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Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Gift-track is officially dead. It's such a weird feeling to have spent eight months of your life working on something only to see it literally disappear within the next year.
Max saw Mansfield Park the other day, which I love. I saw it on a flight back from the U.S. last year. I had one of those little TV screens with all the channels, and they went through the cycle of movies three times. So I saw Mansfield Park, and then I watched Three to Tango (which was short so I got to flip back over and see the end of Mansfield Park again), and then I started to watch What Lies Beneath (but that was crappy, so I watched Mansfield Park yet again). Yes, I watched the film three times during an eight hour flight. It's that good. Embeth Davidtz is a delicious beeatch, and Jonny Lee Miller is yummy as always. And Frances O'Connor is just perfect. (I'm choosing to ignore her horrid, horrid turn in Bedazzled.) She's apparently starring as Maggie the Cat in the revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in London. With Brendan Fraser as Brick. My sister and I are so there.
"Afghan Clerics Postpone Meeting on Bin Laden." I've been playing too much MUD. "Clerics" means something entirely different to me now.
Monday, September 17, 2001
Snookums and I started planning our big Christmas holiday today. The original idea was to get "around the world" tickets and stop in the States to see my mom's new baby before heading off to Australia in time for New Year's. Along the way we thought we could stop in New York, or Vegas, or Tokyo, or Europe... Now, of course, everything's up in the air. I never thought I'd be trying to plan a vacation around a war.
Oh yeah. Home sick. Go me. (*sniff*)
Sunday, September 16, 2001
Just when I think things are finally starting to resemble normalcy again, something happens to make my blood boil and my heart race. Jerry Falwell went on television Thursday and blamed me for Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Yes, he did. Here's what he said:"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'" Here I thought being a feminist was about earning equal pay for equal work and fighting for women's rights. Unbeknownst to me, it also apparently involves pissing God off so that He rains down fire, brimstone, and passenger planes on normal, God-fearing, Republican, heterosexual, non-feminist white folk. Good to know. And to all my pagan and gay friends that simply want to be left alone to worship and love however they see fit, that goes for you too. We're all to blame, apparently.
The bastard did apologize, but only after everybody from President Bush on down condemned his remarks. I believe in free speech, but I really have a problem with racist, sexist, reactionary idiots giving it such a bad name.
Friday, September 14, 2001
Wow. I was poking around at The Leaky Cauldron trying to lift my spirits with some Harry Potter-related goodness, when I came across this quote:"I say to you all, once again - in the light of Lord Voldemort's return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort's gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open." - Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire That's a wonderful quote, and I applaud whoever thought to apply it. And, of course, many thanks to J.K. Rowling for penning it in the first place.
A couple weeks ago I mentioned a breakthrough in "parasitic computing" at my alma mater. I predicted that a lot of people at the university would have moral qualms about using such technology. I was right.
Not feeling very bloggy today.
I did fix a few things on the Perverts page though. I've modified my robots.txt file to keep Google from indexing that page and continuing the positive-porn-feedback loop. I also deleted a few of the fake entries that various people had put in (not that they weren't funny, but it looks better when they're all real). And check out the one where the guy starts defending his sexuality! Weird, man.
Thursday, September 13, 2001
From Salon:
"I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have," said 19-year-old Colin Zaremba who marched with the group from Oak Lawn.
Fuck you, Colin. This sort of thing makes me so, so ashamed. I think it's time to sew a maple leaf on my backpack and start saying "aboot". I don't want anyone to lump me in with people like this.
Hey, Brigita. Notre Dame's got pictures from the prayer vigil they held on South Quad Tuesday. Over 6,000 people were there. Looking at them really made me choke up.
It's Roald Dahl's birthday. I'm running a contest over at my site. Unfortunately the timing turned out to be pretty bad. Nobody seems to be in a celebratory-poem-writing mood right now. As it is, the two entries that have been submitted stand a pretty good chance of winning.
My sister, who is home sick today, called me to say she just watched a special Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace on television. Apparently for the first time ever they altered the ceremony and played the U.S. national anthem. A lot of people have been gathered there and at the U.S. embassy to mourn. Books of condolence have been set up. I wish I were out there instead of in here.
