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Just got back from Budapest last night. I've got a ton more pix to post. I hope to write up the last day or so on Sunday and post everything then.

Meanwhile, here's an article in The Scotsman about Darfur. While I'm glad that the world's finally paying attention to what's going on there, the UN resolution handing the government of Sudan another month to implement its (relatively) slow-motion genocide is just another sign that the UN is a useless institution that oughtta be scuttled. Back for 12 hours and I'm griping already . . .

There is a school of thought that argues that by the time the United Nations Security Council applies its attention to a crisis anywhere in the world, that crisis will already be out of hand, or the moment to intervene effectively will have passed. That is an argument that is particularly apposite in relation to what is going on in Darfur. The same school of thought also contends that when the UN does finally accept that something must be done, it will do the wrong thing, and do it so slowly that it merely compounds an already hopeless situation. And here we have Darfur again. Given the opportunity to act firmly and decisively, for once to present a united front to face down an aggressor and to protect those who cannot defend themselves, the UN has chosen the path of least resistance. It has shied away from using its power for good in favour of mealy-mouthed attitudes and toothless threats of some future, ill-defined, approbation.

So it is no to sanctions, and yes to yet more empty gestures, lest it offends those nations who have much to gain economically by cosying up to the Khartoum regime, and who gain pleasure by thwarting the aspirations of those who backed the war in Iraq, however well intentioned those aspirations may be.

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posted by Gil at 9:55 AM

I gotcher dustbin of history right here, bitch

I went out last night and ended up eating sushi. What other form Asian cuisine will I dine upon before I finally try goulash and eat some Hungarian food? Is there a Mongolian restaurant in the area? (Keep in mind, I was in Paris for more than a week before I finally tried crepes.)

Today, I'm planning to go to Statue Park, about 5 miles south and west of here, out in the Buda 'Burbs. It's a collection of communist-era statues and sculpture. I think it'll be a nice antidote to yesterday's trip to the House of Terror. Of course, the Josef Stalin bottle-opener worked as a pretty good antidote. I think this'll be in the same spirit: monuments reduced to ridicule.

I put together an itinerary of other stuff I want to do before I head back to the U.S. When I look over it, I think that it's a good thing that the others from the wedding have already headed back to the America (and elsewhere). Sure, there'd likely be some overlaps, but a bunch of these things are pretty private, I bet (like the Raoul Wallenberg memorial I wanna check out).

* * *

Rained out. All I got to do today was go to Statue Park, which was pretty rewarding, but the rest of the itinerary's going to have to wait for Thursday.

The Park was great. I felt a little triumphal, I guess. I mean, "Onward and upward," my ass. It was cool to see all these alleged heroes and idealizations of workers and soldiers, reduced to a tourist attraction. At the gift shop, I bought plenty of neat stuff, including a tremendous T-shirt of "The 3 Terrors World Tour" of Stalin, Lenin and Mao.

I thought, "Y'know, I want 'em to gouge me on the price of this stuff, just to prove the point. As they were tallying my bill, I said, "Oh, yeah: And gimme a Coke."

Pix

A bed of flowers in a little square near Deak Ferenc Tec. I've never seen their color before.

The flowers were in front of a statue.

On the way out to Tiszaroff, Rene and I drove through a bazillion acres of wheat and sunflower fields. Evidently, Hungary feeds a chunk of the surrounding countries. Go, Ceres!

Two guys, presumably headed to the future.

Some guy, pretty firmly embedded in the past.

Second most impressive sculpture in the Park. It's of Bela Kun, a communist who took power in 1919 an unleashed "Red Terror" on the country. He got purged when the Romanians invaded a few months later. He was buddies with Bela Lugosi, who was his minister of culture.

Same sculpture, without the flash.

It really is pretty impressive, in person; Kun's up on this podium, and the troops are all charging out to nationalize whatever they can and prove that centralized economies are for shit.

Good-looking guy, that Enore Sagvari.

Some of the statues, like this one, put me in mind of the drawings of Jack Kirby. It's in the expressiveness of being blocky, if yer familiar with The King's comics. It's funny, because Toth is a Hungarian name.

There's no English description of this monument, but it reminded me an awful lot of Oscar Wilde's tomb in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, so here you are.

This guy is directing traffic. With all those little Trabants around, I'm sure it's a tough job.

Rats. Unfortunately, you can't see too much of the detail in
this guy. He has a military look that borders on the appearance of Flash Gordon. It made me think about the utopian aspects of some science fiction and its corollaries in this bankrupt ideology.

Speaking of bankrupt ideologies . . .

That Dmitrov was one suave-looking mo'fo'.

If you managed to avoid getting nailed with an icepick, a la Trotsky, the Party could still have you frozen in carbonite.

I have no idea what this is supposed to represent.

Maybe the faces on these soldiers weathered away from the acid rain that they get around here. I hope they weren't sculpted this way.

This guy greets you upon your arrival in the park. He's kinda impressive, but sorta lifeless.

I took some glee when I noticed that his weapon is a tommy-gun. It fits with the whole racketeering aspect of Soviet communism, doesn't it?

The most impressive statue in the park.

I'm serious, dude. This guy's massive, and full of energy.

Yeah, yeah: nice ass.

I need to write a book, so's I can use this pic for my cover.

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posted by Gil at 10:51 AM

Terror

Took another big walk today. That's what I do in cities; walk around. I rarely take mass transit during trips, but I do consult lots of maps. (This never helps in Boston, of course, which I've pointed out is built along 4-dimensional principles.)

As with my previous posts, all the photos are in links at the bottom. I don't have much time on the wireless network here, so I'm writing up in my hotel room, off the network, then going down to the lobby, uploading all the pix, and formatting the text in Blogger. Like you care. All you wanna know is: What's the city like? How's yer hotel? Didja jump into the Danube nekkid? Did you get accosted by every strip-club greeter, pimp and prostitute along Vaci ucta during your walk to dinner last night?

Glad you asked. Stick around, and you'll have the answers to some of those questions and more! For instance, I did get accosted by all of the above on my way to dinner. I'm not sure if it's because I was dressed okay, or because I was walking alone, but it started just past the Elizabeth Bridge on Vaci ucta, when a guy came up to me, pointed to a side-street, and said, "We got girls with big tits! 100% natural! No silicone!"

Can you believe the nerve of this guy? I mean, English isn’t his first language, but surely he knows that you don't start a sentence with a numeral!

Disgusted at his lack of cleanly transcribable grammar, I kept on down the utca. Two more strip-club greeters tried to entice me to go to their establishments. I averred.

Then two pretty girls asked me for directions. I replied that I just got into town and didn't know my way around. This may seem like a smooth way of establishing that you're cruising for prostitutes, but in fact, it was a smooth way of establishing that I had no idea what district I was in, and that I'd never had any sorta conversation with a prostitute before.

