelevent ideology with virtually no credibility anywhere. So fear not, Americans, most of the world is with you in this terrible hour." They wouldn't actually have to say all that, of course, but I think the idea would carry all the same.
Monday, October 15, 2001 (3:18pm)
Argh...they lost my luggage last night! I don't know how they managed that, I had a two hour connection in Pittsburgh. That was not what I was in the mood to discover at 11:30 last night at the airport. It took me quite a while to get all the forms filled out for having it cleared through customs without me and delivered to my apartment. I guess they called this afternoon while I was at class and are going to deliver it sometime later today. Anyway, to top that off, I got an amateurish cab driver who had to ask me directions and ended up taking me on an engagingly indirect scenic tour of the Muslim neighborhoods of north Montréal. Amazingly, the fare ended up being about normal, which was good since by that time the last thing I was in the mood for was arguing with a gino Lebanese cabbie (is that possible?) about his navigational skills.
Anyway I got back kinda late and didn't study as much for my Latin midterm today as I ought to have, though I think I did really well all the same. Other than that, today was pretty normal, except at lunch time when some crazy old Québécois woman with a beard tried hard to sell me paper flowers on Ste-Catherine. I muttered "Uh...desolé" and sort of started making a retreat. She screached "Vous n'êtes pas desolé!" and then started cackling maniacally. I think she was a witch. I hope I'm not (any more) cursed now.
I just got my bag, which they had sent to Chicago. I'm rather impressed that I got it so quickly but still and all....I mean, come on, guys!
Friday, October 19, 2001 (6:25pm)
Friday at last. What a long week. Two midterms and an essay out of the way. I got my Latin midterm back today. I didn't do as well as I had thought though still pretty respectably, or so the prof said anyway. My translation only had one big mistake but the grammar response section betrayed some empty areas in my knowledge. The problem is that I've been doing Latin for so long, way longer than most of the people in the class who took Beginner's last year, that so much of the stuff I just know and can't explain why really. And then there are some other places where I'm set in my ways and shouldn't be. Oh well, it's all good.
I don't have too much else to report this week besides that. It's been mostly work, work, work. Hopefully I'll manage to get out of the house tonight, maybe drink a bit. I did write a letter to the McGill Daily skewering this article, and though you should be able read it online it isn't up yet. Midterms.... Also, Nintendo has put some captures from Super Mario Advance 2 up on their site. It's the rehash of Super Mario World. It looks really, really good, i.e., exactly like it did on the SNES. I'm glad they decided to do it next, before Super Mario Bros. 3, since it is one of my very faves, though since I never played 3 all that much, it'll be cool to get down with when it does come out. Cool.
Later. Evan
Sunday, October 21, 2001 (8:19pm)
I've been reading Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century all this weekend. It's really quite an amazing piece of work: after decades of producing doorstop after doorstop about the absolute horrors of Soviet Russia, he's letting out what he really things about it all, and is it ever brutal. His assessment of the Marxist/revolutionary mentality and personality is spot on. What is really amazing for me, though, is his description of just how awful the U.S.S.R. was right up to very recent times. The last decade has laid bare that poor country, warts and, well, mostly more warts, but it's still amazing to comprehend. When I was a little kid I sort of imagined the Soviet Union as being a colder, bleaker, less free version of the United States: powerful, accomplished, maybe even reasonably rich, but without the delightful trifles and comforts of the decade of my early childhood. It was, after all, our superpower rival that had beaten us to space and occupied so much more real estate. So reading on page 103 that the whole empire had fewer miles of paved road than neighboring Ohio, or, on page 106 that, in 1990, 80% of Moscow hospitals had no hot running water and 17% had no running water at all, comes as something of a shock.
My roommate's newest grand scheme is that she may go on exchange to Australia next year. I had thought about going on exchange to Australia this year, but with my three year program it didn't seem practical (like so many things; frankly, being given sophomore standing wasn't really much of a present). At any rate, I'm terribly jealous of course, though I'm still working away at getting a summer trip down there planned out. So I'll beat her to it anyway, whether she actually decides to do it or not. She's also considering going to Japan, which also makes me rather jealous, though not as much. I used to have quite a hankering to see Japan (around the ninth grade I think), after seeing Shogun, but it's subsided somewhat.
