Ain't Life Grand?

Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic.

Source: The Smart Guys at NASA

Shaayad

What I'm Reading

Came across Guy Delisle's, The Burma Chronicles, two weeks ago while prowling the shelves at the Oshawa Library. Delisle's previous graphic novels Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China, were both in the same vein as this latest (to me anyways) novel/travelogue: Part political commentary, part travel lit., part history lesson and part humour. Highly recommend reading this latest work as it touches on the surreal nature of rule by military fiat, contrasts the crazy go-go nature of nearby Thailand, mention of the The Lady (recently released from house arrest) and friendly easy-going nature of the average Burmese.

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I have also just started reading Gwynne Dyer's, The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq. Although the book was published in 2007, and events have quickly outstripped the usefulness of the details in the book, it still offers great insights into the reasons why the U.S. invaded Iraq, twice!, and more importantly, projects into the future....as the title suggests.

Dyer is a well known Canadian commentator on military and international affairs and than some.

Dyer's writing assumes nothing on the reader's part (thank God) and brings the reader along with clearly written explications of how events unfolded in the lead up to the invasions of Iraq.

hardee har

October 27, 2010

Currently Reading...

I just finished a small book by Dr. James Maskalyk -- "Six Months in Sudan."

Maskalyk is a Canadian doctor who left his Kensington Market apartment to work for Doctors Without Borders in a small village in Southern Sudan.

To be honest, I was expecting a travelogue: a history of the region, a little bit about the current conflict, some colour thrown in with various characters and a list of the hardships encountered by the good doctor. Instead, I got a poetically written book interspersed with entries from the blog that Maskalyk kept while in Sudan.

It is less about the travel or the doctoring and more about dislocation: Both Maslayk's and of the people caught in the conflict between the rival factions from the north and the south.

Every other page brought with it a turn of phrase, a situation or a bit of raw emotion to life in such a way as to cause me to wince, sigh and count myself amongst the undeservingly lucky few on this planet. Pick it up; read it; follow the blog.

The Giving Pledge

U.N. report: Chinese bullets used to attack peacekeepers in Darfur | Turtle Bay

U.N. report: Chinese bullets used to attack peacekeepers in Darfur | Turtle Bay

Darfur Update

Eric Reeves, who "has written extensively on Sudan, both nationally and internationally," continues to follow Darfur even as the world media turns it's attention and ours to less important and easier to report matters. He writes,

The longest genocide of the past century—and once the best reported—is disappearing.

Afghanistan in the Wake of WikiLeaks Leaks

In the wake of the release of 92,201 classified documents by WikiLeaks there have been a slew of articles pointing in the very direction I identified on this blog on November 2, 2009. Namely, that the war in Afghanistan is fraught with complexities beyond the control of the West.

A recent article by Thomas L. Friedman for the New York Times speaks to my point:

The case of the Great Game of Central Asia is a complicated mix of duplicitous players and failed strategies.

In an article for Toronto's Globe and Mail, Chris Alexander (former ambassador of Canada to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009) has written about the unstable nature of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. Regardless of official pronouncements, Pakistan and Afghanistan are waiting and jockeying for position with the certain anticipation of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Pakistan army under Gen. Kayani is sponsoring a large-scale, covert guerrilla war through Afghan proxies – whose strongholds in Baluchistan and Waziristan are flourishing. Their mission in Afghanistan is to keep Pashtun nationalism down, India out and Mr. Karzai weak.

Chris Alexander's article made mention of a discussion paper written by Matt Waldman for Crisis States Research Centre. The Research Centre describes itself as "a leading centre of interdisciplinary research into processes of war, state collapse and reconstruction in fragile states."

Alexander's paper, The Sun in the Sky (html version or pdf version) meticulously highlights, through interviews with Afghani insurgent commanders and other first hand accounts, that Pakistan's intelligence service (the ISI) is firmly behind both the Taliban and an active party to the Afghan insurgency even as Pakistan receives billions in aid from the U.S. And the U.S., surely, cannot be blind to this duplicity...it is, to quote Taliban commanders, ‘as clear as the sun in the sky’.

And, from The New York Times comes this latest article, summarizing the farcical nature of the situation the U.S. and it's NATO allies face in Afghanistan.

"This report captured the circular and frustrating effort by an American investigator to stop Afghan police officers at a checkpoint from extorting payments from motorists. After a line of drivers described how they were pressed to pay bribes, the American investigator and the local police detained the accused checkpoint police officers." Here's a synopsis of one the U.S. Army reports leaked by WikiLeaks:

"While waiting,” the (U.S. Army) investigator wrote, “I asked the seven (Afhani) patrolmen we detained to sit and relax while we sorted through a problem without ever mentioning why they were being detained. Three of the patrolmen responded by saying that they had only taken money from the truck drivers to buy fuel for their generator.”
Two days later when the American followed up, he was told by police officers that the case had been dropped because the witness reports had all been lost.

Here's a lengthier excerpt from the NY Times article that screams, "get out while the getting is good."

The (leaked) documents show how the best intentions of Americans to help rebuild Afghanistan through provincial reconstruction teams ran up against a bewildering array of problems — from corruption to cultural misunderstandings — as they tried to win over the public by helping repair dams and bridges, build schools and train local authorities.

A series of reports from 2005 to 2008 chart the frustrations of one of the first such teams, assigned to Gardez, in Paktia Province.

An American civil affairs officer could barely contain her enthusiasm as she spoke at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new orphanage, built with money from the American military.

The officer said a friend had given her a leather jacket to present to “someone special,” the report noted. She chose the orphanage’s director. “The commander stated that she could think of no one more deserving then someone who cared for orphans,” it said.

The civil affairs team handed out blankets, coats, scarves and toys. The governor even gave money from his own pocket. “All speeches were very positive,” the report concluded. Read the Document »


DEC. 20, 2006 | PAKTIA PROVINCE
Civil Affairs Report: Not Many Orphans

The team dropped by to check on the orphanage. “We found very few orphans living there and could not find most of the HA [humanitarian assistance] we had given them,” the report noted.

The team raised the issue with the governor of Paktia, who said he was also concerned and suspected that the money he had donated had not reached the children. He visited the orphanage himself. Only 30 children were there; the director had claimed to have 102. Read the Document »


OCT. 16, 2007 | PAKTIA PROVINCE
Civil Affairs Report: An Empty Orphanage

Nearly a year after the opening of the orphanage, the Americans returned for a visit. “There are currently no orphans at the facility due to the Holiday. (Note: orphans are defined as having no father, but may still have mother and a family structure that will have them home for holidays.)”

