Happy Fourth of July!

Mexico

Sol vs. Australia

Sol Trujillo to Australia: "You are a racist backwater."

Australia, all whipped up into a frenzy, replies: "Who are you to call us racist you Mexican bastard!"

While it's hard to summarize a few days of national dialogue, I think that is a fair take on how Australia responded to Trujillo's comments.

Between Rudd's characteristically pathetic "Adios" comment, the repeated "three amigo" references, the radio stations playing the Mexican hat dance at the mention of Trujillo's name, and even the Age's tasteless headline, I'd say Trujillo (who was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to a Mexican-American family) is on pretty solid ground. Crickey collected a number of examples. Once again, Rudd shows he has read and understood the John Howard guide for getting ahead in Australian politics: be as mundane as possible, treat outsiders with contempt and stoke existing prejudices.

Snippet

“Raymond Carver used to describe himself as a cigarette with a body attached to it.”

“How did that work out for him?”

“He died of lung cancer.”

“Well then, I guess Raymond Carver is just a cigarette now.”

“Maybe he’s this cigarette,” I suggested, holding out my durrie.

Kat laughed. “You’re smoking the world’s greatest ever short story writer. I hope you’re enjoying him.”

I carefully inspected the cigarette for evidence that it might somehow be Raymond Carver in the afterlife. But I didn’t find anything conclusive, so I continued smoking. When I’d finished sucking the dregs, I gave the possible Raymond Carver a sombre burial in a pot plant and we headed inside.

Not An Onion Headline

Afghanistan's Only Pig Quarantined In Flu Fear

For those that are not on Facebook (where my 'status update' on this drew a lot of comments), I'm heading to Mexico on June 9-14 - swine flu discount! There are cases of swine flu in the Bay Area but none in the Mexican state I'm headed to (Sayulita in Nayarit) so I'm not at all concerned. Looking forward to surfing some warm water waves and drinking beer on the beach.

Netherland

It's been getting very strong reviews and had been highly recommended to me by friends (even the President is reading it). But I didn't like Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.

I had high hopes for the book after its brilliant opening scene -- a cricket match on Staten Island where the umpire (the supposedly Gatsby-esque Chuck Ramkissoon) confronts a gun wielding player. But Netherland slowly lost my interest over the rest of its 250 pages. Nothing much happens. I feel like I have a pretty high tolerance for books (and music for that matter) where nothing much happens (for example, I like Joseph Heller's second novel, the ironically named Something Happened). But I was irritated this time.

Netherland is narrated in the first person by Hans van den Broek, a Dutch oil analyst living in New York. Although a lot of reviewers have compared it to The Great Gatsby, any "echoes" of Gatsby (as the New York Times put it) seemed pretty faint to me. The central story of the book is the breakup of Hans' marriage. The Chuck Ramkissoon character often seemed tacked onto the rest of the book. And many of the allusions to Gatsby, such as the manner of Chuck's death, seemed forced to me (I'm not giving away much here, the death is foreshadowed very early).

I also found that Hans' baroque narration did not fit with his very plain personality. I guess since O'Neill is a barrister who's also a novelist he finds it easy to imagine an oil analyst with such a flowery inner life - but I found it incongruous given Hans' behavior.

My biggest complaint with Netherland might be fairly unique to me - and could suggest a strength. After his wife leaves him, Hans' life in New York (that of a single, overworked somewhat isolated expatriot urban professional) was so much like my own that I found reading it to be excruciatingly mundane. One of the pleasures of reading a good novel is when it takes you inside a new and unfamiliar world. Netherland simply brought me back into my own world -- a world I wasn't particularly enjoying at the time (I read Netherland slowly because I was preparing for trial and had no free time to read other than my commute).

Perhaps other readers will find Hans' life interesting. I hope Obama enjoys it.

Poor Archie

Message included in today's surf forecast for 13th Beach:

Local dolphin Archie seems to be besieged by crew that want to ride him and an other bunch that want to be a dolphin even swimming like a dolphin. exciting as it may seem i don't think we are meant to be re enacting the sea world experience with a wild dolphin . Archie has given everyone heaps of stoke but we should still accept that interaction should be on his terms and not that of those who have the flipper syndrome.

What to do in Tyler, Texas

http://www.etmc.org/supercolon.htm

Visitors walk through the Prevent Cancer Super Colon™ and get a close-up look at:

* Healthy colon tissue
* Tissue with non-malignant colorectal disease
* Colorectal polyps
* Various stages of colorectal cancer

I'm in Tyler for a while. Don't think I'll get time to visit the Prevent Cancer Super Colon™, unfortunately.

