previous | 28 February 2006 | next Springtime Jihad is in the air, and though I pride myself on my own obliviousness, the following have converged on my radar: Last night we watched the first two episodes of Terry Jones' Crusades miniseries. So much of the Western tradition that I love is built on the horrible, absurd, and miserable. The NYer has a great piece on the legal manipulation behind the torture scandals - I've always felt that the Bush administration was more incompetent than malevolent, but that's changed. Via Bernard Welt, some truth-is-stranger-than-Pynchon war/sex commentary. Really, it could be a chapter out of Gravity's Rainbow. Geez, wouldn't it be great if Pynchon wrote a 'novel' about the Bush dynasty? The soundtrack to all of this is the re-issue of Remain in Light. The remastering is awesome, but the extra tracks add little to the core songs - the original album is a compact statement of the best of globalization. [Incidentally, I recently heard that the OED cites my grandfather, Charles Cerami, as one of the first people to use the term.] Adrian Parsons calls for an all-out ethnic cleansing. Artists go forth and 'liberate' the heathen dorks: Battlefield MUD. Unless there's a miracle, I'm pretty sure the dorks will clean our clocks.