Love After Love

Love after Love

The time will come when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-- D. Walcott

Turn Turn Turn

a terrible turn of events:
the crops failed
the rain ate at my clothes
the breeze has become an asphyxiant
specks of dirt in a baby blue sky
draw long lazy circles overhead
news of atrocities from far off lands
are suddenly not so alien anymore
who knew it would come to this:
the body turning on itself
or the all-too-late realization of a pool of water
that it has evaporated

The Best Vacation Ever

How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.

By Drake Bennett  |  June 20, 2010

Monday summer officially begins, and freed from the hunker-inducing cold, New Englanders’ imaginations have already turned to vacation: to idle afternoons and road trips, to the beach and the Berkshires. School is out, and the warm weekends stretch before us, waiting to be filled.

Of course, this creates its own pressures. Where to go? When? What to do? Is it better to try somewhere new and exotic, or return to a well-loved spot? Doze on the beach or hike the ancient ruins? Hoard vacation days for a grand tour, or spread them around? Time off is a scarce resource, and as with any scarce resource, we want to spend it wisely.

Partly, these decisions are matters of taste. But there are also, it turns out, answers to be found in behavioral science, which increasingly is yielding insights that can help us make the most of our leisure time. Psychologists and economists have looked in some detail at vacations — what we want from them and what we actually get out of them. They have advice about what really matters, and it’s not necessarily what we would expect.

For example, how long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and in the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation — far from being a nuisance — can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place — people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable

things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist.

“How do we optimize our vacation?” asks Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of the new book “The Upside of Irrationality.” “There are three elements to it — anticipating, experiencing, and remembering. They’re not the same, and there are different ways to change each.”

There is, of course, plenty that we still don’t know. People take vacations for all sorts of reasons beyond pure hedonism — to learn about new places, to test themselves, to placate their children, to bask in the envy of their friends and co-workers. Research cannot settle questions like whether the pleasure we derive from anticipating a minutely planned trip will be outweighed by the disappointment when things don’t measure up.

For psychologists and behavioral economists, vacations are a window into the still only dimly understood mystery of human pleasure, a field known as hedonic psychology. Their research, along with other work on prototypically pleasant (and unpleasant) experiences, has begun to yield a portrait of your mind on vacation. And if the findings tell us anything, it’s that we might actually need some help. When we guess the best way to spend our free time, it seems that we often guess wrong.

There are untold shelves of books dedicated to the art of maximizing our time at work, but no corresponding literature on maximizing our leisure time. Even asking the question of how to “optimize” a vacation seems fundamentally un-vacation-like. And yet people constantly puzzle over how to get the most out of their valuable time off: poring over guidebooks, checking the forecast, looking up online reviews of hotels and restaurants, arguing with spouses over where to go and what to do, and when.

The problem, say some social scientists, is that people do all this — and spend thousands of dollars — with an incomplete understanding of what qualities make an experience enjoyable. Take duration. A longer vacation seems, by definition, better than a shorter one, and having lots of paid vacation time is a highly valued job perk. But when we recall an experience, and how it made us feel, it turns out that length isn’t terribly important.

The strongest evidence here comes from social psychology experiments that looked at people being subjected to various pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. The most frequently cited study is one done by the physician Donald Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist whose work helped launch the field of behavioral economics. Patients undergoing colonoscopies — a quite painful procedure — with either little or very light sedation were subjected to a few extra minutes of lesser pain at the end of the procedure. Overall, those patients rated the experience as less painful and less unpleasant than others, even though they had been in pain longer. Kahneman has found similar results for stimuli like watching film clips of playful puppies and soothing landscapes — a pleasant experience isn’t recalled later as more pleasurable just because it lasts longer.

Looking back, what matters far more is the intensity of sensation, whether it’s excitement or pain or contentment. And it’s not the overall average of the experience that people remember, but how they felt at the most intense moments, combined with how they felt right as the experience ended. Psychologists call this the “peak-end rule.”

The research on the peak-end rule has focused on shorter-term sensations — colonoscopies, thankfully, are brief compared to vacations — but psychologists suspect that it also applies to longer experiences. If so, that means worrying about whether it’s possible to get extra days off to stretch a trip is wasted energy. And if you’re deciding between a longer trip and a more eventful one — if, for example, the money it would cost for a few more nights in a hotel would mean you wouldn’t be able to afford a coveted splurge dinner or surfing lessons or concert tickets or a rain forest guide — then it makes more sense to just shorten the trip in the interest of making it more intense while you’re there.

“I really emphasize this in the happiness lecture that I give in my social psychology course,” says Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell University specializing in decision-making. “My lectures are not really didactic in this ‘go live your life this way’ way, but my happiness lecture is. If you have to sacrifice how long your vacation is versus how intense it is, you want shorter and more intense.”

The peak-end rule also suggests that there’s little point worrying about how much fun or how relaxing every last moment of a vacation is, since the trip will be remembered for its high points. Of course, our peak-end proclivities also mean that a trip could be remembered for its low points, experiences of vacation trauma so searing that they overwhelm all else — gastrointestinal disasters, perhaps, or a stolen passport or camera, or epic, frustration-induced tantrums.

But research looking at how people actually feel about their vacations suggests that, by and large, they remember them warmly — more warmly, in fact, than they feel while taking them. The psychologists Leigh Thompson, of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Terence Mitchell, of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, in 1997 reported the results of a study in which they asked people on three different vacations — a trip to Europe, Thanksgiving break, and a three-week bicycle tour of California — to fill out a series of emotional inventories before the vacation, during it, and then after.

They found that in all three cases, the respondents were least happy about the vacation while they were taking it. Beforehand, they looked forward to it with eager anticipation, and within a few days of returning, they remembered it fondly. But while on it, they found themselves bogged down by the disappointments and logistical headaches of actually going somewhere and doing something, and the pressure they felt to be enjoying themselves.

A recent Dutch study had a more striking finding. Looking not at vacation memories, but measuring general happiness level through a simple three-question questionnaire, the researchers found that going on vacation gave a notable boost to pre-vacation mood but had hardly any effect on post-vacation feelings. Anticipation, it seems, can be a more powerful force than memory.

Vacations can’t all be short and intense, and we wouldn’t want them to be. What if we want to just improve a week at the beach house?

One consistent research finding is that people have a stubborn unconscious ability to adapt to their circumstances, whether those circumstances are good — like marrying their true love — or bad, like getting divorced. Whether they want to or not, people quickly begin to take things for granted.