I blithely went on my way until I noticed that the next several beautiful women who walked past me were looking me right in the eye and saying, "Hello." I'm so goddamn thick sometimes.

Eventually, I found a neat, trendy restaurant, had a lavish meal (St. Jacques scallops, Nepal steak, and a poppyseed chocolate confection for dessert, along with a G&T), and paid only $42 for the privilege.

I meandered back to my hotel, talking with more greeters, prostitutes and older women who wanted to introduce me to their younger compatriots. Crossing the Independence Bridge, I marveled over the lights of the city. It's not Paris, of course, but it's a heck of a show. (I'll bring my camera next evening I go out, and try to post some good pix, but the Minolta Dimage isn't great with nighttime shots, esp. long-range ones.)

Home, I opened the window and the door, since 65 euros is only getting me a room sans air conditioning. The hotel's pretty nice, though. It's home to a thermal spring and spa, in which I plan on partaking on Thursday (report to follow).

I stayed up pretty late reading Trainspotting, after finishing that Lester Bangs book (his finished work was so much better than the unpublished stuff, and his fiction was disastrous, which helps reinforce a conversation I've had with some people in my life who've told me not to stress over my inability to write fiction, when my non-fiction is so darned entertaining.

But this particular run of posts has, in general, been more about chronicling. Today, while I was on another big walk, I thought about how I haven't really offered any insights to what I'm doing and seeing here. I thought about writing, "Sorry I haven't offered anything profound yet, but it's not like I offer anything profound at any other time."

Only we both know that's bullshit, don't we? It's not just the jokes and the occasional wacky situations that you tune in for. You expect something a little profound, or at least a sign of deeper thinking than "I went here, then I went there."

One way to describe today: Today I went to the House of Terror, then I walked back to my hotel.

The other way to describe it's a lot longer. Here goes:

I took a pretty long walk today, through the shopping districts, over to the Parliament building, up to the central train station, and through a western-style mall. Bought a pair of sandals during the walk, as I needed something more comfortable than my Merrell Chameleons (great for nature-walking, but city-walking can get a little iffy).

After the mall, I decided to head south on Terez krt and go east up Andrassy ut (where I walked yesterday). On Andrassy, I visited the House of Terror. This building used to be the home of the secret police. Now it's a museum.

I've been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, before. I've seen images of terrible atrocities. I'm not sure I ever really grasped the institutionalization of evil before today.

Since 9/11, I've contemplated history an awful lot. Mostly, it's been about putting the world into context, so that events aren't seen as simply self-generated. To me, everything we're currently going through is a working-out of the cold war, history spasming out of control after an 8- or 10-year stretch in which we tried to pretend history was over. A few days after the attacks, I said to a friend, "The U.S. and the Soviets warred across the planet. Every time there's a war, you get war babies. In Afghanistan, the metaphorical war babies were the mujahideen. Like any angry, abandoned child, it wants to kill its parents. As far as it's concerned, it already succeeded at killing one parent. Now it wants us."

(This is my way of saying that, yes, we shouldn't have bailed out on Afghanistan after their war, and let the country fail and become a breeding ground for Muslim terrorists. However, the point that people seem to avoid mentioning is that the Soviet Union shouldn't have rolled motherfucking tanks into the country in an attempt to brutally subjugate it into status as a "buffer" country. No Soviet rampage, no need to fund an army of Muslim guerrillas.)

When I was at the ticket counter, the clerk asked me if I wanted to buy a ticket for the temporary exhibition in the gallery, too. I asked what it was. "Children in the Holocaust," she replied. I sighed and shook my head. Maybe I could just pay for someone to run up and kick me in the nuts instead?

The entry to the museum involves a walk around an atrium. The back wall consists of photos of people who died in the building. To see them, though, you have to look over the giant black Soviet tank on a platform before you. I was whomped by the sheer mass of it, the image it evoked of dozens of them rolling through the streets of this city to quash the rebellion in 1956.

But that's only the beginning, dear reader. Your correspondent ascended to the second floor of the building, where the exhibition starts, and listened to his audio guide. It began with a description of the post-war resettlement and deportation scheme, in which hundreds of thousands of people were kicked out and others were kicked in (like Czechoslovakia's Hungarian-descended population of 200,000 people, who were "resettled" in Hungary in 1946). The gray-walled room itself (no photography allowed) had a few flat screens displaying old film footage, but it was dominated by this Soviet limousine, which was surrounded by gauzy black curtains. The lights in the room would periodically dim into darkness, heralding the impending age of terror, I guess.

Following that was a short hall of quotes from party officials, offering standard propaganda about getting rid of enemies of the Revolution. Some of the officials were kind enough to mention Jews specifically, while others mentioned "bankers" and "speculators" instead.

Then came a room explaining the policies toward the peasant farmers. They were blasted to shreds in the name of collectivization. The most disturbing part of this room was its shape. It was a pseudo-labyrinth, composed of off-white bricks that read "1 KG [something long and Hungarian]". When I touched one of the bricks, I realized it was sorta waxy, and slightly pliant. There was no explanation of this, and I suddenly feared that they were meant to represent human fat. I sure know how to vacation, huh?

The next rooms were the anteroom and office of the head of the political police (the AVH). The audio guide explained the history of Gabor Peter, police head for a few of the ugly years. It was nice that, pretty much each time one of the heads was mentioned, it eventually was revealed that he'd ended up in the cells down in the basement, and was tortured and hung.

A room like an assembly hall followed, and the Soviet style of justice was explained here. The benches and walls were upholstered (papered) in reproductions of court-transcripts. From here, it was a long haunting hall about the persecution of churches. The hall was dominated by a huge white cross in the floor. It was set up as though the cross was under the floor, and floorboards had been sawn away to reveal it. Speakers in the back of the chamber played dirge-like chants. There were numerous religious items in displays in the walls, including a haunting (for me) tallis-and-tefillim. The audio guide told the story of Cardinal Mindszenty, who was (of course) tortured but not (surprisingly) executed down in the basement. He spent fifteen years living in the American Embassy (1956-1971) before the Vatican and the Hungarian government pressured him into leaving the country.

All this is still chronicling, isn't it? It's not really getting at what I felt. I was weighed down by the exhibits (Mindszenty was the last area on the top floor). While we waited interminably for the elevator, I thought about the sheer evil of the regime, and how on earth anyone could hope to live like a human after it.

