More Parries
December 2008
Stop Yesterday
Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.
Short-circuiting Place-based Longing
If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.
October 2008
Ebullience, Please
A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.
September 2008
History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama
McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.
Encounter at Wetherspoone’s
As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.
August 2008
A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1
Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.
July 2008
Suddenly Seymour
Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.
June 2008
Another End of Times
With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.
Dead Till Eilenspiegel
Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.
All So Simple
First, there is a general moode and desire to write.
March 2008
Why AAPL
Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.
Clash of the Midgets
My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.
January 2008
Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach
Hamas may try to use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, aiming to operate in parts of the Sinai as Hezballah does in southern Lebanon.
Glick Dismisses Gaza Border Breach
Caroline Glick, the strident Jerusalem Post columnist, seems to see the Gaza-Egypt border breach as yet another in a long line of Israeli strategic disasters by incompetent leaders. I’m not convinced however of her arguments, mainly because she doesn’t make any.
Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak
The great tactician Ariel Sharon steamrolled through Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and today we see another step in the unfolding of this masterplan to staunch the damage caused by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967.
The Small Adventures - Part 2
There in the empty restaurant by the water at Dieppe I had toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a creme brulee. Somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up sitting there alone on my travels.
December 2007
The Small Adventures
Of course we were late for the train. We enquired frantically among the taxis for one who would accept the two dogs—mine and Davide’s—and take us to Termini Station so I could catch the 11pm train to Milan that would be one third of our journey to Britain.
Tony Blair and the Four-State Vision
Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. Once Tony Blair acquires this view, he can help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Spooked, They’ll Annoint Rudy
Because of the recent US National Intelligence Report, the electorate will turn to someone who demonstrates not only the ideological conviction required to continue to prosecute Islamism, but also the administrative savvy to reform entrenched bureacracies.
October 2007
A Restoration and Return
There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.
Curs to Fate
Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome. She has not turned up since.
This Trip’s Last Day
I went to Astor Place Haircutters. I crossed Manhattan Bridge on foot. I walked west along Canal St, seeking a bamboo steamer.
I, Thou and Pastor Bob
At Rome I felt queasy that they would paint and revere scenes that occured in Israel, but here, looking at the Calvary Church campus, I felt that the religious energy is actually here, that we are far enough away from the places of the events themselves that they can finally become abstracted and spiritualized and kept relevant. An ocean and a small continent separate Fort Lauderdale from Afula.
September 2007
The Big and Easy
The moon is shining through these tropical September clouds, directly above a neighbor’s palm tree, and it’s completely full. An airplane is landing at a nearby airfield. I ramble, unable to reach what I mean, perhaps because what I mean is an almost meaningless jumble of contradictory thoughts that are less thoughts than incomplete attempts to label fleeting tumbling emotions.
Flightblogging
With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.
August 2007
A Drop in Time
To have a camera back again a personal epoch later feels like a time machine squared. Your chronicling device—itself a time machine of sorts—is suddenly back to what it was years ago, before much was changed, which in itself somewhat returns you to those times.
Sauna Losing Heat
Rather than reaching the heights, to exciting thoughts and feelings, I tend increasingly in the sauna to just sit and think about the work I’ve just done and the work I’m about to do after. Something’s missing.
A Ride to Gatwick Airport
Gatwick is my airport now, largely unchanged since 1986, so it now looks tawdry. Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them often.
July 2007
Busy, Busy City
There’s a bridge in London’s St. James’s park where you can see Buckingham Palace at one end of the pond and Whitehall at the other, with the London Eye behind. Whitehall looked less a thumping fast haven for bureaucrats than a fairytale town, with the improbable slowly-moving Eye completing the fantasy.
First Time in this House All Day
One reaction (in The Times) to Islamist terrorist doctors: “Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital.” So now we know: it’s understandable that after removing an annoying woman’s varicose veins, why, one sets a car alight and drives it into an airport departure hall.
The Soft Ache of Cold Hotels
The back yard is now set up and quite effortlessly picturesque, with its greenage and raw brick walls. Until we start trying to grow wee vegetables nothing else need be done except the daily maintenance of clearing the butts from the ashtray and the leaves from the ground.
June 2007
Only the Rustle in the Trees
We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss—these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass.
A Rash Appointment
I have a rash on my face these days, reaching from my forehead down the sides of my nose and to my mouth. It went away while I was in America but now back in Britain it’s returned. How can that be?
A Cabaret Old Chum
It’s a last bastion of civility, Brian mused ruefully (with that inability of his to be really rued), as we had a beer walking through Penn Station to his train. I realized that I don’t know people like him anymore: libertarian Democrats.
