Ice cubes in the fire

"To the best of his knowledge, Saddam Hussein had been nowhere near his head..."

Good to see that the New York times has something of a sense of humour:

In the summer of 2001 the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, was running around with his hair on fire. When told that Mr. Tenet's hair was on fire, President Bush replied, "I'm tired of swatting flies." The president added that the only thing worse than swatting flies was shaking trees. "You can swat all the flies and shake all the trees you want, but it still won't be a silver bullet," the president said.

As August wore on Mr. Tenet's hair blazed out of control. Mr. Bush received a President's Daily Brief, or P.D.B., entitled, "Fire in Tenet's Hair May Spread to His Eyebrow." Unfortunately, the P.D.B. gave no precise information about when the fire might spread, or to which eyebrow. It was a "historical document," written on yellowing parchment in fancy, "Old English" lettering. Besides, as the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, pointed out, Mr. Tenet's hair had been on fire since the early 1990's. "Our policy toward the fire raging on George Tenet's head was by and large the one we inherited from the Clinton administration," Dr. Rice said. "It was a policy of containment."

By mid-August Mr. Tenet complained that having his entire head engulfed in flames was making it difficult for him to connect the dots. President Bush said that connecting the dots was a waste of time, right up there with swatting flies and shaking trees.

I heard it from Oscar

One of life's golden rules is that if you cannot remember who originally said a quotation, attribute it to Oscar Wilde. He apparently did that himself, in a well-known (and probably completely fictional, but bear with me) exchange, he was listening to someone speak and observed to a friend,
"I wish I had said that." His friend replied, without missing a beat, "You will, Oscar, you will."

So it was a pleasure to find this New York Times article about the joys of quotation-collecting. As someone who collects quotations himself, I mentally cheered after reading the first paragraphs:

I used to wish I could live through the words of other writers. Unpleasant questions would be parried with crisp couplets and song lyrics; strong feelings and opinions would be given third-person protection. I wouldn't have to censor myself because my own prose wasn't up to the mark. Unreliable or omniscient, I would be the narrator in control.

So I kept notebooks of quotations. Lots of people do. Reading them over lets you scan your own temperament. The words of writers you admire provide a trustworthy language for your desires and for how you'll feel when life ambushes them. They relieve you from being brave enough to say what feels unsayable. Notebooks like this are an informal history of your reading."

That's all absolutely right. Go read the whole thing, and then follow Churchill's advice - "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations" - and start collecting quotations for yourself.

Random Passage

(via Kitabkhana)

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

'A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.'
-- Jane Austen, Persuasion
I heartily agree... *looking around his room, shaking his head...*

Another article that states the obvious...

... iPods are damn cool. Go read.

Wild

I leave my site alone for a month, and somehow it racks up 6000 hits. Crazy. Anyway, I'm back, so watch this space.

Sickening

You can't have missed the publicity surrounding the release of Mel Gibson's new film The Passion of the Christ. It's not yet out in Britain, but I'm not planning on watching it when it is. Two-and-a-half hours of sado-masochistic, anti-Semitic, practically-Medieval-in-its-values, cinema is not my cup of tea. Slate's Christopher Hitchens has, however, like everyone else in the US, seen the film, and gives Mel Gibson the flogging he deserves:

So let us not be euphemistic about what is staring us in the face. Last Wednesday, the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver posted a sign on its roadside marquee. It read "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus." This pigsty of a church has, I think you will agree, an unimprovable name. But its elders, or whatever they call themselves, can't have had time to see the movie, which only opened that same Ash Wednesday. Nor, I think it safe to say, had they chosen the slogan only on the spur of the moment. No: They had been thinking this for quite a long time and were emboldened to "come out" and say so under the cover of a piece of devotional cinematic pornography. Some of us saw this coming. In America, I hope and believe, the sinister effect will be blunted by generations of civilized co-existence. But think for a moment what will happen when Gibson reaps the residual and overseas profits from screenings of the film in Egypt and Syria, or in Eastern Europe, where things are a bit more raw. Who can believe that he did not anticipate, and intend, this result?

Apparently seeking to curry favor, Gibson announced a few weeks ago that he had cut the scene where a Jewish mob yells for the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children (a scene that occurs in only one of the four contradictory Gospels). Gibson lied. The scene is still there, spoken in Aramaic. Only the English subtitle has been removed. Propagandists in other countries will be able to subtitle it any way they like. This is all of a piece with the general moral squalor of his project. Gibson's producer lied when he said that a pope Gibson despises had endorsed the film. He would not show the movie to anyone who might object in advance. He will not debate any of his critics, and he relies on star-stricken pulp interviewers to feed him soft questions. Now, as the dollars begin to flow from this front-loaded fruit-machine of cynical publicity, he is sobbing about the risks and sacrifices he has made for the Lord. A coward, a bully, a bigmouth, and a queer-basher. Yes, we have been here before. The word is fascism, in case you are wondering, and we don't have to sit through that movie again.

Go read the whole thing.

Poet, and he doesn't know it

Does Ralph Nader, who is again seeking the US Presidency, news that will strike fear into the hearts of voters everywhere, speak in verse?

Here's his announcement:

After careful thought
And my desire
To retire
Our supremely elected president
I've decided to run as an
Independent candidate for president.

Not exactly "I am a very model of a modern major general," but it works.

Broken again...

I'm sure that one of my New Year's Resolutions was not to get quite so drunk, quite so often. Oh well, rules, rulers and resolutions are meant to be broken.

The Voice of Seb's Conscience: Yes, but every day?

Hee. Hee hee. Hee hee hee...

Via Wonkette:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay: "Americans have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it's being stuffed down their throats and they don't like it."

Too true! Most Americans actually prefer to take it in the ass.

Amateur Profundities

I woke up this morning, and wanted to know what rain looked like.

Have you ever seen a picture of rain? Or any kind of falling water, for that matter? It's strange. When you experience it first-hand, you think of it as a continuous flow. Stand under a shower, and you get a straightforward stream of water. Look at a picture of water coming from a shower, and suddenly all you see are pixels, points of light, water reflecting the flash.

I've been trying to work on a stream-of-consciousness short story for a while now. I finished a first draft, didn't work on it for a few days, and now I come back to it and... nothing. This might help though. Especially when trying to replicate the workings of the mind itself, you can't treat life as a continuous flow. Like falling water, it's not actually a steady stream. It's a series of isolated moments, distinct from each other. You just need to capture each point of life.