I'm thinking now of Timothy Garton Ash's book The File, about what he discovered when he petitioned the former East German government to let him see the file the Stasi kept on him (he was a journalist who lived there for several years). Many East Germans did the same, only to discover that their loved ones had been reporting on them for years. I wondered how you live like that, how you keep the secret, and how you try to trust someone after you've learned that secret. When something like this is institutional, does that make it easier? That exhibition on the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide raises the same questions for me, of course. Or Croatia, where I saw a news item last night about the rebuilding of a bridge that had been blown up during the civil war. How do you live next door to someone who tried to kill you? How do you turn out the light and lie beside someone who was telling the Stasi about your reading habits?

The elevator came. We learned why it had taken so long. It goes down nice and slow so that everyone on board can watch an interview with a man whose job it was to clean out the execution chamber following a hanging. He explained the whole process, and editorialized a little: "Why do something silly like grant a last request? What good would that do?"

The elevator took forever and, right before we reached the end of the descent, someone's cell-phone rang. I swear to God this is true. I wanted to be mad at first, but then I thought that maybe it was a really important call this person was expecting. Her tone was pretty flippant, which got me back to infuriation. The elevator door opened to a recreation of the torture cells in the basement. The audio guided explained the conditions the captives were under, and the treatment they received.

Each chamber contained photos of individuals who were tortured there. A larger room contained a table with some torture implements, including a hotplate and a dental drill. I was hollowed-out, in a fugue of sorts. Not numb, exactly.

And then I got to the hall of the 1956 Revolution: filled with video screens of footage, mementos of student riots, walls with reproductions of graffiti. I started to cry. Not sure why that room did it, but my eyes welled up. It's as if, looking at it now, that the tortures of the post-war era were just a historical disaster. I mean, the Soviets were in control, so of course there were fucked-up, Stalinist secret police torturing and murdering dissidents. That was "according to plan," if you get me.

But the revolution, man, that fucked me up good. It was that idea that these people wanted liberty, that they were willing to fight for freedom after a decade of this post-war monstrousness. And all it got 'em was tanks like the one in the atrium. Imre Nagy, the PM at the time, negotiated a peace and withdrawal of Soviet troops, but the Russians reneged and went apeshit on the populace. Nagy got executed in 1958. In 2004, I looked at the brick wall with the Hungarian for "Russians Out!" in graffiti, and I hoped my contact lenses were going to stay in despite the tears.

There were a few more rooms. One had a series of screens showing footage of the Soviet withdrawal and the opening of the museum itself. Another was a long, narrow hall of "the Victimizers," those who committed the denunciations, tortures and executions, or did nothing to stop them. Christ, you could've put the entire human population into a hall like that.

(When I got home, I saw "EU threatens sanctions against Sudan" on my TV. Took 'em long enough. And the sanctions are bullshit anyway. The leader will make his concessions in word, blow off the deed, and the EU will threaten greater sanctions. I've been agitating about this genocide for, what, 10 weeks now? People like Samantha Power have been on it much longer than that. Why should it take "public opinion" to sway governments to act against a motherfucking genocide? Why, when I know what's going on, doesn't Colin Powell, or Joschka Fischer? Too late now, anyway: Sudanese knew what they were doing. Now the rains are coming, and any aid isn't going to make it to the refugees. The world fucking hems-and-haws over this stuff, every time. And it's not just when Africans are involved. I really need to go get some dinner; I'm starting to get really bitter.)

Last room. That's the one. It's dark, and the wall's a ring of names (cut out from black marble), illuminated from behind. They're the names of every person who was killed in this building, the dissidents and the tiger-catching-its-tail secret police who got fingered by their own, like Kadar and Peter.

The interior of the room is filled with thin, wrought-iron lamps. They stand at odd angles, and their bulbs are dim enough that you can see them all. Some lights have stencils of the Star of David inside to symbolize the Jews who were brought down here.

A few weeks ago, when planning this trip, I thought about taking some side-trips. Primarily, I thought about going to Romania, where my dad's from. But I also thought about Athens. I'd never go around Olympics-time, but I thought that, before I'm gone, I want to go down to the Piraeus, to walk in the same place Socrates (allegedly) walked in during the night that led to The Republic. I had this urge to tie myself into history.

On the way out of the exhibition, I walked into the gift shop. Wrecked, I thought about buying a Hungarian edition of 1984. I went up to the counter with it, and saw a display behind the clerk. It was filled with the most ridiculous knick-knack: candles in the shape of Lenin's head; T-shirts about "the American Beetle"; and coffee mugs in the style of prison cups.

For a moment, I thought about how tasteless, how inhuman it seemed to sell that stuff. And then I thought, "Maybe that's the best response freedom has to offer. Freedom to laugh."

So I bought this.

Pics:

The Deak Ter intersection. I just felt like taking a pic.

Same circle, another angle.

Look, kids! Parliament.

It's funkadelic.

Okay, it's not. Actually, my guidebook sez it's built like shit, outta porous limestone that catches the pollution from all those Trabants that cruise around the city..

A statue of Kossuth. Check out the way he fakes out the soldier on his right. The peasants never fall for a political leader pointing in the other direction.

Some building with a bust in front. I think it was of Petofi, but my recollection sucks today .

The central train station. It connects to a big-ass mall that I decided to walk through, because I am, of course, from New Jersey.

Same train station.

The Terror House, subject of today's rant.

Entrance of same.

Some bank I saw during the walk home.

Open my beer, Joe!

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posted by Gil at 2:47 PM

7/23/04: Abruptions

The aforementioned best-laid plans (midnight flight to Europe, getting sleep en route) did, in fact, go awry. I got less than an hour’s sleep during the flight from Newark to Copenhagen (no direct flights on my budget). This was partially because of the fact that airplane designers are clearly biased against the gawky. It was also because one of the passengers BROUGHT HER DOG ON THE FLIGHT IN A CARRY-ON. I’m serious. Some biddy had her poodle in a handbag on the goddamn plane. And, wouldn’t you know it, dogs don’t deal well with the changes in air pressure.

Neither did the three-year-old in my aisle. I felt bad for the kid, because he was in absolute torment.

Fortunately, official VM Dad bought me a pair of noise-canceling headphones from Bose. I owned a pair from Sony, but they were earbuds, and got mighty uncomfortable on long flights.

The headphones paired nicely with my latest geek-out episode: buying a new 40 gig iPod the day before this trip. My rationale was that the 12-hour battery life of the new model would serve me better on a long trip. And I’m a geek.

Anyway, I listened to music and read a chunk of Lester Bangs’ reviews and essays during the flight. Then I drifted off.

Let this be a warning to you, dear reader: never drift off while listening to your 40 gig iPod, set to shuffle. Oh, it may seem like a good idea, heading off to slumberland with your very favorite tunes a-play (6,692 of them, according to the Pod). But, I ask you, what if you have Van Halen’s Eruptions among those 6,692 songs? You would be most unhappy to be awakened by that particular song, especially with its high recording level.