One way to head that off, psychologists have found, is by constantly varying how we do things. Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside has done a series of studies showing that in all sorts of everyday activities, from hobbies to studying to acts of charity to walking routes, people derive more pleasure from them the more they vary how they do them. When planning for how to keep ourselves (and our families) happy and engaged through a week off, it may help to keep the value of novelty and variation in mind.

The most effective way to inoculate a vacationer against the deadening power of adaptation, however, may be the most counterintuitive — to break it up, to interrupt it with real life. The psychologist Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, working with Tom Meyvis of the New York University Stern School of Business, has found that people, whether having a pleasant experience like a massage or an unpleasant one like prolonged separation from a loved one, felt the pain or pleasure more intensely if the experience was stopped and then restarted.

“If you put a disruption in a hedonic experience, it intensifies it,” Nelson says. The same principle, he argues, would apply to a vacation. “You can imagine spending a weekend at some wonderful beach house. While it’s great for the first couple of hours, by the second day, it’s pleasant and then no longer exciting. If for some reason you’re forced to leave the beach house, when you return, you have all that new pleasure again.”

Other psychologists have a slightly different explanation for the hedonic boost that interruption gives. They see it less as a matter of adaptation and more a matter of evaluation. Having a trip interrupted in effect turns what had been a more open-ended experience into a bounded one, triggering the peak-end rule. That means, says Gal Zauberman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, that if we break up our trips strategically, we might actually get more enjoyment out of them.

“If you partition after each peak experience, then you remember that piece as better than if you partition after each lousy thing,” he suggests.

But for those who can’t get away at all this summer, either because time or money prevents it, there is a finding for you, as well. Odd as it seems, people are often reluctant to take advantage of opportunities for pleasure that they do have, unless they’re in some way compelled. In a study published earlier this year, Ayelet Gneezy and Suzanne Shu, marketing experts at the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Los Angeles business schools respectively, found that giving someone longer to redeem a gift certificate actually makes them less likely to do so. And using sidewalk surveys in London, Chicago, and Dallas, they reinforced a creeping suspicion that many Boston residents probably share — that people who live in cities with major attractions and landmarks are actually less likely to visit those landmarks than tourists are, and likely to only do so when hosting out-of-town guests.

The finding is a testament to the human tendency to procrastinate, in pleasure as in work. Seen this way, part of why we enjoy ourselves on a vacation stems from the fact that it gives us a deadline: an often sharply limited time window during which we have to go out and enjoy ourselves.

If you realize this, suggests Shu, you can give yourself some of the benefits of a vacation without going anywhere, simply by cordoning off a day or two and strictly scheduling it for leisure. That way you’ll actually go out and see the play or concert you would otherwise have skipped, or take the time to dig the tent and camp stove out of the basement.

“Give yourself a milestone or a deadline by which you’re going to go do this enjoyable thing,” Shu says, “and you’ll actually enjoy yourself more often.”

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.

Source: Boston.com

Quaranic Quotes

“There is no compulsion acceptable in religion. The truth and falsehood has been made distinct from one another.” (al-Baqarah 2:256).

"Let him who wants to believe, believe; and let him who wants to deny, deny” (al-Kahf 18:29)

Ameen! And Amen!

And Yeats Again

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Kunta Kinte I've Found You!

After months and months of skulking around the bookshelves of various libraries, half-price and used book stores, I have finally found an author to rival John Le Carre! I said to rival, but not to replace. No.
Seymour. Gerald Seymour is the name. And the book by this genius which I am currently reading is Traitor's Kiss. I am one hundred and forty pages into this book and have been reading it every night until my eyes hurt. The Daily Telegraph calls Seymour "The finest thriller writer in the world today."
Usually, I find thriller writers (the kind that regularly make the New York Times list) to be wonderful writers who simply throw one mini-adventure after another at their hero, with a clever twist or final showdown at the end. There is, with the run-of-the-mill thrill writers, none of the moral ambiguities of the individual characters facing down a situation or comentary on the state of society built into the background of their tales.
Seymour, I think, and happily, is not your run-of-the-mill writer.
Yee-haw!

Quit While The Quittings Good

In a previous post on Afghanistan I made a case for the withdrawal of Western troops and especially, Canadian troops from Afghanistan. My basic premise is that the situation in Afghanistan is filled with layers of loyalty and these loyalties are constantly shifting depending on the situation at hand.

Interestingly, I came across this article which discusses the use of private Afghani security firms, which guard western convoyas, and their many layered uses for their ostensible masters, the Western forces in Afghanistan. The article makes my point clearer: That loyalties are ever-shifting and the only rule for Afghanis is to survive and to make money while surviving, because sooner or later, the West will abandon Afghanistan to its own devices.

Although the investigation is not complete, the officials suspect that at least some of these security companies — many of which have ties to top Afghan officials — are using American money to bribe the Taliban. The officials suspect that the security companies may also engage in fake fighting to increase the sense of risk on the roads, and that they may sometimes stage attacks against competitors.

The suspicions raise fundamental questions about the conduct of operations here, since the convoys, and the supplies they deliver, are the lifeblood of the war effort.

“We’re funding both sides of the war,” a NATO official in Kabul said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was incomplete, said he believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.
...

The investigation is complicated by, among other things, the fact that some of the private security companies are owned by relatives of President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan officials. Mr. Popal, for instance, is a cousin of Mr. Karzai, and Western officials say that Watan Risk Management’s largest shareholder is Mr. Karzai’s brother Qayum.

Source:nytimes.com

Palestine and Israel

Ever since Israel imposed its blockade of Gaza in 2007, the territory has become a byword for misery, stoking ever greater anger in the Arab world and growing concern in the West.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Let us shed our illusions, starting with ourselves, whoever we are and however august our inheritance of stupidity. Let us not forget the eternal hole in our human pocket. Let us not, henceforward, judge Israel or seek to have it judged for its intelligence, for its prowess, for its righteousness or for its moral authority, by any standard other than the pathetic, debased and rickety one that we apply, so inconsistently and self-servingly, to ourselves and to everybody else. And let us not forgive ourselves — any more than we forgive Israel, or than Israel can forgive itself — for that terrible inconsistency.

Source: nytimes.com (op-ed)

Marvin K. Mooney!

Leaves Shimmer

Leaves shimmer in uncoordinated
unison:
The Gardener at work
A bird hums high on sugar
Buzzes away on its own breeze
And me
I sit in a monsoon
Drenched:
The Gardner stoops to his work.

You Decide

Recent mail from China:

We are an international electronics wholesalers and retailers, our sales of computer, television, cell phone, game consoles and other products, we have a very good price and credit, and our products are the real book has to guarantee that if you buy more than items, products you will be presented,
all to do at：hhomemall.com
Waiting for the arrival of you.

