Poetry
“Wir sollen nicht wissen, warum
dieses und jenes uns meistert;
wirkliches Lebenis stumm,
nur, daß es uns begeistert,

macht uns mit ihm vertraut”

“We are not to know why
this and that masters us;
real life makes no reply,
only that it enraptures us,

makes us familiar with it”

Rainer Maria Rilke, May, 1924 (Translation by John J. L. Mood)

Life - Things to do on a lazy Saturday
Run with your dogs on the beach.
Go to the Farmer's Market and buy everything you really want.
Eat the whole bag of English Shelling Peas.
But save the raspberries for guests tomorrow.
Browse, dreamily, in the bookstore's travel section.
Memorize some more of the words to A Felicidade so you can really sing along instead of just making sounds.
Nap on the floor with the dogs for a little while.
Then nap with your significant other.
Walk by the flower lady's house and admire her roses.
Dig out that old Roseanne Cash CD so you can remember how much you love "Bells and Roses".

See, no day is wasted if you waste it in the right way.

War and Peace, cont.
Another good speech by Robert Byrd yesterday concerning those MIA WMD's. Courtesy of Best of The Blogs. A good article by Jake Tapper in Salon on the same subject.

Today's scary thought, courtesy of Senator Byrd: What if Iraq did have usable WMDs and they dispersed them to other Arab nations or to terrorists before the fall of Baghdad? It's interesting that the administration hasn't (publicly) sounded an alarm about this possibility since the end of the war.

Questions, questions...

Update: Interesting viewpoints that I don't agree with (but are worth pondering):

Thomas Friedman in the NYT: Because We Could
John Dean in FindLaw's: Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?

Scandal Mongering and Media Politics, cont.
Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, the executive editor and managing editor of the New York Times, have resigned as a result of the Jayson Blair scandal. Conservative pundits and other opponents of the Times are crowing, of course, but I think they miss a larger point.

The real scandal isn't the Times' poor fact-checking, editorial favoritism, or its supposedly left-wing bias. The real scandal is how poorly the Times reports the news, in terms of reporting what actually is happening and, more importantly, why what's happening is happening.

And that's a scandal that encompasses all of the major media in this country, left, right, and center. What gets reported is so circumscribed, neutered, and watered-down that it's nearly useless. The scandal at the NYT is simply an extreme example of the overall mediocrity of all of our major media outlets.

Unfortunately, this will have the appearance of legitimizing those news outlets who have replaced reporting with ideology. Ideology doesn't require fact-checking; it requires faith, the opposite of critical thinking.

Scandal Mongering and Media Politics
So they've indicted Martha Stewart for selling 4,000 shares under suspicious circumstances. Big news? Only because she's a high-profile celebrity with a tarnished reputation. Important? Only in the sense that it serves to distract attention from real, serious criminal activity by other business executives.

WHAT ABOUT SKILLING AND LAY?

David Weinberg relates some irrelevant facts about this.

Music
Stuck in my CD player:

Bebel Gilberto, Tanto Tempo
João Gilberto, Live in Montreux
Gigi, One Ethiopia
Moreno+2, Music TypeWriter
Kathleen Edwards, Failer
Aimee Mann, Lost in Space
João Gilberto, Vóz e Violão
Wayne Shorter, Footprints Live

Yeah, still hung up on the Brazilian thing.

Software
An article by Farhad Manjoo in Salon on the SCO suit against IBM and Linux comes to almost the same conclusion I came to last Thursday - that the suit could end up legitimizing Linux to the mainstream business customer.

Relevant quotes: "...the SCO lawsuit may do more to ratify Linux's ascendant position in the software universe than anything else. Amateurs tend not to create software that inspires billion-dollar lawsuits. SCO's frantic scrambling to salvage something out of its Unix holdings -- with Microsoft's support -- is the clearest sign yet that Linux has arrived...'In the end I think IBM starts indemnifying its customers'...if IBM does do that, it would be quite a win for Linux; all those claims, so often casually mentioned by the likes of Microsoft, of Linux being somehow dangerous for business would be wiped away."

War and Peace
A nice collection of quotes from various people in the administration about those damned WMDs. From billmon courtesy of David Weinberg.

No, I can't leave it alone. The post-war rationalization that we did it to liberate the Iraqi people rings hollow.

