Come to papa!

After 16 days, my Barclays' debit card, which my mother mailed via US priority mail from Loo-zee-anna to Paris to try to catch me before I left for Montpellier, has finally arrived chez ma souer.

Go go postal service!

Looks like this guy was in charge:



(And a hello to the new visitor, Jolene!)

In case anybody was wondering

I have very little to say about the baseball situation, other than it was nice to wake up this morning, my fifth morning in Montpellier, and the first when I didn't check the scores to see that the Red Sox lost and the Yankees won.

Of course, neither played yesterday. But I'll take what I can get.

In a very real sense, it hardly matters now whether the Sox win the playoffs or not. The Yankees have so clearly been the better team for the past two months that I really have low expectations for the playoffs. With the best four hitters on the Red Sox all injured and the bullpen running out of steam, it could get ugly.

That will be my only comment for a while, as my German readers don't want to read about baseball.

Talk like a pirate day!

Garrh! Avast ye maties!

Some resources for your pirate inclined.

The homepage, your handy Talk Like a Pirate Day translator, and a YouTube clip featuring everybody's favorite movie pirate!

No, not Captain Jack Sparrow! It's Steve the Pirate!

RIP, Robert Jordan

Sad news.

Lesson for other authors: do not overestimate your ability to stay alive indefinitely, when choosing to add exponentially many characters and plot twists to your fantasy series. In the early 90s, Jordan put out the Wheel of Time books at a pace of about one every year to 18 months. And then the books started getting longer and longer, with more and more (mostly identical) characters, pursuing ever more uninteresting plot lines.

And now the series remains unfinished.

*sigh*

OK, this post is in poor taste. So be it.

going King mode

Too many things...time to go into an incoherent, Larry King-style rant.

- OJ got away with murder, so of course he thinks armed robbery is an easy thing!

- I'm sorry, there just is no moral line between "using your own cameraman to steal signals" and "using the network's cameramen to steal signals". Yes, rules should be followed, but enough of the moral outrage already|

- Buffy is tired of moving. She needs a permanent home.

- All those websites that have decided I speak French? Stop it! (I'm looking at you, Google..)

- Anyway, while the cats were staying at the Finsbury park flat of Dr. J and his red-head, the good doc tested his stealth badger camera in the flat to track cat movement. Some pics will be forthcoming.

- Bush cannot leave office soon enough. I'm tired of the idea that winning a war is done just like any other PR campaign. And the media fall right in line, every time, sucking up to General Petraeus on schedule. Stop it! The war is still a stupid and immoral idea. The fact that a temporary increase in force (and unsustainable increase in force, in fact) can be used to create statistics indicating a decrease in violence (as long as the stats are doctored sufficiently, and the media don't examine the story closely, which of course they won't) does not in any way justify staying in Iraq.

Whether Iraq becomes a peaceful, democratic society or not is not something that further American military presence in Iraq can affect in a positive way. Best idea? Get out. See Vietnam for an example.

I was refreshed to see Alan Greenspan acknowledge the elephant in the room: this war is about oil and always has been. That's always been true. I'm sorry, but it's so obvious that it's hard to stomach the steadfast refusal of mainstream media outlets to address this issue.

Look, oil prices have doubled since the invasion of Iraq. That fact is caused in part by the decrease in oil production from Iraq. It's also caused in part by the fact that the Bush family is essentially a subsidiary of the Saudi royal family.

Not only are oil prices going up, energy company profits are zooming up. Net profits at ExxonMobil, for example, have doubled during the war years. This is a fact that needs to be pointed out in any discussion of the war. Right now regular taxpayers are paying for a war (or, more precisely, funding debt to support a war) in order for Exxon to double their profits.

When discussing the American foreign policy, it's important to keep an eye on the ball. It is not in the interest of the country as a whole to do everything one industry wants it to do, no matter how important that sector of the economy is.

Let's take on these ratfuckers directly.

update

Have not really had a chance to blog recently. I'm at my sister's place in Paris. Sadly, all of her WiFi neighbors have discovered encryption, which means that I have to take my turn at the PC along with my sister and her husband.

Lots of things to talk about...the incompetence of Bush, the sheer vapidity of the news media, and the Patriots videotaping scandal.

I don't have time for any of this right now, but I should be back online tomorrow.