Result: Unanswered because who the hell knows what they're saying!!

Recent mail from Nigeria from Dr. Brown Babaginda:

[Bulk] (PLEASE I NEED YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE AND TRUST)

Unopened due to possible virus and scam contained therein.

Recent mail from the U.S.:

Does it satisfy her?
Please Her Like Never Before.
Special: Buy 3 Get 1 Free Today.

Really, really could use this but not willing to as 3 for 1 is just not a good enough deal for a true-blue Indian like me.

And I Quote

"We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vunerability."

-- Alain de Botton, Harper's Magazine, April 2010

Worth Repeating

The Pope Should Be Questioned in Sex-Abuse Cases

By Christopher Hitchens

 
Detain or subpoena the pope for questioning in the child-rape scandal? You must be joking! All right then, try the only alternative formulation: declare the pope to be above and beyond all local and international laws, and immune when it comes to his personal and institutional responsibility for sheltering criminals. The joke there would be on us.

The case for bringing the head of the Catholic hierarchy within the orbit of law is easily enough made. All it involves is the ability to look at a naked emperor and ask the question “Why?” Mentally remove his papal vestments and imagine him in a suit, and Joseph Ratzinger becomes just a Bavarian bureaucrat who has failed in the only task he was ever set—that of damage control. The question started small. In 2002, I happened to be on Hardball With Chris Matthews, discussing what the then attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas Reilly, had termed a massive cover-up by the church of crimes against children by more than a thousand priests. I asked, why is the man who is prima facie responsible, Cardinal Bernard Law, not being questioned by the forces of law and order? Why is the church allowed to be judge in its own case and enabled in effect to run private courts where gross and evil offenders end up being “forgiven”? This point must have hung in the air a bit, and perhaps lodged in Cardinal Law’s own mind, because in December of that year he left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with a subpoena seeking his grand-jury testimony. Where did he go? To Rome, where he later voted in the election of Pope Benedict XVI and now presides over the beautiful church of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as several Vatican subcommittees.

In my submission, the current scandal passed the point of no return when the Vatican officially became a hideout for a man who was little better than a fugitive from justice. By sheltering such a salient offender at its very heart, the Vatican had invited the metastasis of the horror into its bosom and thence to its very head. It is obvious that Cardinal Law could not have made his escape or been given asylum without the approval of the then pontiff and of his most trusted deputy in the matter of child-rape damage control, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Developments since that time have appalled even the most diehard papal apologists by their rapidity and scale. Not only do we have the letter that Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops, enjoining them sternly to refer rape and molestation cases exclusively to his office. That would be bad enough in itself, since any person having knowledge of such a crime is legally obliged to report it to the police. But now, from Munich and Madison, Wis., and Oakland, come reports of the protection or indulgence of pederasts occurring on the pope’s own watch, either during his period as bishop or his time as chief Vatican official for the defusing of the crisis. His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.

As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same. As I am writing this, plaintiffs are coming forward and strategies being readied (on both sides, since the Vatican itself scents the danger). In Kentucky, a suit is before the courts seeking the testimony of the pope himself. In Britain, it is being proposed that any one of the numberless possible plaintiffs might privately serve the pope with a writ if he shows his face. Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on “crimes against humanity”; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.

In Kentucky, the pope’s lawyers have already signaled their intention to contest any such initiative by invoking “sovereign immunity,” since His Holiness is also an alleged head of state. One wonders if sincere Catholics really desire to take refuge in this formulation. The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Benito Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy. It is the last survival of the political architecture of the Axis powers. Its bogus claim to statehood is now being used to give asylum to men like Cardinal Law.

In this instance the church damns itself both ways. It invites our challenge—this is where the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights becomes relevant—to its standing as a state. And it calls attention to the repellent origins of that same state. Currently the Holy See has it both ways. For example, it is exempt from the annual State Department Human Rights Report precisely because it is not considered a state. (It maintains only observer status at the United Nations.) So, if it now does want to claim full statehood, it follows that it should receive the full attention of the State Department for its “lay” policies, and, for that matter, the full attention of the Justice Department as well. (First order of business—why on earth are we not demanding the extradition of Cardinal Law? And why is this grave matter being left to private individuals to pursue?)

It is very difficult to resist the conclusion that this pope does not call for a serious investigation, or demand the removal of those responsible for a consistent pattern of child rape and its concealment, because to do so would be to imply the call for his own indictment. But meanwhile why are we expected to watch passively or wonder idly why the church does not clean its own filthy stable? A case in point: in 2001 Cardinal Castrillón of Colombia wrote from the Vatican to congratulate a French bishop who had risked jail rather than report an especially vicious rapist priest. Castrillón was invited this week to conduct a lavish Latin mass in Washington. The invitation was rightly withdrawn after a storm of outrage, but nobody asked why the cardinal could not be held as an accessory to an official Vatican policy that has exposed thousands of American children to rapists and sadists.

Only this past March did the church shamefacedly and reluctantly agree that all child rapists should now be handed over to the civil authorities. Thanks a lot. That was a clear admission that gross illegality, and of the nastiest kind, has been its practice up until now. Euphemisms about sin and repentance are useless. This is a question of crime—organized crime, by the way—and therefore of punishment. Or perhaps you would rather see the shade of Mussolini thrown protectively over the Vicar of Christ? The ancient Roman symbol of the fish is rotting—and rotting from the head.

Hitchens, a NEWSWEEK contributor, is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

What am I Reading

Currently reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. So far so good. Half of a Yellow Sun received the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.

The New Yorker said this about the book when it was first published:

Based loosely on political events in nineteen-sixties Nigeria, this novel focusses on two wealthy Igbo sisters, Olanna and Kainene, who drift apart as the newly independent nation struggles to remain unified. Olanna falls for an imperious academic whose political convictions mask his personal weaknesses; meanwhile, Kainene becomes involved with a shy, studious British expat. After a series of massacres targeting the Igbo people, the carefully genteel world of the two couples disintegrates. Adichie indicts the outside world for its indifference and probes the arrogance and ignorance that perpetuated the conflict. Yet this is no polemic. The characters and landscape are vividly painted, and details are often used to heartbreaking effect: soldiers, waiting to be armed, clutch sticks carved into the shape of rifles; an Igbo mother, in flight from a massacre, carries her daughter's severed head, the hair lovingly braided.

I am also starting, but not wholly into, The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill - brother of Dan Hill! What a bunch of over-achievers!

The Book of Negroes won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It was the winning selection for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2009.

