So I'm moved into my new apt. Even bought a new bed - and very comfy it is. Alan and I have been relaxing, set up some bookcases in the living room and unpacked all the books. Next project will be to move the bed around to the other side of the bedroom to maximize free space. Then when I go back to work, I need to buy some storage units and get all the clothes and stuff stored away neatly.

But it's really lovely having a genuine kitchen again. I made crepes for breakfast a couple of days ago. Also made beef, mushroom, and barley soup - yum! Last night I picked up a duck for Xmas dinner. I wanted a goose but none at the supermarket. I probably will ask the manager if he can get one for me anyway if it's not insanely expensive.

This afternoon we're going out to New Jersey to the Lunarian's Christmas Party. Hopefully a nice day. We went to the Museum of Natural History this week. That's always sort of like going home again. We just looked at the meteorites and the hall of minerals and of course the orgami Christmas tree.

(Note- any of you who are reading this blog- I'm job hunting! Email me for a copy of my resume if there's any work available at your company.)

Moving Day

Moving Day- words to strike terror into even the hardest heart. All went relatively well, however. We went out for a Rreally excellent meal afterward at the fabulous chinese/japanese restaurant on Broadway & 100th Street. I managed to get the laptop hooked up to the cable modem and working - obviously since I'm online now.

Now I have to set up the bookcases, unpack, scrub down the refrigerator, etc. And buy groceries. And most important, buy a bed.

Profound thanks to Adam and Andrew for interrupting their lives to slave away at a miserable task for me when they had so many other important things to do. Also thanks to Tom for helping with everything.

I have to transfer my landline here on Monday but meanwhile my cell phone does it all quite well. This place has connectivity unlike my other place which was in a completely dead zone.

I'm still feeling very happy about my birthday Friday as family and friends surprised me with a stream of phone calls and flowers. Definitely an excellent cheerer-upper.

Today's my birthay.

The good news is that I found a new apt. Adam and Andrew will help me move on Saturday. I'd really, really like to get started bringing over the small stuff today tho. I tried yesterday, packed a shopping cart with stuff. But when I got out the door, it started to rain, icy stinging rain. I had to turn around and go back inside. What a bummer!

Still job hunting. Asti helped me polish up my resume so fingers crossed that will help.

Books- I just finished reading, "The Bookseller of Kabul". Excellent book, highly recommend you read it. A view of post Taliban middle class society thru the life of a bookseller's family. Fascinating.

When does the Christmas season start?

Growing up in New York City, I always knew when the Christmas season started. It started as you stood, shivering in the cold, on Central Park West, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the moment the Santa Clause float passed by. Period. End of question.

Then you stopped for hot chocolate with your family before you all piled into the subway to go home for your Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner.

Viewing the Santa Claus float go by was like the figurative flipping of some celestial switch that started a clockwork mechanism that initiated an orderly progression of events. These events continued in proper sequence, year after year for decades, culminating in the day we all returned to school in January.

Part of the clear and visible seasonal protocol was that christmas carols were not played or broadcast, decorative lights were not turned on, and season window displays were not installed in windows till AFTER Thanksgiving.

And it was good. Very good.

After the parade ended, the lights suddenly switched on, carols were broadcast on the radio stations and in stores and public buildings. All along 5th Ave the stores vied to offer passersby the most opulent, gorgeous, amazing Chistmas themed window displays.

A week later the lights were turned on on the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. That signaled the start of ice skating.

Each familiar traditional event triggering the next -

The Nutcracker Suite at the NY State Ballet, Ahmal and the Night Visitors at the Brooklyn Acadeny.

Orgami classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and decorating their orgami tree.
A visit to the Central Park Children's zoo to feed the seals and look at the polar bears.

Weekend visits to Central Park to go ice skating at the Wollman rink, ride the carousel - the moving horses on the outside for us kids, the stationary sleigh seating for the parents.

Buying roasted chestnuts, freshly spun cotton candy, or red candy apples from street vendors.

Strolling down 5th Ave looking at the marvelous window displays. Neidermyers for hot chocolate.

Visits to F.A.O. Shwartz's. Macy's toy dept and then a session with the real, genuine, Santa. (Macy's Santa is THE real santa - see Miracle on 34th Street)

And yes, watching the Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland on TV on Thanksgiving day - it was always broadcast. And then watching the original B & W Miracle on 34th Street, which imho is still the absolutely best and perfect and defining version of the story. (And please note this- they NEVER showed that horrible piece of crap It's a Wonderful Life -ever- during the season. That film all by itself can kill every last shred of holiday spirit and good will towards men within me.)

Going to Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center to sing the Halleluia Chorus - audience and stage singers, all together, a cappella. Glorious! If you've never done it, do it!

Christmas day we all stood on line for the (CHEAP cheap cheap) matinee show at Radio City Music Hall - usually another magical Disney animated film and the wonderful Rockettes, a ballet, the Christmas spectacular with a live nativity, and the awesome Wurlitzer panzer-organ. Well, this was the tradition in MY family for Christmas day since we were not Christians. I had no clue what Christ was, what the religious part of Christmas involved, untill I was 9 years old I had only the vaguest idea what Christians were to begin with and if you had told me what it was I'd have thought you were winding me up, that no one could possibly believe such obvious nonsense.

New Years Eve meant crowding and squashing together in Times Square to watch the ball drop. Kissing the one(s) you loved was absolutely required ritual. Regardless if it's family or as you grew up it was your romantic partner- if you didn't kiss the one you loved on New Year's, the whole year was somehow ruined.

I've left a lot out of this, but you get the picture.

When did/does the Christmas season start for you?

Thanksgiving Day

I went to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Hadn't planned to. Just one of those things. Tom emailed me asking what I was doing for Thanksgiving. My reply: nothing. He said he had no plans and was wondering if I could think of anything interesting to do. I suggested the parade. Shortly thereafter Adam calls to say he's coming into NYC and wants to go to the parade with me. So 8:05 am I was standing on the corner of 66th St and Braodway waiting to meet up with Adam to watch the parade. His dad came along with him. Late, as usual. However, we were still early enough to find a good viewing space on 65th and Broadway. I've watched the parade from that corner almost my entire life.

It was nice being with Adam for a few hours. After the parade we strolled back to Broadway and settled in at a cafe with tables outside. This meant we could smoke with our coffees, so of course we lingered. The weather was quite warm, in the mid-60's at least. Adam gave me a new cell phone and switched my sim card into it. I'm in the process of rebuilding my phone addressbook so anyone I know who is reading this, please send me your preferred contact phone number to add to it.

It was early on a warm summer's evening in the 1970s, as I stood in a palm plantation high on a green hillside in western Java, that I saw for the first time, silhouetted against the faint blue hills of faraway Sumatra, the small gathering of islands that is all that remains of what was once a mountain called Krakatoa.

-Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Two interesting web sites recommended to me by a friend.

The Pilgrims of Russian-town 70 Years Later, Stephen Scott

Linguaphiles' Journal

Two product warnings -

The US post office. Don't be mislead by their fraudulent so-called Priority mail. There's nothing priority about it except the name. Mail sent this way costs 20 times First class and doesn't get there any faster. In fact, it often gets there slower.

Second warning is Firefox. I'm very sad to say that while I tried Firefox and really liked it when it was in Beta, when they recently released the final official version 1.0 what they released was complete CRAP. I have no idea what happened but the nice program that did what I wanted it to and was fairly stable has turned into a complete and utter pice of crap. Of course, like most open source software, they think they are doing you a favor and therefore can be arrogant and rude and not supply any documentation. They can also not supply any help or tech support or explanations.

On a nice note, Andrew's in Vienna. I hope he has a fantastic time. I have 5 days off from work and plan to catch up on sleep. I've been suffering from major fatigue due to too little sleep and the disruption of my entire day/night activity cycle. I had intended to walk a bit today but it's raining so that's a great excuse to slob around the house instead.

Andrew is off to Vienna today. I hope he has a wonderful time there, takes loads of photos. I loaned him my digital camera. I was very excited about that camera when I first got it but it's amazinghow fast things change and now what I want is a really small thin one.

I'm listening to the Dresden Dolls, "Coin Operated Boy". I need to get more of their music and see if it's as good as this song.

Night work is still messing up my energy/sleep cycles. I'm off for 5 days for Thanksgiving. I'll be working on my resume and looking for a new job. I really need to get back to a normal day job.

I can see I'm babbling. I had something I wanted to blog about but I've forgotten.

Awesome, awesome solar video website!

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/spaceweather/lenticular/96_01seq_new.mov

You MUST see this! Simply must. 'Nuff said.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDREW!

Yes, today is Andrew's birthday. He's 21; an interesting milestone in life.

So, we met this morning and went off to have a birthday brunch (with a small side trip to the bank to deposit my paycheck which FINALLY arrived - only 2 weeks late).

Amyway, a pleasant morning meal with Andrew - and he will stop by again in a few days to pick up his birthday present. I also loaned him my new digital camera for his trip to Vienna next week. I look forward to seeing the photos he'll take.

I won't go into any philosophical outpouring about Andrew's birthday. He and I had a very nice conversation over breakfast this morning and I'm not particularly inclined to share with outsiders. It's not that kind of blog.