It should be an easy-ish week this week, though once November starts it's going to be pure hell. I have six or seven more research papers to write this term. Anyway, I want to get ahead in my reading so I can focus on the papers. It's also why I'm reading for pleasure this weekend; I may not get another chance for a while. So I think I'll get back to it now.
Thursday, October 25, 2001 (12:45am)
I bought the new Calvin and Hobbes book yesterday. It is the catalogue from an exhibit of some of Bill Waterson's orginal black and whites for the Sunday comics at Ohio State. They are really amazing to see; the funnies elevated to art. But then Watterson was an amazingly talented artist, and by the standards of his profession extremely principled. I'm not one to condemn consumerism but his hard-contested decision not to merchandise his work is something to be admired, and will probably ensure that he gets the sort of respect commensurate with his creative ability he deserves over the long term. Of course, here he is already hanging in a museum. I'd really like to go see the exhibit before it closes on January 16, but I'm not sure how practical that is likely to be.
It seems hard to believe that nearly six years have passed since Watterson retired. Calvin and Hobbes ran from 1985-1995, pretty much exactly coterminous with my own childhood, and it's safe to say that the comic influenced me more growing up than anything else, even when I didn't understand them (which was often). I haven't really looked at the strips in a few years, as indeed Watterson says he hadn't either, and they are fascinating to see again from a more mature light. In his introduction to the book, he remarks that they don't look as fresh as they used to. His principal insight - that comics need not depict any particular objective reality - is now widely imitated, by Foxtrot most notably but in other strips - and also other media - as well. So even if he did it better than any imitators, it's easy to forget how revolutionary it seemed in the beginning. Even at age five, I could tell this was a different animal altogether from Garfield. The comics pages now, since both Watterson and Gary Larson checked out within a year of one another, are basically total wasteland now, unhappily. I'd love to see something new and imaginative, but there just isn't anything available now. Dilbert is clever and subversive from time to time, but has no claim to artistic merit. Garfield, which I actually did love when I was younger, hasn't made me laugh in most of five years, though looking back on the old collections, it did used to be hilarious, if not exactly deep. Such is life.
Yet another source for future nostalgia has just come into being. I read here that Polaroid has filed for bankruptcy. A victim of digital cameras apparently. Rather a pity, I suppose, though surely the luddite pornographer market is contracting. I have a Polaroid camera and I hope that I will still be able to get film for it (some Japanese company will surely license the technology, right?), as there are some cool (non-smutty) uses for them. But I somehow doubt it. Oh well, another part of my world ripped away from me. That's how it goes.
I've got the apartment to myself right now. I'm listening to the Crimson Tide soundtrack pretty loudly. Some of my musical tastes run, admittedly, toward the fascistic (or the inverse extreme, in the case of the Red Army Choir) and it promotes household harmony to save that sort of thing for when I'm alone. As for the neighbors, fuck 'em.
I fed a seagull a couple of pieces of pepperoni at lunch today. I was eating lunch on the Redpath Library terrace today, enjoying the nice weather, when one of the noisy bastards waddled over and started staring at me. I don't know what he thought he was doing so far uptown, though maybe he was spying on the pigeon motherland. I felt a bit guilty encouraging him but I was in a magnanimous mood. I guess I'm an animal lover, even mangy stupid animals. I think I'm a fairly rational one, though; I'm all for eating tasty ones, shooting surplus ones,and pumping appropriate ones full of experimental drugs. In the distorted university world I inhabit, though, where personal disposition must be raised to the level of high principle, to be really authentically an animal lover (like an authentic punk or anarchist or any other such self-defining clique), you usually have to be radical and vegan and all that. My roommate is vegan, which is totally cool as long as she doesn't get into the politics of it with me. That's the infuriating thing about the Trotskysite mentality of extreme leftish people, that everything is politics: politics is about power and power means winners and losers. Plurality and tolerance, then, just become words. Thinking personally that doggies and kitties (and birdies for that matter) are cute, which is how most people start down the path (especially urban people who don't know much about nature's machinations), is fine until politics get mixed in (though some people start at the politics because they believe rich people eating meat means more starving poor people). Then it cannot be sufficient, since it's just a personal opinion; you are right, goddamn it, and people are cruel baby-eating capitalist bastards if they like steak. The totality of that is not usually recognized, even by these people themselves. It's really interesting, then, to see adherents of various not necessarily compatible totalist ideologies rubbing up against each other. One of my Leninist friends loves steaks and hates environmentalists but doesn't see the connection. Me, I just mind my own business and pack a lunch when I go to any university events that serve only unidentifiable vegan slop in their misguided attempt to be as inclusive as possible by serving food nearly incapable of sustaining human life.