Fatahland and Hamastan
Wherein I obsess about developments in Gaza rather than recording the sights and sounds of New York City in the springtime.
Squelching in a Bath of Me
I rode the Metro subway for the first time—didn’t even known Los Angeles has one. It’s cheap and clean, but the problem is there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car.
Stars, Stripes and Superlatives
Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cutting-edge web applications by people down from the Bay Area. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.
Pursuit of Hashemesh
Welcome to three weeks in America. Top story in USA Today: Tiger Woods is going to design a golf course.
May 2007
Bikram’s Yoga, Meet David Allen’s GTD
Both systems are comprehensive in their respective realms and, controversially, ground-up rather than top-down.
Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now
Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. And Israel is undergoing political convulsions, hammering out a new political system it seems. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.
My City to Your City
A bunch of loud white kids came running down from the promenade shouting vilely to each other. I was reminded of El Topo (we saw it yesterday at the fabulous Duke of York cinema) and I was reminded of the scene when the three bandits gradually build up their cackling harassment of the man in black as he rides into their valley.
Shite on Brighton
“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”
From DisneyWorld to Watford
I needed my wallet more than the gypsies did.
Back in Black
Please pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. Following are some memorable moments from them in the order they popped into mind.
Daily Yin
For my first test of the day as day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.
April 2007
Wetherspoones and Raisins
No that’s not right, said I, sipping strong tea just brewed. Klement wanted me to read over an email he wrote. “Thank you for taking your time to interview me,” it began. My Dad also called to tell me of his new socks.
Mind the Dream
Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.
The Meaning Addiction
I’m reading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. I chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion—“Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!”—that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction.
Short Stuff
Persian civilization typefaces, Palestinian innovation, Flood worries, that’s life with websites, Brighton is slow, and bad Jajah.
do like Mondays, fresh and raring attempts to once again do everything on the weekly plan. Printed off is my pristine new weekly checklist full of hopes that this time, this time, I’ll wake before 6am every morning, brush the dog every day, take a photo of myself sometime every day with PhotoBooth, bill a full day’s work every day, and of course, write these Parries; and other things besides.
So I am up early, hitting the alarm then going back to sleep, but jolting out of a dream at 6:03am, with partial pain in my diaphragm as usual these days as the heartburn takes a turn for the worse unless I load up with pints and pints of water throughout the day. Now, Irit often accused me of only remembering the good and forgetting the bad, ie, of being a sentimentalist, whenever I wax reminiscient about living at Even Sapir in the Judean Hills. But in fact I also forget the good. For instance, at our previous place here in Brighton I would always stock goat’s milk because it made earl grey tea taste better. And I’d completely forgotten about that for months, and this week I suddenly remembered.
But first things first. It’s still dark in here in January at 6am. I stumble into the orifice—the office—the second bedroom—and there Jam is sleeping on the little blue Ikea sofa we bought from the previous two tenants when they moved out (along with the big sofa, the fridge and the washing machine). Students, they were. Maddie would always try to raise me at 6am—she’d lick my nose if my mouth was open, my mouth if it was closed (I realize that now)—but in those days I had not inaugurated this new regime of early rising, and her efforts, joyful though they always were to me, were in vain; I’d ruffle her head and go back to sleep. But Jam doesn’t bother. I’m up and about and she’s still completely a dead weight on the sofa. “Good morning to the Jam,” I whisper. “Good morning to a doggies.” We just saw The Golden Compass. A CGI travesty though it was, and I knew it would be, it did make me want to read the book, with its English fantasy application of Platonic daemons, and it did make me wonder about my own attachment to my dogs. “She was me,” was my mantra of bereavement for at least a year after Maddie passed.
Then it’s down the stairs—how nice to have stairs—and I switch on the light in the area just outside the bathroom, because it would be too bright still to switch on the bathroom light, though I need to see what’s where, as there’s no window. Usually I hate a bathroom without a window but in this place we have two, and the one upstairs has got one, so I usually use that one, but it’s the only window in the place that hasn’t been replaced by double glazing, and it gets cold in there. So now you know my morning pee choices. The world needed to know.
Done, it’s to the kitchen we go. Still too bright for main kitchen light, so I switch on the one built in to the oven. First procedure: clean out the 2-cup mokka from the previous usage. The sink here is metal and I really enjoy lightly bashing the coffee holder against it to knock the damp grains out. Into my cupped left hand and down into the rubbish bin under the sink they go before swilling the remains out under the tap; the sound is just the same as what the baristas make in cafes. Then I spoon fresh coffee out of its converted jam jar into the mokka and pour in the mineral water. Then the lovely switching on of the gas stove by electric spark. Each time I do this is an involuntary moment of appreciation, for the ease of lighting the fire, for its immediate steady easy burn. So many things around us are technological but apart from a lighter this is the only time we see fire, and the way the gassy air ignites with a bit of a whoop, well, it’s a helper in the waking up process. Plus I’ve been able to smell the coffee to come.