One thing we did talk about, and agree about, was people who live too much of their lives on the net. We substitute the net for a life and think that that is functional. It's not. The internet is not now and never has been "a life". Entertainment, hobby, employment, relaxation, distraction, information but not life.

I'm feeling pretty crappy at the moment. I just finished my second full week working installing/migrating/configuring computers and still haven't gotten paid yet. So that's actually the first partial week and then 2 full weeks pay they owe me. We were told so many different stories about when we'd be paid that I've gone thru all the stages of annoyance to anger to despair. The latest story is that they were delayed and rolled the first partial week's pay into the first full week's pay and then after being told several times that the checks were being processed and sent out, finally, in writing, told tthe checks were mailed out Thursday and should be here Saturday. Yeah, right. It's Saturday and the mail came and, what a surprise, no check.

FUCK!

Possibly it will be here in Monday's mail. The post office has been VERY slow delivering mail the past few weeks. My postlady claimed it was the massive amount of Xmas mail starting early. This is also bullshit.

I don't know what it is but it seems to me the bullshit level of life has recently increased to impossible levels. I don't think it's just that I'm looking at things through jaundiced eyes because I'm depressed. I think it's really so. All around me I see people just going through the motions. Doing as little as possible, as slowly as possible, with as little thought or effort as possible. This infuriates me because I sincerely always try to give what I do my best effort. Perhaps I should change my style and start becoming a slacker, too?

Anyway, I'm terribly upset at not being paid yet. Mind you, it's a 90 minute commute to work in New Jersey and the transportation costs me about $15 round trip each day. And this is to work that awful 5pm to 12 midnight period that screws up your sleep and wrecks your day. So my personal and financial costs for this job are a daily strain.

Arrgh, I don't usually rant quite like this. But this is simply awful. Simply awful. I feel like I'm no longer looking into the abyss but IN it. Damn, someone has to help me find a better job, a real job.

The work situation in New York City is really terrible. There are just so many people looking for work and so many companies laying off people. We are becoming a society of migrant cyber-workers. Buy us by the dozen, we're anonymous hands. Buy us by the hour and toss us away when finished. New hands always available. Easy-peasy. No wonder companies are getting away with forcing their staff into unpaid 60+ hour wook weeks. I've lived with that myself. Full time, permanant staff are all classified as exempt (ie no overtime) by a series of sleazy manouvers and ebnding definitions and rules. Snap, people routinely working 9am - 8pm and later, working weekends, working, working, working. So easy for companies to use/abuse workers now. So easy to outsource. Anyone who says outsourcing doesn't hurt the economy, doesn't hurt American workers is not just a liar, they're a damn liar. And they know it.

Yes, I'm ranting again. But the middle class is shrinking. The sides are pulling apart. And the ugly consequences are becoming very visible.

Hope your lives are more settled and positive. We now return you to your own realities.

First night at work went well! Commuting there takes a long time but it's relatively straightforward. Going home, I got a lift to my door from one of the other techs who lives in Brooklyn. Hopefully we can work it out so he'll do that every night. That would be ace.

Friday Andrew came over and we went to my local post office to apply for his new passport. Turned out, my post office had a clueful woman behind the counter. She was careful but helpful! What a shock ;) WIthin the hour Andrew's papers were certified and accepted for processing. He didn't need me at all- which is how his local post office *should* have done it on Thursday. I really hate incompetent civil service people, esp USPS jerks who seems to make a complete speciality of being the biggest jerks possible.

Anyway, having a relaxing weekend. Work starts for real on Monday.

So it's all set. I go in tonight for a training session, then Monday start a 3 week work contract. Get paid for the training tonight and paid each week. I'm a happy bunny.

Just spoke to Andrew. He has to renew his passport and his local post office are not only complete morons but giving him grief about it. He's going to meet me tomorrow morning and we'll go to my local post office instead and he'll renew it there. If there's any aggro, I can legally "identify" him.

Looks like I've got a 3 week temp gig doing an XP rollout for some financial institution. It's in NJ but not a bad commute from the Port Authority terminal. It's at night so my days will be free to continue job hunt and interviews.

My contact for temp jobs says my resume needs redoing. He's right, I haven't been happy with it. I -HATE- doing resumes.

Anyway, this means cash flowing in to Chez Barb again. I'm much relieved. If I could be sure of a steady supply of temp jobs I would be tempted to stick with that for a while. I'm in the middle of making some major life changing decisions - and this would give me some wiggle room untill I know what country I really want to concentrate my job search efforts on.

Ah well, we shall see. First I need to do this work successfully. I've already googled the specific tasks involved and done some serious refresher studying.

No need for flu shots here

When is a cold not a cold? When it's the flu. Well, lucky me, no need for a flu shot this year.

Four and a half hours - yes, 4 hrs and 30 min- WASTED by bastard ad/spyware crap program silently(invisibly) installed without my permission. Worse, without the permission or knowledge of the owner of the original artwork package I was trying to download. So now, 4 1/2 hours later, my PC is once more clean. HijackThis confirms it. And even more important, the horrified and mortified artist is now on the phone with her hosting service asking them what the hell is going on. Then she says she intends to change hosting services over the weekend.

What a nightmare.

Hello World.

Very strange...I get a call on my landline phone late this afternoon, about 4pm. Man says, Hi, This is Giovanni, is this Barbie? Nice, polite, well modulated voice but not familiar. And err, I never call myself Barbie. But, I meet a lot of people and who knows what name they may think of me as? So I say, This is Barb but I don't know any Giovannis so where do you know me from? He says, but we've talked so much on the chat line.

Bzzzt!

No, wrong answer. I've -NEVER- chatted on a phone chat line. I tell him, sorry no way. Never use them. He insists, very politely, that he recognises my voice. I don't think so.

I tell him someone must have given him my name and number but it's not me and I'm not interested. He says lets chat anyway. Jeez, what is this, some new pick-up technique? (This is all the shorthand version obviously) He's very apologetic and extremely polite, sounds as if he thinks this is weird, too.., says he's so sorry, please excuse and we end the call.

Now I'm doing a paranoia-instant replay and wondering if it was a simple mistake or some new scary criminal ploy? Like identity theft set-up or some deviant sex thing.

Arrgh! I know I should have just said - sorry, don't know any Giovanni- and just hung up. I didn't give out any info except yes there is a Barbie/Barb/someone at the number he dialed. But still, it's freaking weird.

Back in the old USA

A relatively decent flight. Saw two very amusing films: Saved, which is a excellent little send-up of the whole evangelical jesus-is-your-personal-saviour nonsense and the remake of The Stepford Wives. Stepford Wives didn't have the taught dark horror of the original. We've moved on and such topics are now simply more comedic fare. Be that as it may, the film wasn't particularly funny, at least not in the intended bits. Lots of unintended humour for me, I assume so from the fact I was laughing when others weren't. However, Bette Midler was great, she was so perfect and so funny. She made the film for me. I seriously think Bete Midler is enormously underappreciated as a great comic actress. But then we don't really like great comediennes as a society. Perhaps we allow Lucille Ball the honours but we're very unforgiving of others. A damn shame.

Anyway, Newark airport has a relatively painless Immigration and Customs set-up. Bravo Newark Airport!

Arrived to cold drizzle. Today is cold drizzle. Dark, gray, wey.

Cashed my damn check, paid phone bill and rent. All's right with the world. Kinda-sorta. Back to the job search.

Actually ended up speaking up at the last moment in London about some serious issues - got the usual frustrating, "why didn't you tell me yada-yada. I had no idea yada-yada." We'll see. More needs to be brought up and discussed. It will be.

On my way back home, I'm on my way home

The cab will be here in about 90 min to take me to Heathrow for my return flight. A nice time here but frustrating as we didn't settle the issues I came here to settle. So, I shall consider that an answer and act accordingly; not much choice otherwise I suppose.

I just keep thinking it's another case of "you don't know what you've got till it's lost" ...

Ah well. Ave atque vale, London and all that.

Holiday* in London still going well*.

* For the set of definitions of "holiday" that include business as usual, previous commitments, unfair practices, house cleaning, etc.
* For the set of definitions of "well" that include having a pleasurable time but exclude serious talk.

Yeah, yeah, having fun. The seamed black stockings and 5" high heels getting lots of milage.

Also, setting up job interviews for next week.
Going to pick up some goodies for Kate this weekend. Already got stacks of books and goodies for others to bring back.

Yesterday we went to the National Portrait Gallery to view an exhibition on Women Travellers. Small but remarkable exhibit of their portraits and their associated momentoes, sketches and work. Well worth trekking into town (and more of the endless long walks) to see. And another long walk after to have dinner at Cafe Pacifico. And then another LONG walk back to the train (I'd have been more than happy to take the tube - we passed 3 stations along the way!) and another long walk home from the train station at our destination. I like walking in nice weather. Not in cold wet windy weather.

I have a fairly nasty cold and today the weather is cold and drizzly -quite miserable. As we walk a lot here, this does not make it easier on me.

We're going into town shortly to meet for a marketing session. This is going to be a less than pleasant experience as I'm not going to play the nice, sweet, every obliging, optimist I usually do. Frankly, I've had it and intend to be blunt. I need a quid pro quo from now on. Btw, this is NOT my idea of what to do on a romantic or relaxing holiday.

