Hurtling toward the heat death of the universe...

...at the mind-binding rate of 3,600,000 milliseconds per minute!

Enough fun and games.

Another 15 pages of stuff found expression in English today, thanks to yours truly. I am currently in 'reflection' mode, as I await the arrival of Huntur (a consequence of Drew and Shannon going to Durango). Hopefully, the tyke will arrive a little in advance of 8 pm, which is her normal bedtime.

We all have been sick lately. Huntur seems to have had what I had, at about the time I had it, and today, Drew was complaining of not being well. I likely caught whatever the heck it was from Galina. And so it goes.

Tomorrow, I plan to finish off the document I've been working on these past couple of days, and its little sibling. That will leave me with two items on my plate: one due Wednesday; the second, Friday. If I pace myself, I might actually be able to have a life at the same time.

Cheers...

I know I've resolved not to, but...

I find it interesting how, suddenly, it's chic to start talking "retro," as if we're back in the 40s or something. Trent Lott appears to have been pining for that time long past when he said the following at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

I don't know what the man could have been thinking (though I have my suspicions), but he's gone from the public scene, thank goodness. On the other hand, Gretta Duisenberg is still with us.

Who is Gretta Duisenberg?

Well, her claim to the news spotlight appears to be that she is the wife of the chief of the European Central Bank, and that she is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians. Recently, she stirred some international controversy - but none that I could detect in this country - by using her diplomatic passport to visit Yasser Arafat. She's also made remarks that Dutch and Israeli officials have called biased.

Biased? Maybe.

Stupid? Definitely.

Check out this Duisenbergism:

"The cruelty of the Israelis knows no bounds. For example, it's not unusual that they blow up Palestinian houses. The Nazis never went so far during the Dutch occupation."

How sad it is that a woman who comes from a socially privileged and financially affluent background can have both such a limited imagination and a lousy education in history.

She appears to have missed the fact that, just to give one example, the Nazis blew up a whole bunch of Dutch houses in 1940, in Rotterdam, while the details of an armistice were being worked out. The Germans did this from the air, of course, for the sake of that well-known Prussian efficiency. The buildings they were bombing, I'm sure Ms Duisenberg will be surprised to note, were occupied by Dutch citizens at the time.

The Israelis, obviously operating beyond the outer limits of cruelty, blow up buildings belonging to suicide bombers and their next of kin. One at a time. Oh, and they drag the occupants outside before yelling whatever the Hebrew is for "fire in the hole!"

The fact that this is done as retaliation and without trial is probably not a great advertisement for due process, but there would appear to be a clear distinction between targeting perps who randomly blow up tourists and civilians (Israel, ca. today) and shooting hostages in reprisal for assassinations of military personnel (occupied Europe, ca. 1940-45).

Shooting hostages, you say? Yep. The Nazis did it all the time, apparently.

According to William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the shooting of Germans in occupied Europe during WWII most often resulted in an announcement that 50 hostages were to be rounded up and shot immediately, with 50 more to be shot within 24 hours if the perps weren't brought to justice. This proportion - 100:1 - was publicly proclaimed as the price for killing Germans.

I seem to recall one extreme case that occurred in wartime Czechoslovakia, where the assassination of the deputy chief of the Gestapo resulted in the eradication - persons and buildings - of an entire town, Lidice. (There is such a town in the United States, in Illinois - if memory serves - and the name is not accidental.) And that doesn't count the 1,331 Czechs (including, notes Shirer, 201 women) who were executed immediately after "Hangman" Heydrich, the Gestapo capo, expired.

So, if we are to understand this shrew's value system correctly, blowing up an unoccupied house belonging to a suicide bomber (or his family) is "cruelty without bound," much worse than rounding up five score bystanders and turning them into corpses.

Ye gods. In any event, it's highly unlikely that Duisenberg will make any blip at all on our domestic media radar. I should stop reading European web sites.

Cheers...

P.S. Compared with some other countries, some say Holland got off lightly, with only 2,000 or so hostage executions.