Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
" If there is some small consolation to be had in the horrific loss of life from the Iranian earthquake, it is that the disaster is likely to strengthen the growing ties between Iran and the outside world and further rein in the US neo-conservative hawks itching to deal with the Tehran mullahs the way they dealt with Saddam Hussein," Andrew Gumbel writes in today's Independent. Some no doubt see that as a bad thing.
UPDATE: There is a minor league baseball team in Albuquerque, New Mexico called the Isotopes. More here and here. Follow those links if you don't know why this is beyond funny. 4:38 p.m. 12/28/03
UPDATE #2: In yesterday's New York Times the brillant David Brooks writes:
...ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.
Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.
...the Americans and Iraqis are now... muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and that we'll learn through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.
Yeah there was no plan, certainly none to back away from. I suppose it would be bad form to point out that maybe, just maybe, people who are historically cursed to bad planning ought not to be taking over other countries and transforming them for the fun of it. 4:57 p.m. 12/28/03
UPDATE #3: I've been listening to Cyndi Lauper's excellent Merry Christmas...Have a Nice Life! (Epic, 1998) for the last week or so. It is a fun set that mixes original compositions with a few classics, all done in the Lauper pop style.
Anyway I was reading about her at allmusic.com and I see that she is 50. Not sure why this shocks me, but it does. 5:45 p.m. 12/29/03
UPDATE #4: From the file of things that make life funny, Ted Bridis of the AP writes:
The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.
But we are going to defeat these fuckers! 6:08 p.m. 12/29/03 posted by micah holmquist at 12/28/2003 02:44:00 PM
