Fiat Lux

While listening to ABC's "This Week" this morning on my way to work, I started to hear echoes of Robert McNamara in Donald Rumsfeld. Look at what he said today: "It's clearly a tragic day for America," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington. "In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days. But they're necessary." (source). Maureen Dowd wrote a great column on this very subject a few days ago. Her best line, and one oh so apt for Rumsfeld's quote today: 'In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."'

In the early days of the war on Iraq, my husband and I discussed whether we weren't getting into another Vietnam. As time passes and the shadow war continues, I grow more sure that President Bush and his crew have not learned the lessons of history and have committing our troops to another multi-year battle against an enemy we cannot defeat in a land we do not understand.

I feel both sad and angry that who knows how many of our men and women will have to pay the ultimate price until this mess gets straightened out. I just hope our next president will be able get us out of there quickly and with some faint shreds of our honor intact.

"Lagniappe" is a word I first heard in New Orleans which I'm told more or less means "unexpected gift". The lagniappe of my new commute is that my Saturn, which has consistantly delivered 30 highway MPG and 20-25 MPG in city driving, has somehow shot up to better than 35 MPG recently. I guess the intense highway time makes her happy. Either that, or someone at Jiffy Lube screwed up and put some pixie dust into her chassis at the last oil change.

I also gifted myself this week with a brand-new 20GB iPod and car kit. I'm still learning all the ins and outs of the thing, so I'll save a full rundown for another blog post. But so far I'm enjoying it.

$200 million dollars to NPR, courtesy of the late Joan B. Kroc (the widow of McDonald's restaurant founder Ray Kroc).

Personally I think McDonald's sucks, but Mrs Kroc did a very cool thing with her money, so maybe I'll actually go buy some McNuggets for lunch tomorrow.

Or maybe not. Their food still sucks.

Way to go George Soros, for 1) proving that not everyone who is immensely wealthy is a Republican and 2) being willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Notable quotes from the Washington Post article:

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said.

and

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

Not surprisingly, the Republicans have now accused Soros of buying the Democratic Party. Even if that were true, I'd rather have George Soros calling the shots than a bunch of Texas oil barons.

One of the things I have to do at my job involves once a month going through all the shoes, socks, and shoe care stuff that for whatever reason can't be sold. So tonight as I was sorting out those that have to be trashed from those that get sent off to be fixed up and resold, I came to a realization. Life is too short to not like your socks.

Now, you might reasonably think that a grown woman would have figured that out at some earlier point in her life. But if I buy socks and then later decide I don't like them, they stay in my sock drawer and get worn when I run out of the socks that I like. It's probably some misplaced notion of thriftiness I inherited from my Depression-surviving grandparents. At any rate, I was wearing a pair today while I was sorting out the shoes, and decided to try on a pair. They fit weirdly, and I realized that my socks were twisted all around. Then I realized that I hated those socks, always had, and didn't really want to be wearing them. And finally, the realization that despite the fact that I feel that I'd be throwing money away by getting rid of socks that were still wearable, life is too short too wear socks you hate.

There's a lot of stress in my life right now. I recently started a new job, I had 2 people quit on me with no notice on Friday, and I'm probably not going to have a day off until Thanksgiving. I need to be kind to myself to get through that. I might as well include my sock drawer. I suppose the other lesson might be, I should be more selective about what goes into my sock drawer if I know they're not going to get thrown out until they wear out.

Anyway, when I got home, I tossed the offending pair into the garbage can. I felt weird throwing them out, but you know what? I won't miss them once the trash goes out.

It's late and I'll pay for this when the alarm clock goes off oh so early tomorrow morning, but I saw "Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World" tonight & wanted to throw down a few lines while my impressions are still fresh.

As a longtime avid fan of the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin series, I had waited for the opening of the movie version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Happily, I was much more pleased than disappointed by the results. Given the limits of what you can cram into one movie, I think they did a fair job of bringing an O'Brien book to the screen. But my pleasure was not unalloyed.

Other, less exhausted reviewers of the movie will go into detail of the subplots cut, the bits freely borrowed from other O'Brien novels, and the somewhat contrived ending. I'll limit myself to these few observations:

1) I think they could have kept the original love triangle subplot with Midshipman Horner, the gunner, and his wife rather than making Horner out to be just another aging, inept midshipman who couldn't pass for lieutenant. I suppose it made the film too long to add it in.