(On a more light-hearted note, that picture of Brendan Fraser is pretty funny. I mean, he's looking right at the photographer like, "Don't take a picture of me. I look like hell. Don't take a picture of me." I mean, I'm not laughing at him, but rather at the fact that the BBC used it anyway.)
I just got the Nostradamas e-mail forward again. Thank God for Snopes.
Giuliani's the man. I couldn't agree more. While I've never been a big fan of the guy, he's holding the city together right now and he's encouraging a lot of people to get on with their lives. He's a lot more reassuring than Bush, anyway.
The dinner went well. Snookums settled the menu question by asking for chili, since he likes it a lot. So I made chili and corn bread. The Americans were both from the South and the tragedy didn't seem to affect them much. As for Jann's "getting hammered" idea... Ugh. I'm hungover. I hate the world. Thanks, buddy.
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
Choire has pictures from today. Go there now.
Nice to see that even during an international crisis, there are still those determined to get their daily share of porn. Ugh.
Just got an e-mail from my Dad. He's writing from our home town of Lagrange, Indiana, which is just about as "middle-of-nowhere" as you can get. He says:
"You should have seen the gas stations around here yesterday. People were panicked and the cars were lined up 30 and 40 to a station. The Shell station in LaGrange pumped dry... Some of the stations started price gouging by raising the prices to any where from 4 to 6 dollars a gallon. I also
heard on the radio this morning that there was a fire in Topeka and the Life Care helicopter from the hospital was grounded and a little Amish girl died because they couldn't get her to the hospital in time."
Everybody's affected. Everybody's panicking. Those planes didn't just hit the east coast. They hit America.
I've been listening to Capital FM all day today. (It's the big "Top 40" station in London.) They've been pretty good about giving news updates. It's their playlist that I'm having a problem with. They claim that they're taking requests and only playing stuff that fits the listeners' mood right now. So far I've heard Gabrielle about fourteen times (nothing out of the ordinary there), Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone", and that "You're Makin' it Hard For Me" song that was big in the States, like, five years ago (the one my mom calls "That Erection Song".) What the hell? I hope to God that's not the prevailing mood in the capital right now. They did just play "Everybody Hurts" though, and the DJ said it was the most requested song of the day. I suppose the others can just be attributed to weird people calling in.
*Trying to get back to normal*
I was excited to see that Amazon has a new Computer Store that sells Apple machines! Now whenever somebody tells me that Apple's out of the question because they don't know where to get one, I'll have an answer.
Amazon's accepting donations for the Red Cross. They're waiving all the fees. Just go to it. I made my donation and then went back to refresh the page to see the total go up. It jumped a lot more than I pledged. It's over $280,000. There's a lot of people helping out.
Oh God. I just remembered that I'm supposed to be hosting a dinner party tonight for my friend eMan (the one who quit last week) and his two visiting American friends. Those poor kids. I'm pretty sure neither was from the east coast, but jeez. They don't even know how they're going to get home at this point. And now I'm preoccupied with the correct food to serve during an international crisis. Any ideas?
I forgot to mention this. Okay, I'm not saying that "public speaking" has anything to do with general competence in government officials, but the difference between George W. Bush and Tony Blair could not have been more marked last night. Bush seemed like he was floundering, like he couldn't function without somebody whispering the words into his ear. I cringed every time he said "turrorism" or "Amurrica." Blair, on the other hand, was both emotional and eloquent. Whatever else his faults, when he speaks you feel like he and his Cabinet are in control. Bush gave us generalities about "hunting those folks down". Blair told us what he was doing to make us safe. I know which one I feel safer with as a leader.
 Life goes on in London. According to the BBC, we remain on "high security alert". I think most of the City buildings are open though. (Any word, Jann?) All the flight paths going into and coming out of Heathrow have been altered, which means whenever I look out the window the planes are going in completely the wrong direction. (Hammersmith isn't far from the airport.) The security guards at my office -- who normally just wave the regulars on through -- have apparently been instructed to double-check everybody's ID's. I have no idea what that's supposed to accomplish. (What would a terrorist want to do in our building? Download porn and warez on our T-1 connection?)
