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A Day for Vodka

Image from Reuters

The other day I asked a friend of mine from Ukraine what he thought about Yushchenko. He said that when Yushchenko was Prime Minister a few years ago, they released a brand of vodka called Nedrigailovskaja, named after the region where Yushchenko was born. My friend said the vodka was still probably his most outstanding achievement so far (ha ha).

Then yesterday I saw this article on Reuters... Mikhail Kalashnikov, the retired Russian army general who invented the infamous AK-47 rifle in the 40s, has just released "Kalashnikov," a new vodka brand. Perfect! Where can I get some? Pity the label is in Romanic rather than Cyrillic characters.

By the way, Yushchenko went in front of Parliament yesterday and publicly accused Kuchma's government of poisoning him. He also made the accusation that killings had been ordered as part of the Ukrainian political process before. This is going to be an interesting election.

Yushchenko ascendant?

Just heard on the BBC newsfeed that there's been a big pro-Yushchenko rally in Kiev. Can't find any current information about it elsewhere. It's a good sign, I suppose, that people are not so scared of Kuchma that they won't rally for his biggest opponent.

Last I heard about Yushchenko was that he was probably not the cleanest, but at least the most likely reformist to unseat Kuchma. Pro-Kuchma forces deride him as a puppet of the Americans, which is pretty ridiculous given that I can guarantee you that Bush has no idea who he is.

I'd been thinking of taking a week in Simferopol after the election next month, to soak up some atmosphere and post-election buzz for this book I'm trying to write. But the way things are looking at work it doesn't look like I'll be able to get away. My head has been so flattened lately, I'm not sure it would do me much good even if I could get away.

One odd thing--the report I just heard said that Yushchenko had just been released from the hospital, and his campaign manager said that he'd been poisoned. Hmm... Maybe Kuchma's decided to run a negative campaign...

Blackball

Just had to ban a couple of IP addresses... the comments pages were getting a whole bunch of spam for online casinos and some weird Viagra analog. Evil bastards.

The last three weeks have been a real stress-fest--I haven't had a day off work since I got back from Paris. A new big project fell out of the sky on us and it's all been top secret. Now that it's finally more or less under control I get to try to put the pieces of my life back together. I'm looking forward to being social and, you know, human again.

Yesterday was Cec's birthday, and we went out for lunch in Copenhagen. It was so great to just be out in town again and surrounded by people. Last night I made a wicked pastitsio (Greek lasagne from my mother's recipe), and we had some good wine and watched a couple of Woody Allen movies. Given what the last few weeks have been like, it was paradise.

Core

September 11 today. It's one of those days when I feel twitchy and nervous logging on to the newsfeed. Don't know what's coming.

Dreamt last night I took a week off work and took a flight to a resort on the moon. There was a settlement called Core there, which looked pretty much like Toronto. I spent the week hanging out in bars, taking ecstasy and dancing at underground events in warehouses. (Not such a bad dream I guess.)

The best bit was ordering a martini in a hotel bar, and watching the bartender pour it from a silver shaker into a glass, the vodka streaming out slowly and globular in the low gravity.

After the week off, I seemed to have joined the Canadian Air Force, but I woke up before I could figure out what that was all about.

The Kyoto scene

This has been slowly simmering in there for a long time, and hit me this afternoon in between meetings at work. I think it was a conversation with Cecilie last night, about what makes Brian Eno's On Land album special, that really made the breakthrough.