Otherwise, the flight was uneventful, although landing was a bit strange. We were on a new Airbus 340, and every seat had its own video screen with all sorts of entertainment options. Among those options: checking out the views from the in-flight belly and nose cameras. For most of the flight, there was nothing to see (note: do not cite Bowie’s Nite Flights here). But during the landing approach, it’s pretty weird to see the view from the nose of the plane. I mean, I’ve played my share of flight simulators in my time, but it’s different when it’s YOUR GODDAMN PLANE THAT’S MAKING THE APPROACH.

Anyway, I’m writing this during the short flight to Budapest. I’ll try to find a hotspot once I’m there, so I can post away.

7/24-25/04: Dateline: Tiszaroff

Wow.

Here’s the chronology. I got into Budapest at 4:30pm on Friday (7/23). I didn’t sleep much, as mentioned earlier. My suitcase was the third one out at the baggage claim, which is unprecedented. I got my passport stamped again. I met up with Rene, another guy coming out here for the wedding. We got his rental car at 5:30. We drove out to a little town called Tiszaroff, to the castle where the wedding party was staying. We had no currency, and the ATMs on the road weren’t on our network, so we stopped at a supermarket on the way and charged some bottled water, candy bars, and other supplies.

The drive took more than two hours, and the traffic frustrated Rene, who was not accustomed to driving our little Peugeot. We arrived, checked in, greeted the wedding guests, then went to our rooms. I showered, dressed nicely, and headed down to dinner.

The rest of this is somewhat blurry. I mean, I remember everything, but that doesn’t seem to mean much. I ate a little at the dinner, around 8:30pm. By my body’s clock, this was only 2:30pm, but I hadn’t slept the previous night. So I figured I’d have a beer with the guys, then turn in and get a full night’s sleep.

Instead, I had a couple of beers, got into many conversations, had more beers, walked in on a German girl in the bathroom, joined a contingent of Americans and Germans in the pool, decided to doff my swimsuit after the realization that 6 out of 8 of us were swimming naked, and drank more beers.

I thought I bailed out around 3am, but it appears that our skinny-dipping contingent actually split up at 4:30am. Which is to say, I had gone a very long time without sleep, and had 8 or 9 (?) beers in me with virtually no food.

Got upstairs to my room and went to sleep, evidently at 4:30am. Woke up to noise (people going to breakfast) around 10:45am. Knew that if I moved, I’d be sick. Around 11:30am, I moved. I was sick.

After worshiping at porcelain altar, and sitting on floor of bathroom in a cold sweat, I dragged my ass back to bed. Woke up at 3pm.

Got up, showered, ate a candy bar and drank a Coke from the minibar, and put on my suit to get down to the wedding party, which was convening at 4:15.

We drove 15 minutes in a convoy to the town where the bride grew up. The church service was Lutheran, I think, and pretty brief. The minister didn’t know much English, and we joked that we understood her better when she was speaking Hungarian. (This language, I should note, bears virtually no connection to the romance languages, and is made even more incomprehensible by its speakers’ thick accents.)

Got back to the hotel for the reception out by the pool. I drank half-heartedly, but engaged in good conversation with a cinematographer who was seated beside me. He’s married to a Hungarian girl too, and said that he has never understood anything that her parents have said to him. I told him that this was probably a good thing.

Some local teenagers put on a performance of local dance, which was entertaining. I cracked, “Whenever I see eastern Europeans in boots, I get a little nervous.”

At midnight, the bride came out in a red dress. This is a traditional rite of marriage, with the bride signifying her no-longer-a-girl transition into womanhood by changing into the new red dress.

We had eaten at a buffet from 7:30-9:30pm (or thereabouts), but now a new buffet was opened up, to feast for the new phase. I ate some pastries, drank half-heartedly, as mentioned, then moved back to Cokes. I stayed sober, and did not jump in the pool naked again.

I had a conversation with the German girl I’d accidentally barged in on the night before. Around 3am, I thought about heading up to my room, packing, and getting ready to leave for Budapest with Rene at 10:30am (he’s flying home on Sunday). But the band stopped playing, and I was cajoled into bringing my iPod down and hooking it up to the speakers, so we could listen to bad ’80s music. We did for a while. (Yes, this means I was Djing at around 3:30 in the morning.)

Two members of the band were absolutely transfixed by the iPod, and asked me many questions about it. The younger one also asked me if I had any Thievery Corporation music. I told him I did, complimented him on the Groove Armada CD they put on between sets, and introduced them to the music of Zero 7. Then I pleased some people by playing "Rock You Like a Hurricane," by the Scorpions, and "Separate Ways," by Journey. The band packed up all its stuff, and eventually had to take the speakers away.

Just then, I noticed the sky starting to lighten. A rooster crowed, and I said to Rene, “Let’s just stay up, and roll out for Budapest around 9 or 10am.” We committed to that plan, but later realized that, because of the change of latitude, "it gets early early around here." It was only 4:30am when we made that realization.

But we decided to stick with our plan. We hung out by the pool, and a few of the other guys, including the groom, jumped into the pool naked. I just watched the sun rise over eastern Hungary.

Now we’ll stay up all night, have some coffee and breakfast around 8am, and roll on to Budapest. Where I will sleep like a motherfucking log, dear reader.

Thanks for your interest.

Here are links to a bunch of pix from the wedding day:

Castle Hotel Tiszaroff.

Wedding #1.

Wedding #2.

To the limo!

Group photo.

The pool.

Jon-Eric & Monika at the reception.

Local dancers.

Bringing out the cake.

Rene, Jon-Eric, Axel (whom I nicknamed Ahmet), and Paul.

That sunrise I mentioned.


7/25/04: Zarva

I’ve settled into the Hotel Gellert in Buda, jus above the Danube by the Liberty Bridge. A single room with no air conditioning: 65 euros. It jumps to 200 euros if I want AC. I’ll probably try to find better (middle-of-the-road) accommodations tomorrow. I napped, then took a walk. Found an Internet café, so I could at least check up on my e-mail, if not post this rambling entry.

Sounds like I’m missing another great Yankees-Red Sox series back in the U.S. Oh, well. To establish my Ugly American credentials here, I walked around in my Derek Jeter jersey.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and most of the establishments in Buda are closed (Zarva). My dinner consisted of lo mein and paprika chicken at a Chinese restaurant. Time to chill out and read some of that Lester Bangs.

All speedfreaks are liars; anybody that keeps their mouth open that much can’t tell the truth all the time or they’d run out of things to say.


7/26/04: Andrassy Ut

Took a walk across the Independence Bridge over to Pest, then trundled up Andrassy Ut, which leads up past some pretty significant buildings, to the City Park. It rained (and figures to for much of my stay here, alas). I took a bunch of pix. Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the TV, and saw South Park in German. I’m pretty sure I was awake, at least.

