speaking of Nick (my friend, not my cat)

You should check out his jazz page at http://nicholas_bruner.tripod.com/the_a_train/ I'm sure he'd welcome both more visitors and more feedback.

UKL on fantasy

thanks to brithistorian for the tipoff to this excellent speech by Ursula K. Le Guin on the nature of fantasy writing, especially for children and young adults. One of the best paragraphs reads:

Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they're on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence—as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.

translation difficulties

from the BBC

The world's most difficult word to translate has been identified as "ilunga" from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.
It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".

It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate.


In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for "a chronically unlucky person".

Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.

another "Jim will put something here" error

I'm applying for a distance learning graduate program, so I click on a link that's supposed to lead to the enrollment form.

The page I get has a scrolling banner that says "The page you requested is currently unavailable. Please try after Sometime."

Uh, oops. This does not fill me with confidence.

in over his head

Thanks to geekchick for pointing out this transcript of a recent The Daily Show exchange between host Jon Stewart and guest Stephen Hayes, of the conservative The Weekly Standard.

Mr Hayes seems unable to effectively justify why Douglas Feith and his staff, not trained intelligence officers, could be trusted to produce a more coherent and trustworthy analysis of (selectively chosen) source material than trained and experienced intelligence analysts. Nor does he seem conscious of the logical trap that he argues himself into (that limited indicators are adequate for declaring war in the absence of a casus belli, but equally limited indicators didn't even tell us someone was planning to attack us on 9/11). He falls flat on his face when he reveals he did not know Iran used chemical weapons in their war with Iraq. He admits that the Bush administration is not credible. He insists that the UN believed before the late war that Iraq had WMD stockpiles (in fact, Hans Blix, in a BBC interview before the war said "...I'm not assuming at all that the Iraqis have retained weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, it would evidently be naïve of me to conclude that they don't. In that case, the inspection would not be needed. So inspection on site is important."). And he slips into admitting that Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran and Sudan (as well as, let's face it, Syria and our close friend and ally Pakistan) finance and support terrorists, which he argues is a key criterion for unilateral US attacks.

This guy is not ready to be out on his own in the hostile atmosphere of interview programs where he has to think on his feet. The darn things keep ending up in his mouth.

good news, bad news

US troops may now be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court (mind you, that's the good news)

but, if they give up now, al Qaida in Saudi Arabia will receive an amnesty

Saudi Arabia has announced an amnesty for terror suspects who turn themselves in within a month.

A statement read out on state TV on behalf of King Fahd said the amnesty would cover anyone who had "committed a crime in the name of religion".

...

Correspondents say King Fahd's amnesty offer appears to amount to a pardon for those who do not have blood on their hands.

It was read out by the de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah.

good summary of the Bush II first term

rivka, in an ongoing debate in her blog with a twit at GWU Medical Center, wrote this:

If you're not going to vote against Bush because he panders to his wealthy supporters at the expense of the middle class and poor; because of his utterly ineffectual response to the threat of international terrorism, both before and after 9/11; because he led us into an unnecessary, bloody war and then butchered its execution; because he surrounds himself with arrogant, corrupt and incompetent advisors; because when his theories come into conflict with facts, he throws out the facts; because his tax cuts place a crushing burden of debt on future generations without even providing temporary relief to the majority of Americans; because he assists those who would make the United States a theocracy; because he has squandered our international alliances; because he tells bold-faced lies; because no civil liberty appears to be safe from him save the right to own firearms; because he has said that his ideal Supreme Court Justices are Scalia and Thomas, and there are likely to be vacancies on the Court next term - if any or all of these reasons don't lead you to oppose Bush, are you really going to be swayed by concerns about his childhood survivor's guilt? If you're unmoved by the thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed, the hundreds of dead American soldiers, will it really make a difference to hear that as a boy, Bush shot frogs with a B.B. gun?

Brava!

read http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/ It's good writing.