P. D. F. Bach...

The subject line occurred to me as I contemplate the arrival of two PDF files weighing in at 17 and 7 megabytes, respectively. And while FineReader was able to open and do what appears to be a reasonable job of recognizing the content, I nevertheless will either have to fire up the laptop or print out the nearly 200 pages of stuff so as to polish up the recognized text.

Or maybe not. My task, relayed to me through a talking Altoids tin that self-destructed 7 seconds after The Boss wished me "Good luck!," is to translate a mere fraction of the content... for Monday.

* * *The iPod accessories arrived today. The recorder gizmo works, but it's far from a high-quality item, and the functions available for recording amount to "record," "pause," "stop," and "play." I haven't tried to see if I can use the position-within-track maneuver (I assume it works), but for sure there is no way to change the name of a track or delete it while in the field (as far as I can tell).

The memory card reader apparently requires batteries, and I didn't bother checking to see if the ones starting to corrode inside the unit worked or not, I just threw them out. More information will be available when I have four AAA batteries sitting around with a death wish.

* * *An interesting observation by Victor Davis Hanson on whether President Ahmadinejad has miscalculated:

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

So far the Iranian president has posed as someone 90-percent crazy and 10-percent sane, hoping we would fear his overt madness and delicately appeal to his small reservoirs of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90-percent children of the Enlightenment, they are still effused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.

What is interesting is that this is a redux of the kind of error made by, notably, Germany and Japan during the last century, which gave us Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima.

(As an aside, one wonders... would Hollywood have been so wholeheartedly supportive of the war against the Axis had Hitler not attacked the Soviet Union in June of '41?)

Cheers...