Have I whinged enough yet? Just wait till tomorrow. That's been screwed up by a Labour party meeting in the evening. Thursday? The plumbers are coming for the annual maintenance. Friday? Pre-comitted to a dinner out with a bunch of friends. Saturday is actually FREE I think. Sunday is a ACCU meeting . And Monday I go back to the states.

Coming down with a stinking cold. Just figures, doesn't it. I'm determined not to let it spoil my time here in London. In about an hour we're going in to central London to the National Portrait Gallery. There's an exhibition on about 300 years of Women Travelers, not just their portraits but journals and objects they collected. Sounds good to me. Then dinner after at Belgo or Cafe Pacifico. Tomorrow's a marketing meeting. I don't really expect anything brilliant out of it. Same old people, same old crap.

Have I really been here almost 4 days? It's been nice. Very nice. Very, very nice.

From the secret fortress in London
OK, it's not a secret and it's not a fortress. But, it is London. And despite a long list of nightmarish obstacles , I've made it here safely.

And I having fun yet? Ummmmmmm yes!

Oh yes, and one more thing- I couldn't reach the other half by phone either. So I couldn't even moan and cry about how miserable and nightmarish my day was.

So there.

I suppose the next thing tha will happen is my flight will be hijacked or bombed.
I can just tell this is not the end of it all.

When a day goes bad, it goes right to hell!

Today was one of the genuinely worst days of my life in terms of things going wrong. FUCKING EVERYTHING WENT WRONG. This is beyond the laws of mere chance, this is beyond random. This is diabolical. I planned carefully, made arrangents, orgazined, and set up everything so carefully for today..and son of a bitch, each and every thing that was supposed to happen today was totally screwed up. None of the packages that were shipped, all sent overnight special air, UPS, extra cost to absolutely positively arrive today, arrived. All are mysteriously delayed. Each in a different way and for a different reason. My check didn't arrive. Another packaged sent US Post priority mail didn't arrive. I could go on and on. And to top it all off, the supreme treat, I had no cigarettes and couldn't leave the house because I was waiting for the deliveries.

Bastards. Kill them all!

Bored, bored, bored. I'm wasting my time today waiting around the house for things to be delivered. It's driving me nuts. This is my last day in the US before I fly off to the UK at 8:20 am Thursday morning. I'll be back - but not for 10 days. Meanwhile I'm waiting for stuff to be delivered. And it's all so time critical.

I need the packages and my check to be delivered. I need the damn packages delivered reasonably soon so I can take the check (assuming the postman delivers it) to the bank and deposit it so I will have money in the UK. And what's more there is another package waiting at the post office for me to pick up - but I can't go there untill the packages have been delivered. So I'm hoping everything will be here by 3pm so I can leg it over to the post office.

I was hoping everything would be here by 10am so I could run down to Chinatown and pick up some tea from Ten Ren to take with me. Ain't gonna happen. This is sad.

And worst of all, I'm out of cigarettes.

Arrrgh!

Did the time at the TechXNY Expo yesterday at the NY Women in technology booth. It was good because I need to professionally network more. I also met an old collegue from AboveNet who may be a good contact for a new job.

If you love something let it go free. If it doesn't come back, you never had it. If it comes back, love it forever.

-Doug Horton

This is shaping up to be one hell of a week.

Sunday I did my good deed and helped the Lunarians move their boxes and shelves and stuff out of their old storage room in Connecticut and then into their new storage room in New Jersey near Newark airport. Quite exhausting for me, I'm still in one of my episodic, seriously anemic stages. My dieting doesn't help either, but that's how it is. I was supposed to call and arrange to meet my older son Adam afterward. However, by the time I got home, I just flopped down on the bed and slept. By the time I woke up it was 7:30 pm and he had left for home. I hope he had a fine time in the city shopping for food goodies.

Then I went online, and I was gobsmacked to find an email waiting for me from my old friend Bo. We hadn't spoken in so long. Can it be almost a year? Time passes too quickly. We parted at the time with the friendship in tatters. And then suddenly Sunday I get the email. Subject: From the dead. With a very familiar, "Hi Barb". I posted a brief reply, saying how lovely it was to hear from him again and hoping he was well. Even better, I then went into Fed2, and there he was, waiting for me. It was really lovely talking again. I really missed him. He's a very special person. I hope we can rebuild the friendship. I think we both want that.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be helping staff the NY Women in Technology booth at the TechXNY Expo at the Jacob Javitz Center. Hoping to do some networking, make some contacts to help get a new job. NY WIT is a great group.

Wednesday is shaping up to be complete madness.
1. I have to get down to Chinatown and buy 2 special kinds of tea at a marvelous tea shop called Ten Ren. They have branches in several countries but nothing in the UK. So every time I fly to London I check if we need a resupply.
2. I also have to buy a liter of Sapphire gin. I have an early flight on Thursday and Duty Free won't be open. I know Virgin sells it at their in-flight duty free cart but they usually sell out in First Class and are all out when they get to the cattle class seats.
3. I have to take my check to the bank and deposit it so I'll have money in London.
4. i have to pay my phone bill. Luckily I paid the credit cards last week.
5. I'll pray to the internet gods that the cigarettes arrive with the mornign mail. If not I'll have to buy some crappy English ones from in-flight duty free. I'm such an addict.
6. Sort out my transport to the airport, check the reservations. I have an 8:20 am flight so I need to be at Newark airport sometime between 6:30 am and 7 am.
7. Pack my bag. I usually pack just before I leave but not with such an early flight.
8. Do all the other stuff I'm just not going to mention.
9. Clean the house and give Andrew the perishable stuff like steak.
10. Get Andrew to close and lock the bedroom window for me. That window is cursed.

Thursday I'm off to London for 10 days. It was supposed to be a long overdue relaxing holiday. Ha! Six out of the 10 days already have business commitments. Somehow I'll try to showhorn in some private time and visits to the 2 exhibitions I'd planned to see. It's really getting to be time to move over and end this silly constant commuting.

Job Interviews and Broken Promises

What a surprise, the company I interviewed with that promised to contact me and let me know one way or the other, that asked would I be reachable by phone until 8 pm or as early as 7am so they could set up a final interview on basically no notice and would I please hold Friday's schedule open so they could call me in....didn't even bother to send me an email saying thanks but no thanks.

Perhaps they don't put a high value on professional courtesy. I could understand not responding to resumes they were not interested in after the first eyeball review. But this far into the evaluation process, after a preliminary phone screening, a formal phone interview, contacting professional references, an in-person interview, and telling me they would let me know, that does surprise me. I'm glad I had the professional courtesy to promptly send them a post-interview thank you letter. I maintained my professionalism even if they didn't. Cold comfort, but there it is.

Well, I'm back to actively sending out resumes and looking for job ops.
It's a real bitch that the job offers I've had have all been from the UK. Can't get a work permit there for love or money.

Search Order
by Raúl Rivero

What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?

What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?

What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?

How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?

Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?

Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.

They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."

A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.

Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.

Note: Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, is serving a 20-year sentence. He is one of the dissidents Václav Havel and Elena Bonner are supporting in their campaign of solidarity. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico.

SHAUN of the DEAD

This film is fucking hilarious! It's the absolute perfect send up of all the George Romera Night of the/Dawn of the Dead films. A warning, it's very anglocentric humour. But, if you get the Brit lifestyle thing, you will be creasing up as you watch and screaming in laughter by the end.

I'm not a horror fan, but this film is just brilliant.

GOODBYE LENIN

Go see it! Awesome film. Awesome. Thank you, Andrew for loaning me the DVD. Awesome film. It brought tears to my eyes. Awesome.

The Strange World of Job Interviews

As if the agony of the whole job seeking/interview process isn't ugly and horrible enough, the bullshit you sometimes get from interviewers has the capability of making it infinitely worse.

Case in point, I responded to an inquiry posted on my women in technology list for a position that looked interesting and a good fit. I phoned the woman who posted the letter and check that the position was still available. We chatted briefl and she urged me to send in my resume, which I did.

About 10 days later I get a phone call from her saying they will be doing phone interviews and would I be available the next day. We set an appointment and I rearranged my afternoon schedule for the next day to accomodate the call. The phone interview seemed to go well and she said they would review all the phone interviews and decide which they would like to schedule for in person interviews. I would get an email letting me know what decision they'd made about me sometime the next afternoon, a Friday. Friday came and went and I assumed I was not their choice. Life goes on, tho I was a bit disappointed they had not sent me the email as promised, letting me know it was no thanks.

Monday, no email from them, I put them out of mind. I arranged to meet Astrid for lunch before she left for home in Switzerland. But, checking my email one last time before I left the house, I recieved an email asking if I could meet them on Thursday afternoon for an in person interview at their New York offices. Of course I could. I don't know if they were running late, if their first choices had declined, or they simply had no time sense about their commitments.

Thursday I showed up for the in person interview. I thought the session went well. They explained they would be interviewing all their semi-final picks and then selecting the final choices for an interview with the actual Director the position would direct report to. I was asked if I would be available to return on Friday and told they'd phone me between 7 & 8 and let me know either way. I said there was no problem, I'd be available, just phone and let me know. It was all smiles and a pleasure talking with you.