Chaand Ke Saath

chaand ke saath kayi dard purane nikale
kitane gam the jo tere gam ke bahaane nikale

fasl-e-gul aayi phir ik baar asiran-e-wafa
apane hi kuun ke dariya mein nahaane nikale

dil ne ik int se taamir kiya taajamahal
tuune ik baat kahi laakh fasaane nikale

dasht-e-tanahaayi-e-hijraan mein khada sochata huun
haay kya log mera saath nibhaane nikale

...
JAGJIT SINGH

Afghanistan: Exit Strategy Needed

Robert D. Kaplan, writing for The Atlantic this month, points out the one and only reason why the U.S. and Canada and all the rest should get the heck out of Afghanistan before it becomes hopelessly difficult to save face and avoid any more loss of life for the Canadian Forces. Italics are mine.

The story of Colonel Chris Kolenda, of Omaha, Nebraska, is instructive. Kolenda, a West Point graduate with the sharp-eyed, comforting manner of a family physician, commanded the 1st Squadron of the 91st Cavalry from May 2007 to July 2008 in northeastern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan. When Kolenda’s 800-soldier battalion arrived, armed violence was endemic. Coalition headquarters in Kabul blamed a Pakistan-based insurgency. “The conventional wisdom was wrong,” Kolenda told me. “Almost all of the insurgents were locals who fought for a whole variety of reasons: they were disgusted with ISAF, as well as the government in Kabul; their fathers had fought the Soviets and now the sons were fighting the new foreigners.”

Then there was the “psychodrama of interethnic and clan frictions,” abetted by the fractured mountainous landscape. The area was populated by Nuristanis, Kohistanis, and Pashtuns, all of whom harbored disdain for the Gujars, migrant farm workers from over the border, who, in their eyes, were “not real Afghans.” (So much for the argument that there is no Afghan national identity.) The Nuristanis, in turn, were divided into the Kata, Kom, Kushtowz, and Wai clans. The Kom were split into hostile and well-armed groups whose current divisions stemmed from the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, when some of the Kom backed the radical forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known as the HIG, or Hezb-i-Islami-Gulbuddin, and other Kom sub-clans were loyal to the moderate National Islamic Front of Afghanistan. The Kata, meanwhile, were generally loyal to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (“Army of the Righteous”), which carried out major attacks against India from bases in Pakistan. The Pashtuns themselves were divided in some cases, on account of blood feuds, into five elements.

Kolenda apologized to me for “getting down in the weeds,” but explained that until he’d learned who was who, and who was fighting whom, his battalion couldn’t make progress and escape the cycle of ferocious firefights that had characterized the first three months of its deployment. “People were often giving us tips about bad guys who weren’t really bad guys, but simply people from another faction with whom the tipster had a score to settle.”

Allow me to interpret: Afghanistan is not a banana republic; it is not a Haiti or a Panama where overwhelming force can be applied simplistically. It is politically fractious, geographically far and culturally alien to the West. Without the will, money and manpower for an extended, neo-colonial stay, the war is lost. Just as it was lost by Alexander the Great, the British, the Russians (who were next door to Afghanistan), and now the (other side of the world) U.S. led coalition.

Tarah and Mansoor

Cuties: Mansoor and Tarah at Rox's 50th Birthday Celebration.

(Click to see larger pic.)

Seth's Red Converse Shoes

Seth proudly displaying his new shoes. We went to the SoftMoc warehouse and got a pair of converse high-tops for him. Also pictured is his BLACK hoodie as he wants to go "goth" on us....sheesh!

RePost: Names I Love

There have always been certain names that have always captured my imagination. Names that make me think, "Wow, that name has a certain ring to it."

Names like: Jhumpa Lahiri, Anjali Holstein, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Koyalee Chanda (Emmy award winning director of Blue's Clues) Jurgen Goth and Jian Gomeshi.

I'm not quite sure why some names just stick with me like old friends. Does anyone else have these same associations with names of people that you know of, but don't really know?

And the best name of all? Why, Tarah (Star) Noor (Light) Paryani (Pari or fairy).

Thoughts From the Sixth Floor

The nurse's station is a seething mass of work complaints, professional armour against patients' requests and female politics.

Sunnybrook Hospital's standard of service delivery is miles ahead of Toronto East General's.

Why are the orderlies, on average, more pleasant than the nurses? Is this due to their lower professional status within the hospital or due to the general difference in gender between the two professions?

All the relatives on this floor seem to be swimming in their own ocean of worries.

There is the smell of death coming from the room across the hall...then again, it is Passover, right?

Why do the doctor always seem to be moving on before you have time to even formulate a question or two? They tell you things you have never heard before; they explain all the alternatives; but never let you wonder about which course would be the right one...almost as if the "right" decision will be made for you. You are ancillary.

There is a Swiss Chalet, a Tim Horton's, a cafereria and gift shops; there are TVs, beds and laundry facilities; doctors and pharmacies close at hand. Maids to make up the room and people to push you to the next department. Free, clean clothing for the asking. Pools, I'm sure, in the physio area and lots of rooms with nice views. Why would anyone want to leave this place?

Letter to the Sheraton Chain of Hotels

Hello,
I stayed at the Sheraton in Nassau from March 19 - 22, 2010. I am writing in order to inform you that the service at this particular location is atrocious. I have stayed at the Sheraton in Markham, Ontario, in New Delhi and in Niagara Falls on numerous occasions.

The staff at the Nassau property at the front desk are anything but helpful. When I arrived, having made my reservation through my bank's point system, I found that the Sheraton in Nassau did not have my reservation. I presented my voucher and other documents, but the manager at the hotel (Cypriana) did not recognize the voucher. I gave her my copy of the voucher as she assured me that she would call the Sheraton's reservation department in order to clear up the mix-up. Over the next three days, I talked to at least 6 different people at the front desk in person and over the phone.

I finally used the internet to get the number of the RBC Travel Assist line, I called the assist line. At this point, I was asked to use the phone in my room to make the call. I declined and used the phone at the front desk so as not to incur any long distance charges of my own. The RBC travel assist rep. was extremely helpful and took care of my bill and, amazingly and in contrast to the Sheraton staff, told me to not to worry and enjoy the rest of my vacation and that she (the RBC Travel Assist rep.) would figure out the details of the reservation and payment for me with the hotel manager.

This experience of the many days spent talking to the front desk and the single phone call to the RBC Rep., more than anything, brought home to me just how terribly inattentive and uncaring the staff at this hotel are. There are other minor incidents which occurred, from minor lapses of courtesy with other guests (such as not even saying something like, "thank you for staying at the Sheraton" to staff simply shrugging their shoulders when they were corrected about extra amounts billed to guests bills.) Which, by the way, happened to me as well. I was over-charged about $60 on my final bill for buffet breakfasts which were included in my package!