People are shocked here, but more at the extreme devastation than the shock of American vulnerability. British people (and Londoners in particular) have been living with the constant threat of terrorism for decades. There have been several attacks just in the past year (bombs at Hammersmith Bridge, BBC offices, pub in West London, etc.). When I first arrived here in '98, I asked, "Why aren't there any garbage cans on the Underground?" The straightforward answer: "Because the IRA figured out they're a damn good place to hide explosives." Once you've been here for a while, you realize that terrorist acts do happen in the Americanized "West." We're not immune to it. It's just a shame everybody in America had to learn it the hard way.
(Brief moment of humor: Watching the news last night, Nick said we should spare a moment for the poor IRA guys who are inevitably sobbing into their pints and lamenting, "Look what they did! And we can't even blow up the bloody Hammersmith Bridge.")
I find the kneejerk racist reactions of many of my fellow Americans appalling. I live and work in a very multi-cultural environment. I know many Muslims and I don't hold them up as representatives of their countries or religions. They, in turn, do not see me as the embodiment of America. We would be a lot better off if everybody else did the same.
It's been so weird to be outside the country while this has happened. I had several people from the States contact me hours after the events asking whether I'd heard what had happened. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world makes jokes about America's self-absorption? I'm, like, "What the hell do you think I've been doing all day? We have television. We have the bloody Internet. Everywhere outside America isn't the goddamn Stone Age." My entire office was clustered around the telly in the kitchen following it from the moment it happened. We probably knew about it before half of America did. I suppose it's pretty natural to assume that since American media never carries stories about disasters in other countries, the same situation exists elsewhere. I'm happy to report that other nations aren't so insulated.
This is one of my longest posts. I don't know what else to say. As Snookums put it this morning when we were going our separate ways at work: "If America goes to war, we're going to Australia." I couldn't have put it better myself. Get me the hell out of here.
Roger Ebert went into a movie screening at 8:30 in the morning yesterday and "walked out two hours later into a different world." His wife and daughter were in New York City (they're safe). He puts into words what a lot of people were feeling. He's a good writer.
Slate has collected all of the day's editorial cartoons. You know, a cartoonist can really make an event hit home in a way that video footage cannot. I really found myself getting choked up at a lot of these. A lot of cartoonists used the theme of the Statue of Liberty sobbing and averting her eyes... but there were two among the lot that show her still standing there, proud and defiant. I like those the best.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Oh God. Beau works in Manhattan, right? Has anybody heard from him?
I'm compiling a list of blog reactions I can find in the NY/DC area. Here's what I got so far:
New York: Andy's Chest; East/West; UltraSparky; CamWorld; superhyperdemonchild; Everlasting Blogstalker; BroadwayStars.com; Saran Warp; Scripting News
DC: fredosite
Notre Dame's cancelled all classes and activities and declared it a "Day of Prayer". That's an understatement.
They've evacuated most of the City of London. (The City is the square mile financial district in the middle.) Canary Wharf, the London Stock Exchange, the Natwest Tower, the Lloyds of London building... All empty. This is frightening.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Can you believe this? Our whole office is clustered in the kitchen watching the news footage as it rolls in. The BBC site seems to be swamped. My cousin IMed me from the States to say she'd just seen the footage. I IMed my mom and told her to turn on the TV. My sister called from work to say she'd heard from her boss that something terrible had happened. It's like a disaster movie.
Excerpt from an Instant Messenger conversation:
Snookums: What is disputed? The fact that there is always carrots or the source of these carrots? The presence of carrots is ubiquitous enough to make it into at least 3 entries in this excellent list of regurgitative euphemisms.
Kris: Dude, you're just making this worse. You know it all goes straight to the blog.
Snookums: I found a reference to vomit always containing carrots somewhere on hairytongue.com.
Kris: Nasty. *pause* You ready to go to lunch?
Damn. My perverts page is catching people, but a bug in my code meant that their "appeals" weren't getting recorded properly. It's fixed, though, so hopefully we'll get some suckers today.
Oh, and I changed the poll. :)
Is it wrong to wanna see Michael Jordan fall on his ass? This is gonna be ugly, folks.
created and maintained by Kristine Howard © 2001
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