Everything

Everything Counts
Everything I Do
Everything I Have Is Yours
Everything In Flames!
Everything In It's Right Place
Everything Is Alright
Everything Made More Sense
Everything Should Try Again
Everything You Do Is A Balloon
Everything You Touch Becomes A Crutch
Everything's Fucked

Inspiration

A while back, I posted a great video from Boards of Canada. The reclusive Boards were inspired by the soundtracks of 1970s and 1980s National Film Board of Canada nature documentaries. After looking at some clips from that era, it's easy to see the influence.

Bees (Sesame Street):

The Loon (NFBC):

Some more Boards:

And more:

These Boards of Canada videos are fan made. Dayvan Cowboy is their only official video.

Montgomery, TX

An empty luxury hotel next to a fake lake. To get there, drive north from George Bush Intercontinental Airport for an hour and a half past endless rows of strip malls and office parks. The landscape runs past like the background in a computer game where the programmers have recycled the same few graphics over and over: pawn shop, Taco Bell, I-Hop, furniture store, office park, Walmart, pawnshop, Taco Bell, I-Hop, furniture store, office park, Walmart, pawnshop . . . . It goes on forever. I wonder if it would look any different here if conquering aliens ordered Texans on pain of death to make the landscape as ugly as possible. I wonder if maybe this already happened and for some reason I never heard about it.

It doesn't seem any more fanciful then the alternative hypothesis: that people made the world look like this by choice.

Change

Change?

Now this is disappointing. Very disappointing. I would have thought it was exactly the kind of issue where Obama would have broken with Bush. Not so. Makes you wonder what will happen to the detainees in Guantanamo. Are they going to be brought to the US just so they can languish for years in a similar legal limbo in a domestic supermax? If so, they'll be nostalgic for Cuba.

UPDATE:

More, from David Luban, here. This is a big issue. The idea that something is unreviewable by the courts solely on the executive branch's say so was one the Bush administration's most Orwellian doctrines. As the ACLU"s Wizner points out, under the government's theory in this case, the only place in the U.S. where you are not permitted to talk about the rendition program is a federal courthouse. Now Obama/Holder are invoking the same arguments to cover up Bush's misdeeds. A lot of people have been very surprised by this.

I was not alone when I worried that Eric Holder was a very bad choice for attorney general. But I felt like, given my respect for Obama, I should at least give him the benefit of the doubt. The benefit of my doubt is hereby withdrawn:

Australia Day

Today, Surfline has a feature about a visit to Australia by some seppo groms (i.e. young US surfers). It includes some sadly comical reflections about Australia Day. Apparently, the seppos where amazed that almost no one could tell them what Australia Day was about.

Finally, young Aussie surfer Mitch Crews explained it to them. Here are Crews' words of wisdom (the audio, with thick Aussie accent, is classic):

Yeah, Australia Day is pretty much, like, a day where to celebrate, um, the discovery of Oz I guess. Captain Cook found Australia. Yeah so we thought, why not name it Australia day? And everyone gets blind on that day. So it's a good excuse to get blind.

Crews appears to be the most knowledgeable person the seppos could find. Nevertheless, for the benefit of my American readers who might not know this history well, I will quibble with a few of his claims:

First, Australia Day commemorates January 26, 1788. Thus, Crews' suggestion that it relates to Captain Cook's "discovery" of Australia suffers from the following flaw: Cook had been dead for almost 10 years.

Second, even leaving aside the fact that people had already been living in Australia for 40,000+ years, Cook wasn't even close to being the first European to "discover" Australia. The Dutch beat him to it by over 150 years.

Third, the day doesn't even relate to "discovery" or exploration at all, but commemorates the establishment of a colony by the First Fleet. In other words, it celebrates the displacement of an Aboriginal community by a few hundred half-starved, lice-ridden convicts and their military masters. This is why the day would be much better known as Invasion Day (or maybe Survival Day).

The Surfline feature is a sobering reminder of how hard it will be to convince Australians to change the date of the national day. How can Australia's Aborigines convince the rest of the country that the anniversary is inappropriate for celebration when most people have either no idea what the day is about or have some half-formed but completely wrong notion? No wonder Rudd, who I'm beginning to think likes to mollycoddle ignorance as much as Howard, shoots down any suggestion of moving the day.

Learning In Slow Motion

The Onion predicted the Bush presidency eerily. If you haven't read it before, or recently, I recommend revisiting their article published on January 17, 2001 (and yes, it really was published before he took office):

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over'

It took the rest of America a lot longer to realize that this impatient, incurious, ideologue was a terrible leader. Apart from three spikes (for 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein) his popularity eroded at a slow, but amazingly consistent, rate:



It looks like the overwhelming evidence of Bush's incompetence gradually burrowed its way into the national brain.

Anyway, I'm feeling good about Obama's inauguration today. Some evidence of real change: Marty Lederman will be at the Office of Legal Council. I've followed his writings on Balkinization over the last few years. It's fair to say he'll offer a different perspective than John Yoo.