Conditionals

The other day I saw this link on Wood s Lot, and followed it. That took me to another YouTube link, which showed Liberal leader Stephane Dion struggling to understand a question that had been put to him.
In the twelve years since I left Canada, I have not followed Canadian politics and am very unfamiliar [...]

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Insurance

Last Saturday I went to pick up N. from work and was parked on one of the busier streets in the centre of Heraklion. I found a place to park in front of a church, by a square. Across from the square a couple of streets emptied out into the one where I was parked.
It [...]

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You, the universe

I’ve never published a book (there were a couple of chapbooks back when I was too young to know any better) but I’ve been able to imagine the sense, which published writers often describe, of letting their book go into the world, of it not belonging to them any more, but to the public. You [...]

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Moving Home 2

We found a mover who wanted to take us down this weekend. He said it was better for him than the next one. That meant that we’ve spent our last week in Athens not going to the Cycladic Museum, for example, which is a short walk from here, and which I’ve been telling myself for [...]

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Moving Home

Kieslowski explained that when the Double Life of Veronique was shown in the US, viewers were confused when Veronique returns to her father’s house. They didn’t understand who he was, and whose house it was. Europeans understood immediately, but for Americans he had to add a shot of her addressing him as her father.

He tells [...]

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Pedestrian Alert

I forgot to mention that I finally got my driving license. It’s common practice here to bribe the examiners and just be done with the whole thing, a hundred euros each. My instructor said that 90% of them take the money. I wanted to avoid the test, and was willing to spend the money. Taking [...]

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Blind Spot

K., a friend of mine, was a chemical engineer before taking an early retirement. A few weekends ago we sat around and talked about beer and he told us all about how it’s made, how it goes off, how it’s preserved and transported. (He used to work for Heineken.) It was all fascinating.
He’s very intelligent [...]

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Faces

On the bus last week I stole glances at a woman sitting next to me. She was probably in her late fifties or early sixties and had a somewhat tough, masculine face, care-worn and tired looking. Her eyes were a light grey, the kind that always remind me of spent flashcubes. (When was the last [...]

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Ten Top Trivia Tips about Thomas

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Thomas!

1. Thomas is only six percent water!
2. When Thomas is swallowed, he will enter the blood stream within twenty minutes.
3. If Thomas was life size, he would stand 7 ft 2 inches tall and have a neck twice the size of a human!
4. Finding Thomas on Christmas morning is believed [...]

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Snow

I want to remember these details months or years from now: It is night in Europe. Cold winds descend from Siberia. Snow falls obliquely through the streetlights of Europe. Tomorrow morning cities will be white.
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my beloved.
This is a good world.
The [...]

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Absinthe

On Saturday night N. and I invited Jamie over for a couple of drinks. I had bought a small bottle of Absinth, of the Czech variety. We had been planning for some time to try it. (He studied French literature in university, and I was a big Rimbaud fan when I was a teenager, so [...]

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Time as a room, or a train, or something

From the notebook, 13.10.05
More often than the feeling that time is passing quickly is for me the sense that time, as a passage, has constricted and become a narrow tube or tunnel. “I have no time” means then that I have no room to do other things than run down this tunnel; I can’t stop, [...]

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Summer’s Almost Gone

I finished the textbook some time in July, and tried to concentrate on my own writing for a while. I started a few blog posts in my notebook, some of which might eventually make it up here.
And whenever I could, I went for little day-trips.

I want to get a digital camera. The one I’ve got [...]

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Death of a Spammer

While it’s true that the internet allows for a great deal of sharing of information and that it has made it easier to communicate with people all over the world, in many ways the people we communicate with don’t really become human beings.
A couple of weeks ago, a little buzz ran through the internet when [...]

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Money doesn’t talk, it swears.

I’ve been busy with the textbook I’m writing, which should be out of the way at last later this week, when I go to Athens to do the CD for the listening sections. As a result, I’ve been neglecting the blog.
I’m a bit late, but I want to draw attention to this post by Dr [...]