2) I'm a fan of Billy Boyd, but I found him somewhat incongruous as Barrett Bonden. I'd always pictured Bonden to be older and not as good looking.

3) Russell Crowe did a good job as Aubrey. I would have liked to see Aubrey a little more human and less permanently enrobed with the godlike authority of a captain, but that's not what you get with Crowe, and all things considered it was an acceptable tradeoff. He certainly did a good job of the glee Jack felt when sailing Surprise into a storm or boarding a Frenchman's deck, for example. And I loved the 'lesser of two weevils' bit.

4) Maturin. As with Billy Boyd, Paul Bettany is a good actor, but my mental image of Stephen Maturin was not in line with him. Bettany is too tall and too good-looking to be the small, scrawny, bewigged Doctor. And in the final battle, despite the fact that O'Brien does take pains to demonstrate that Stephen is a good fighter, there's no way Maturin would have boarded the enemy. His place was in the cockpit with the wounded and he would not have left it.

4) Blakeney. I would have preferred meeting young Babbington.

Despite my quibbles, I do think "Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World" is a move well worth seeing and I suspect it will fight it out with "Lord Of The Rings" for a few Oscars this springtime.

Scott pointed out something tonight that I totally missed in the last episode of ER. There's a nice echo of Moby Dick in the end to the saga of Dr Romano in that he was killed by the same creature that previously took his limb (in other words, a helicopter, albeit not a white one).

Very clever of the writers.

Fall isn't much of a season in the Bay Area. Indian Summer takes up most of September and October. That leaves November before the winter rainy season kicks in. That leaves November.

It's been cold and crisp these last few days, with the scent of smoke from fireplaces filling the air in the evenings. Autumn was always one of my favorite times back home in New York, and these kinds of days remind me strongly of home. Now that I work in Santa Rosa, I get to see more greenery as I drive to and fro. The trees here don't change colors as dramatically as they do in New York and Connecticut - most of the trees are just yellowish brown - but a few patches of bright red can be found. A field of grapevines near Petaluma has turned bright yellow. I've dug out my wool sweaters and a scarf, although the gloves and down jacket aren't likely to be needed.

The gas fireplace in our last apartment wasn't quite as good as the real thing, but it would be nice to curl up near any kind of fireplace on days like these. Instead, I make do with one of the cats. Tina and Tommy compete for lap space on cold days. They like the warmth too.

It would be nice if I could look forward to some snowy days to come, but I'll have to drive to Tahoe for that sort of thing. Instead, we get the incongruous sight of palm trees with holiday lights on them. There aren't a lot of palm trees this far north, but there are a few, and it always throws me off a bit to see them.

"Black Friday" is fast approaching, and with it, the twin horrors of extended holiday hours and holiday music. I don't really mind the odd work hours, especially since I get to set the schedules now, but I utterly loathe the overproduced pabulum that passes for holiday music which the home office decrees we should play in the store. Christmas isn't my holiday, but I wouldn't be too upset if I had to listen to some good classical arrangements of carols, or classics like 'The Nutcracker Suite'.

Ah well. I just keep reminding myself, it's only for a couple of weeks, and then I can burn the damn CDs. Until next year.

The sucky thing about working in retail is that if your family is more than a few hour's drive away, you won't see them for the holidays. Since mine is some 2400 miles away, this year we're borrowing a family from my friend Katie in Berkeley. Not that Katie & her family are bad people - they're warmhearted folks that are a lot of fun to spend time with. But it's still not quite the same as being with your own family.

When I was still living back East, most years we would head down to Washington DC to be with my aunt & her family. I've always liked the DC/NoVA area and Scott and I have several times considered moving there. My uncle would do most of the cooking with a little help from my aunt & my mom. We generally stayed in the McLean area and didn't go into DC itself, instead doing homey stuff like taking their dog for a walk, watching my cousins' soccer games, and enjoying the slightly warmer than NYC weather.

It's silly and maybe a bit snobby, but one of the things I miss is a tradition my family inaugurated about 10 years ago. We found that Beaujolais Nouveau goes quite nicely with turkey, so my folks would pick up several bottles of the stuff for us to enjoy on Thanksgiving. It was fun and made the day a bit more special to taste that year's vintage and see how the different brands compared.

Yes, I know I can buy Beaujolais Nouveau here. It's not the same.

At any rate, I have a lot to be thankful for - health, family, friends, pets, and employment - so a little homesickness isn't such a big deal in the grand scheme. Maybe next year we'll be in NY again.