The ultimate extreme of this ridiculousness is the idea of "speciesism," which I've actually heard increasingly bandied about seriously around here, these things taking hold in the undergraduate mind rather more easily than in other folk. The complete and utter fatuousness of the idea seems so instantly self-evident to me that all I really have left to wonder is whether Peter Singer just devised it as a wicked intellectual hoax - and spends his days in his office at Princeton picking his nose, checking his stock portfolio, and thinking up inflammatory things to say to the press - or whether, predictably, he actually believes it. I would love to think the former, but I'm afraid I probably know the answer better than that.
Anyway, a lot of words to explain why I was annoyed when some radical looking people gave me a dirty look for feeding the gull.
One last point: here is an interesting news item out of Italy. Can anyone tell me why so many of these worldwide Islamic nutjobs live in or pass through Montréal? For gracious sakes, go away, my mother already has enough trouble sleeping nights.
Sunday, October 28, 2001 (9:19pm)
Daylight savings time today. Damn, it gets dark early all of a sudden.
This next month is going to suck hard. I have a six page document analysis due this Tuesday, a research essay on Thursday, a midterm on the 12th, a reading test on the 14th, another research essay on the 15th, a term paper on the 19th, another term paper on the 21st, and, to finish it all off, both another term paper and another research essay both due on the 29th. The 30th will, quite needless to say, I am going to go get very drunk. My first final exam is December 10th. Here's to Christmas....
Friday, November 2, 2001 (12:38am)
Feeling a bit better now. This week's two papers are finished and I get a bit of a breather now. But only a bit. Tonight I went down to Chinatown with my friend Ben. It was a nice walk, even if we did run into a couple weirdos in that weird dead area south of René-Lévesque near the federal building. The weather today was super mild and I understand tomorrow is supposed to be more of the same. Here's to that! I'm sure it's going to be bonecrackingly cold soon enough.
We ended up at a cool second floor café place. It was really neat and filled with bright, fresh faced young Chinese people. I had some bubble tea and tasty fried dumplings. Definitely a worthwhile place to keep in mind, even if it's a bit far away. Might be a decent place to study come exam period, too.
I don't have too much else to report. I haven't figured out if I'm going home at Thanksgiving yet or not. I suppose I should decide and get airline tickets soon or I might not have a choice at all. I'd like to go home since Thanksgiving is also my dad's birthday and I think Nick will probably be there, but who knows how practical it will actually be. Lots of work this month. Time will tell.
Oh yeah, the November Reason is posted online now, so you can read the letters about my article. I guess the new issue coming out next week for subscribers has a new, evidently very hip design. Should be cool, their current design is far too stodgy for its content. I guess the same guy who did the new Economist worked on it, and he did a very good job there. Anyway, that should be cool even if I won't see it until I go home. Hmm...another reason to get cracking on airline tickets I guess.
Anyway, later.
Sunday, November 4, 2001 (3:29am)
Just finished watching Pulp Fiction. Heart warming as always. That's about it for my Saturday night, but that's alright I guess. Last night was also a peculiarly unlively sort of Friday night for after a crazy work week. Both my roommates' mothers are here this weekend, so there meant massive advance cleaning. Afterwards three of us went for a walk east on Mont-Royal. We got as far as the 1000s east, which is further than I'd ever been. It was terra incognita. We ate ice cream bars and then got quite rare belly buster hamburgers with the works at some greasy spoon place. It was a really nice night to walk around eating raw meat, though there weren't that many people out and about surprisingly, at least in this part of town. Most action I saw all night was a couple cops picking up a homeless woman with a bag full of syringes. Pretty sad. After walking back home, we christened the French Monopoly board. I lost. For having become a free lance apologist for corporate America, I'm still personally a lousy capitalist.
Today was pretty uneventful too, for that matter. Highpoint was going out to eat lunch with my roommate and her mother. We had (a ton of) mussels
Tomorrow - or today, however you choose to look at it - is the municipal election here in Montréal. At the end of the year they are merging all the municipalities on the island into one Super Montréal World, so they need to elect a new mayor and council. One of my friends' landlord is running as an independent in our ward, on a platform of "I'm more Greek than the other two candidates." The incumbant here is one of the most powerful politicians in the city, and Greek too, so he'll certainly lose, but I suppose it is nice he's running. No doubt he'll get a few votes.
