Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

Clueless guys can’t read women, but nevertheless a Linux developer gets laid.

And here is a quote — intended to make you flow into the Monday depression oriented in the right direciton:

There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens the pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.
– Cry, the beloved country. Alan Paton

The U.S. immigration service said yesterday that it will stop denying green cards on terrorism grounds. From here.

The algorithm is simple – you get a package of Kimchi, add water, various vegatables, rice/barley, cook and eat. quite good.

The only problem is that the house fills itself with the smell of Kimchi. The reocmmended solution is to sell the house immediately, and move to a different continent.

I got my green-card.

Applied: January 13, 2003. Got it on March 17, 2008 (arrived by mail on March 20). You do the math.

Update: Got the green card itself two days later.

Also… The green-card notice letter says on the top: “Welcome to the United States of America”. I guess living here for the last 8 1/2 years does not really count.

Asides (i.e., quickies) are now enabled again…

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

from a long but fascinating (or do I mean “not what one might venture to call short, but yet, after deliberation, might still be, if one indulge in such considerations, not necessarily uninteresting”) piece by George Orwell.

Link taken from here.

After much hacking I recovered the old entries on my blog. Entries are replicated, and stuff like that, but at least all the entries I have are back online. Several people had some constructive comments on my “Gone, baby, gone” entry (whcih is now gone [but I might reinsert it]). Thanks!

Puting the blog entries back (even in their current deplated form), required some serious hacking [but since I enjoy hacking sometime, I do not complain], the right plugin, installing some pop3 programs and stuff like that. I learned a lot of things from this process, but I think I could have lived happy and long life without knowing them. For example, email might be encoded  by <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64″>base64</a>, and stuff like that. I guess if this computer science nonsense does not work out for me, I could always work as a programmer .

Saw the movie “The flag of our fathers” about the battle of Iwo Jima (from the US point of view), and was somewhat disappointed. Its the counterpart to the movie Letters from Iwo Jima, which tells the story from the Japanese point of view. I was not crazy about Letters from Iwo Jima but it was better than this movie.

So, why I am wasting your time? As the wikipedia entry explains nicely the whole battle was probably a waste of life, resources and energy from the US point of view. But the movie never mentions this, because, well, it would make it less convenient to watch.

The conclusion is not to learn your history from movies (or wikipedia).

Which brings me to an **excellent** book I just read on the civil war: “Battle Cry of Freedom”, by James M. McPherson. Which is a line taken from a song, also involving flags. And so the cycle closes (for people obsessive about closing cycles), with a much grandeur story of heroism, incompetence (of politicians and generals alike), symbolism, success and failure. The great success of this book, is that it leaves you with much better understanding of how complicated the whole affair was. There are no short easy answers, and no easy lines. It is not even clear what were the reasons why the south lost the war (yeh, there are a lot of reasons, but as the book discusses, none of them tells even a large fraction of the story).

And that is what great telling of history is all about – it leaves you much more knowledgeable but with fewer certainties. This book reads much more like a suspense book than a history book (although you know the end [the butler did it, of course]) – I found myself skipping ahead when reading this book and then going back.

And you ask yourself, why should I waste my time reading about the civil war? Well, if you want to understand the US realities of here and now, you need to understand the story so far, and the Civil war is a large fraction of this story. Of course, you dont have too, ypu probably already understand everything about it, because you already saw all the relevant movies…