Thinking about it now, everything about that day felt as if it had an essence of strange clarity to it... the solid, pleasant soreness in his limbs and loins from fucking Mona hard the night before in the cheap Roppongi district hotel. The sound of the traffic outside and sunlight flashing from the angled windows of cars. As they left the taxi in front of Shinjuku station, Thomas saw an old woman standing to the side of the inrushing weekday crowd, one arm extended as tiny brown sparrows took crumbs from her hand. Inside Shinjuku, rays of early morning sunlight filtered through the cigarette smoke. Everyone in the crowd shuffled towards their platforms with the unthinking economy of long practice. He scanned their faces, busy, happy, bored, beautiful, seeming to Thomas as if surrounded by faint cocoons of light, each of them individual and unique. What had it been, the thing building up inside him? How had he known what was going to happen later that day in Kyoto? Thomas had felt almost post-ecstatic as his Shinkansen tore down the Japanese countryside, Mona's head lolling against his shoulder as he stared out the window at the foreign geometric countryside. The rapid hum click from the engine and wheels-on-rails was like the backbeat of a good dance club track, throbbing, almost subliminal. He was transfixed by the morning sunlight, flashing staccato on his face as it flickered through the slender trunks of cedars on the side of the railway, the train tearing through a forest thirty minutes past Nagoya at a propeller plane's cruise speed. That flashing moment stretched, creeping up on him slowly. But then surrounded by the gestalt of sound and flickering light he felt himself expand somehow with the sensation... he was at once man and girl and train and forest and light... At first it was as if he could see all around him at once, and then it was as if he could see through it all... It lasted only a moment before the Shinkansen tore out into a plain dotted with industrial towns as it approached Kyoto, but the moment had been there, and as he and Mona stepped out from the glass and steel abstractness of Kyoto station, he'd felt different, changed. Myoshinji was much larger than he'd been prepared for. When Mona described it as a "temple," she'd not brought across the scale of the 40-in-one temple complex, and it had been busier than he'd expected—more tourists and less ascetic formality. But then some time in the late afternoon when the sunlight was angled flat again, and Mona had tired of telling him about her Japanese childhood—her dad's alcohol problem and mom's retreat from the world into Buddhism—and they'd just been standing still for a moment in the shadow of a big orange pagoda with unreadable, kanji-encrusted walls... it was then that a huge brass bell had been struck somewhere nearby, and that's what had done it for him. The two-tone hi-freq buzz lo-freq rumble washed over him in a moment of fatigue... he was tired and thirsty and had given up on thinking and just was... Maybe he was still feeling a little rarified and abstract from the morning's sun-through trees experience. But the two-tone sound of that bell, the sudden clarity and foreverness at once... like a rogue wave crashing on a beach, like his ears popping clear of moisture hours after swimming as a boy, like the moment of waking and remembering the night's whole dream in all its scintillant complex repose, like an old friend's voice suddenly amazed, breathing the words "of course!"... The sound found him ready and did its work. When he came to, he was cradled in Mona's arms. She was fanning him with a tourist map and asking him in worried tones to respond. It took a few moments for him to be able to focus, but when her face came through it was dark in silhouette, the strong lines of her jaw suggested rather than drawn by the sunlight radiant behind her head, filtered through the corona of her dark hair like a halo. "My God, Mona... It's as if we are stars..." The first thing he was able to whisper, and the one and only coherent image he was ever able to bring back from the garden, the ten thousand Buddhas smiling in their ancient sleep as he struggled for words. He realized almost immediately that the language did not yet exist for him to tell her what he then understood, and that, through the sudden painful joy of unexpected knowledge, brought its own sadness. The moment couldn't last and it didn't. He had not been prepared for the garden but stumbled into it through a back door. Much was lost too quickly. But even now after all that happened, all the desolation and exquisite agony of the last few years, he still remembers. He doesn't remember the garden itself, for that is a thing inaccessible outside the now and therefore forbidden to memory, but he remembers, will always remember, the sound, the light.

Falling down-o-phobia

I just read that keraunothnetophobia is the real word used to identify people who fear being crushed to death by a man-made satellite as it descends from orbit at terrifying speed.

I'm so happy. If there's a word for it, it must mean that at least a few people suffer from it... I'm not alone in this world after all!

Bad news in Russia

Image from Reuters

More than 320 killed in the school siege in southern Russia, at least half of them children.

Just when you think that human depravity can't get any worse, it does. Fighting violence with violence isn't the answer, but Jesus, how do you negotiate with people that behave this way? How can you get inside the heads of people that are willing to create an atrocity like this? The mindfucking thing about all this is that we will have to. If we can't beat them with military force then we'll have to find out how to engage them.

I think that Putin and Bush are wrong when they say that you can beat the terrorists by blowing all of them up. Even if there was some way to find all the terrorists, I think there's enough evidence to say now that using military force against them just inspires more terrorism. Look at Israel, which has been very effective at finding and hitting the terrorists where they live. The security situation there is still pretty unstable. The military strategy isn't working very well.

The people that attacked the school (there's some doubt about who they were) said they wanted independence for Chechnya. There are a lot of people in the West that support Chechnyan independence as well. But the last time Russia gave Chechnya autonomy, after the 1995 war, Chechen extremist groups attacked Dagestan next door and tried to topple the government. So an independent Chechnya might not be the best long term solution for the stability of the region. Fuck knows another Taliban-like state with expansionist-evangelist tendencies is the last thing we need.

So we need a political strategy- one of the very few things I agree with Bushie on is that a functioning political process can serve as an outlet for the anger of people that can't always get what they want. But how to make a functioning political process in Chechnya? The last election was more or less a farce, and guys like Maskhadov, Zakayev and even Basayev may still have more popular support in Chechnya than the "elected" president. (I'm basing this purely on what I've heard on the news- I can't confirm any of it)

After this siege, the instability is going to spread, and the spaces in which political solutions have a chance to thrive will be pulled even narrower. It's a pretty fair bet that Ossetia and Ingushetia will be at each other's throats again once the bodies are counted (according to reports, many of the hostage takers were Ingush and others were Arabs). That will bring the Russian army in on the side of the Ossetians. The whole region may go hot. What a mess.

The pictures on the news are heartbreaking... those poor kids.

Could Space Signal Be Alien Contact?

This is, of course, almost certainly a false alarm. But it gives me chills to think of what an incredible wake up call this would be... how this would shock us out of all of our petty bullshit so we could for just a little while be awake and conscious of the universe and where we stand in it.

Could Space Signal Be Alien Contact? - Magazine
Thu Sep 2, 2004 06:50 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - An unexplained radio signal from deep space could -- just might be -- contact from an alien civilization, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday.

The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico.

New Scientist said the signal could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon or even be a by-product from the telescope itself.
But the mystery beam has excited astronomers across the world.

"If they can see it four, five or six times it really begins to get exciting," Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath in western England told the magazine.

It was broadcast on the main frequency at which the universe's most common element, hydrogen, absorbs and emits energy, and which astronomers say is the most likely means by which aliens would advertise their presence.

The potentially extraterrestrial signals were picked up through the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through the huge amount of data picked up by the telescope.