Software
I'm appalled to find, in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM), two vendor puff pieces - one from the from the "Master Architect for Sun Professional Services", the other from the "CTO for Microsoft's U.S. Central Region" - professing to compare the merits of J2EE and .NET. The actual technical content in each piece could be reduced to a couple of paragraphs. The rest is marketing dribble that seeks to cast aspersions on the other product. CACM bills this as a "lively debate". I think it should spark a debate as to CACM's credibility and relevance.

We do need in-depth, unbiased, highly technical comparisons of J2EE and .NET by independent sources with no axes to grind. Hiring shills from the vendors of these products is not the way to go about this.

By way of contrast, the June 1993 edition of CACM - a special issue devoted to the next generation of Graphical User Interfaces - does not contain any pieces from Microsoft about the next generation of Windows or from Apple about its future GUI plans. I'm now wondering when exactly in the ten year span between these issues did CACM lose its integrity?

Culture
Further proof that Barbara Streisand is an shallow, self-obsessed, hypocritical idiot. She's as bad a representative of true liberals as Ann Coulter is of thoughtful, intelligent conservatives. Couldn't they both just go away?

In the meantime, let's just ignore them. Put me down as anti-idiot as well as anti-ideology.

War and Peace
More Salam Pax. Apparently, someone has set up free access to the Net in Baghdad. Instapundit discusses post-war malaise in the blogosphere, but then goes on to make some good points about the current situation and why there's reason for optimism. Frankly, I think that winning the peace is far more important and interesting than winning the war (which I expected to be every bit as easy as it was). I'm not very sanguine about the eventual outcome. But I'd love to be proven wrong. We'll see - this will be one of my continuing topics, because I think it's going to be one of the critical events of the next 25 to 50 years.

Panic, in Paradise
[NOTE TO S.: I didn't tell you all the details. Don't read this until you come home Thursday]

Took the dogs to Schwan Lake Park today. I started out intending to go the beach, but the fog was so thick (and I was worried about SM causing trouble without S. to help me wrangle her) that I opted for the Park instead.

Bad choice. It's the time of year when foxtail seeds start to mature - I'd thought we were safe until July or so. Mr. C was off leash and, as is his wont, decided to roll around in the tall grass at the end of the walk. He came up sneezing. Clueless, I laughed at first, thinking that he was getting a little taste of how SM feels with her allergies. Then he started sneezing a second time after we got home, and I began to get concerned. Our vet lives next door but unfortunately he was out. So I decided to wait for his return, keeping an eye on C. Then C.'s third sneezing attack spattered drops of blood on the wall in the hallway.

Blood will quickly move you from simple concern to outright panic. Greyhounds aren't babies, but they are a little more sensitive than some breeds. Interesting fact: they scream bloody murder about small things (getting their toenails cut, having their tails pinched, etc.) but are completely stoic about the big things once they're over the initial pain or shock. C.'s spasmodic sneezing was so violent he was banging his nose on the carpet. But when he stopped he didn't react any further - no whining, no nothing - which moved me to a whole new level of fear. I talked to the emergency vet (Pacific Vet) and quickly packed C. into the car and drove there. Interesting fact: I can be completely, totally panicked and still be able to function without getting hysterical.

The receptionist there told me C. was the 7th dog in today because of a foxtail seed getting lodged somewhere. She had a Borzoi - you meet sighthound people everywhere - and her calm manner helped us both relax a little. The vet had plenty of experience with greys and other sighthounds, so we decided she would put him under in order to be able to thoroughly clean out his nasal cavity.

They kept him there for a few hours, which gave me time to make Osso Buco for the H's which I'd promised I'd do earlier in the day. Interesting fact: I can make a fairly complex recipe even when I'm filled with panic and dread. The O.B. wasn't great, like most John Ash recipes we make are, but it wasn't bad. Certainly it was more productive than, say, hysterical paralysis.

C. seems fine, although his nose is dripping a little bit of blood (which the vet told me to expect) because it bled a lot (let's avoid words like profusely, ok?) during the procedure. She did find the foxtail seed in his nose and showed it to me. S. called and I told her about it, although I left the gorier parts out (hence the note at the top). I'd like to take him to work with me tomorrow, but that means leaving SM alone all day.

We're going to the beach tomorrow morning, because I know there's no foxtails there. In fact, I think I'll buy a tent and live there with the dogs for the next few months.

I know this is a long, boring post. But I'm still freaked, and writing about it makes me feel a little bit better.