This morning, I sent them a polite post-interview thank you note. So far, no call to let me know either way. I can't imagine they meant next Friday. I'm sure they meant today. I've written them off but it's annoying they didn't bother phoning to let me know as they said they would. When I've been on the other side of the equation, I was always careful to email the applicant and let them know we appreciated their interest but had decided to select someone else. It's a simple but very important courtesy.

Perhaps I will be surprised and get a call from them yet. I won't bet the farm on it.

The Drowned and The Saved by Primo Levi

I'm reading The Drowned and The Saved by Primo Levi at the moment. Very engrossing book, lots to think about. Not at all the usual view of the death camps. More devastating for all that.

Asti's New York Holiday

Asti arrived in NYC on wednesday afternoon. I had a somewhat hectic day cleaning house before she arrived. But, even with a slightly delayed flight, her cab picked her up and she was soon here. It was great to see her again. She is gloriously attractive, as always and witty as ever. Since she was tired and starving, we grabbed a cab to my favorite Chinese/Sushi restaurant on Broadway and 101 street.I phoned Andrew before we left the house so he could meet us at the restaurant. Perfection! The food was drop dead wonderful.

We had delicate gyoza and 3 kinds of sushi for starters. Then we had crispy beef with orange flavor, sublime general tso's chicken, and beef chow fon for our mains. I should have taken a photo of the platters. They are huge slightly off round plates with vegetable flowers decorating some of the absolutely best chinese food I've ever eaten. Their general tso's chicken is truly sublime. And this is the ONLY place I ever eat chow fon, they make it so well. Usually I can only barely contrain my shudders even looking a chow fon. They also make the crispy beef with orange flavor correctly here! It's tender, juicy, rare slices of steak with a crispy sweet/hot coating. Oh man, this was such a perfect meal - and the company and conversation were as excellent.

After the meal we stood outside under the awning for a smoke break. Andrew and I were mourning that in a civilized city we could smoke in restaurants and linger over after dinner coffee but not in NYC any more. I said it was a pity there were no cafes with outdoor seating (and an awning to protect from the rain) where we could go for coffee and dessert and a smoke and just sit and chat because this evening was just so nice, much too nice to end it now. And praise be, Andrew said...let's go to the Hungarian Pastry Shop! So we grabbed a cab and were soon up at 113th ST and Amsterdam. In a giddy fit of indulgence Asti & I had double espressos and Andrew had a hungarian coffee (mountain of whipped cream on top). They also picked out about 6 dessert and we settled into a comfy little outside table with our goodies. We must have spent 3 hours sitting there in the cool moist night, sipping coffee, smoking, and talking. It was past midnight when we finished and waved down a cab back to my house. I loaded Andrew with a few packs of cigarettes since I refuse to support NY State's tobacco extrotion tax and after a bit more chat, we called a cab to take him home. Then Asti and I unwound a bit and finally got to bed.

What a terrific evening.

Thursday was a bit of a nightmare. Asti successfully dropped off her laundry, found a nail/wax/massage place and had some well deserved pampering, and made it back in time for us to have a late (1pm) breakfast of vegetable and chedder omelets. Then she phoned her hotel to verify check in time and address. And that's when the nightmare started. The company admin had neglected to make a room reservation. And of course, for reasons no one seems to know, there are NO decent hotel rooms available in NYC this weekend for under $500/night. Most places in fact are totally sold out. It was a genuine comedy of errors. I finally located a room for her at a rather posh east side Omni hotel but it was almost double the price she wanted. Her boss came through and said the company would cover it- afetr Asti waged suitable psychological warefare. So late Thursday evening she cabbed over to the hotel, checked in, and surrendered to luxury and room service for the night.

I slept very late this morning. I'm suddenly terribly anemic again and weak. So Asti's call at 11:20am woke me up. We arranged to meet about 1pm for lunch - so I had time to run out and retrieve our clean laundry. I dropped mine off a thew house and zoomed down to the hotel. We did the Carnegie Deli fora classic NYC lunch, pastrami on rye and Dr Brown's diet celery soda. What a hoot that place is. Then a stroll over to Lindy's for coffee and cheesecake (1 slice shared) in their lovely little outdoor area. Lot sof great people watching ops. Finally Asti wandered off to get cheap discount tickets to a Broadway place and I took the subway back uptown to my neighborhood and walked back to the house.

Firefox

I updated to Firefox 1.0 (preview release) ie They really, really, really wanted to release 1.0 FINALLY! but....they weren't confident enough to stand behind their work so they hedged their bets and called it "1.0 preview release" so if it's really fucked up or everyone hates it they can claim it's not really the REAL 1.0, it's the preview.

Umm, funny but we used to call that beta and stick with a 9.something release number. When we go to v1.whatever it's because we've drawn the line, taken a deep breath, and presented the item as The Real Thing. Of course we'll issue further releases as we correct bugs, add new features, etc.

So what's with the weasily 1.0 preview release nonsense.

Anyway I downloaded and installed it. Frankly Firefox is crap without the extensions. Loads of potential that's NON-FUNCTIONAL without the extentions tha put all that potential to actual use.
We'll see how it goes. If they don't open up a load of utility extensions real soon I will just go back to SlimBrowser.

My useless baysian email filter

I've always used and like MS Outlook and Outlook Express. However, the increasing avalanche of viruses-worms-malware, what have you, combined with the ongoing vulnerability of Outlook and OE to said criminal crapware pushed me to try an alternative email application.

In the past I've tried others that friends and collegues have highly recommended. I've given those an honest try -usually 3 months because my dear ones would always cry, "but Barb, you have to give it a real chance, have to stick with it , get used to it a bit, it'll grow on you!" No, sorry , 3 months is way more than enough to confirm that crap software is crap. Not just lacking functionality but distinctly unpleasant to use. The following are my Two Lousiest Email Programs I've Ever Used-

Eudora
Pegasus

Absolute shite. My dear ones who use these applications have a million excuses why they use it. The truth is, they are willing to put up with poor usability and lousy functionality just so they don't have to use an MS product.

Btw I have dear ones who do the same thing with MS Project. There is simply no substitute for MS Project yet. But these dear ones still keep trying pathetic open source wannabe-MSProject-clones that are shite. And they know it, and they even admit it. Idiots.

Sorry, I don't work that way. That's too stupid to even discuss.

Anyway, I was playing around with a alternate browser called Firefiox. It's rather nice, I like the tabbed window thing,. Firefox is one of those very cool, tres nift applications that just not quite ready for prime time yet. But it has enormous potential. I quite like Firefox except when it unexpectedly digs its heels in and does something dumb. But I'm still using it- for now, because it simply has so many EXCELLENT features. Firefox is an evolution of Mozilla. Funny enough, I loathed Mozilla. Still don't like it.

Anyway Firefox has a companion email program called Thunderbird. Yes, I'm tired of the silly names, too but what can you do? Anyway, since I was looking for a safer alternative to Outlook Express, I tried Thunderbird. And it's raher nice. I don't think it wins any prizes yet tho. It's still very crude. Its formatting system for composing mails is so bad, so irritatin, and so time wasting tha I will probably soon go back to Outlook Express.

So, what's all this got to do with baysian filters? Ah ha, well, Thunderbird uses that for its spam filter. And I have been trying to "train" this so called spam filter for almost 5 weeks now. Hopeless, useless, doesn't work. It's as if the filter ignores me when I keep clicking "not junk" day after day on the same exact emails it keeps marking as junk.

Now the program is supposed to automatically classifiy any email coming from addresses listed in your addressbook as "not junk". So I make sure these emails are listed in my addressbook. The filter still marks them as junk and sends them to my spam folder.

5 weeks and it hasn't learned? No way, this filter has obviously decided to ignore me.

I'll give it a few more weeks and then I think it's back to good old reliable Microsoft products.

Build me a more functional, intuitively usable mousetrap and I'll happy use it. Till then, I'll stick with MSMouseTrap, thank you very much.

Useless knowledge of the day contest

What is linen water?

I was out today doing various weekly chores. As a treat for myself I stopped by a little local close-outs shop. This place is definitely legit since it cycles through all sorts of luxurious and posh items that I've drooled over at their original prices. Of course, these luxurious products are usually sold in posh shops in trendy areas. I guess the ends and leftovers get sent off to cheap little stores in marginal residential areas, there to salvage their last bit of value by selling for 99 cents.

Today, to my delight, the shop had a rag tag assortment of natural French traditional scents products ...including a case of elegant bottles of linen water. Yes, I do know what linen water is. The shop owner had no idea tho, as I discovered chatting with him while I waited on line to check out. I explained to him the concept and use of linen water and he was thoroughly horrified at the decadence of it. Clearly a holdover of the Raj. He denounced it loudly.

So, your mission if you choose to accept it, is to explain what linen water is.
I'll provide the answer next week.

RAIN-RAIN-RAIN-RAIN

Blech- it's been raining here all day. Not gentle rain. Pouring rain. Flooding rain. Cold and clammy rain. Flood the subwats and low lying highways rain. Our little gift from Hurricane Frances rain.

Rain, blech.
On with the rain coat. Out with the umbrella.
Into the rain.

