Wouldn't you like to live in one of these places?

It's almost time for white rabbits, everyone!
This is how it works. The first thing you should do -- on the first morning of each month -- is say "white rabbits" out loud. You have to say it before you say anything else (common mistakes: saying "urgghghh" or "must-brush-teeth" first.) Saying "white rabbits" out loud will bring you luck for the rest of the month.
My family has been doing this for as long as I can remember. I always thought that this was a game my mother had invented, as no other families seemed to call out for rabbits at the beginning of the month. But it is, apparently, quite common among English schoolchildren. Some families say "hare" before they go to bed and "rabbits" in the morning. more

Jason Burke on our war in Aghanistan: "We are told that the Americans have knocked out the Taliban "command and control centres". I have seen many of these. They largely consist of a man sitting on a rug with a radio, an ancient, unconnected telephone and the mother of all teapots." more

What drove a rich Saudi boy -- captured in a holiday snapshot circa 1971 in a lime-green top and blue flares -- to become a terrorist mastermind? Read Jason Burke on the life of Osama bin Laden. more

From The Toast Bible --
"On the first day, God created the plants and animals and people which inhabit the earth, and the land upon which plants shall grow, and the animals and humans shall live on, and the seas in which the fish shall live. The latter half of the first, and the remaining six days, was devoted to divine and glorius toasted products.
On the second day, God created condiments. The butters, jellies, jams, marmalades, syrups and other wonderful toppings [ed. note -- also Marmite] to enhance the taste of toast (as if it needed it.) And God looked upon these condiments, and placed them in his mouth, and deemed them: "Good."...
On the sixth day, God created a device which makes toast and toasted products available to anyone and everyone: the toaster. And God deemed that toasters would cause the toast to pop up from their pocket of warmth, and that a dial would be placed on its side so as to adjust the amount of toastiness. ...
On the seventh day, God rested, looked down upon what he hath done, and said: 'Yum'."

Here's your chance to go and see the I Furiosi Baroque Ensemble while you can still afford to. They will be playing at the Glenn Gould Studio Thursday, November 15th, 12:00 pm (tickets are free but please arrive early if you want a seat). For those of you not in Toronto, you can listen to the rebroadcast on Music Around Us -- CBC Radio 2, 94.1 -- Sunday, November 18th.

Feli and friends will be playing works by Carlo Farina, Claudio Monteverdi and John Frederick Lampe.

[The Breeder's Cup, Saturday October 27th, Belmont Park]
Everyone dreams at the races...
The favorite, as he galloped towards the finish: I can fly. I can fly. The sheik: Will they like me better if I lose? The police horse: Just let me race. The ladies room attendant: I need a better job. Me? What was I dreaming? I dreamt I went for a day at the races and the police didn't carry machine guns.

Evey morning this week I've woken up with this tune in my head:
L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years
How quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas
By the one, the only, the great Burt Bacharach!

This is why I am a librarian.

The New York Times reports today "that a cluster bomb used in an American bombing raid early Tuesday on Herat, in western Afghanistan, had left a village near a Taliban military camp strewn with deadly unexploded "bomblets" that were yellow in color and the size of soft drink cans."
As a cluster bomb falls, it releases 200 or so bomblets, and each bomblet releases 300 fragments of steel. If you are unlucky enough to be under one, it seems, you die a nasty death. That's pretty horrible, but it gets much worse.
Not all of the little bombs explode on the way down, and undetonated bomblets can litter the countryside. What's particularly devastating is that their bright color and shape make them very attractive to children (they resemble, variously, lawn darts, soda cans, or baseballs with little "parachutes" attached).

• cluster bombs explained by the BBC


• CNN on the use of cluster bombs in Kosovo


• what is a cluster bomb & why they should be banned, from the mennonite central committee


• the us campaign to ban landmines

These cute people are my twin sister, Frances, and her older son, Brendan. As Scorpians, our birthday season begins this week! Happy Birthday!

Have you received copies of a petition protesting the situation of women under the Taliban? If you are person 500 or something, you are supposed to forward a copy to a student at Brandeis University. Sadly, it's not current. This student's e-mail privileges at Brandeis were cancelled, years ago, because of the overwhelming response her initial e-mail received, and the university is deleting everything that goes to that account, unread. more

Go instead to HelpAfghanWomen.com, where you can sign a petition, join an action team or buy crafts made by Afghan women.

This e-mail has been making rounds on the internet for over a month now. Some have suggested it's a hoax, but it's not. It's from the children's author Tamim Ansary. He writes "Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban." (You can read the original e-mail at Salon.com.)

My instinct was that he had to be exaggerating. But any of these sites confirm his sobering e-mail as fact:

• more on life expectancy


• more on widespread civilian displacement, human rights abuses, and malnutrition


• more on the use of child soldiers by all warring parties


• more on landmines and abandoned ammunition

C.J. Peters is the head of a new bioterrorism center at the University of Texas and a former C.D.C. expert on special pathogens. He speaks my language - that is - he doesn't get hung up on technical terms. But I can't say if I find this comforting, or, uh, worrisome...