Nothing much else to report. I did some work on the Montréal directory page. Pretty much all I have on there now are bars but I'll add some other categories soon, at least so you don't think that I ain't nothing but a boozehound.
Anyway, it's late and I'm ready for some ZZZs. Later.
P.S. I still have five more papers to write this month! How is this possible?
Thursday, November 8, 2001 (7:38pm)
Headline in Wall Street Journal today: "The problem isn't the Republican agenda. It's the Republicans." Well, duh.
I got airline tickets on Monday. So I'm going home. That'll be nice. Getting to then will be the bitch though: oh, the work! My paper that was due this week got postponed to the 20th, so that makes things a little bit better, though I'm now in the peculiar situation of having three papers due on consecutive days. That's alright, though, I'm going to do one of them this weekend and the other two will...somehow fall into place?
Weird visuals today. On the way to class in the cold rain this afternoon I crossed Hutchison at Milton where they have been paving all week. A steamroller had just gone by and there was massive steam pouring out of the fresh warm asphalt, like someone had just melted a witch. It was awesome to walk through. Then around 5:00 I took the métro back since I was further downtown than campus. I walked through the Underground which was full of people scurrying neatly through the narrow passageways to their busses, trains, and subways home. Very much the bustling metropolis at work that I usually forget coexists with my corner of the city. I felt like I was in a scene from Baraka.
So apparently we and the Russians are going to scrap two thirds of our nuclear arsenals if an agreement can be worked out. That's something like 7,000 warheads, though of course we'll both have more than enough left to snuff out all life in the solar system. Hurrah, I suppose, though some seem to think we're even more in danger of being nuked than before, or at least any time since I was much younger. That's a creepy thought, though I suppose no more so than if we were to be smallpoxed. My roommate Shikha is the only person my age I know who won't croak if we are, since she grew up in India and got vaccinated. And don't think our landlord wouldn't make her keep our lease if Annika and I croaked from the plague. (He's a cockroach so he'd live, too.)
Anyway, I'm getting to morbid and I have work to be done. Later.
Sunday, November 11, 2001 (6:25pm)
Well I'm standing on the brink of the week and a half from hell, followed by turkey, followed by another week of hell. That's cool, though. At least I won't be bored. I worked for about 13 hours more or less straight yesterday, pretty much burnt myself out. I've done less today, but I'm not real worried. I'm doing what I can.
I spent a bit of time this afternoon at the library. What I need is all out, of course, though a few of them are currently in over at the Concordia library, and hopefully they won't go anywhere before 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. Grr.... Out of idle curiosity I did a database search of Reader's Guide and found the entry for my Reason article. Sort of cool, I guess. Supposedly they index in Historical Abstracts/America: History and Life as well, but I couldn't find it there. I guess it wasn't really a history essay so that's probably why, though they could just not have indexed it yet. It's the best database for what I do but sometimes it's a bit frustrating.
Speaking of Reason, I bought their redesigned December issue this afternoon. I have a copy sitting on my kitchen counter at home now, but I didn't want to wait until Thanksgiving to see it. It looks pretty cool, though I haven't had a chance to read through it yet. Really interesting looking articles.
A few updates: New mayor in Montréal. Merger Maniac Pierre Bourque is out and Merger Me-Too Gérald Tremblay is in. City government here is pretty disfuctional, so in the long run I don't think it makes much difference but I'm all for turning over the scoundrels from time to time. Coincidentally, Warren also had a mayoral election last Tuesday, though you may not have heard about it what with the election in New York. Only so much the AP can handle, you know. Anyway, I sent in my ballot, which probably went immediatly into the shredder since I voted for the Democrat, but there you go. The Republican, somewhat needless to say, won, though only by around 300 votes. Of course, I suspect that only 400 people actually turned out to vote, since there was absolutely nothing else important up this year. There you have it, democracy in the sticks.