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The City

I was out having some drinks with some friends last week and one of them, David, mentioned that over the weekend he had broken up with a woman he had recently been seeing. “She said there wasn’t enough ‘chemistry’,” he said, shrugging resignedly. Chris commented that at least she’d been honest and upfront with him, [...]

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A New Anatomy of Melancholy

I found a new blog today, A New Anatomy of Melancholy, although it’s not so new. It goes back to 2003, although there aren’t nearly as many entries as I’d like.
Back in April of 2003, David Lettvin, the blogger wrote this as part of what can be seen as a statement of policy:
I am tired [...]

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Step back, suckah!

My friend Alice in Nova Scotia wrote me to tell me about having watched “Pimp My Ride” once on television. Her description of it was so funny that I asked her if I could post some of it.
I was flicking through the channels and there was this show. Ridiculous! It’s very boring, really, although there [...]

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Melancholy Revelation — a message of love and reconciliation

A couple of days ago, on the 16th, someone somewhere, probably in the UK, if my sitemeter information is correct, took some magic mushrooms and then asked the Google Oracle, "What is melancholy?"
As you will see, the oracle gave this person my blog as an answer. She looked around at a few pages, and then [...]

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Insomnia

It’s 3.30 am. I went to bed a couple of hours ago. I listened to classical music on the radio for an hour, till it shut off by itself, then listened to my heart beat. Then I got up and made some chamomile.
I have an interview tomorrow, and I’m dreading it because I always thought [...]

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Lateral Research

Here’s an interesting new blog. If you drop by to take a look, make sure you start at the beginning.
It lends a whole new sense to the term “link”.

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Buried Alive

My mother is claustrophobic. Whenever she enters a small space, like an elevator, she becomes short of breath and can’t wait to get out. When I was younger, I thought, with the typical cruelty of children, that it was funny, and that she was exaggerating. Once we went as a family for a hike on [...]

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Democracy is coming

Does anyone remember wanting to puke during that Kodak moment when Safia Taleb al-Suhail, leader of the Iraqi Women’s Political Council, proudly held up her ink-stained finger, after Bush’s State of the Union address?
Well, try to keep your gorge from rising when you read how the times are a-changing for women in Iraq, at Baghdad [...]

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Get your head round this one

The Los Angeles County DA has decided that he will seek the death penalty for a man who tried to kill himself.
Juan Manuel Alvarez drove his Jeep Cherokee onto the commuter rail tracks near Compton, supposedly intent on killing himself. (I don’t know if Alvarez has admitted as much.) Apparently he changed his mind as [...]

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Back

I’ve been back since early January, but haven’t posted anything. I haven’t been in the proper frame of mind, and I never wanted this to be a journal.
In December I had become so enthusiastic about them that I registered on Bloglines to keep track of all the ones I was reading. When I returned, [...]

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Off to Toronto

I’m leaving for Toronto today for two weeks. I hope to have lots of bloggable experiences while I’m there.

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How much disappointment can one man bear?

How bleak and lifeless everything seems! How miserable and bereft I feel! All is emptiness. In this pitiful excuse for a life I lead, there is no comfort, no hope, no relief from pain and loneliness.

I followed the instructions, but after more than 24 hours since I dropped the Sea-Monkey “Instant Live Eggs” into the [...]

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Instant Pet

My sister mailed me a Sea Monkeys set. You get an aquarium with them. I always thought you put them in a glass of water and watched them for about five minutes.
I’ve filled it up and added the water purifier. In 24 hours I will drop the little critters in.
Meanwhile:
The Bad Fads Museum
Sea Monkey Worship [...]

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The Last Page

He has a book with countless pages, beautiful sheets of transparent rice paper, the kind once used to protect frontispieces from yellowing. They are so delicate that each one tears off when he turns it. He is meant to write or draw on them, but for now he only likes to feel them between his [...]

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Uneasy Rider

About a year ago, I came across a site that hosted photos and writing by some “Elena” who liked to ride her motorcycle through the empty streets of Chernobyl.
Today I came across a thread that pretty much settles it that she was lying about a lot of things. Nevertheless, the pictures are still great to [...]

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