I ate Thai for lunch. I’ve now had two meals here, and they’ve both been Asian. Eventually, I’ll have to have some goulash.

During lunch, I read about the history of the city. I found out where my hotel (and the hill it’s located on) got its name. Sez Lonely Planet:

In 1046, a Venetian-born bishop named Gerard (Gellert in Hungarian), who had been brought to Hungary by King Stephen, was hurled to his death from a Buda hilltop in a spiked barrel by pagan Hungarians resisting conversion. The hill now bears Gellert’s name.

Whew! Mystery revealed! (Of course, it does raise the question of whether pagans kept a supply of spiked barrels around for just this occasion.)

Here are links to some pix I took today:

The national opera house.

The Millenary Monument (unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good shot of the colonnades behind it).

That monument again.

A walk in the City Park.

Same shot, different proportion.

Have fun storming the castle!

A monument I don’t know the name of, on Buda hill, right before the Elizabeth bridge.

In Pest, I saw this monument in the big retail walkway.

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posted by Gil at 10:33 AM

Safe, Sound, Sleepy

I'm in Budapest, staying at the Hotel Gellert, on a hill in Buda, right by the river. Once I find a wireless hotspot (I'm at an internet cafe in Pest at the mo), I'll post the story of the two days in Tiszaroff for Jon-Eric's wedding, a period your humble bloggist would probably do better not to publicize. But hey.

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posted by Gil at 12:02 PM

Budapest by Blimp

Social butterfly that I am, I have weddings to attend on consecutive Saturdays. On July 31, I'll be attending the nuptials of one of my co-workers in Cranford, NJ. This Saturday, I'll be at the sorta-wedding of my lifelong friend Jon-Eric, in Budapest. (J-E actually got hitched last year, eloping with his Hungarian fiancee. Her family couldn't come out to the U.S., so they decided to have a second wedding in Budapest. (This will be the second Hungarian wedding I've attended. Not sure if they'll throw a pair of shot glasses over a house, the way the other bride and groom did, or if that was just some made-up "tradition".))

So, dear reader, this entry comes to you from the wireless hotspot in the international terminal at Newark Airport, where your humble blogger/typist awaits his SAS flight. It's an 11:55pm take-off, which means (I pray) that I'll be able to sleep during the flight, and be relatively adjusted to Euro-time by tomorrow night.

Best laid plans, blah blah blah . . .

Against my better judgement, I've elected to take my PowerBook with me, since it's awfully darn light and I don't plan on stayingin seedy, unsafe hotels (hotel rates are cheap in Hungary, at least by my bloated American standards). If I can find some connections while I'm there, I'll post away, replete with all sorts of fancy pictures.

And, virtually at this moment, the Swedish Economic Development Council is finalizing its plans to fly me out to Stockholm, Copenhagen, etc. in five weeks' time, so I can tour their pharma/biopharma facilities and interview their executives. So it looks like I'll get to cover the Raoul Wallenberg circuit pretty well this summer (except for the part about the assassination in a gulag).

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posted by Gil at 10:18 PM

Cuban Launches Missiles

I'm a bit of a moron about finance and money matters, even though I've gained a good deal of expertise on the pharma business in the last 5 years. Mark Cuban is too easily goofed on as a self-promoting maniac, but it's important to remember that he's not just some internet bazillionaire; he's also a pretty smart businessman and investor. Here's his take on Microsoft's plan to pay out a sizeable dividend and buy back a chunk of its stock.

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posted by Gil at 8:30 AM

Some pictures

I live out in the woods, as mentioned in previous posts. It's only about 25 miles from New York City, so I can get my urban vibe on as necessary. This morning, I opened the curtains in my bedroom and saw the following scene in the backyard:



And that's part of why I love living out here. Not paying rent is also nice.

Last week, my family came out to visit from St. Louis: brother, sister-in-law, and two nieces (four-and-a-half and one, respectively). On Wednesday, while the Nets were in the process of bollixing things up with Kenyon Martin, and while the unspeakable kept on keeping on in Darfur, I went with my family to the Toys R Us in Times Square, so Liat could spend some time in heaven.

She and my brother Boaz rode on "The Big R":



They also met a dinosaur:



They didn't give him a funny name. Liat was too overwhelmed by the two-story Barbie store, where she found her true calling: fairy princess.



We went on from TRU to the Plaza Hotel, where Liat got to live out her Eloise fantasies. Unfortunately, my pictures from there aren't any good. Appreciate the good things. God is Love.

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posted by Gil at 9:42 PM

The Atomic Clock of Wackiness

Michael Jackson and a surrogate mom are expecting quadruplets. I can't make this stuff up. Didn't Indira Gandhi start enforced sterilization back in the 1970s or something?

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posted by Gil at 4:50 PM

Saith the Lord, blah blah blah

Sports Guy has posted The Vengeance Scale, as a way of gauging just how pissed off Shaquille O'Neal is going to be next season. Enjoy.

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posted by Gil at 12:09 PM

Irvine Welsh explains it all

Wit and wisdom from the author of Trainspotting:

Hopefully you grow old, but never up. My whole life's been a midlife crisis. Dunno whether it's a prolonged adolescence or a premature menopause, it's seamless to me.

Failure teaches you everything. Success teaches you nothing at all. You learn things about people, how two-faced and sycophantic they can be. People who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire when you're a failure are suddenly all over you when you're successful.

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posted by Gil at 9:29 AM

Bonnie James Dio

Official VM bartenderess (ret.) Bonnie recently partook in the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. She was part of the Iron MerMaiden Brigade. Click on her boobs or something for the link.

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posted by Gil at 7:01 PM

Independence Day

I've been an NBA mark for years. I'd watched the league as a kid, but I became a fan when the Knicks took Patrick Ewing with the #1 pick in the 1985 draft. For 11 seasons, I was a devoted Knicks fan. I cheered when Ewing made his first all-star team (even though he barely played, in the typical rite of passage for first-timers).

I didn't understand the game and the team's recent history well enough to lament the loss of Bernard King to a series of knee blowouts (the same injury I suffered in the spring of 1991). But I cheered when Bianchi and Pitino’s Bomb Squad made the playoffs, when Trent Tucker hit the 4-point play against Chicago with 0.1 left on the clock, when the Knicks swept the Sixers and several players broke out a broom and started sweeping the court. And that was just the high school years. The team fell apart through a series of bad trades and drafts (Jerrod Mustaf? Rod Strickland for Mo Cheeks?). Afew years later, Pat Riley came in as coach and the team became a title-contender.