There was also a general election in Australia today...err yesterday. Well...it was yesterday there but today here, if that makes any sense at all. What I mean is, the election happened on November 11, which was yesterday in Australia. The sitting government was re-elected, even with an enhanced majority. To the limited extent that I know anything at all about Australian politics - which are damn near impenetrable to anybody but Australians, especially from 10,000 miles away - there didn't seem to be much in the way of a choice between the two main parties. Unfortunately, in Australia you have to vote for someone, though presumably you could write in "Paul Keating" or "Paul Hogan" into perpetuity if you wanted to, which is probably what I would do were I a member of the antipodean electorate, of which obviously it's just as well I'm not. (Though I'm fairly certain that, although not a Canadian citizen, I could easily have taken part in the election here last week without raising any eyebrows to speak of.)
The New York Times apparently ran a snarky article about the election today, which needless to say is causing the feathers to fly a bit down under. They are upset about the consensus on turning the boat people around and not letting them into the country. Although theoretically I'm all for open immigration, I guess I have a bit of sympathy for their position to the extent that Australia is a small country without endless resources to spend on starving, beleagured Afghans and the like (I guess it's mostly been Afghans since well before the war started). Australian taxpayers have to subsidize refugees far more than your run of the mill Vietnamese or Indonesian immigrant who probably grows the economy anyway, and that's hardly fair for them. On the other hand, I wouldn't like telling anybody they had to stay in Afghanistan (or most anywhere else in a 5,000 nautical mile radius of Australia for that matter), and a lot of the opposition to the boat people comes from the "Two Wongs Don't Make a Wright" corner of the Australian political spectrum, the erstwhile Pauline Hanson constituency. So in short, I think it's unfair to call all the Australians hopeless bogans and yobs (thanks, Matt) but I don't know what I'd do about the situation, which is why I'm glad I'm not their Prime Minister.
One last update: a few weeks back I posted a link to an alarming story about a Soviet biological weapons dump lying open in the Aral Sea. You'll all be gratified to know that we're helping to clean it up. On the other hand, as I mentioned last time, the Russians are getting rid of 3,500 nuclear warheads and, well, they always need more hard currency. So watch your backs.
Monday, November 12, 2001 (10:16am)
So apparently an American Airlines A300 crashed in Queens on approach to Kennedy this morning. No suggestion of anything suspicious beyond the fact there is another smouldering crater in New York now.
I knew right away this morning something was up when I couldn't load any of the web news sites, which is how I realized trouble was brewing two months and a day ago. The only site I could get to load then and today was the BBC, which must have a killer server. Unfortunately, their coverage is generally a bit behind the curve (when I first read them on 9/11 they were still reporting private planes; imagine my surprise when I flipped on the TV). The only coverage I can get at the moment is on Radio-Canada TV and they don't know much. Just as on the morning of 9/11, the CBC (English) is still playing cartoons. Their news director needs to find other work.
I'm sort of numb to this right now, which may show how desensitized I am from 9/11 since before that plane crashes generally got me quite worked up. Tell me, though, why is that nearly every major plane crash in the last five years has been a flight departing or heading to JFK? I'll be damned if I ever set foot near that airport now, I'll tell you.
Anyway, apparently New York is basically shut down now and the Dow is plummeting. I guess we'll see what we'll see, but I have to run. Last minute studying to do for a midterm at 12:30.
Tuesday, November 13, 2001 (12:45pm)
I just noticed that I dated yesterday's entry September 12 instead of November 12 on accident. How Freudian. I did that last week with the Australian election entry, too. Both are changed now, though.
Yesterday really wasn't the mini little 9/11 the media wanted to make it out to be, even if it did certainly bring back a lot of the same feelings for most everybody, though they passed pretty quickly. My entry yesterday was written hastily when the facts were still young. Apparently the crashed flight went down on take off, not landing. There's still no evidence that would really firmly link the event to terrorism and there seems to be a consensus, and for what it's worth I agree, that it was a mechanical problem. However, there are some troubling aspects to the case.
Initially it appeared as if an engine had fallen off the wing, possibly as a result of fire, possibly as its cause, or possibly there was no fire at all to begin with. The engine was found some blocks away and looked to me about like what you'd expect a jet engine which had just plunged hundreds of feet onto concrete to look like. Anyone who is making theories based on the TV footage is blowing smoke; only an expert looking at it is going to be able to tell, and probably only after a lot of metallurgical testing and so on. Anyway, that made it seem clear to me, and to most others, that terrorist activity was probably unlikely, unless in the case of sabotage. (I suspect, however, or at least hope, that all the Middle Eastern looking airline mechanics, indeed all the airline mechanics, have been pretty well checked out in the last two months.) However, by late afternoon it turned out that the debris field was rather larger than intially thought when a fair bit of the empennage of the plane was pulled out of Jamaica Bay.
