Snow Day
O, the reams. The reams and reams and reams. If it would only snow, I could go out and play, and not sit around reading through piles of periodicals. Here's the Wilson Quarterly - the Autumn issue! Christopher Hitchens, who vies only with fellow-Brit Andrew Sullivan as the Mr MixItUp, scolds us (he is always scolding) for disapproving of political divisiveness and wishing that campaigns would make nice. He's right to do so, but it would have been better if he had followed through and identified the longing for political politeness as a precursor of fascism.... Terry Eagleton, in Harper's - the current issue this time - takes a long look at the Enlightenment and assesses its ambivalences. Current History? Why do I take Current History? Because of a very good article years ago about the Kurds. This issue is devoted to Latin America. Pass. When it becomes common knowledge that Latin American societies (north of Argentina and Chile, anyway) are as structurally racist as the Old South ever was, then I'll pay attention.... Tell me, have you seen Unconditional Love? PPOQ says that it's as bad as Plan 9. Surely he exaggerates? But does Julie Andrews really sing from a cockpit to calm passengers on a choppy flight?... RSS Feeds. How much longer can I put off learning about RSS Feeds? Answer: indefinitely. The queston is, how much longer can I go on worrying that I ought to know? Not much.... Gee, it's snowing. Effing blizzard.
And I'm signed up with NewsGator, with their Outlook Edition and everything. And I only asked one dumb question during the whole procedure! Nothing like asking a dumb question to quicken the little grey cells.
Remark of the day (last Friday, actually): a rather young Frenchman renouncing love (en anglais): "I have stoped this stupid game; it’s too much expansive." (From La Coquette, of course)
Comments
Yes, PPOQ does remember, from his Vicodin-induced fog, Julie Andrews (what could she have been thinking? Does she need the money that badly? Or is it boredom?) singing "getting to know you"from the cockpit of a plane in great turbulence. (I thought immediately of the BlagueMaster and his unconditional love of flying) The movie, "Unconditional Love' ought to have been entitled "Unconditonal Stupidity". It involves a murdered dead closeted singer (Jonathan Pryce) whose lover (Mr. Everett) tries to find the murderer aided and abetted by Kathy Bates and her dwarf daughter-in-law\....others appearing in this horror show include Dan Akyroyd, Barry Manilow (as if it weren't gay enuf) and Lynn Redgrave, who should have shot her agent immediately. It isn't in Plan 9's exalted place in movie history, but just below it under "mierda."
Posted by: PPOQ | February 28, 2005 07:04 PM
The unnerving thing about Chile and Argentina is that the European settlers wiped out most of their indigenous peoples -- well, most in the case of Argentina, and many in the case of Chile. Also, why would structural racism in the rest of Latin America dampen your interest? It's not like there's a lack of racism about Kurds in West-Central Asia. Re racism: a sports-watching friend has alerted me to the utterly, utterly appalling jeers that some Spanish soccer fans have been directing towards black players of varied origins. Monkey chants, apparently. I love Spain, but something about Spanish culture is still extraordinarily insular. Indeed, the Iberian peninsula missed out on most of the Enlightenment.
Plan 9: from my corner of geekdom, I should tell you that there was once an advanced operating system from Bell Labs called Plan 9. (It was most certainly named after the movie.) It still exists, sort of. As you're certainly aware, it was not a raging commercial success.
Is that what happened to Jonathan Pryce?
Posted by: Max | February 28, 2005 07:58 PM
I played with RSS initially a couple of years ago, and didn't like the programs I tried, so I abandoned it. In the world of Windows software, there are often dozens of options, none of which is much good. Amy encouraged me to try again after getting hooked on her newsfeed aggregator, a Mac OS X-only program (the Mac software world often has very few choices, most of which are good). I finally landed on SharpReader, which is quite satisfactory, and extremely simple to use. (It does have a biggo software prerequisite which you may or may not meet; if you have a recent Windows XP install, I believe you should meet it.)
Posted by: Max | February 28, 2005 08:50 PM
Argentina and Chile: Yes, that's how they solved that problem. I do have a bit of a chip against Hispanic culture for the reason that you mention, but what bothers me about Latin American racism is that it is so completely taken for granted that it is never mentioned as part of the continent's huge economic problems. Why do affluent people in Sao Paolo live behind armed gates? Because of the poor. But who are the poor? The indigenes.
News feeds: Setup was so easy, and it works so well, with less than an hour's input, that I'm afraid to think about it. It was the Outlook plugin that sold me; having the feeds right alongside my mail is just what I needed. Now I can go back to worrying about my bandwidth consumption.
What PPOQ won't tell us is that he was in Plan 9. And he wonders why nothing works anymore! Silly him!
Posted by: R J Keefe | February 28, 2005 10:02 PM