I have gone on at length only to bring home the point that what is happening at the Sheraton in Nassau is not just the lack of a quality customer care experience (which I have come to associate with the Sheraton name) but the degradation, in my mind, of the Sheraton brand. You have a beautiful property in Nassau, but your brand is taking a beating for no particular reason except that it has become acceptable at this location to view the guests as burdensome or as annoyances.

Thanks for listening,

Zahir Paryani
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Nassau: First Full Day

Had a large breakfast. Lay on the beach till 1 p.m. and then rented a scooter. Unfortunately, my friend, Chris, was not comfortable riding on the scooter and we soon rented the bike and took the local transit into town.

Downtown Nassau is full of tourist trap type of shops and supposedly high-end jewellery stores. Everything is overpriced but it was nice to walk through town anyways.

Pictures of our time on the beach are trapped on my iphone, but below are pictures of our day out.




Close up of beach bags for sale at the straw market in Nassau.

This cute old graciously allowed me to take her picture and called me boo-boo, darling and baby, which was very sweet of her. She looked the part of the doting grand-mother and who doesn't love doting grand-mothers.

Sign with Chris' finger for a comment.


One of many mega-ships which come to harbour in Nassau, releasing tourists to drink in the streets, buy over-priced crap in the stores and generally act like they own the town. Or they just looked frightened and wonder if they'll ever make it back on the ship for another game of shuffle board.

The Enigma of Arrival

Flight was eventless...Will definately fly WestJet again instead of Air Canada.

Getting out to the airport in Nassau was a nightmare. We waited in line for 1 hour. There were only 4 booths\officers taking their sweet time with clearing the backlog of 3-4 flights arrival at about the same time. In order to remedy this situation, a live band came on the band stand reserved for just this situation. Which means it happens all the time! After an hour, I had move about 15 feet. Finally fed up with the waiting I went to the front of the line, to see if more booths couldn't be opened up. Or at least they could put the band to work clearing the backlog of tourists.

I asked to speak to a supervisor...such a North American thing to do! I was told to go into an inner office, where there were about 10 customs officers and one head honcho identified by a single star on his epaulet. Totally ignored and told to sit, I decided to stand with hands folded in front of my crotch. Defiance with a touch of subservience.

When a woman, amply stacked, looked at my passport, she wondered why I was in the office. I told her I was going to be late for a meeting at the Sheraton and told this to the guy at the booth and then he sent me in. Note: Playing dumb is good, making up lies can be helpful. She asked me which guy sent you here....I said I couldn't remember which guy, but it was a guy...not a girl.

She said, come with me. We went to an unoccupied booth. She stamped my passport and immigration document and voila! Out the door to greet my friend and enjoy the weather!

I love the third world.

Review: Crowne Plaza, Niagara Falls, Ontario

We stayed at the Crowne Plaza in Niagara Falls for 2 nights beginning on March 15, 2010.

We had a package which included one buffet breakfast, one-and-a-half day access to the water park and some coupons for dinner at the Sheraton or the Crowne Plaza (the Crowne).

We were checked into a tiny room with two double beds. There was hardly any room to put our luggage down, not to speak of the fact that we were travelling with two active kids. The air in the room was hot and stuffy. I played with the thermostat and found that there was no air vent in the room, and there was no air conditioning unit on the windows. The bathroom also had no vent. After going down to the front desk, I was offered a fan to help circulate the air in the room. The offer of the fan was done very matter of factly...like this was an everyday occurrence. What I really wanted was to get some fresh air into the room and then cool the air off....you know, like an air conditioner would? I was told I could open the window...unfortunately the window, which I had already tried to open, only opened about 4 - 5 inches!

We were then shown another room, which the front desk told me was an upgrade -- it turned out to be exactly the same size as the last room. Back down I went with the bell-man in tow. This time I was given the keys to a suite...a double room. So with some grumbling from my wife and kids, who were already getting settled into the first room, we moved.

The first night in the suite was cold. I had the thermostat turned all the way up. Unfortunately, the heaters were not working. The next day, after spending a great day at the water park, we returned to take showers in our room. As I tried to adjust the shower head, the pipe going into the wall simply bent right off the inside-the-wall pipe. Nice! I turned all the water off and called the front desk. I mentioned that I had (big strong guy that I am) had simply broken (not bent, but broken) off the pipe attached to the shower head. Without missing a beat, the lady on the line said, "Okay, I'll send up an engineer right away!" Which made me think that this type of occurrence wasn't entirely novel to this hotel.

After having lived and settled-in to this room...the maintenance guy informed us that we would have to move to yet another room as the repairs would take a long time.

Fine. So we moved, conveniently, across the hall to the same type of suite as we had just vacated. As soon as I entered the room, I could smell the distinct odour of fumigation chemicals. I said as much to my wife...but I also knew that the kids were in no mood to move yet again and neither was the wife. After showering and just as we were getting ready to head out, my keen-eyed daughter spots an ant, then another, then another, then another. I crush them all and assure her that there are no more ants in the room. Before leaving I opened the "one" window in the two rooms 5 inches wide (as far as it would go)to air the room out. We spent 3 hours out and returned to find our room freezing cold. No big deal, I thought, I will just shut the window and turn on the heat.

The heaters did not work, the single pane window, which was on rusted hinges, would not shut. I tried to slam the window shut with no luck. I looked for a knife in the room to "jimmy" the window with no luck. Finally, I took the belt off my pants, looped it around the small window handle, pulled hard and pushed the frame of the window upwards to finally close the window shut for good. Unfortunately, the room was still very cold owing to the the single pane, circa 1929, windows. By this time, I was well onto the hotel. I called down and, without explanation, asked for a portable heater to be brought up to our room. The operator's response, again, was non-chalant and a portable heater was promptly brought up, no questions asked.

The kicker was that another, as we found out later, very nice family had moved into our suite. Their story was similar....they were shown the cramped room, they complained, were upgraded to our previous room of the broken pipe. We exchanged some intelligence with them, they asked to take over our portable heater as "their" room was also freezing the night before.

The only thing good about this hotel were the staff, who seemed to have a, 'Yeah, we know...we're sorry, but what can you do, it's an old hotel' attitude about them. Nevertheless, they were all very pleasant and understanding and accommodating. Without the graciousness of the staff this whole experience would have been a total loss.

Bottom line: The Crowne Plaza in Niagara Falls is a very old hotel which has had cosmetic renovations but no structural renovations leaving many things to be desired. Save your money and go to the Sheraton Fallsview which is next door to the Crowne.

