Bush shows Segway fails foolproof test

The Segway is supposed to be foolproof – “A two-wheeled, intuitive personal transportation device that won’t fall. This super-smart, computer chip-laden machine won’t topple with a driver’s clumsiness.”
This week our very own chief fool showed this to be just plain wrong.

US President George Bush has been photographed falling off a high-tech scooter near his family’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
A sequence of photos show President Bush stepping onto a two-wheeled high-tech scooter and then lurching forward before recovering his balance.

destroying homes can only destroy everyone’s security

I don’t know how a figure could be strictly defined, even if one could somehow be located on the record, but while a friend who has spent time in Israel and Palestine reported anecdotally that the number of homes which have been destroyed by the Israelis in the Gaza Strip is 80 percent, any percent would be an abomination.

. . . there was no record of the Za’anin family having heard a nearby explosion, in a street controlled by tanks and armored personnel carriers, at around 6 P.M. that day. About 20 minutes later the family, which was sitting in the living room, heard the noise of the churning bulldozers.
“Suddenly we saw Jews in the house,” said Amana Za’anin. An officer and soldiers entered through a breach they opened in the wall of the house. They aimed their weapons at the family, and ordered them out. According to the family, they were not allowed to take anything with them. Not even the mother’s head covering. The student daughter cried she didn’t want to leave without her books and notebooks. Her parents said that they had to drag her away from “under the bulldozer.”

[Anees found this]

naked for art – and much more

Spencer Tunick did his thing in Barcelona on Sunday. But Barcelona did more than Spencer’s thing.
While Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani censored Tunick’s art, along with the inclination of New Yorkers to happily get naked in its service. Giuliani had managed to arrest, and sometimes jail, Tunick 5 times. Three years ago a photoshoot much smaller than Barcelona’s was proposed for a Sunday dawn in an area virtually empty of people, but there was to be no joy, no art in Gotham that morning, thanks to our prosecutorial hypocrite.
In Barcelona the authorities seem to have had no problem with 7,000 (described as up to 12,000 elsewhere) happy naked Spaniards filling a “sweeping Barcelona boulevard” in daylight, and even provided a nearby massive convention hall for an assembly area.
But the Catalonian crowd was interested in more than art or mass urban nudity. As Tunick gave them the go-ahead, speaking into a microphone,

The crowd erupted into cheers and then chants of “No War!” and “No to Bush!”
Ozan Sezen, who works with computers, said he had read with dismay of Mr. Tunick’s repeated installation-related arrests in New York City several years ago. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that Mr. Tunick had a right to stage his art outside without being jailed, but the Giuliani administration rejected his subsequent permit request; Mr. Tunick has not approached Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for permission.
Mr. Sezen, 35, who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Rock Solid Beefcake,” prepared to take it off.
“In many of his exhibitions, there are a lot of fat guys, which makes it much easier,” he said.
The time came. There was loud cheering, and the sound of thousands of underpants hitting the floor. Everyone walked outside, naked.

The intrepid reporter joined them, with only a notepad for cover.

Then it was over. Some people jogged nude up and down the boulevard. Others re-dressed. Inside, Scott Ansell, 31, an Englishman who had already taken part in an earlier work by Mr. Tunick, involving hundreds of naked people riding the escalators in a London department store, mused on the cultural differences.
“The English seemed a bit more giggly,” he said. “I get the impression that half of the people here will be naked later today, anyway.”
His friend Jane Hyde, 44, said of the apparent Spanish tendency to spank their own naked rear ends as a form of applause, “That bottom-smacking thing is rude!”

Ahhhhh.
For a small slideshow of pictures, see Reuters.

“he vaguely looks like Robbie Williams”

I expect Bloggy will be seeing an increase in traffic in the near future. The very hot and very sweet Glenn thanks him for help in setting up his new site:

Barry recommended my server, helped me get everything running, and has the added attraction of being a stone’s throw from a Krispy Kreme. Plus he vaguely looks like Robbie Williams.

modern antiquity

I couldn’t recomend more highly the Les Arts Florissants production of Rameau’s “Les Boréades” which opened June 9 at the Brookly Academy of Music. I’d be astounded if it hasn’t sold out already, but the Academy Howard Gilman Opera House is a very big space.
The music is gorgeous, and until recently inexplicably neglected. The singing is superb, and the visuals are magificent, modern but fully respectful of the formalism of mid-eighteenth-century France.
The story and the libretto, with their elevation of la Liberté to the highest order, well, next to the redemptive qualities of love, are pure Enlightenment, and a healthy reminder of how much we still owe to the French, who taught our Fathers so much we seem now to have forgotten ourselves.
Rameau wrote the music in 1763. He was 80, and he died the following year. The text was the work of a Freemason, which may explain why it was never performed in his time. The work but had to wait for its premier until just a few years ago. This is it’s American premier.
More than most operas, “Les Boréades” is a balance of theater, music and dance. There are long sections with no vocal lines whatsoever, where the dance soars.

Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, mountainous piles of autumn leaves, punishing winter snows, and thunderous spring storms. The soloists, chorus, and dancers, 140-strong, are costumed in late 1940s, Dior-inspired dress to simpler garments to no garments at all. And then there are the marvels of Rameau, a master whose haunting airs and orchestral dances for Les Boréades put many more familiar operas to shame. Rameau called on a lifetime of experience in its creation, but above all he knew the human heart.

The huge chorus and the dancers (astoundingly, they are virtually indistinguishable for much of the evening in this production) are individually and together exceptionally beautiful and athletic, and lucky in their choreographer. The sets and lighting would please Wieland Wagner and Robert Wilson.
Awesome.
p.s.
Adding to our own entertainment on opening night was the buzz created by the presence of the dashing young Canadian equery who accompanied “Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, C.C., C.M.M., C.O.M., C.D., Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada” and her consort, the essayist and novelist “His Excellency John Ralston Saul, C.C.”
This handsome, perfectly-bilingual couple sat immediately across the aisle from us and joined the champagne patron receptions during two intermissions. The smiling equery, equally bilingual, clutched a thick leather portfolio (documents which might be needed to identify the GG, in the event of some unpleasant emergency, like our INS mistreating another Canadian citizen?) and never strayed far.
I have to gasp at the biographies of these two and admire what that says about their nation, especially when we look at what passes for the “qualifications” of our own current pretender to the office of U.S. chief executive. Of course the Canadian executive office has no real power, but it does clearly represent what Canada holds dear. Both nations regularly select lessor creatures to do the real ruling business.
[Note: The Governor General is nominated by the Canadian Prime Minister and approved by the Queen (Canadian Head of State) as her representative in Canada.]
By the way, Clarkson and Saul were at BAM on Monday not because of any official Canadian connection, but just for the show (they’re both interested in the culture of all nations, and Saul especially is interested in promoting that of the French). Just a night out.

have we made Iraq “A land fit only for flies?”

What does Baghdad look like today?
The strongest account I’ve read succeeds where even pictures have failed.
An excerpt:

And then you drive back, through the centre, and see what has happened to the ministries and powerhouses that used at least to keep some of the country alive, and realise that they have not merely been looted but invaded, lobotomised, trepanned. The Americans are hardly in evidence, and soon it will be dark again, and the guns will begin again: and you can’t help but wonder how, when we managed to get the surgical excision of Saddam so right, we have apparently managed to get everything else so wrong in this country. An old and an interesting country, and one in which everyone has been unfailingly, unaccountably courteous and helpful, apart from the ones who are trying to shoot you. They welcomed me into one mosque for Friday prayers, this know-nothing Westerner whose country had just helped bring their city to a halt, careful as they washed their feet not to use too much water. Prayers were all-male: women have stopped coming out for the moment.
Others offered me their bottled water, as they always offer it to each other. It is sweet to see the way in which old men unembarrassedly hold hands on marches, quick to pull each other out of the way of traffic (or perhaps it’s just in case they’re hit by one of the cacophony of toots: they laugh, here, about their drivers’ propensity for the horn, and call it ‘Baghdad music’.) A kindly and spectacularly ravaged people, and I’m not sure quite what’s about to happen to them.
. . . .
Baghdad has turned into Afghanistan faster than Afghanistan. As I write this, the UN weapons inspectors are going back in to see whether the looting of the city’s main nuclear power station has given Baghdad a radioactive water supply. Could this really imaginably be, in the minds of those who went to war for even the best intentions, the preferred legacy? A land where all the children smell of petrol? A land fit only for flies?

[thanks to Anees]

Bush is cooked?

John Dean (remember John Dean?) suggests that lying about the reason for war is an impeachable offense. My first thought is how could Americans think it’s worse than fibbing about a blow job, but Dean argues that the NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman may have been right when he said “the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history – worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra.”