The connection of this to the, presumably subsequent, detachment of the engine seems highly mysterious and calls into question again whether or not it really was terrorism. The voice recorder tapes out today indicate nothing suspicious (i.e., no other voices) but highjacking wouldn't be likely anyway; more likely a bomb or missile. At any rate, why would a terrorist want to crash a jet in Queens? To quote Bruno Kirby from The Freshman, "Don't get me wrong, there are marvellous things in Queens," but after taking out the World Trade Center, it seems like small potatos. I'm still inclined to believe this is a mechanical thing, though it's going to be a real puzzler. More ominously (I fly next week), I fear that with the financial pressures in the last couple months and overwhelming focus on security, some of the other areas of airline operation are probably not getting the same attention as before (certainly passenger service). I can only hope safety isn't one of them.
The other big event of the day is that our purported allies, the Northern Alliance, have evidently entered Kabul with far more ease than predicted. So now everyone is trying to get their plans and policies up to speed with this unexpected new contingency. The Pakistanis are upset and I don't think we're real thrilled either, but at least the Taliban are getting their butts wupped. The worriers are thinking they abandoned their capital to organize some sort of ambush. Indeed, as Glenn Reynolds over at InstaPundit pointed out this morning, there is a history of feigned retreats in these parts and with these sorts of people, though often, such as at the Battle of Tours, it was more a matter of making the best of a legitimate defeat. In that case, however, Charles Martel knew better than to follow the ostensibly defeated host to try to wipe it out and so he won. In our case, however, being that we have F-15s and Charles Martel didn't, we ought to follow and annihilate the sons of bitches down to the last man. I know, it didn't play well when we tried that in Iraq with the Republican Guards, but I think the American public will be a little less sentimental this time around, especially after yesterday's scare.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on these matters, as if they matter. I'm on the fourth floor of the McLennan Library - aka, Death Star - right now. I've got an hour and a half before my Renaissance Italy class and don't really have much else to do. There's not really enough time to work on my papers and I'm planning on coming back afterwards to work for a few hours anyway. So I'm writing here. Yesterday I went to the Concordia library since all the books I was looking for on my one topic were out here. It's a pretty nice library, much more comfortable and modern feeling than ours, though not as big or complete. Seating is much more comfortable, though less abundant. There also aren't nearly so many computers. It's only on two big floors as opposed to McLennan's smaller six, so there isn't as much running up and down stairs, which is nice. Also, much better light and far better air quality/temperature. Not a bad place to pass three hours.
Unfortunately, while I was there doing that, my roommate Annika was locked out of our apartment and camped at our nearest friend's place, which had no heat. So she spent like five hours there with her parka on. Meanwhile, the dog hadn't been walked all day and was going ape shit inside, and there were several frantic messsages from roommate no. 3, who had run through earlier and was worried about the dog and whether the refridgerator was broken and our food spoiling. Never a dull moment, I'll tell you.
Well, I think I'll go scan the news on the research terminals and see what's new with the situation. Later.
Another highlight from InstaPundit today: apparently my friends the International Socialists gangfucked an anti-war conference at Berkeley this weekend. Not that it matters much since, as he points out, by the time these all guys get their heads out of their asses enough to do anything it'll all be over.
Apparently, from what Chris and Mere have told me, the U.S. International Socialists are no longer a part of the same "tendency" as the rest of the world's International Socialists, including theirs, by which I guess they mean they like to molest 12 year old boys now or something. Beats me. I guess they're hard folks to get along with.
Friday, November 16, 2001 (12:47pm)
This time next week I'll be happily gorged on turkey.
I found a thing online today from Forbes, their predictions for airline liquidations in the aftermath of September 11. They give US Airways an 80% likelihood. Hopefully this won't happen before I complete my trip next week. But seriously, US Airways is the largest employer in western Pennsylvania and this is really something to be concerned about for the local economy, in terms of our accessibility by air travel as well. At 0.05%, Southwest is sitting pretty, though. My Northwest investment, though I've already lost a ton of money, seems to be secure, though. With American and Continental, they are given 4 in 5 of making it. (One wonders with the crash on Monday whether AA's figure might not need a second look or not. Probably not, I'd guess.) Still, as Mark Steyn points out in this excellent article today, if the airlines are having a hard time filling planes at Thanksgiving, they basically are all in a world of trouble.