Scenes of Things to Come II

Sheraton Nassau Beach Resort

Scenes of Things to Come

Itinerary for Nassau

Yeehaw! I have finally finalized plans for my 3 night getaway to Nassau.

I will be leaving Toronto on Friday, March 19th, staying at the Sheraton for 3 nights and 4 glorious sun-filled days. The last time I was in the Bahamas was two years ago, in Freeport.

Day 1 - Friday
Arrival and then to the beach for the afternoon.
Dinner at Thai Lotus: "If you want great value, fantastic service, excellent food in a nice quiet, beautiful atmosphere, this is the place for you." (Source: TripAdvisor.com).
Evening: Explore the hotel next door, watch movie in room, sleep early.

Day 2 - Saturday
Buffet Breakfast at hotel.
Day at the beach!
Lunch: Arawak Cay: "Take a cab to "Fish Fry." It is actually called Arawak Cay, but the locals call it Fish Fry. When you get there you will find several shack-looking restaurants. At this point you might want to leave, but don't. My recommendation is a place called "Oh Andros." Many locals say it's the best in Fish Fry, and I must tell you, I had some of the tastiest, freshest seafood I have ever had."
Afternoon: Go into town and check out the straw market and breath the air at some of the pricier stores. Visit art gallery touted as having good Bahamian art.
Evening: Nap at the hotel
Night: Fish Fry on the beach, Casino

Day 3 - Sunday.
Buffet Breakfast at hotel
Morning: Walk through downtown Nassau
Afternoon: Scuba Diving
Dinner: Sushi
Night: Dancing


Day 4 - Monday
Buffet Breakfast
Beach...beach...beach
3 p.m. - Catch flight back to Toronto.

What Am I Reading?

I am currently some 300 pages into Richard Evans' wonderfully written tome on Nazi Germany during the war years -- 1939-1945.

The book (The Third Reich at War) is a beautifully written, meticulously documented (through letters, official documents and diaries of soldiers, victims and leaders)and touches on many different aspects of Germany's war polity.

And when I say, tome, I mean tome. The book is some seven hundred pages long and was well worth the wait time from the local library.

I have read auto-biographies by Elie Wiesel (Night) and Primo Levi's, Survival in Auschwitz and still, Evans' book brings home terribly the obscene depravity of the mass killings carried out by the Nazi's of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and other so called "sub-human" races. One of the most interesting things Evans has done is to bring to my attention the fact that the Nazi's were very careful not to directly order the mass extermination of, as they said, "jewry." Legalist bureacrats that they were, they were aware, even while denying it to be true, that there was something so very wrong in killing civilians en masse based on their ethnicity. And that history would judge their behaviours harshly. In the end, the 'final solution' was an accumulation of speeches vilifying the Jews and others, documents pushing leaders and soldiers to squeeze more work from the forced labourers, a need to keep the area behind the front line clear of partisans, a hierarchy of needs due to food shortages, years of indoctrination and propaganda starting in the pre-war years, which finally gave permission for people to be able to hammer, shoot, kick, hang, starve, over-work and gas the supposed enemies of the Nazi state.

The Man in the Potomac

Today, I thought of a man, whose name was unknown at the time that he became famous, who repeatedly handed over a life line thrown from a helicopter to his fellow survivors in the wintery waters of the Potomac River in Washington D.C. He was the only passenger, as we later learned, to have drowning declared as his cause of death.

I went looking for him today. His name was Arland Dean Williams Jr.

A Wikipedia article quotes the Washington Post's description of what happened after the crash of the passenger plane on January 13, 1982 and is worth quoting at length:

He was about 50 years old, one of half a dozen survivors clinging to twisted wreckage bobbing in the icy Potomac when the first helicopter arrived. To the copter's two-man Park Police crew he seemed the most alert. Life vests were dropped, then a flotation ball. The man passed them to the others. On two occasions, the crew recalled last night, he handed away a life line from the hovering machine that could have dragged him to safety. The helicopter crew - who rescued five people, the only persons who survived from the jetliner - lifted a woman to the riverbank, then dragged three more persons across the ice to safety. Then the life line saved a woman who was trying to swim away from the sinking wreckage, and the helicopter pilot, Donald W. Usher, returned to the scene, but the man was gone.

On January 25, 1982, Roger Rosenblatt, wrote a touching essay for Time Magazinehttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925257-1,00.html on Arland Williams' extraordinary heroism.

Overjoyed

Over time, I've been building my castle of love
Just for two, though you never knew you were my reason
I've gone much too far for you now to say
That I've got to throw my castle away

Over dreams, I have picked out a perfect come true
Though you never knew it was of you I've been dreaming
The sandman has come from too far away
For you to say come back some other day

And though you don't believe that they do
They do come true
For did my dreams
Come true when I looked at you
And maybe too, if you would believe
You too might be
Overjoyed, over loved, over me

Over hearts, I have painfully turned every stone
Just to find, I had found what I've searched to discover
I've come much too far for me now to find
The love that I've sought can never be mine

And though you don't believe that they do
They do come true
For did my dreams
Come true when I looked at you
And maybe too, if you would believe
You too might be
Overjoyed, over loved, over me

And though the odds say improbable
What do they know
For in romance
All true love needs is a chance
And maybe with a chance you will find
You too like I
Overjoyed, over loved, over you, over you

Tarah At Five

When going through the car wash, she calls the pre-soak rinse the "free-soap." This fact is endlessly irritating to her brother.

She is lactose intolerant and lately, obsessed with farts, farting, smelly farts and all things poop (tee hee). She asks, "Mom, can you fart anywhere in this world?" A discussion then ensues about the etiquette of passing gas. About how her pregnant teacher needs to leave the room when a student farts otherwise she will throw up.

Later, we discussed the situation in the Ukraine and other such stuff.

Bo

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.

When Boa Sr sang in her own language, the result was gently hypnotic. "The earth is shaking as the tree falls, with a great thud," she sang, on a recording captured by linguists.

But the grey-haired, 85-year-old woman will not be heard again. And neither will her native tongue – Bo – aside from the recordings that have already been made. Campaigners revealed yesterday that the recent death of Boa Sr on India's remote Andaman Islands marked the end of the Bo tribe and the loss of a language.

Rogaine

This is exactly why I have avoided hair growth products...the results can be frightening.

iLike

Definately like the look of this new gadget. Definately was looking for a tablet pc before settling on my HP notebook. This is neither a tablet (where's the keyboard?) nor a kindle-type reader. To write up longer documents a touch keyboard would not work...even longer e-mails. Nevertheless, iLike. Oh, Bill, enough with the "i" in front of everything. iStop already!