Those were exciting times, especially because Riley’s defense-first style meant every game was a low-scoring affair, which kept things really competitive. In college, my friend Mike, who wasn’t a hoops junkie like I am, watched games with me every Sunday on NBC. After a few weeks of nail-biting Knicks games, he said, "I can’t take this anymore! I’m gonna have a heart attack if I keep watching these things!" I knew where he was coming from.

Within a season, as the 1980s dominance of the Lakers and the Celtics waned, the Knicks were fighting Michael Jordan’s Bulls each year in the playoffs, then battling with the Pacers as the legend of Reggie Miller began. They were great times, even if the Knicks' style was ugly. The ups and downs were phenomenal. I watched John Starks' incredible playoff-dunk against Jordan and Horace Grant, Charles Smith's failure to connect on a layup in that same series, Greg Anthony's sucker-punch of Kevin Johnson, preceded by Doc Rivers' spitting out of teeth after getting tripped on-court. I watched Ewing climb onto the scorers' table in 1994, preening for the crowd like a gladiator, watched him blow a finger-roll against Indiana in 1995 to lose in the playoffs. Sure, Ewing was outplayed by Olajuwon in the 1994 Finals, but it was a heck of a series. And, yes, Starks missed a ton of shots in game 7 of that series, but Ewing’s demands for the ball in the fourth quarter of game 6 may’ve cost them more.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, I was a huge Knicks fan (and general NBA geek). That ended in 1997. Riley had bailed out on New York to take over the Miami Heat two seasons earlier. The teams squared off in the second round of the playoffs, winner to meet Jordan’s Bulls. The year before, Jordan had set the record for most wins in an NBA season (his team went 72-10) with the most ferociously sustained performance since the Lakers won 33 games in a row back in 1972. The Bulls ran through the eastern conference, going 11-1. The Knicks handed them their sole defeat and, after the series, Patrick Ewing made his standard comment after getting eliminated in the playoffs. He said, "We were the better team; we should’ve won this series." As I said, this Bulls team had just set the record for the best record in the history of the NBA. But that was Patrick: great talent (not great enough to carry a team to a championship), hard worker, and a completely delusional view of the world. What’s not to like?

In 1996-97, the Knicks retooled their team solely to beat the Bulls. They romped in the first round of the playoffs, then took on Riley’s Heat in the second round. Riley had built the Heat as a mirror-image of the Knicks, right down to getting a Georgetown center a la Ewing in Alonzo Mourning. The Knicks, up 3-1 in the seven-game series, were in position to knock them off and face the Bulls, with their best chance of knocking off Jordan and getting back to the Finals.

The Knicks, as was their wont, blew game 5 badly. They were never good at closing out teams, almost always playing too loose in their first elimination game of a series. At the end of that game, Knick guard Charlie Ward took a cheap shot at the knees of Miami’s P.J. Brown. Brown, a foot taller than Ward, flipped him into the front row on the baseline of the court. A brawl ensued. A number of Knick players got off the bench and, because of league rules, were suspended for a game. Without their full complement of players, the Knicks lost in 7 games to Miami, which went on to get dusted by the Bulls. I decided on that night that I could no longer support the Knicks.

How could I keep cheering for a team that seemed to always find a way to let me down? After following the team devotedly throughout the season, I watched them melt down in a single moment, not even failing on the court, but through the stupidity of getting into a fight with Riley’s players.

I decided I’d had enough of having my expectations dashed. No more would I cheer for a basketball team all year long, only to be disappointed. I would cheer for a team with no expectations. I became a Nets fan.

The Nets, see, were one of the biggest jokes in the NBA. The ownership group at the time consisted of "The Secaucus Seven," a bunch of investors who could never agree on a direction for the team, and left it constantly floundering. The Nets played at the Meadowlands, a cheap arena that looked even cheaper during the 1996 NCAA basketball finals, when a rainstorm revealed numerous leaks in the ceiling. It was a dump. The players hated being there. There was never hope of making the playoffs. Promising players developed terrible attitudes and were traded. Draft picks were disastrous. Coaches were re-treads. I’d found my new home.

I decided that cheering for the Nets would be fun. After all, there was no pressure. The team goes 30-52? That’s better than last year! After all, this team had won exactly one playoff series since it had joined the league in 1978. There was never the Riley-esque slow-and-steady progression to a championship. There was just a basketball team adrift, no real direction and no real location (the Meadowlands are out in the swamps of Jersey, as Bruce Springsteen would put it).

Within a year, unfortunately, the Nets became up-and-comers. The young college coach who took over was energizing the fans. The players came together and complemented each other’s strengths. No one was bickering about a contract. Just my luck: the Nets had turned the corner. The team put on a great run to make the playoffs, got swept by Jordan's Bulls, and began making offseason plans to become a serious power in the NBA.

And I started to build expectations. When that season got underway, the key player on the squad turned his ankle and the Nets started the season 3-18. I learned that this wasn’t disappointment; with the Nets, this was standard operating procedure! So I got back to enjoying watching them lose. Mid-season, they traded for Stephon Marbury, their first star player in years. On April Fools day of that season (1999), the star player dived for a ball, and broke the leg of the Nets key rebounder and "glue" player, Jayson Williams (who went on to shoot his chauffeur in the chest with a shotgun). Those crazy Nets!

The next season, my buddy and I bought a 10-game ticket plan for the Nets. We watched them lose to a number of exciting teams that had great management and better players. At one point, during a game against the Heat, I turned to my buddy and said, “Stephon Marbury is out on the court with Lucious Harris, Stephen Jackson, Aaron Williams and Evan Eschmeyer. Those four guys shouldn’t even be in the NBA! And that’s our crunch-time squad!”

We went to the games. We watched Stephon put up 50 (in a losing effort, of course) against the Lakers. We ate hot dogs and pretzels. We had fun. We never expected them to win games, and they never let us down. The team even added the #1 pick in the draft that year, but he broke his leg midway through the season. Of course, since it was the Nets, he had also broken his leg late in his last college season. It was a risk, but the Nets drafted him anyway. His name is Kenyon Martin.

The Nets went 26-56 that season. My buddy & I re-upped for a 21-game plan. It was cheap: just $25/seat in the lower tier, and the games were all against great teams.

Then disaster struck. The Nets transformed in the off-season, trading Marbury for Jason Kidd, drafting well, and building a winner overnight.

Now, this isn't as bad as I perversely make it sound. After all, going into that year, even Kidd said that a .500 season (41-41) would be a great accomplishment. That season, they became the best team in the east, rampaging over the competition and reaching the NBA Finals. Along the way, they played in the most exciting pro basketball game I’ve ever seen (game 5 against the Pacers in the first round of the playoffs). We were swept up, but the winning wasn’t expected, so that somehow made it acceptable. It was fun, and we went to half their home games, so we really got to see the players develop and grow.

