On a sunny Saturday in Harvard Square, there were East Turkestan protesters waving flags and trying to get us to chant, in favor of a nationalist movement on the other side of the globe we know nothing about. I didn't poke around to work out if they were one of the pro-Taliban groups or not, but certainly pro-independence. Just down the road, there's Revolution Books, a place to get the writings of the american Maoist Bob Avakian, who thinks it's all been downhill in China since 1976. China can't do anything right in Harvard Square. I wish I'd thought to ask them what they thought of each other. In between, as always, were the LaRouchies, who somehow manage to bother me the most viscerally. they are most transparently delusional. You can see why revolutions don't happen. Apart from imperialism being bad, I'm not sure there's anything the three groups would agree on. I suppose I should give LaRouchies credit for not wanting to kill anybody. It may be simply that I identify as english just enough to resent them using anti-britishness as a polite cover for anti-semitism, so the hatred at the center of it is more apparent to me. The Uyghurs have a certain moral standing from oppression, and the Maoists somehow are less urgent about the need to remake the world, sitting up in their bookstore, rather than on the sidewalk.
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(1)
10:56:45 AM,
Monday 13 July 2009
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This may not be work.
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10:46:20 AM,
Monday 13 July 2009
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Also? Kate's Mystery Books is a neat place, but I don't think I've ever felt so surrounded by books that I had absolutely no inclination to read.
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08:59:13 PM,
Sunday 12 July 2009
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I would have absolutely adored Pandamonium Books back in the day. I still think Magic is a fantastic game, but I don't think I want to dedicate the time and money to it. Maybe I'll drop by for boardgame night sometime, though.
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(3)
08:14:35 PM,
Saturday 11 July 2009
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I seem to be the sort of person who prefers reading old, worn ideas well expressed, to winkling difficult, novel ideas from a hostile text. I don't think it was always this way. But the ideas I found buried in hostile texts never seemed worth the effort: they weren't able to survive outside of their native mud and confusion. A hard argument is often hard because it's either a trick or a mistake.
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(4)
12:27:23 PM,
Friday 10 July 2009
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I am very much enjoying Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the trouble is, I'm trying to read it on the Kindle, and footnotes are mixed in with the text, in the same font, some of them his, and some of them the footnotes of 19th century editors who feel the need to go on for pages defending Christianity from him. It's like a little footnote proxy war: they may be right about the limitations of religious tolerance in polytheistic Rome, but it looks petty, and they don't write gloriously rolling sentences that change direction halfway through, so I don't care what they think.
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07:28:05 PM,
Thursday 9 July 2009
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Civil disobedience measurable in amperes. The world is a strange place.
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(3)
03:17:20 PM,
Wednesday 8 July 2009
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I think about 90% of my posts, I first post with the links as HTML, forgetting that I'm using the rich-text thingum.
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03:17:02 PM,
Wednesday 8 July 2009
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This morning, I realized with horror that, without any sort of doubt, someone is going to make a Woody Allen biopic. But back in the present, Woody Allen appears to be making a Bollywoodish movie! It has Ash Rai in it and everything.
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(2)
12:16:35 PM,
Wednesday 8 July 2009
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Some say you can you can judge a society by how it spends it's resources. We now have GPS equipped puffins. Within my lifetime, I expect to have a device that will tell me where the nearest mountain lion is.
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(1)
02:42:47 PM,
Monday 6 July 2009
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09:34:30 PM, Sunday 5 July 2009
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We got back from St Louis around noon on Wednesday. I managed to fritter away most of the time between now and then, (the strategic error was buying a copy of Dragon Quest IV for the DS while stuck at the airport), but the weekend tasks did get finished yesterday, we made it to the fireworks (or rather a hillside about 5 miles from the fireworks) and today we managed to get the kayak out for the first time this year, and go up and down the Sudbury River in Concord. The river is well out of it's banks. Only saw 2 turtles, but lots of herons.
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05:14:51 PM,
Sunday 5 July 2009
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site & script courtesy of Moss
