Thursday, 4 December 2003
Topic: Oddities
"Ducks and chicks and geese better scurry..."
While surfing Le Figaro you'll also come across the French being, well... French.
See this:
Foie gras : la valse des etiquettes
Val?rie Sasportas, Le Figaro, 04 d?cembre 2003A regarder passer les oies, le gourmet pense foie gras. Qu'il s'agisse de canards, et l'envie se fait plus souvent confit, magret. Pourtant, sur les march?s, le foie gras est bien plus souvent de canard que d'oie... [and so on]
Well, I prefer duck foie gras to the foie gras from geese (les oies). In one of the stalls at the Christmas fair at Les Halles a few years ago I came across some pigeon foie gras, but my French isn't very good so I might have been mistaken, or hallucinating. I passed on that.
Yes, you animal rights folks, it is wrong to like such stuff. But it's the season.
Topic: Local Issues
First the fires, and now this? Even the French are worried about things out here!
So I'm glancing at the summary of the French press at RFI - Internet Press Review in English - and Michael Fitzpatrick in his daily review of what's in the papers there tells me this:Just in case Californians thought the worst was over, now that Terminator has made it to the State House, there's serious bad news on the Science pages of today's LE FIGARO. The home of Hollywood is not simply threatened by bad acting and big earthquakes, California also faces the threat of being engulfed by a monstrous tidal wave.
According to new research by a team of geophysicists, the gradual grinding at the meeting-point of the American and Pacific Plates... those enormous chunks of the earth's crust which move past one another at the rate of three-and-a-half centimetres each year... is sometimes interrupted by a massive collapse which causes undersea earthquakes and sends out waves of up to five metres, travelling at around 850 kilometres per hour.
Damn.
Things are tough enough. It's not just bad acting and big earthquakes out here.
So I look it up.
L'histoire d'une vague g?ante qui d?ferla de l'Am?rique au Japon
Yves Miserey, Le Figaro 04 d?cembre 2003La faille San Andreas qui traverse San Francisco n'est pas la seule menace sismique pesant sur l'ouest des Etats-Unis. Tout le long de la c?te californienne jusqu'? la Colombie britannique (Canada), la plaque oc?anique Juan de Fuca glisse et descend sous la plaque continentale am?ricaine, ? raison de plus de 3,6 cm par an. L?-bas, chaque rupture brutale de la cro?te peut provoquer de redoutables tsunamis (1) car cette zone de subduction est situ?e sous la mer. Les vagues g?antes sont un danger pour toutes les r?gions c?ti?res du Pacifique. C'est ainsi que le 27 mars 1964, un tsunami provoqu? par un tremblement de terre au large de l'Alaska traversa l'oc?an Pacifique ? la vitesse de 830 km/h, atteignant les bords de l'Antarctique seize heures plus tard et faisant au passage 130 morts en Am?rique du Nord. [ and so on... ]
And I suppose I'll see this in the Los Angeles Times tomorrow.
Topic: Oddities
A follow-up... We have a winner!
As noted earlier, there was this contest...
See She came with the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys, which was flattering, if alarming. for the initial item.
Now the results:
Reporter Wins Bad Sex Award
Thursday, December 04, 2003, London (Reuters) An Indian investigative journalist on Wednesday won Britain's little-coveted Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a turbo-charged account of a lovers' tryst that likens their amours to a speeding Bugatti.
Aniruddha Bahal, who posed as an arms dealer to expose an Indian military bribery scandal in 2001, flew to London to receive the prize from rock singer Sting before a 500-strong audience.
Now in its 11th year, the dubious honor is awarded by the Literary Review magazine for the most inept description of sexual intercourse in a novel.
Bahal beat rival nominees including John Updike, Paul Theroux and Paulo Coelho, thanks to a passage from his novel "Bunker 13."
Bahal's hero says he feels like an "ancient Aryan warlord" after discovering a Swastika shaved into an intimate part of his female companion's anatomy.
As the temperature between the two rises, Bahal shifts gear in a blur of motoring metaphors.
"She picks up a Bugatti's momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen's steady trot... Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she's eating up the road with all cylinders blazing."
Previous winners include AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg.
And the BBC adds a bit more:
Bad sex writer laughs at victory
BBC NEWS, World Edition - Last Updated: Wednesday, 3 December, 2003, 20:03 GMTThe winner of this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award says he can see the funny side in winning the prize.
Indian writer Aniruddha Bahal told BBC News Online: "I'm not one to shy away from having a laugh at my own expense."
Mr Bahal won the award, presented in London by Sting on Wednesday night, for an extract from his novel Bunker 13.
The author, best known as a reporter who uncovered match fixing in cricket, said he was happy to win the award, beating Paul Theroux and John Updike.
Mr Bahal said he was happy to accept an award for sexually explicit writing because in India there was too much censorship. He said the award was a "rebellious gesture".
... The Delhi-based writer told BBC News Online he had heard of the award in India but "never thought that one day I would be nominated for it".
... As a journalist Bahal has reported on a wide range of subjects, from environment to defence, and is best known for his investigations into match-fixing in cricket.
In 2001, he exposed corruption among Indian defence officials, after covertly filming them taking bribes.