New Events in my so-called Life

1. I've made reservations on VirginAtlantic to fly to London Oct 7th.

Alan's been nagging me about this for a while now. I've put it off because I couldn't financially justify it when I wasn't working. Finally Alan called and told me to just put it on his frequent flyer miles and use his credit card to pay the fees. So voila, I'm off to London. I'm just waiting for them to send the e-ticket so I can pick my seats

2. I'm looking for a job.

I know, I know, I've been looking for a new job for a while now. But I've moved myself into high gear now and I'm working very seriously at it, really truly looking. And no, going to London won't screw it up. The last 3 jobs I got were all within a week of making reservations to go to London. It's almost like some good luck talisman. They were all fine about the scheduling, too.

3. I've gone back on my serious diet again.

I guess this is all part and parcel of putting my life back together again. I was really pleased how well the dieting went last year. So I expect similar results this year. Perhaps even to the point of reaching maintenance. We shall see.

I couldn't get to the gym today. Not that I didn't try. I walked all the way there, a pleasant brisk walk in this cooler weather. When I arrived at the nearest corner I was blocked by police lines. The street was filled with - wait for it- The Media. Former president Clinton had checked into the hospital and the media was hovering outside desperate for a photo op or a chance to rush someone, anyone with "face" or "name" to comment.

So I was turned back. Bad Barb - no ID to prove to the secret service who I was. All I had on me was a house key and cell phone. The local NYC cops would have let me thru but the secret service dork insisted that ANYONE could be a terrorist.

Uh huh, yeah, right.
Hmm perhaps they will blame the disaster in Russia on me, next.

Seige at the Russian School

Of course, everything is still in chaos as surviving chidren and other hostages are rushed to local hospitals and emergency centers in Beslan, Russia. But the media spin is starting already- putting the blame for this brutal and inexcusable atrocity on the Russian RESCUERS instead of clearly and squarly where ti belongs - on the Ilamic and Arabic TERRORISTS.

I'm just waiting to see how long before the figure out a way to blame Israel and the Jews for it. This is the New World Agenda. Look how brilliantly appeasement is working in Iraq.

Welcome to our brave new world where cold, calculating terrorists take a schoolful of little children and their parents and teachers hostage - hold them in high heat for 3 days with no food or water, surround them with shrapnel filled mines, shoot them, torture and murder them and then .....the blame for this is placed on the rescuers and we are asked to understand the pressures that caused the terrorists to do what they did. Does this include the 10 Arab mercenaries in the hotage-taking terrorist gang? Probably, it'll even give the media the opening for blaming Israel - and probably the US as well. Why shift the blame?

Ah, there's the rub. The West MUST shift the blame. If we ever stop shifting the blame, we might be forced to look at the facts. To place the blame on the terrorists themselves. To admit there might be other cultures that do not define peace as we do, who do not want the sort of peaceful, tolerant civilization we want. We might have to admit the lessons history should have taught us.

My take is we need zero tolerance for terrorists. Zero tolerance for hostage takers.

When it rains it pours - as I sat at the keyboard, sipping coffee, and typing about the new mouse capture, another one stepped onto a glue trap. So, a most successful morning.

Ode to Mouse

I was so deeply and pleasantly asleep this morning. I know this because when the sounds started I didn't actually wake up. I just silkily drifted up to that floating, warm, comfy dream state which is very lovely and relaxing. There's no real time sense in that state so I have no idea how long it was before my brain interpreted the sounds as being the frantic cries of a mouse caught in a trap. At that, I was instantly awake. And that's how I knew how mavelously well I'd been sleeping since I was alert, well rested, and feeling great. Full of energy. Which I haven't been for weeks now.

A quick peek revealed the trapped mouse. Stuck to the glue trap. I'll dispose of it later. Of course now I'm completely wide awake.

So glad I was wrong!

My hat's off to the leaders/organisers of United for Peace and Justice. They did a magnificent job of keeping the march peaceful and controlled. And considering there were probably 500,000 people there, that is an amazing feat!

Bravo!

What a pity, the early forcasts called for serious thunderstorms on Sunday afternoon. Now it will just be hot and humid. I was hoping the downpour and lightning would dampen the idiot/protestors who planned to illegally rally in Central Park and destroy the Great Lawn.

Having spent a great deal of my childhood playing on the Great Lawn and most recently helping to raise money to finish its renovation after years of abuse by massive groups, I take this issue rather personally.

Anyway, today I need to go downtown and brave the chaos of the ciminals/anarchist/professional & recreational protestors. I have great respect for the genuine legitimate organizations which plan orderly, civil demonstrations. I belong to several myself and that's why I'm going downtown today. But my goal is not to disrupt innocent people's lives. I'll be part of a mass voter registration drive.

Tomorrow's goal is more crass. Andrew is meeting me to carry home the TV I plan to buy. Yes, I'm going to break down and buy a TV. After 18 months being TV-less, I'm giving in and bringing one into my house again.

The Arrogance of Protest

It's the start of a week of massively, inexcusibly, arrogant recreational prottests in NYC. The disruption to everyday life for city dwellers is inexcusable but the arrogance of those causing the incidents makes is all the worse and not surprisingly, very devisive.

For the most part these people are not locals. Their protests are really aimed at causing as much chaos and general disruption to the city and its citizen's lives as possible.The point of this escapes me as New York City is most definitely not Bush Country. Want to punish the idiots who voted for this little tin pot hitler? Go to Arizona or Kansas.

Tonight's treat was a cute little circus act of about 1000 bicylces weaving their way through the friday night traffic - the wrong way, ignoring lights, ignoring pedestrian crossings. They are very lucky that NYC drivers are actually quite courteous. Elsewhere they might find drivers a lot more hostile and less willing to give up right-of-way to some arrogant little bastard on a bike. Traffic, as you can imagine, is a mess. I decided it wasn't worth going down to 23rd st to meet friends for dinner. That seems to be an area of focus for the 2-wheeler moron set.

Happy Birthday Asti 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ASTRID

The Joy of Cell Phones

I just got a new cell phone yesterday, a Nokia 6200IM. With this phone, I've finally fallen in love. It just does things so right. All the countless little annoying things about previous cell phones have been corrected. Even the address book is reasonable to use.

Mousetime again

Sometime during the night another mouse was caught. I thought I'd gotten them all before but I suppose this wil be ongoing. The original total was 5 I believe and then I got another 1 last week but nothing since. Foolishly I was thinking of dumping the glue traps. Just as well I didn't.

Andrew is returned from his holiday at Walt Disney World. I loaned him my digital camera and I'll be downloading the photos from it later this afternoon. Other than the camera, Andrew planned and paid for the entire vacation for him and Kate all by himself. He said they had a great time- he'll fill me in on the details today.

I've decided that my Hispanic neighbors on this street come equipped with volume controls with only 3 settings.
1. Very Loud
2. Soundblasting Loud
3. Excruciating Loud

This is not just their radios and CD players, it includes their children. I routinely see families standing in the street chatting, a small child with them screaming at top volume and being completely ignored. Obviously the "being ignored" bit has something to do with this. However, there's definitely a different definition of acceptable noise levels.

I really -HATE- gMail.
The service itself may be great but their customer service is in the toilet. I had one of the first gMail accounts and it was fine. Butthen one day I tried to log on and couldn't. After monumental efforts I contacted a human at gMail and they confirmed I was using my correct username and password. I assume they sorted something internally because suddenly I was able to log on again. For a week.

Then I could't log on., Still can't. Can't reach anyone at gMail or Google to help.
Can't start a new account either.

Bastards!
I hate companies who arrogantly trash their users.
I HATE gMail.

Andrew and Kate left for Orlando, FL for their holiday at Walt Disney World today. Andrew called from Orlando airport to let me know he arrived safely...and that it was a very turbulent flight. No doubt, with the remnants of Hurricane Charley still around.

Anyway, it's an exciting time for him- his first grownup vacation. Planned and paid for all by himself. I'm hoping they have a fantastic time and get some great photos to bring home with them.

Mouse status report

So far 4 mice caught. Luckily they are stupid little creatures. I just put a glue trap by the hinge side of the door and they keep marching in there to die. So far the total is 4 mice. I just threw out the most recent kill. Fresh trap is waiting.

The World Is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.---Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

-WIlliam Wordsworth

Tales of the mouse

About 6 weeks ago I bought myself what I thought would be a productive treat - a wireless optical mouse. But it was neither productive nor a treat. The mouse had a mind of its own. The pointer would dissappear and go skidding off into a carnor and I'd be clicking away and tapping the mouse and cursing. I tried all the sensible, logical things like making sure there were no machines or sources of interference nearby, bringing the sending unit closer, checking the USB port, etc. No joy. Finally, in deperation and with my mousing hand beginning to ache, I gave up and bought a wired optical mouse.

And what did I find? The wired optical mouse did the same crazy things! This time I knew it couldn't be hardware failure so I started checking out the software. I tried updating and reinstalling the s/w and the drivers and the device manager. No joy! Yes the mouse was clean. It was brand new but I checked anyway.

Today, by accident something I was reading triggered something way, deep in the dusty vaults of my mind and I suspicously tucked away my new and stylish SuSe Linux mouse pad. I got out a sheet of paper towel and started mousing on that.

Problem solved.