The current evidence on the American Airlines crash Monday is pointing to wake turbulence from a flight to Tokyo seven miles up ahead. That's quite a long ways away (I think the minimum separation behind a 747 is four miles), so there must have been something else with the aircraft to make it react so violently. Apparently the vortices hit the vertical stabilizer and deflected the rudder, shaking the aircraft twice. Then, somehow or another, the fin broke off and went into the Sound, while the engine detached and landed at the quickie mart. As I predicted, it's looking a lot less like terrorism and more like catastrophic mechanical faillure of a deeply mysterious nature. Some are still muttering about sabotage, and I guess that's a possibility, but a remote one; I toured a maintenance facility for a major airline this summer, and they have a lot of levels of supervision and inspection, so a lot of people would have to be in on it to pull it off. So the investigation continues.
Interesting debate on 'whine' vs. 'whinge' over at Virginia Postrel's site the last few days. I'm probably one of the few Americans who knew all about this after years of corresponding with Aussie Matt, who explained it to me, though what with Harry Potter, it may enter the American vernacular now too. I contributed my two cents worth, though she didn't post them (probably because I have no evidence and it was late at night when I wrote so I was probably incoherent). The Oxford English dictionary shows that they come from two separate roots, the root of 'whine' originally meaning 'to make an annoying noise' and that of 'whinge' meaning 'to complain.' I think that 'whine' in the sense of 'to complain,' as is used more by Americans than the Brits or Aussies, is a cross-formation from 'whinge,' playing off a sense of onomatopoeia. This is supported by the fact that the first use of 'whinge' cited in the OED is from 1150; 'whine' shows up meaning 'to make a shrill noise' in 1275; but it wasn't until 1530 that it appears with the older meaning of 'whinge.' Interestingly, the first usage comes from William Tyndale, whom I'd writing a paper about for my Tudor England class this week. Of course, I could be wrong about this but I don't think so. Anyway, you read it here first.
Sunday, November 18, 2001 (12:26am)
Wow am I tired. I spent eight hours at the library doing research today and am going back for another day tomorrow. People tried to get me to go out tonight but I just didn't have it in me and, at any rate, I don't want to be out late tonight. In fact, as soon as I'm done with this I'm jumping straight into the sack.
I did take a break in working today and had a decadent lunch at Eaton Centre. I had sushi and a massive crèpe with bananas and maple syrup. Weird combo, I know, but tasty. It was really busy in the mall today. I'm in there virtually everyday for lunch but it's usually just businessmen on their noon breaks. Today there were tons of families and teenagers and whatnot. Lots of shopping and staff in elf outfits and so forth. Christmas shopping season is here, I guess. Of course in the U.S., it doesn't start until the Friday after Thanksgiving, but they don't have the convenient holiday in Canada, so the decorations tend to go up a lot earlier here. Some places have had their stuff up for two weeks already.
Afterwards I walked to my favourite computer store's new downtown location (no more trips to Decarie!) to sneek a peek at the new Apple iPod and find out if they could install my extra memory chip in this computer for me (I bought it this summer and discovered that to install it would be a much more major undertaking than I had thought). They said yes, so I think I'll bring it with me on Monday and drop it off at lunchtime. It was cold today but there were lots of people out on Ste-Catherine. There was an old white busker dude dressed up in an old school Batman outfit and jiving to some funky rhythms from a ghetto blaster in front of the Anglican cathedral. So weird. That's the same place where I got accosted by the witch a few weeks back. I don't know what it is with that spot but it sure draws in some winners.
Anyway, off to bed. More fun tomorrow.
Another full day of library fun today. I started to go sort of cross-eyed around 3:00 and left to grab some pizza and browse around Indigo for a while. Bought a P.J. O'Rourke book. Then back to work. Some day.
I noticed that there was a big pile of various Osama biographies in both English and French at the checkout, all somewhat ambitiously priced at between $15 and $35. Being that the bastard probably isn't going to survive the week, it seems like they should be priced more to move than that, lest too many be left to be shoveled into the black hole of passé trade paperbacks. Even more appalling was an equally large pile of sensationalistic Taliban books. While Osama may have a few of his fifteen minutes left, the Taliban is already basically history. Oh well, for some reason no one seems to be calling me up on the phone asking me to be in charge. Funny, that.
Oh well, their loss.
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