A characteristically eloquent (and fantastic) essay by Arundhati Roy, courtesy of ZNet:

So here’s Iraq – rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here’s Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here’s all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night.

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Richard Cook, from The Penguin Guide to Jazz, on record collecting (in The Wire):

Sade once told me that she couldn’t imagine going through life without a big record collection, and I think that was about the only time I felt any empathy with her.

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That hoary old e-mail message about NEA cutbacks and the possible axing of NPR and PBS arrived in my e-mailbox today for the nth time.

But look who got suckered! The cool part, though — and this indeed may be part of the hoax, though it’s an iteration I haven’t seen yet — were the following signatories:

> > >1095) Salman Rushdie, New York, NY
> > >1096) Peter Carey, New York, NY
> > >1097) Annie Proulx, Wyoming

I would have been #1103.

Maybe it should become a new trend: counting your degrees of separation from famous people on e-mail petitions.

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No sooner did I post the Roy-Orbison-in-clingfilm story when this month’s fetish, tamakeri, was brought to my attention via the Sound Scavengers mailing list.

As a student interviewed said:

“I recently asked my girlfriend if she’d kick me, but she looked at me as though I was some sort of weirdo,’ he says. “All I can do is watch the videos. The more painful it looks, the more excited I get.”

Yowza!

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Sydney Schanberg’s essay in the Village Voice on Bush’s lies (link via thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse):

I’d like to explain why I’m using lie in its several forms, instead of the euphemisms journalists usually employ, such as spin or misspeaking. I think it’s probably because this graying journalist has perhaps been around so long and seen so many of the really foul things humans can perpetrate on other humans that the urge to call things by their proper name has overtaken him. I hope it doesn’t put anybody off.

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