President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake – acts of war against another nation.
Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush’s White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away – unless, perhaps, they start another war.
. . . .
Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison.
. . . .
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be “a high crime” under the Constitution’s impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

Yeah, sure, but this is the entertainment-news, born-again and ADD America. Where’s the sex?

for once, it’s not about Martha

Ellis Henican writes in today’s New York Newsday:

The Martha Stewart case isn’t exactly Enron, where thousands of workers saw their whole life savings vaporized.
Martha isn’t WorldCom, where the three-card-monte accounting reached $9 billion high.
She isn’t even Arthur Andersen, where 28,000 employees were blithely sacrificed on the altar of executive greed.

Henican observes from the courthouse:

Despite the delicious embarrassment of a prim perfectionist extraordinaire, two things were hard to deny yesterday:
1. If Martha weren’t famous, we wouldn’t be here.
2. And neither would she.

In spite of the big media fuss, the criminal charges against her are not for insider trading (the evidence was found to be too flimsy), but rather for lying.

Martha’s lawyers, Bob Morvillo and John Tigue, kind of had a point when they emphasize the absence of the underlying charge. “It is most ironic,” they said in their statement, “that Ms. Stewart faces criminal charges for obstructing an investigation which established her innocence.”
Why? they asked.
“Is it for publicity purposes because Martha Stewart is a celebrity? Is it because she is a woman who has successfully competed in a man’s business world by virtue of her talent, hard work and demanding standards? Is it because the government would like to be able to define securities fraud as whatever it wants it to be? Or is it because the Department of Justice is attempting to divert the public’s attention from its failure to charge the politically connected managers of Enron and WorldCom who may have fleeced the public out of billions of dollars?”
There’s a difference, it’s been said, between insider traders and the rest of us. The difference is the quality of their tips.

for Um Mazen

A Palestinian friend in East Jerusalem sent this email on Tuesday to me and to a number of others. I have not altered a single letter. These words do not come from another planet or another time – they describe our own world, today.

Hi friends,
I just finished having lunch and felt a strong urge to write this. With us today at the lunch table was Um Mazen, a woman from a West Bank peasant community God knows where. She’s been working for us for years now. She comes and helps my mom with cleaning the house once a week. She comes around 8 and leaves after lunch.
Today was sort of different. Earlier, some British reporter interviewed Um Mazen. My mom, who runs a charity society that helps poor Palestinians, was receiving him upstairs in her little office when she mentioned Um Mazen’s stories of hardship. He was interested in learning more about this woman, and asked to come downstairs to meet her. This happened while I was trying to prolong my sleep. (I went to bed after 4 am this morning.) My mom and her secretary translated the Brit’s questions, and Um Mazen told her stories.
I was not there to hear what she said, but I can guess what stories because I know about Um Mazen. Stories about waking up at 4 to bake bread which she brings us some of every week; about her good-for-nothing husband who smokes a lot and does nothing; about supporting her ten or so children and how they support her; about walking hours at dawn around checkpoints to reach the Jerusalem households she works for; about having done this work for years; about staying overnight yesterday in Jerusalem because all roads (I should say dirt-roads, trails, Torra-Borras) back to her town were closed or patrolled by soldiers; about how other things in her life are unbearable and how she deals with them.
I heard them moving around outside my door at the end of their talk. The reporter took a picture of Um Mazen to take home.
Back to lunch which just finished. Mom was telling Dad and I about the brief interview. Then Um Mazen said what she said. “You think he believed and was convinced?” It broke me to hear those words out of her mouth. This is a 40-something woman who was worried perhaps she didn’t appear convincing to this Westerner. That perhaps her stories sounded too far fetched. That it must be that Westerners don’t believe our stories and that’s why they don’t help us; because if that was not the case then how can it be that they don’t do anything to help us? Because if that was not the case then why would someone interview her when her story is repeated thousands of times a day? Isn’t it to make sure it’s true?
This woman, whose life is totally dictated by the sum of all the forcefields of oppression in our region, thinks that she has a credibility problem.
All this was not alone in keeping me from sleep. There was also a bulldozer outside my bedroom window busy terracing land for the upcoming attraction to our neighbourhood: an overhead road that winds its way between houses to serve a nearby Israeli settlement (by connecting it with another). Looking at a plan for this road obtained from our local council one wonders what the hell made it necessary. It is completely redundant. But we know why it will be built. Because: the world believes them and not us.

[many thanks to Anees]