They were blown out by the Lakers in the Finals, but that was expected. The next year, they got there again, but were beaten by the Spurs. I went into last season (just finished) with a certain ennui. The winning had gotten to me. I now thought about plans for how the team could remain a powerhouse for years to come. Kidd was going to decline a bit as he gets older, but Kenyon Martin’s ferocious defense and fire, combined with the all-around game of 2001 draft pick Richard Jefferson, would keep them competitive for years.

I’d forgotten the #1 lesson of being a Nets fan: success is an accident; you can only plan for failure.

This takes us to yesterday. This year’s NBA off-season has been filled with some pretty depressing turns. The most dominant player of the last 10 years just got traded. A star player who is on trial for sexual assault was given a 7-year/$140 million contract (voidable if he’s convicted: whew!). A key player convinced his team to drop his contract option for next year (he was to get paid $700,000), then took a big-money deal from another team. A player signed a deal to leave his current team, and watched his team owner write a lengthy blog entry about it.

And the Nets, who had changed the face of their team in the past three seasons, just traded Kenyon Martin away for three future draft picks because he wanted a big contract. The team is under new ownership, which plans to move the squad from New Jersey to Brooklyn, and decided that it’s not worth carrying around a huge payroll for the next few years. So the #1 pick is gone, the fiery leader is gone, the man who won a game last April by catching an opponent’s shot in mid-air is gone. In his place? Draft picks in a league where most players take years to develop.

Fans never turned out in huge numbers to Nets games. Even during the two runs to the Finals, the regular-season attendance was usually among the bottom five in the 29-team league. Tickets were expensive, traffic to and from the arena sucked, and there was (almost) always an overall feeling that the sky was about to fall in. Once the move to Brooklyn was announced, even fewer fans turned out. With Kenyon’s departure, that number’s guaranteed to get worse. I’ll be amazed if the Nets play in front of more than 5,000 people a night in another season or two (while the Brooklyn site undergoes the typical construction delays of any city’s mega-building projects).

It’s not my money, of course, but I’ll bet that the amount the team saves from not paying Kenyon is going to be offset by the incredible decline in ticket sales, parking and concessions revenues.

But that’s neither here nor there. What all of this is heading toward is my declaration that I am now done supporting the Nets, the Knicks, or any team. From here on in, I will continue to be an NBA mark, but I will no longer root for one team over any other. I will buy my NBA League Pass on DirecTV again and, whichever games are on that night, I’ll tune in if I’m in the mood. I’ll cheer for whoever interests me that night, and make sure to catch the players I love to watch (Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Jason Williams, Peja Stojakovic (regular season only)). If a team strikes my fancy (like the Grizzlies last season), so be it. But no team gets more than a one-game commitment from me any longer.

That's the new NBA.

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posted by Gil at 11:46 AM

Funny Books

Really long article on comics, by Charles McGrath in the New York Times. Oh, wait. It's about graphic novels, not comics. My bad.

It actually has some good points about the narrative form, and some neat comments from cartoonists. It doesn't really get into the finances of the business, which is integral to understanding the development of comics.

I'll write more extensively about the subject soon, as it's something I care about a lot. I'm not sure how such a massive article on comics can get published without mentioning (like it or not) the work of Dave Sim, who recently finished a 300-issue serial written and drawn monthly over the course of twenty-seven years, but we've all got our lacunae, I guess.

And it's "McCloud," not "McLoud."

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posted by Gil at 11:02 AM

Good night, Sweet Weezie

Isabel Sanford, best known for her role as Louise "Weezie" Jefferson on the eponymous TV show, died yesterday.

My buddy Tom writes:

I think I'm the only one who finds it super odd that the actress who played Weezie Jefferson was 21 years old than the actor who played George Jefferson on The Jeffersons. I can't think of any other television pairing with that particular age disparity.

Howzabout it, VM reader? Can you think of any other more disparate age-pairing? And no fair going with Joan Collins and any other cast member on Dynasty.

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posted by Gil at 10:23 AM

Talk about Woody

Go here and let it load. Then laugh.

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posted by Gil at 2:39 PM

No Genocide for Oil, you French Motherf***ers!

Back in May, I wrote my Representative about the Congressional resolution on the Sudanese genocide. He wrote back this weekend (see below). There've been some developments, but no serious results yet. Several Congressmen are calling for the U.S. to label this a genocide, which would automatically trigger intervention by a whole ton of countries. For the same reason, NO ONE who stands for re-election wants to label this a genocide.

The U.S. is also pushing for strong measures from the UN, but seems to by stymied by . . . France and China (and others, but F & C have permanent veto powers on the Security Council)! It looks like both of those countries have significant oil interests in Sudan, and would like to stay on good terms with the military junta that runs Sudan (into the ground). I'd call this the heights of hypocrisy, especially given France's complaints about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but this is a country that provided military assistance to the Hutus during the genocide in Rwanda. So I guess we have to consider it a major advance on the part of France that it's not currently providing military support to the Janjaweed militias. Fuckers.

Anyway, this isn't the site to go to for Sudan updates. The best place to find out what's going on in Darfur and what you can do to help stop it is Passion of the Present.

Here's Rep. Garrett's response to my e-mail.

Dear Mr. Roth,

Thank you for contacting me about H. Con. Res. 403 and the ongoing problems in Sudan. I value your comments and appreciate the opportunity to respond.

We agree that the atrocities being committed by the Janjawid militia and Sudanese government are horrendous and should cease immediately. That is why I recently voted for H. Con. Res. 403, sponsored by Representative Frank Wolfe (VA-10). This concurrent resolution condemns the Government of the Republic of the Sudan for its attacks against innocent civilians in the impoverished Darfur region of western Sudan and urges the Government of Sudan to immediately disarm and disband government supported militia groups immediately. This resolution passed by a margin of 360-1 and has been referred to the U.S. Senate.

According to the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan branch of the Library of Congress established to conduct and provide non-biased research for Congress, "In late 2000, Washington defeated efforts to lift United Nations sanctions on Sudan and prevented Sudan from becoming Africa’s representative in the United Nations Security Council. Senior U.S. officials met with Sudanese government officials in 2000 to inform Sudanese officials what it would take to improve relations. U.S. security officials also spent several months in Khartoum talking with Sudanese security officials on terrorism. President Bush has mentioned Sudan twice in his speeches in the last two months, condemning human rights violations by the Bashir government. In early March 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell told members of the House International Relations Committee that Sudan is a priority to him and the Administation . . . (in 2004) later declared that the U.S. will not normalize relations with the government of Sudan until the Darfur situation is addressed."