Weekend, My A**!

The two days of rest signalled by the ever-gloried Friday afternoon never really occurs at my home. A case in point: this weekend.

Went to my mother's home at 9 p.m. Friday night after having dinner at home and blowing out the candles with Seth (the birthday boy). Slept overnight at mom's so I could be present to received the carpet installer. In my dad's absence, we are re-decorating his one room office.

After squaring up with the installer, came home to shower and take some goodies to LaserQuest (LQ), where we are holding Seth's 9th birthday party. On the way to LQ will pick up one of Seth's friends and then set up at LQ. My wife, in the meantime, has taken Tarah to ballet class, gone to pick up the cake and assorted goodies. Tarah and mom will arrive at LQ after the first game and then, "Happy birthday to you...Happy birthday to you..." then another game, goodbyes and back home to clean up.

In the evening, I will be taking at least one of the kiddies back to my mom's to check out the new carpet, install a shower head and fix the kitchen faucet. Also, will need to measure room for new shelving and possibly a new desk. Then back home.

Sunday: Go to Ikea in the morning, possibly bring items found at Ikea back to my mother's place and then? Seth has a birthday party to attend! What! What?

Oh yeah, the bathroom needs cleaning and need to vacuum the house. Kitchen floor to sweep and mop.

Ah, I love weekends....what was your weekend like?

What Am I Reading?

Spy (Thriller)
By Ted Bell

Ted Bell is a former advertising exec. turned writer. Spy pits Islamo-terrorism coming out of South America against the wits of a few "good Americans." A good read...but he's no John Le Carre.


The Frozen Leopard (Travelogue)
by Aaron Latham

Aaron Latham, journalist, ventures to Africa (Kenya and Rwanda) and tries to work his way out of his depression/writer's block. The chapters in the book are a little too episodic, but a nice easy read.


Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction
By Christopher Frith and Eve Johnstone

Frith is a Professor in Neuropsychology. Johnstone is Professor and Head of the Division of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh. (Yikes!) This a fabulous primer on the subject. By a stroke of luck, while prowling the bookshelves at the library, I came across this book which is one in a series of books on subjects like cosmology, psychology, Islam, Communism, etc. etc. Just picked up Galaxies: A Very Short Introduction...the book is much smaller than you would expect.

In reply to my previous post, Anwar Sumar asks:
"Can you describe that whole flesh wound thing...how it happened"

I don't normally indulge obvious attempts to mock me but....An Indian woman (looked to be in her early 20's) and her boyfriend/husband/whatever happened to have sat next to us at the pool that afternoon. They were, in my opinion, trying very hard not to look our way and smile or say, 'hello.' It was quite obvious that the woman in question was, how should I say without seeming arrogant, taken by me.

In order to attract my attention this girl...really, she was a girl...hardly a woman! Ordered a tall coconut drink complete with an umbrella. At least that's the way I remember it. I found this a little embarassing to be quite honest. Such unashamed attempts to gain my attention went on for a good part of the afternoon.

My buddy and pal -- Anwar; normally a schmoozer himself, decided to ignore the pool-side goings-on. He even hinted that this little girl's affections for me were a figment of my fecund imagination. And if there is one thing about me you should know...I do not take lightly people calling me fecund. No sir!

Anyways, to get to the moment of the wounding of my flesh and yes, even my heart...I was coming out of the pool where I had just gone in to void my bladder. I looked up to see my admirer doing exactly that. No. Not voiding her bladder but admiring me. True, the water was dripping off my man-boobs, my taut, muscled legs carried me ever closer to my seat and lo and behold what do I see? The girl in question was sitting in the middle of an inflatable ring complete with pictures of Disney characters. How cute I though to myself. I faltered and blurted out, "That's very nice."

She mis-judged my comment as being sarcastic and made a face which could only mean that our little romance had come to an end. I was Jack Tripper caught in a comedy of errors. Mr. Furley mistook me for something I was not and what ensued was that I ended up walking into my beach chair, scrapping a whole heap of skin (two inches of it) from top to bottom off my glistening shin.

And that, as they say, was that. I hope this satisfies your need to mock me Sumar! You may want to take a gander at Anwar's encounter with a Man-Maid at the Sheraton in New Delhi here. Who's laughing now, laughing boy?

Open Letter to the Park Hyatt in Goa

Dear Park Hyatt,

I know it has been quite some time since I was with you. My apologies for not writing sooner. Between getting back to Toronto, starting into work and family commitments, I simply haven't found any time to write.

I recently posted some more pics of you that Anwar had taken. You may remember him from our visit in late September of last year. Anyways, the pictures have brought you back to mind: Memories of having showers in your rooms...was it 348...how soon I've forgotten. Forgive me.

Your lush grounds which were meticulously kept by the battalion of grounds-people; chestnut brown meandering boardwalks leading to a white-sand beach which literally went on for miles and miles. Your multiple pools: so clean, curvacious and inviting. The fountains on the pathways leading to our room. The palm trees, the Masaai-red earth which nurtured such luxuriant growth, the birds and yes, even the lizards have me singing your praises.

I apologize. For not writing sooner, but also, for not squeezing more enjoyment out of our time together. For taking you for granted and caring overly much for my own comfort. Besides your memories all I have left are questions. Why didn't I take more pictures of you, explore your alleyways and touch the stone work I walked on or use the hot tub at night? Why is it not possible for my mind to be as still as a photograph and for long enough to lull me to sleep with you in mind.

There's a rock in the pool which is closest to the ocean. My friend and I spent a whole afternoon lazing next to this pool. There is a rock that forms the edge of one side of that pool; a seat has been carved into that rock. You know the one I mean? Where one can come out of the pool sit on the half submerged rock and admire the view of the grounds leading to the beach, and further on, the ocean. That was a great place to take a break from the swimming. I did recognize it at the time for what it was -- a sublime spot for a repose.

I hate to sound overly sentimental, but it is this way, especially when I think of you. What can one say in closing except, thank you.

p.s. I inadvertently scrapped two inches of skin off my right shin while walking around that pool. The bleeding wouldn't stop. My friend suggested calling someone to bandage my leg. At the time, it was painful and I was too busy dealing with the pain to give the flap of skin much thought. I tore it off and let it fall. Now, I think, wistfully, that perhaps you knew I would soon depart and this was your way of keeping a little of me with you.

I will return one day. I promise.

Article of Note: The War on Drugs

"Reading the stories of so many lives derailed by drugs and hobbled by poverty, one can’t help but ask: are we winning the war on drugs? It’s been exactly forty years since Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “a serious national threat” and coined the phrase “War on Drugs.”