"Speculating on how anthrax could escape from a sealed letter, he said, "I think when it went through one of those squishing machines where they flatten it out, if there was even a little hole in it, it may have gotten out"." (As reported in The New York Times - 10/23/01.)

My dear friend Alene makes the international newswire (and not for any of the reasons we might have predicted). If you want the CNN version, go here. If you want the Alene version, go here.

No work today.
I prefer to think of today as a kind of snow day - except of course it's October and NYC and 75 degrees and sunny - and really, it was a bomb-scare that kept me home.
AJ and I got on the train at 8:40 this morning only to get off again ten minutes later as our conductor announced no trains to Manhattan. Thirty, sixty, ninety minutes later and still no trains. The poor fellow in the token booth had no idea when train service would resume, and when AJ called the MTA phone line for an update she heard the funniest recording:
"All trains are running on or close to schedule except for those that are delayed." With that information in hand, we turned around and came home.

Listening....
on a flat roof
there's a boy leaning against the wall of rain
aerial held high
calling "come on thunder, come on thunder"
From Sometimes (Lester Piggott) by James (1993)

Reading...
...Both the totality of the war efforts and the determination on both sides to wage war without limits and at whatever cost made its mark. Without it, the growing brutality and inhumanity of the twentieth century is difficult to explain. About this rising curve of barbarism after 1914 there is, unfortunately, no serious doubt. [One] reason... was the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consquence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets... could not be. Mild young men, who would certainly not have wished to plunge a bayonet in the belly of any pregnant village girl, could far more easily drop high explosive on London or Berlin, or nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Hard working German bureaucrats who would certainly have found it repugnant to drive starving Jews into abbatoirs themselves, could work out the railway timetables for a regular supply of death-trains...

The greatest cruelties of our centry have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities.
From The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon, 1994).

Yum. Yum, yum, yum. I just pulled the Bara Brith out of the oven and it looks great! Now, I certainly know how to cook with currants -- I use them in scones, bread and salads. I even have a recipe for eggplant that uses currants. But I've never been moved to find out what a currant "was" before it was all hard and black and shriveled up.

I favored Carrie's explanation -- that currants were a type of grape (maybe a concorde grape). And Carrie's right! There are two fruits called currants. The dried zante grape is the kind that is available here in the USA. The other type of currant grows on a short, shrubby, bush and is in the same family as my favorite fruit, the gooseberry. These grow wild in Northern Europe and are used to make jams and jellies, syrups, and cassis!

He was the guy "looking at the organic tropical fruit, quietly singing I like bananas, Cause they don’t have bones."

Did George W. Bush really say -- and I quote -- "I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt"? more
Did Bill Gates send a secret message about September 11th via Microsoft's wingding & webding fonts? more
Were street protesters in Bangladesh carrying posters that showed Osama bin Laden arm-in-arm with the Sesame Street character Bert? more
Did one of the WTC terrorists warn his American girlfriend to stay out of the mall on October 31st? more

Two of these four stories are real - but do you know which ones? Truth is certainly stranger than fiction.

"On my best days, I feel like I live in the perfect home, a city in which, even during grief, two ideas can be held simultaneously, resonating like a tuning fork: solitude and community, autonomy and long-term love, self-denial and hedonistic abandon, danger and safety." -- Emily Nussbaum on NYC.

You may be surprised to know - for all the bands I go to see - that I am really, really bad at remembering the names of musicians.

Me: You know -- Joe Strummer teeth - weed smoking - cowboy hat wearing - guitar playing - dead dude. Hasn't been around for, like, at least ten years
Carrie: Nope. I don't know who you mean
Me: You know -- really long long guitar solos - pot belly -
Carrie: Nope. Still don't know.

Do you know who I'm talking about? All I can say, is thank god for UBL. [If you still haven't figured it out you can go here for the answer].

Almost missed my stop this morning reading the Portraits of Grief page in the NY Times.

In these snapshot portraits I learn more about the people who perished September 11th.

People like Michael G. Jacobs, who was learning to play the bagpipes, Veronique Bowers who named her son Dior after her favourite clothes, and Santos Valentin Jr. who loved his dog, Luger, so much that he would leave the Animal Planet channel on for him when he was not home.

I didn't know any of these people. But I miss them. And - one month later - yes - I am still grieving.

ALL ABOUT ME / READER'S CHOICE
Welcome to my [ice-castle / bedroom / hockey rink / playroom/ blog]. For the past five years I have lived in [New York City / Panama / Moscow] where I work as a [flower girl / model / librarian / fisherman]. It's tough loving me because I am [beautiful / mean / one-legged / sad] but I thank you for persevering. Today I am intrigued by the possibilities of [peace / dragons / air flight / deadbeat boyfriends].