Be assured that I will continue to monitor this situation as it progresses, and will support the United States and the international community’s efforts to encourage and end to the 20-year civil war in Sudan.

Again, thank you for contacting me. [. . .]

Sincerely,

Scott Garrett
Member of Congress

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posted by Gil at 9:43 AM

My From the Editor page in the July/August issue of my day job:

Who Knew?
Cancer drug prices explained! (and the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, to boot!)

In June 2004, Robert Bazell, the chief science correspondent for NBC News, wrote an article called Strange Medicine on Slate.com. I’ve read Slate, which is owned by Microsoft, for a few years now. It has its partisan turns, which can drive me to distraction, but I find its articles pretty informative, in general.

In his article Mr. Bazell attempts to explain why cancer drugs are so expensive. He writes, “[T]he simplest answer is that drug companies can charge whatever price they want.” Who knew it was that simple? I certainly didn’t, so I kept reading, to find out why Pharma doesn’t charge $1 million per dose of every drug (a prospect which surely would’ve made this year’s Top 20 Pharma Companies Report (starting on page 36) even more entertaining).

Well, I discovered, it’s because Medicare has failed to rein in costs by setting fees for treatment. Since private insurers follow Medicare’s lead (until they don’t, in Mr. Bazell’s world), new MAbs for cancer like Erbitux and Avastin are ridiculously expensive because drug companies want to charge lots of money for them. He writes, “Like all pharmaceutical companies, [Bristol-Myers Squibb] and Genentech cite research costs and the huge risks involved in drug development (many drugs fail; clinical trials are expensive . . . but haven’t we heard it all?) as explanations for the high prices of their drugs. But the real reason is that market forces do not apply to drugs.” Who knew? Perhaps the $2 billion that B-MS committed to ImClone to co-market Erbitux simply grew on a tree, too.

Referring to manufacturing those same drugs, he writes, “True, these antibodies are more expensive to produce than most pills, but only slightly—the technology can be replicated in any college biology lab. Production costs amount to few dollars a dose at most.” (You can go back and read those lines again; I’ll wait.)

Again, who knew? All this time, I was under the impression that my readers and advertisers were manufacturing and purifying multi-step chemical and biological processes under cGMPs at large scale, then storing, packaging and distributing them, while educating doctors and other prescribers about the uses and benefits of their products (e-mail me to let me know what additional steps I missed, like formulation and validation). Now I realize that a bunch of college kids could make Erbitux to treat the 106,000 annual colon cancer diagnoses that Mr. Bazell cites, and there wouldn’t be any problems at all!

At this point I rapidly concluded that my AppleCare warranty likely wouldn’t cover damage to my nifty new laptop caused by hefting it across the room. Then I was reminded of something I read a few months ago. At the risk of turning this space into the “Michael Crichton page,” I’d like to A) note that I’ve never read a book of his, and B) cite another of the writer’s speeches (to the International Leadership Forum, in April 2002):

[T]he Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.

[. . .] You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. The paper’s full of them.

[. . . .Y]ou read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read [about your field]. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. [. . . I]t does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Smart guy, this Crichton. If he applies himself, he may just amount to something in this world.

Gil Roth
Editor

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posted by Gil at 10:19 AM

But we're still above child molesters!

According to a Harris poll, the industry I write about—which develops drugs and vaccines to heal the sick and improve quality of life—is regarded as poorly as oil companies and tobacco marketers.

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posted by Gil at 9:19 AM

There IS no CO, man

Fallujah's going to be a real problem:

"We could take the city," [Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq's director of national intelligence] said, "but we would have to kill everyone in it."

As Ralph Peters puts it:

"Nothing says that wars of attrition have to be fair."

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posted by Gil at 9:12 AM

Build It Up, Tear It Down

According to this article in the Washington Post, the organized homicidal faction of the Palestinians is calling for reforms of the Palestinian Authority (an end to corruption, nepotism and graft, particularly), and wants a voice in the government.

At first, I was going to make a joke about how tough it would be to vote for candidates who always wear black ski masks, but that seemed mean-spirited. Then I thought about how the article (which I read quickly) doesn't seem to mention a need to destroy Israel. Which made me think, "Maybe this security wall is already serving its purpose."

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posted by Gil at 9:05 AM

You say, "Catfish," I say "Basa Tra"

Something's not kosher here.

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posted by Gil at 8:44 AM

Memory Hole

Yeah, it's embarrassing that the New York Post ran a front-page headline that John Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt as his VP candidate, the morning that John Edwards got the nod.

But for the Daily News to slam them for it is kinda pissy, especially since the News ran a back page headline last winter that definitively stated Mike Fratello was to be named the Knicks' head coach. Lenny Wilkens got the job and, Fratello expressly TOLD the idiot NBA-writer at the News BEFORE THE ARTICLE RAN that he wasn't offered the job and hadn't even talked to Knicks about it.

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posted by Gil at 6:54 AM

Back!

Not exactly rested and ready, but at least the big issue is wrapped, in time for my family's visit for the next 7-10 days!

To get re-started, here's a post by The Brooding Persian, about the 4th of July in Iran.

In the Persian calendar, today is 18 Tir, which has become a day of protest for Iranians. It marks the anniversary of the 1999 Iranian students national uprising, which was flat-out massacred by the troops of the theocracy. There are protests and demonstrations going on worldwide, a guide for which can be found here. If there was one in NYC tonight/this afternoon, I'd head out for it.

Update: Here's a little more background on the events of 18 Tir back in 1999.

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posted by Gil at 6:43 AM

I thought he'd be the Indian

I thought I'd have some indignation regarding this story on Colin Powell's singing disco at an Asian security meeting in Jakarta.

Instead, I marveled over the coincidence of the song & get-up he chose, and their similarity to a friend-of-a-friend's award-winning design for a pack of condoms.

It's been a strange little life, 33 years into it . . .

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posted by Gil at 7:15 AM

Just Amazing

Someday, I'll be able to tell my (brother's) grandkids that I saw Derek Jeter play.

Unfortunately, for his two greatest plays (last night's, and the incredible backup play he made in the 2001 playoffs against Oakland), I was in the car, and heard them on the radio.

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posted by Gil at 12:55 PM

That hurts

Mickey Kaus just referred to my car (the Honda Element) as a "fake panzer" in his review of the new Scion xB. I considered buying the Scion, but discovered that it actually possesses a lawnmower engine, and thus would be impractical for the hills where I live.

Mickey also writes: Drive a Scion for a few days and you'll see other cars the way Humbert Humbert saw college girls—as repulsively over-ripe.

Nice.

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posted by Gil at 11:55 AM

Guys Gone Wild?

The best part about this story is the fact that the "out-of-work actress grapevine" gets a shout out.

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posted by Gil at 7:05 AM