sj's Longest Now [v.1]

At least two of you will understand how excited I was to find this article.  The link to it I saw on someone else’s page paused while using “hua she tian zu” in context to toss it off, after a mention of how indescribable certain idioms are.

Filled with deep and ancient anti-semitism and cheauvinism, though apparently a great place to work.  (The gentleman in charge of the reconstruction of Kenya’s main road in 1998, who told many wonderful stories that I still remember fondly, and had worked all over the world, assured me it was the best country he had ever worked in.)  From their government website, until this bit was redacted just yesterday :

Visas will not be issued for the following groups of people:

• An Israeli passport holder or a passport that has an Israeli arrival/departure stamp.
  
• Those who don’t abide by the Saudi traditions concerning appearance and behaviors.  Those under the influence of alcohol will not be permitted into the Kingdom.
  
• There are certain regulations for pilgrims and you should contact the consulate for more information.
  
• Jewish People

Important Instructions:

• If a woman is arriving in the Kingdom alone, the sponsor or her husband must receive her at the airport.
  
• Every woman must have confirmed accommodation for the duration of her stay in the Kingdom.
  
• A  woman is not allowed to drive a car and can therefore only travel by car if she is accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver.

At least they don’t go around chopping off hands.

Igby, Igby!  Take that flag and run with it.  It’s probably not the worst thing that his campaign is disbanding.  This man’s a political animal with now national as well as international exposure; I give him three weeks with fam before he turns up again. 

And alive.  I would pay a lot to see today’s Al-Jazeera broadcasts (for instance); I hope they’re being archived somewhere.

I’m not sure where I’ve seen real reporting recently.  The British article below is one of the first truly interesting articles I’ve seen this year, and it boasts two years of investigation (and the assistance of another country’s team of bloodhounds) condensed into ten or twelve newspaper inches.

The Auchi investigation, pursued by the French and (re)published by the Guardian.

Oh yes, and there was that elegant history of Clark… hopefully the bite of presidential reporting will produce another one or two before the season is out.

I’ll say one thing for General Clark — by the time a man gets to be his age, he’s responsible for his face. As my father would say, Clark has a good face… [read more]

Have I mentioned recently how goldanged cool some people are?  Not everyone who gets out on the mat does better than Muhammad Ali.

The Canadian [world and olympic champion Daniel Igali] beat Nate Ackerman of England 9-4, and followed up with a 5-1 win over Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali.

The 2003 World Freestyle Wrestling Championships are this weekend, at MSG.

PBS co-sponsored the first official debate among Democratic presidential candidates this season, and the first officially bilingual presidential debate[1] in the US, last Thursday in Albuquerque.   But I spent an hour looking for transcripts and audio/video online — checking the Albuquerque public radio station, CNN, NPR’s main site, major candidates’ websites, even asking my big buddy — before I found them!  Even PBS itself (which does indeed have transcripts) relegated the debate to the bottommost link on its front page.  What’s with that?

And as long as we’re talking about reaching out to voters in Spanish — what’s with this site?  (for starters, two of the first three lines on the page are in English…)

[1] not that there was much spanish spoken by the candidates.  But the primary announcer was Maria Salinas, a Univision spokeswoman, and she often made her statements and introductions in Spanish before she made them in English.

The UN-Baghdad bombing was a sad mess.  Robert De Mello, RIP.
The Prez grants total immunity to oil companies:  Executive Order 13303.
The lasting effects of pipeline sabotage in Iraq.

In its latest issue, Science tackles the outrageous misreporting of the looting of the Baghdad museums.  This comes far too late for my taste, but I’m very glad that it got out — and that the looting is discussed by a few different authors in the same iss.  I remember reading before the war about the storing away of the major artifacts, and then not being able to find that needle in the haystack of war journalism afterwards [and being roundly ridiculed for suggesting such a thing]… 

Few things get my blood boiling like the lack of independence among the various reporters, writers, publishers, academic experts.  The current state of world knowledge is miserably narrow, with no obvious path towards improvement [but instead towards similarly narrow, but ever-incremented, knowledge-sets]. 

If you have a Harvard U. PIN, you can read the Science article online.