Medium-sized cosmic joke...

Well, after weeks of rumors of imminent snow, I woke up today and saw...

RAIN!

This rain will do its level best to remove whatever snow is left on the ground around here, and help make things drier, faster.

Farblegarg.

I can only hope that it's cold enough for the rain to be falling as snow on the mountain.

Cheers...

Amazing what you learn from the news...

Interesting words from Pavel Felgenhauser, writing for The Moscow Times:

I lived for almost 40 years under a totalitarian regime, and I know from first-hand experience what life without freedom means. Anti-war protesters in Western Europe and America do not know and could not care less.

Only by military means can millions of Iraqis be released from total servitude, and Hussein destroyed along with his Baath party that has ruled Iraq since 1958. If there ever existed such a thing as a "just war" then the coming U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could be the most righteous of them all.

Later on in the piece, Felgenhauser notes the following and comes to a conclusion that seems to appear more and more often, albeit not in the mainstream press (with rare exceptions)::

In April 1975, Hussein visited Moscow to ask for Soviet help to build a full reactor to make nuclear weapons. Although Russia agreed to supply Iraq with staggering amounts of conventional weapons, it balked at helping Baghdad go nuclear. In September 1975, Hussein went to Paris to meet politicians with far fewer scruples than Soviet Communists. The French prime minister at the time, Jacques Chirac, signed an agreement to sell Hussein a reactor and arms-grade uranium.

If Chirac and other French politicians had had their way, Hussein could have made tens of nuclear bombs by 1990. The war to liberate Kuwait would never have taken place or would have turned into an all-out nuclear confrontation between Iraq, Israel and the United States. The tragedy was avoided when in 1979 Israeli agents near Toulon destroyed two French-built reactors en route to Iraq. In 1981, the Israelis bombed to debris the French replacement reactor in Iraq before it could be made operational.

Maybe France and Germany are so loyally trying to save Hussein because they want to cover up their long-time cooperation in helping to build weapons of mass destruction? Is the treachery of the past feeding more treachery today?

A lot of people (including your diffident spectator) have been wondering the same thing.

* * *A ringing cell phone or beeping pager may now cost you a $50 fine in New York, if you happen to be attending the theater or a movie house. If this is not the epitome of nanny government, I don't know what is.

Next on the agenda: fines for talking in movies or failing to dress appropriately for theaters.

I'm kidding.

Or am I?

* * *Today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on the front page of section B. It turns out that the Europeans are working through the World Trade Organization trying to "take back" the names of a variety of products, from cheddar cheese (UK), to pilsner beer (Czech), to balsamic vinegar (Italy).

I breezed through the article, so I probably missed a lot of juicy details, but I did glean the following: the Europeans are not going to be satisfied with calling something, say, "imitation mozzarella" or "balsamic-style vinegar." The way I read the article, these products are going to have to be completely renamed (I missed out on whether you could license the use of the name). Besides this, the article mentioned a desire, on the part of the Italians, to check out more than 60,000 "Italian" restaurants around the world, to make sure they are up to snuff and are using Italian-made products.

Looks like protectionism coming back with a vengeance, I'd say.

Opponents offer up a number of objections, the very least of which is the idea that, if you want to protect a name, you should trademark it (as is the case with, I believe, Roquefort cheese).

In any event, should the Europeans somehow succeed in this attempt to corner the market on behalf of their local products (that is, convince everyone else in the world to change the names of stuff they've been selling for years, which I don't think is realistic; I think the WTO will go down the tubes first, if push comes to shove), I predict a horrendous subsequent collapse of the European market in such goods, as everyone else in the world gets used to new product names and ceases to buy what will become niche goods with esoteric names (and prices).

* * *In the neverending quest to improve my language skills, I am informed (via the Telegraph) that the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" - a term describing the French, made famous by the character of Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons - translates as: les primates capitulards toujours en quête de fromage, at least in the Telegraph.

Although my French skills are weak, I believe the phrase, as rendered, back-translates as: "surrendering monkeys always searching for cheese." If I had to stake what little reputation I have expressing myself in French (i.e., none), I'd have tried with: "les primates capitulards qui mangent de fromage."

But what do I know?

Cheers...

Small steps...

On an impulse, I bought some Internet advertising for my translation business. The outfit doing the selling had two alternatives: $3 for 3000 "impressions" (i.e., for each 3000 ads that are displayed), or $35 for 100 "clicks" (i.e., for each time someone actually clicks on the ad).

Given my demographic, I went the "click" route. We'll see what, if anything, develops.

* * *I don't know if I mentioned it, but a few days ago, the top tier of the garage door came off the track, making it very awkward to keep the door closed, so I propped the hinged tier closed with an eight-foot 2x4. Today, I needed to open the door to get moving with a crating job that's been lying around for way too long, and it turns out I had forgotten just how heavy the swinging piece is. (I now have some black-and-blue marks and a painful laceration to remind me).

In any event, a new garage door may be in the cards sooner than I thought, since when Drew helped me get the door back on the track, the tensioning cables came off their pulleys, making it nearly impossible to close the door. (This means, among other things, that the garage door is open to the weather right now.)

With any luck, Drew will come by tomorrow and we'll fix the door, close it, and try to keep it closed.

* * *Galina was going to watch The Bourne Identity with me tonight, but got sidetracked with something else on the tube. While I waited for whatever program she was watching to finish, I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail on a DVD that I borrowed from Drew. I think this is the first time I've watched the film since it first came out, and while it has its funny moments, I don't recall it being as slow-paced as it appeared to me tonight. No biggie.

Cheers...