::sigh::

The other tale of a mouse concerns the other sort of mouse, the nasty little furry ones. We've had so much rain lately that the mice seem to have migrated to drier spaces. Being on the ground floor and with a lovely convenient space under the front door of the apt and god alone knows what other little cracks and openings in the walls in closets and behind appliances, I started hearing suspiciously familiar noises at night. Then yesterday while I was online, I saw a small, dark body scurry from under the sofa across the floor and under the door. I didn't think I was hallucinating. It explained the familiar sounds. So I went to the store, bought some glue traps and set them out. Twenty minutes later the glue trap along the wall under my desk had trapped its first victim! I tossed that out into a metal can in the garbage room. Problem solved.

Not so fast.....later that afternoon I heard those suspicious sounds again, then walking down the hall to the bathroom I saw another furry little body scurry out under the bathroom door and across the hall to the closet.

Ok, back to the store for a bunch of mousey glue traps. My house is now a mouse-mine field. Death to rodents.

Your giggle for the day

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end.php

How the world will end...very clever and amusing.

Catch-up on July

It's been a crazy hectic month and it's not over yet.

On July 16th, we launched Federation II. It went off very successfully with a big online launch party that was great fun for everyone. It was also terribly stressful, enormous work, emotionally ravaging. People said heartbreakingly terrible things to each other as they started to break down toward the end. And now that we've built it, will they come? That's the $64,000 question as they used to say. And it's also my next project for Fed2.

My daughter Asti was in NYC and we met at Cafe Figaro for cappucino and cannolis. Had a lovely time chatting. Great afternoon

Andrew's getting ready for vacatin. Busy working in the lab. Getting paid for his research work.

Miserably hot and humid here.

All aboard the train from Paris, mes petits enfants doux

In Paris, railroad station focuseson history of Shoah deportations
By Philip Carmel

PARIS, July 18 (JTA) — Almost two months had gone by since the Normandy landings, and the Allies were closing in on Paris — but Nazi authorities in the French capital had other priorities.
On July 31, 1944, the final transport of French Jews left the transit camp of Drancy in the northern suburbs of Paris carrying 325 children. It was bound for Auschwitz.
That event, the 78th transport to leave France for the death camps, is being commemorated through July 19 at Paris’s Gare du Nord train station.
The station is hosting a photo exhibition entitled “The Last Transport, Jewish Children Deportees,” which marks the final event commemorating the 60th anniversaries of the deportations of some 73,000 Jews from France between 1942 and 1944.
The exhibit, which shows hundreds of portraits of Jewish children, already has appeared in 18 railway stations across France and at the head office of the SNCF, the national railway company.
The pictures are part of a vast collection of photographs and Holocaust archival material brought together by the French Holocaust survivors’ organization, Sons and Daughters of French Jewish Deportees.
Set up in 1979 by Serge Klarsfeld and his German-born wife Beate — who have spent decades seeking and prosecuting Nazi war criminals and the French collaborators who assisted them — the group has organized more than 80 commemorations over the past two years to mark the departure of every transport to the camps.
Those events, mostly held at Drancy but also at far-flung provincial railway stations and internment camps across France, generally have been modest affairs attended by a handful of local officials and activists of Klarsfeld’s group.
The group’s obstinate commitment to mark the exact date of each transport has been important in personalizing the horror of the deportations, but Klarsfeld recognizes that the station exhibits have been most effective in bringing the subject to a wider public.
For Klarsfeld, who approached the railway company to host the exhibitions in 2001, the choice of train stations was both a logical and a highly symbolic decision.
“There are thousands of people passing through these stations every day, and most of those people would never see these exhibitions in museums,” Klarsfeld said.
More importantly, he pointed out, was the centrality of trains in the deaths of millions of Jews during the Shoah.
“More than anything, it is the train that evokes the route of the martyr,” he said.
Klarsfeld, who successfully pursued and brought to trial Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie and French officials such as Maurice Papon and Rene Bousquet, rejects claims that the railway company should be held responsible for providing the trains for the deportations.
“We don’t hold them guilty. They had no choice as a public-owned company forced to carry out work by the Vichy government,” Klarsfeld said. “Justice should be carried out for those who led the anti-Jewish round-ups.”
“We have never claimed anything against the SNCF. That would be like trying French gendarmes or German soldiers,” he said.
For some, though, trains still evoke a painful memory, even 60 years later.
“I can’t stand trains, smoke, stations, even some kinds of light,” Simon Drucker said.
Drucker was rounded-up at the Vel d’Hiver bicycle stadium in July 1942 — where thousands of Jews from the Paris region were held before being deported to Auschwitz — and he was one of a number of Holocaust survivors explaining the significance of the photos to interested passengers at Gare du Nord.
Drucker said he remembered the clinical efficiency of the transports.
“The trains left at exactly the right time,” he said. “There was never a derailment and they always arrived at Auschwitz at the right time.”
Charles Barron, another French Holocaust survivor who was liberated from Dachau in1945, said he was particularly struck by the contrast between his own deportation and the bustling nature of Gare du Nord at the start of France’s summer holiday period this year.
“I remember the noise of the steam trains, the whistles and the shunting of wagons,” he said. “Today, it’s all so different. You see huge buildings with millions of people passing through.”
Nevertheless, it remains “symbolically important” to hold the exhibitions at the stations, he said.
“Stations are a place for release on the way to and from work. People sometimes have an hour to spare while they wait around for a train,” Barron said. “I think it’s better doing it here than in museums, where people can feel trapped and they become indifferent. Here they’re more sensitive to it.”
As at other stations, the exhibit dominates the front entrance to Gare du Nord.
Given the station’s function as a principal destination for trans-European routes and the departure point for London-bound trains, the railway company decided to host an additional exhibit in English in the waiting area for Eurostar trains crossing the English Channel.
David Rebibo, an Orthodox rabbi from Phoenix, Ariz., said he was taken aback when he arrived by train from Copenhagen to see a banner proclaiming the exhibition.
“It was the first thing I saw when I got here, and I was surprised,” he said. “I know there’s such strong anti-Semitism in France, so I never expected to see such a thing here.”
Rebibo said he was very moved by the pictures, and by the fact they had been placed in such a public place.
“It’s so important to educate people about this and so easy for people to forget what happened,” he said.
Rebibo said he had contacted Klarsfeld to ask whether he could bring the exhibition to his community in Arizona.
Arielle Ferhadian from Paris was seeing off her children as they boarded a train to London, and stopped to look at the photos.
“You see this and you realize that railway stations can be associated with contradictions,” she said. “It’s about travel and leisure, but there also has been murder and distress at these places.”
For others, it was not only the pictures of the victims that left a telling mark.
Axel Krause, a history teacher from Hamburg, stopped for a time in front of a picture of German soldiers.
“I know the pictures because I teach kids about this, but for me it’s also a very living memory because my grandfather and father were soldiers,” he said.
After it closes in Paris, the exhibition will appear probably for the last time in public in Jerusalem next Jan. 27, marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
But as Klarsfeld has noted, this form of remembrance is unlikely to be repeated.
In a booklet prepared in 2002 to introduce the 60th anniversary commemorations, Klarsfeld wrote that this period was exceptional “because there are still among us hundreds who survived Auschwitz, there are thousands of children who survived while their parents were deported, and tens of thousands who passed through the Shoah without being deported and who did not lose their parents.”
“In 10 years time, that will no longer be the case,” he wrote.

With all the serious things I could comment on- the agony of the world railing against injustice - the thing on my mind is why do deli counter clerks lie about slicing Boar's Head Ham thin when requested? It's like a point of honor for them to try to get away with slicing cold cuts as thickly as possible so they can get it over with and get rid of you and go on with whatever earthshaking occupation they prefer - like chatting up some cashier.

This is the truth about the human race. We don't really give a damn about genocide in the Sudan, government corruption, or space exploration. We really just want to leap over the deli counter and strangle that lazy, lying bastard clerk.

Thus ends the lesson.

How can someone casually ask me, "Explain DNS to me?". I just couldn't believe this; this is a whole field of study and frankly I would never casually ask someone to just hand me info. Haven't people heard of Google? Duh! You go to google first and make an effort to learn for yourself. Then you go ask questions to clarify details or to get specifics about how it applies to a particular situation. But just "Explain this?", get real.

By default, I'm the Sys Admin for IBgames. I'm also the head of their Tech/Test Team, their marketing/PR person, and I wrote amusing pieces for their newsletter and build planets. Starting next week I'll be writing a regular, weekly column about IBgames/Fed2 tech news and advice for players.

Damn. The things we do for love.

Spacecraft Cassini Enters Saturn's Orbit! Mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers shortly before 9 p.m. PDT when a radio signal indicated Cassini had been captured by Saturn.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

I've finally gotten DSL installed. I'm back among the living again.

Brave New World of No-Cheese - Cheese Pizza

I'm just back from the supermarket, decided to combine my daily exercise walk with a practical bit of grocery shopping. It's so hot and humid here I hadn't eaten all day, seeing and seeing that frozen pizza was on sale, I decided a single serving size wouldn't be bad at all.

Bzzzt! Wrong! Unless you're in the mood for a mouthful of chemical goop masquerading as cheese...DO NOT BUY SUPERMARKET PIZZA - unless - it prominently displays the 100% REAL CHEESE symbol.

I searched the freezer cabinets and couldn't find a single package of frozen pizza marked 100% real cheese (and that 100% is important, folks!).