Then we bring a little espresso cup and saucer out of the cupboard and place them on the kitchen counter, sliding one onto the other, and this act and resulting sound is also pleasingly similar to how it goes with the professionals in a real cafe. Then I pour in half a glass of milk, because I figure the milk should go in first so it won’t scald when poured on top of something boiling, then a teaspoon of sugar as raw and organic and rough and not ready as I can find. The four coffee cups and saucers, perfectly servicable pure white porcelein, were only £1 in the nearby pound shop—Britain may be expensive but bargains abound. Ah, all this internal chatter repeated so often 6am-ish.
Then the surprising part: a pint of water in a beer glass with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. Yes, this is the adamkhan.net morning tonic of choice, complete with the little mothers of vinegar. This is downed and the day feels begun right. Besides, coffee to come.
Soon enough the mokka begins to bubble—air now, no longer liquid rising into the upper chamber—and it’s off the stove, into the coffee cup. Upstairs I go, leaning forward alarmingly and wondering if this is due to encroaching old age before remembering that I used to scamper up the stairs leaning forward when I was 8. In the orifice I place the coffee on the desk. The lights go on and Jam briefly squints, but whereas it takes me about 3 minutes to adjust it takes her less than 3 seconds.
Window open for fresh air? Perhaps a Nag Champa incense stick, or a tea-light to heat up the little tray of frankincense and myrrh. If I’m good then before looking at the computer I open today’s folder in the 43 folders cart and see what bill there is to pay or little suggestion for something to do. Then we sit down and although my work is defined and I should start it immediately, I nonetheless “warm up” a little by checking email, and maybe RSS feeds on NetNewsWire. Perhaps there’s a likely-looking project advertised that I should respond to. It’s about 6:30am.
At about 8:00am I’m feeling the beginnings of the nausea of having ingested nothing but coffee, milk and sugar. It’s time for porridge. How easy porridge is to make in the microwave, as easy as any breakfast cereal, yet much more satisfying, and much cheaper. While spooning it in I read craperoni on the web. Drudge. Jpost.com. Links I’ve had the discipline to copy and paste and put in green-colored stickies to read later. Then it’s back to work until about 9:30am.
This morning I stepped out then to Dockerills, the pretty hardware store around the corner, and bought some 100w lightbulbs and, at last, a metal bin to replace the ugly plastic one we inherited that’s been outside in the yard. Upon returning to the house I was strangely hungry, almost as if I hadn’t eaten that bowl of porridge, and so it was time, aha!, for the current breakfast2/elevenses/brunch/lunch ritual. I make toast with the current delicious bread of the moment from the bakery on the other corner from Dockerills, Infinity—it was sourdough but now I’m on the spelt—then, a trick from Aaron, rub the toast with garlic before spreading butter (well, spreadable butter, so mostly butter) and something else. Today it was Philadelphia cream cheese and smoked salmon, both on sale at a 50% discount last week at Sainsbury’s. My, my. Jam got two slices of spelt toast and cream cheese as well, but no smoked salmon. That’s for me.
Meanwhile two duck eggs have been boiling in my little portable titanium camping pot. I use it because it’s a small pot that heats up fast, and to help keep it real. After two slices of toast the eggs are ready.
Accompanying all this is, when we’re lucky, the Hugh Hewitt show, posted on the web within a day of the live show. Today was a treat: Mark Steyn, Rudy Giuliani and Norman Podhoretz! All while having breakfast! What a constellation. Then it’s time for some earl grey tea with goat’s milk to take back upstairs to the office and resume work.
Today, not long after that, I got a phonecall from Aaron. He was driving a rental car up from Eilat to Tel Aviv, as is his wont, this time taking the Jerusalem route to see Yisrael’s new restaurant, and had stopped in view of the Dead Sea for a pee and a smoke, and to call and say he’d just arriving at the Dead Sea and was stopping for a pee and a smoke. Ah, to be sure, I feel I should be there doing that as well, with him, back there at our small yet spectacular homeland. But here, this is quite cosy as well, and I’m fond of these current routines, fond enough to set them down.
Now, how will I do Tuesday? Already it’s 12:03am, too late, too late, for realistically rising pre-6am.
∞
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