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Anti-Anna I'm falling in love again...err with tennis.  maria sharapova - tall, russian, blonde, and in the
The Graduation Stole as a Heckler's Tool Al-Muhajabah points to this excellent commentary by Juan Cole of Informed Comment on the recent graduation stole controversy at UCI.
Most Ridiculous Item of the Day Christiane Amanpour is one of the best, and most memorable journalists on television I've ever seen, right from the days when CNN was covering the Gulf War in 1991 to her current coverage of the situation in Iraq. Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor today suggested she should perhaps cover "movies or something" since her spouse, Jamie Rubin, is deeply involved with the Kerry campaign. This is an incredible suggestion, Amanpour has had a stellar reporting career in which she's covered not only the Gulf War and Iraq, but also did substantial work in Bosnia, Rwanda and Pakistan besides interviewing a range of world leaders. Here's a look at the awards she's received, For her reporting from the Balkans, Amanpour received a News and Documentary Emmy, two George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, a Courage in Journalism Award, a Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival Gold Award and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. She also was named 1994 Woman of the Year by the New York Chapter of Women in Cable and Telecommunications, and she helped the network win a duPont Award for its coverage of Bosnia and a Golden CableACE for its Gulf War coverage. Now Mr. O'Reilly wants her to give up political journalism, that, to borrow a line from The Factor, is the most ridiculous suggestion I've heard today. It's funny how full of himself Bill O'Reilly really is, he hawks "Boycott France" bumper stickers, threatens Canadian guests of boycotting their country or cutting off US trade with them, casts aspersions on the Justices of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and repeatedly calls people unpatriotic, he were, as if, the sole guardian and arbiter of what patriotism is. I find it more than a little rankling to hear talk of an individual's or a group's patriosm being questioned based on their belief system. Back home, in India, for example, I was once asked by a friend in all seriousness, who my loyalties lay with, Pakistan or India, during the Kargil conflict. The implication of being a closet supporter of a country merely because I followed the same religion as they did, was absurd in the extreme for me, I don't identify with Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Pakistan, atleast not with any sense of allegiance, my identification with the peoples of those countries is the same as it would be with the people of any other nation, in a basic humanist sense.
If you gaze long enough... Israel daily Haaretz reported last Friday of an exhibition going on in Tel Aviv right now showcasing the excesses the IDF habitually commits in the occupied territories near Hebron, Yehuda Shaul still can't put his finger on the exact moment in which "it all clicked" for him. Maybe it was the day when some settler girls were sitting and playing a few meters away from his post, in Gross Square in the heart of Hebron. An elderly Palestinian woman passed by, loaded down with baskets, and the girls "picked up rocks and started stoning her. When I asked them, `What are you doing?,' they said, `How do you know what she did in 1929?'" A sampling of the images at the exhibition here.
Losing the fight The New York Times reports on a soon to be published book, Imperial Hubris, by a senior (and current) CIA officer, "U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious," the officer writes. "We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency — not criminality or terrorism — and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces." I agree with the thrust of this analysis and the book is probably rather incisive in this regard. However, a review of a previous book by the same author raises some questions. Purportedly, that book, Through Our Enemies' Eyes has some bizarre analogies comparing Osama bin Laden with Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, [B]in Laden’s character, religious certainty, moral absolutism, military ferocity, integrity, and all-or-nothing goals are not much different from those of individuals whom we in the United States have long identified and honored as religious, political, or military heroes, men such as John Brown, John Bunyan, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. The review does credit the author for his perspicacity in the overall sense though, UPDATE: I’ve gone back and revisited the remainder of TOEE—the part which details the historical evolution of bin Ladin and his network—and would commend that portion to you. It’s easily the best one-volume treatment that I’ve seen on that account and does a superb job of crystalizing the nature of the threat we face, in a way that is still not grasped by most analysts even two years later. While Anonymous’ cutesy historical analogies and word games early in the book are annoying, he gets the threat analysis right. The review is highly recommended, as is this interview of the author on Talking Points Memo by Spencer Ackerman.
Spade An article in today's Guardian by Martin Jacques takes a critical look at democracy and it's fallibility in a global context,
Hat tip to illruminations.
Computational Origami Open your eyes and believe. Haha, truly fascinating.  pic via nytimes.com Meanwhile somewhere above the Mojave desert, freshly, and uniquely crowned private astronaut and veteran test pilot Mike Melvill had what he described as almost a religious experience. He said it felt like touching the face of God, a reference to the poem High Flight by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr,
I particularly liked this report.
Midnight's Children - Tribute When reading the historical novels of James Michener, I'd always lament the fact he'd never bothered to write about my Bombay and my India, it was an aching loss, something I wanted to fix in good time, when I indulged in the fantasies of my own prowess as a spinner of tales. What I never really realized was that such a book had been written, only a few years following my birth, and it was a book I'd read too, but never grasped, not in the least. That book I've just finished reading, a second time, and the import of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, is heavy and obvious. Undoubtedly one of the great books of our generation, a brilliant work, acute and impeccable, it is an enthralling bit of literature, written with deep feeling and by an uncommon talent. The narration of the first thirty years or so of India's independence, the hopes that freedom and democracy brought, and the hopelessness that invariably accompanies those ideals are captured with a magical and apocryphal look at historical events, through the eyes of an observer who sees in him reflected his country's birth, adolscence and gawky jump into adulthood. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the novel was first published, the generation hinted at by Saleem Sinai, born of the late seventies and the early eighties, is today's yuppie, the generation of IT services and economic booms that don't reach the masses, the generation of a billion people, an immense teeming mass that is as yet uncertain about what which way to go, of changing city names and dreams of lunar travel, my generation. I've jumped ship, so to speak, and write while sitting in a city a full twelve hours behind the city of my birth, but the ties remain, strong as ever. I've said this before, and say it again, it is pitiful that such an important writer, important both to Indian as well as world literature, a man who has held up the mirrors we gaze our images in, has been treated like a pariah by the country of his birth and that of his fecund fantasy.
A Mole A mole on the face of the sun. No but it was too evanescent, so perhaps, an adolescent's pimple?
Irreverent At the risk of sounding irreverent, could we have please please have some real news on the networks instead of an interminable series of final goodbyes? Back in 1994, when India's ex president Giani Zail Singh died in a car accident, Door Darshan, the state run TV station, and, at that time the only programming on the Indian air waves, ran nothing but really bad, mournful music for seven long days. Though this is not evem close to that sorry experience, I'm watching more of Bravo, USA and TNT than CNN, FoxNews and MSNBC, and I'm not happy.
Quote To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. |
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