What is being foisted off on you is no different in spirit (and sometimes ingredients) than the adulterated, nauseating, and often toxic ersatz mixtures we read about in horror during previous centuries. And you Americans thought the FDA and the USDA were established to protect you? Wrong again.

How Can They Label It Cheese Pizza When There Is No Cheese?

I know, you're thinking, c'mon Barb, there are laws that cover labeling foods. And disclosure and what about the USDA?

Well, once upon a time food packages had to disclose what the contents really were in a truthful manner. Of course there were subtle workaround but at least you had standard clues. If it said cheese, it damn well had to be the natural DAIRY product defined by the USDA as cheese. If it said cheese flavour you know that meant Watch Out!.

With the introduction of mandatory product ingredient labeling (and I won't get into that because that is loaded with allowed cheats)food manufacturers lobbied for rule changes on the package labeling.

On October 22, 2003 the USDA eliminated the standards for pizza products. "The standards were eliminated to allow for more innovation in pizza manufacturing."

So what are they trying to feed you when they sell you ersatz cheese? Start with partially hydrogenated oils (can we say Trans-Fats? I knew you could), soy products, yeasts, fungus, starch, water, emulsifiers, colorings and artificial flavors, HIGH amounts of sodium, and other chemicals. You're basically getting processed oil.

And boy! but that oil looks good compared to the newest cunning trick in imitation cheese manufacture....replacing the oil with Genetically and Chemically altered manufactured FIBER. Yes, "functional fibre" the brave new world newspeak - Novelose resistant starch constitutes the first commercialised concentrated source of enzyme-resistant starch for the food industry.

Soylent Green, People, Soylent Green.
On your pizza.

I didn't buy the frozen pizza. I bought some fresh brown eggs for breakfast tomorrow and some rolls from the bakery. I stopped at the local pizzeria on my way home. I know they use real dairy mozzarella cheese, the empty boxes are stacked up to go into the rubbish tip. The make the pizza themselves. You can watch them making the dough early in the mornings. It's a simple product, crust dough stretched by hand, tomato sauce ladled on, handsfulls of shredded mozzarella tossed on top, pure virgin olive oil drizzled on, a quick flick of oregano. For $1.25 I bought myself 1 slice from a cheese pizza pie fresh from the oven.

Life could be so simple...

Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to visit Andrew at his lab. He's extremely enthused about his work with quantum dots. I'm really delighted for him.

Do not see films on IMAX!
You've been warned.

I saw Harry Potter again on a non-Imax and it was great. None of the weird unpleasant cinematography I disliked so much on the IMAX "remastered" version.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I just returned home from an evening out with Andrew celebrating the end of another successful academic year, brilliant grades, and his first paying job (working in the organic chemistry lab) making and researching quantum dots. In fact, today was his first successful batch of quantum dots!

Alan and I got him a nifty little digital sound recorder with a rather nice built in camera. He wanted one so he could capture his summer session organic chemistry professor's lectures and then save them to files on his PC.

We decided to complete the celebration by watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on IMAX. So we met at the cinema near Lincoln Center and after buying tickets strolled up Broadway to a restaurant. A pleasant dinner, good food and good talk. Then back to the cinema for the much awaited Harry Potter 3 film.

I'm still thinking about it and deciding how I liked it as well as how much I liked it. It's not a simple decision as the first 2 films were. They were ace, they were brilliant, they were the book and the fantasy come to life. This one is different. I wouldn't bother seeing it on IMAX if you have a proper widescreen cinema.

I'll post my critque of the film later. Right now it's coffee and a cigarette time.

AMUSING vs IDIOTIC

There is a serious problem on the internet with perspective. So many people seem to have lost the line between what is amusing and what is just idiotic.Here's my personal list:

AMUSING IDIOTIC

Witty Roleplaying Elf princesses, Forsooth speak
Pirates of the Carribean Pireate Queens, Pirate Talk
Sapphire G&T Drunk
Witty flirting Cybersex, Porn, Adultery

What a week this has been.

My hair.
It's long and getting longer and I like that. I changed the colour and I really like that. It's back to my own dark reddish brown and I love it.

vs

The miserable world.
A week of almost endless cold drizzle that stops just long enough for me to leave the house and starts just as I've gone slightly past the mid-way point of wherever I was going so I can walk back wet and chilled.

The US Mail.
My important letters have gone astray - 2 checks sent out 5 days ago.
Our postman delivers the mail at 4pm; the post office claims they rotate the route but it's over a year and I haven't seen us chamge from last delivery position to first yet.
The mail carriers are lazy, arrogant, often just don't deliver and there's an attitude problem.
I think there's a direct relationship between the sort of people working for the USPS and the sort of people working for the US Army in Iraq who recreationally torture people.

Crappy software
AOL - bloatware, controlware supreme
RealPlayer -spyware, controlware - AOL forced insall
ViewMgr/mediaplayer - (starts to sound familiar) spyware, controlware, - AOL forced install

Basically I got tired of my computer which used to be a clean quick responsive and stable machine turning into the digital experience fro hell. So I uninstalled AOL and all the programs they forced me to install that I never wanted in the first place. Ran spybot to make sure everythng was gone and cleaned up.

Voila! My computer is back to its normal pleasant to use stable state again.

Wait a minute! It's stopped raining! (to quote Alan Sherman)

I'm outta here! The sunshine is calling me....

The glory of war...

From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes, and now the water was rising about them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning. Horrible visions came to me with those cries - of Woods and Kent, Edge and Taylor, lying maimed out there trusting that their pals would find them, and now dying terribly, alone amongst the dead in the inky darkness. And we could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries...

Edward Campion Vaughan

'There was not a sign of life of any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of grass. Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn. Death was written large everywhere. Where there had been farms there was not a stick or a stone to show. You only knew them because they were marked on the map. The earth had been churned and re-churned. It was simply a soft, sloppy mess, into which you sank up to the neck if you slipped from the duckboard tracks - and the enemy had the range of those slippery ways. Shell hole cut across shell hole. Pits of earth, like simmering fat, brimful of water and slimy mud, mile after mile as far as the eye could see. It is not possible to set down the things that could be written of the Salient. They would haunt your dreams.'

RA Colwell, Private, Passchendaele

Memorial Day

The jets just thundered overhead in the Missing Man formation. They flew by very low, I could feel the bass vibrations rumble through me.

I'm a child of the Vietnam era. I silently remember - dead bodies in jungle clearings, a letter from my brother asking for help for a orphanage in Quang Tri, a dinner party in South Ozone Park where a friend home from the war leaped behind a chair in relex duck and cover when a car backfired loudly outside. I remember a college friend who used to shyly carry my books going off and not returning.

I remember taking my children to Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville; walking the lines on a battlefield where the trenches were evident over a century later.

Taps was played earlier. I remember being taken as a child to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; standing silent, hand held by my mother. Years later I went with Alan and Nick to the Vietnam memorial in Washington. Walked the wall silently reading the names, tears dripping down my cheeks at the loss, the sacrifice. I remember Alan's voice when he told me about Passchendaele.

There are no easy answers for why we march these young souls off to war and sacrifice them to the firey mouth of Moloch. The least I can do is remember.

Why I despise Opera browser

I haven't mention how much I dislike Opera broser. I really despise it and loathe the people who produced it both for their deception and arrogance. I uninstalled it tonight and suddenly all the awful problems my laptop was having disappeared. it definitely has a serious memory leak-resource management problem. It has loads of other problems I won't even go into. Also, the bastards who produce it do not supply a users manual. They refuse to support it if you use it as adware. They exchange the free use for allowin gthem to feed ads to your PC, claim it's free then. It's n ot, you HAVE paid for it by allowin gthem to send you adverts. And then they demand to be paid to tell you how to use it? No. This is not on.

In its place I installed Flashpeak Slimbrowser. This is an excellent product and freeware. Genuine freeware. As in no adverts. No bullshit. Free. And a real manual. And courteous support. My computer likes it as much as I do. It's a lovely piece of software, great usability, browsing becomes the pleasure it should be.

I must be suffering an episode of brain deadness. I logged onto Blogger to post something that occured to me and I thought was sufficiently important and interesting enough to post. By the time I got here, after all the interruptions, I'd completely forgotten what it was I wanted to post. I suppose that means it wasn't exactly world shaking.

It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.
Emma Goldman

Another thunderstorm today. Two in the afternoon and dark as past sunset. Then the thunder. It's soothing, a low rumble in the background slowly drawing nearer, getting louder. Almost hypnotic.

Loud, loud peals of thunder now. No lightning flashes that I can see from here. Just pouring rain, a heavy soaking downpour that has driven all the neighborhood children inside on the after-school start of a 3 day national holiday here. Not to belittle the memories of those whose sacrifices are the basis of this holiday, but we know the real meaning of this holiday here. It's the start of summer. The start of the slide towards the end of the school year, summer vacation.

When I was a small child this was the time of year when suddenly great towers of neatly folded linens would appear in the bedrooms to air in the breeze from opened windows. Closets would be turned out, storage boxes unpacked of all the summer wear. Then in a flash, a few days later, it would all disappear and huge steamer trucks and barrels would start to line the hall and block the pathways from the bedrooms. Next morning they would disappear; once I woke up very early, before dawn perhaps and discovered my dad wrestling a barrel down the front stairs and into an open truck. The back of the truck, boards for sides, no roof, was filled with trunks and crates and barrels.