He said his publishers had flown him over to accept the award and he "took it as an opportunity to see my friends in London".
He also said he was "a bit peeved" he had won. "Lots of other writers in India thought my book had great sex writing," he said.
And he said that winning the prize has not made him less proud of his writing. "I wouldn't change a word," he said.
This is, no doubt, more than you wanted to know.
Wednesday, 3 December 2003
Topic: Bush
Is the President a Pathological Liar? Define "Pathological."
Well, the answer is no. Or it's a little more complicated than that.
I recommend this item.
Bush's unhealthy relationship with reality
by David Corn, L.A. Weekly, DECEMBER 5 - 11, 2003
As for the pathology involved, Corn is still reconsidering matters.What forced this reconsideration was a speech Bush delivered in late November to several thousand troops at Butts Army Air Field in Fort Carson, Colorado. On this occasion, Bush served up the usual rah-rah about the war on terrorism. But as he was hailing the U.S. military, he remarked, "Working with a fine coalition, our military went to Afghanistan, destroyed the training camps of al Qaeda and put the Taliban out of business forever."
Out of business forever?
That was a false statement.
... What then could account for Bush's truth-defying assertion about the Taliban? After all, it was a statement ridiculously easy to disprove. (The Bush bashers of Moveon.org immediately sent out a mass e-mail citing this remark as further evidence that Bush is a misleader.) Was Bush really trying to hornswoggle the troops and the American people? In a way. I assume that had he bothered to think about this line, he probably would have realized that it was inaccurate and that there was no reason to claim the Taliban was stone-cold dead when he could have truthfully declared that the U.S. military (under his command) and its Afghan allies had routed the Taliban. It was not as if Bush said to himself, Aha! I know what I'll do. I will boast that I eliminated the Taliban -- even though anyone who follows this stuff knows a Taliban resurgence is under way -- and fool people into believing I am winning the war on terrorism.
Bush was more likely engaged in the deceit of triumphalism -- ignoring facts and saying whatever sounds good to juice up the public. It was hype, extreme rhetoric, utterly divorced from events on the ground. This statement was a report from Planet Bush, not the world as it exists - a demonstration of Bush's penchant to embrace (and peddle) self-serving fantasy over the obvious truth.
Yep, we all see that.
But after reviewing many other items Corn's conclusion is this:So Bush tells us the ongoing war in Iraq is a strike against the forces that hit America on 9/11 and would do so again (were it not for the invasion of Iraq), and he proclaims the Taliban extinct. None of this is supported by the readily available information provided by the media or Bush's own military. Making such melodramatic and misleading claims may or may not be pathological, but it certainly isn't a sign that Bush has a healthy relationship with reality.
Is this a problem? Read the whole thing. It won't make you feel better.
Topic: Local Issues
"All Politics is Local" Yeah, yeah.
Out here national politics are having a local impact.
The Republicans in Washington punish Southern California...
GOP guts projects by local Dems
Los Angeles Daily News, article published Tuesday, December 02, 2003 - 11:45:40 PM PST
By Lisa Friedman, Washington Bureau
The head:If a congressional Democrat asked for it, Southern California won't be getting it.
In one of the year's ugliest political battles, Republican lawmakers have rejected almost every request made by a Democrat for a local education, job or health program.
The reason: retaliation. Earlier this year, Democrats voted en masse against a federal spending bill. Now it's payback time, and local programs such as nearly $3 million in educational and community programs in San Fernando and Lake Balboa and at California State University, Northridge, can kiss federal funding goodbye.
Local GOP lawmakers said they are standing behind their party, despite losses to local communities.
"I support the decision of the cardinals on this," Rep. David Dreier, R-Glendora said, alluding to powerful House appropriation leaders. "I have no choice."
Democrats, however, are fuming and calling the move an abuse of power by Republicans.
Well, this is how the game is played.
Denied: $750,000 for High Tech High at Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley community of Lake Balboa and $1 million to help Cal State Northridge pay for its aquatic center for students with disabilities. Also cut was $1 million earmarked for a community health education center at Mission Community Hospital's San Fernando Campus, and a $3 million request Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, made for Huntington Memorial Hospital's trauma center. Add the $600,000 request to renovate a health clinic in Azusa and the $400,000 request for the construction of the East Valley Community Health Clinic in West Covina. No way. Gone. Along with $240,000 for the city of Pomona to establish an after-school program. Ain't gonna happen.
Schiff didn't like the cuts in the federal education budget. He voted against the cuts. Bad move, Adam!
"Why should Huntington Memorial Hospital suffer the loss of funding for its trauma center because Democratic members feel the president should fully fund education?" Schiff said. Calling the cuts "close to the line of ethical propriety," Schiff charged, "This means health care in our community will suffer."
Well, you could have voted with the Bush folks more often. People may die because you didn't. The engineer behind all this political retribution is Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, chairman of the subcommittee that controls spending on education, health and job programs. Regula astonished lawmakers earlier this year when he announced that Democrats who voted against the spending bill July 10 would not see their "earmarks" -- sometimes called pork -- included in the compromise final version of the bill.
And so it goes. The man in Ohio punishes the folks out here in Los Angeles for voting against the Bush team.
This all is a pretty good argument to vote straight Republican from now on. It is too dangerous not to.
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