All returned to normal then for the few remaining weeks of school. Finally, on the last Friday in June, the last day of school arrived. I, along with all the other noisy throng of children, went running home with my report card, proudly shrieking that I'd been promoted.

The next morning, Saturday, we'd be woken early, helped into play clothes and given a rushed breakfast. A loud honking from the street would stop everyone in their tracks and produce a sudden parental frenzy of activity. Then I'd remember, it's time to go to Spring Valley for the summer. Away from the sweltering heat, away from the dreaded polio epidemics. And we'd run to the hack waiting outside to take us north to a cool green valley with apple orchards, where my mother and grandmother would make vast cauldrons of applesauce and I'd sit with my grandfather on an old stone wall by the side of the road, waiting for the occasional car to go by and we'd shout KALAMAZOOO!!! at it as they passed.

I'm sitting at my laptop now, years later, it's pouring rain outside and thundering. Spring Valley is now a crowded commuter suburb north of New York City. It's dirty and noisy and has crime and heavy traffic. The apple orchards are long cut down for tract housing. The little rural 2 lane road is now Route 59, many lanes wide, a major highway through the country. Gone are the stone walls lining its length, gone are the apple farms, the chicken farms, the family farms with a vegetable stand by the side f the road. Now it's lined with huge malls, outlet stores, auto dealerships.

There's a thunderstorm here and I can still hear my grandfather shouting KALAMAZOO in the distance.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that it is easier for the world to
accept a simple lie than a complex truth.

Aiii, Mami!

If you happen to live in or near a hispanic community, as I do; and you are female and tend to wear tight jeans, as I do, you know those words well. It doesn't matter how old you are or how pretty or not, if you walk around with your bum showcased in a tight pair of jeans, you will hear the admiring chorus.

Aiii Mami!

You just have to smile. They're not coming on to you, of course. They're simply expressing their admiration of you and the whole female race. It's a nice part of the hispanic culture here.

What I really like, now that warm weather is here, is how entire large, multi-generational families come out in the evening and sit in the park. Riverside Park is literally just around the corner here and untill the wee hours of night you will see grannies sitting and gossiping and watching the children. Couples strolling, gaggles of teenage girls giggling together, men gathered around a new car. Sometimes, especially on weekends they will play music. Sometimes loudly. But it's melodic, traditional ballads most often, oaccasionally not from a box but from several men clustered together with their guitars and singing energetically. I went out one evening to listen to the music and found couples dancing in the street. A fiesta in NYC.

On May 25, 1925, John T. Scopes was indicted in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

Things haven't changed much in almost 80 years.

Regarding the Torture of Others - The Culture of Shamelessness

----------------

Regarding the Torture of Others

*By SUSAN SONTAG*

*1*

For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down
the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The
Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an
insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now
seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with
the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year
will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in
the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit
a
public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs --
rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy
revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of
the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's
initial response was to say that the president was shocked and
disgusted
by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not
in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word
''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,''
eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My
impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I
believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not
going to address the 'torture' word.''

Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance
of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being
slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years
ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing
anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what
has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo
Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to
call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of
torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a
signatory: ''/any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such
purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a
confession./'' (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in
treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva
conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The
1984 convention declares, ''/No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,
whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political
instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a
justification of torture./'' And all covenants on torture specify that
it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving
prisoners naked in cells and corridors.

Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of
the widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and
elsewhere -- trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges,
resignation of senior military figures and responsible administration
officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it is probable
that the ''torture'' word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge
that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this
administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of
American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to
undertake unilateral action on the world stage.

Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to
America's reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to
use the ''sorry'' word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to
America's claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in
Washington on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he
was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the
humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, he went on, he was
''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the
true nature and heart of America.''

To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must
seem,
to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of
the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation,
is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions
representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was
done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was
systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The
issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs
such
acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this
administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes
such
acts likely.

*II.*

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are
representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation
together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The
Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and
sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this
generic
corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American
rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after
its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive
doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has
embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if
the president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy
enunciated
by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January
2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have
any rights under the Geneva Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe
for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands
incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run
prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the
photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American
custody?
No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated
from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the
perpetrators
posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the
Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were
committing
in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed
themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in
a
book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk.
If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would
be
some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the
1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked
mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree.
The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose
participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the
pictures from Abu Ghraib.

The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies --
taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums,
displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib,
however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to
be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera
is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was
the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all
photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of
what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images
among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At
least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real
events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be
edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people
record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am --
waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast,
getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their
lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family
life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially
when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the
dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and
monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in
''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki
about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.

An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be
captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture
is
more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual
component.
It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public
view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images
of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the
torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the
coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among
themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the
man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told
he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners
bound
in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are
infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only
to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress''
fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the
pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a
young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix
imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on
the
inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of
pornographic
imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by
sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

*III.*

To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and
therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or claiming to be
oblivious, to the camera's nonstop attentions. But to live is also to
pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as
images.
The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted
on
helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is
the
deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more
inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times)
but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The
grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if,
after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them.

Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at
the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs
at
the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled,
hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another?
And you feel naive for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently,
People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the
genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi
concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam
Hussein.
Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to
feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be
humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that
the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion.
For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were
performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that
there was anything wrong in what the pictures show.

Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and
seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas,
more
and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world --
part
of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the
increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence
is
everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a
principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game ''Interrogating
the Terrorists'' really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that
has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick.
Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to
have grown. >From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in
many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's
1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical
brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports
teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the
practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.

What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme
sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last,
near-unwatchable film, ''Salo'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in
the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era --

is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To
''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller
to
Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his
radio
show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The
observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. What may still
be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response:
''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different
than
what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin
people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort,
and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good
time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh
went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm
talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard
of
emotional release?''

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and
the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the
Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open
contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose,
thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures
to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would
have
given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a
television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is
as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for
unapologetic brutality.

*IV.*

The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the
president
and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to
one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an
aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us
doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has
sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the
United States and to recast many domestic institutions and
prerogatives.
The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious
doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing
less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations.
Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are ''detainees'';
''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the
rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized
countries. This endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both
the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in
Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree -- inevitably leads to the
demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush
administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up
for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.

The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq
and Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the Red Cross reports that 70 to
90
percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than
simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some
sweep of ''suspects'' -- the principal justification for holding them
is
''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever
the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining
prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture
become inevitable.

Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the ''ticking
time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that
justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent
attack.
This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by
American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a
shadowy
empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in
countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any
information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no
information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a
failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners to talk.
Softening them up, stressing them out -- these are the euphemisms for
the bestial practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists
are
being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in
his diary, a prisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of
a
man in a body bag with ice on his chest may well be of the man
Frederick
was describing.

The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world
in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our
leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After
all, the conclusions of reports compiled by the International Committee
of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by
humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on
''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in prisons run by the
American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been
circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports
were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or
Condoleezza
Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their
attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed; it was
the
photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up
to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our
age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and
so
much easier to forget.

So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as many
Americans
are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are
already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the
world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will editors now
debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which,
with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box,
gives a different and in some instances more appalling view), would be
in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read:
critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For there can
be
no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, ''the
reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are
courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedom
across the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image, our
success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush administration
principally deplores. How the protection of ''our freedom'' -- the
freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having American
soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected
officials.

Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against
indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication
of
the pictures is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do
not have the right to defend ourselves: after all, they (the
terrorists)
started it. They -- Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's the
difference? -- attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a
Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before which
Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the
only member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage'' over the
photographs than by what the photographs show. ''These prisoners,''
Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know they're not there for traffic
violations. If they're in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners,
they're
murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them
probably
have American blood on their hands, and here we're so concerned about
the treatment of those individuals.'' It's the fault of ''the media''
which are provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence
against Americans around the world. More Americans will die. Because of
these photos.

There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not
because of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal
to
be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command -- so
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and
(among others) Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican,
suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full range of images on May 12.
''Some of it has an elaborate nature to it that makes me very
suspicious
of whether or not others were directing or encouraging,'' Senator
Graham
said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that viewing an
uncropped version of one photo showing a stack of naked men in a
hallway
-- a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the scene,
some not even paying attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion
that only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the line,''
Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were either told or winked
at.'' An attorney for Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who is in the
picture, has had his client identify the men in the uncropped version;
according to The Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the men
were military intelligence and one a civilian contractor working with
military intelligence.

*V.*

But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as between spin
and policy -- can easily evaporate. And that is what the administration
wishes to happen. ''There are a lot more photographs and videos that
exist,'' Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are
released
to the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.'' Worse for
the administration and its programs, presumably, not for those who are
the actual -- and potential? -- victims of torture.

The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to
censor soldiers overseas, who don't write letters home, as in the old
days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable
lines. Today's soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.''

But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will
come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover
up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs
with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes
it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit
criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American
soldiers who have been killed in the course of the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to
disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of
America.

After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.

//http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html?pagewanted=1

/Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding the Pain of
Others.''/