Ik ken er één die zal verschieten als hij zijn logs nakijkt vandaag 🙂

Wat een prachtig mooi artikel in de Washington Post:

And as if to prove that dreams are prompted by anxieties, the new video of Osama bin Laden arrived right on schedule, just as the country was preparing to mark the second anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. The fact that there was nothing particularly threatening in the images, just a walk in the woods, makes it, by the perverse logic of dreams, all the more threatening.

[…]

Because of our voracious need to read some sense into this odd tape, of bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri wandering through lovely dells and vales, it begins to make more sense than we can be certain it was intended to have. It begins to mean things in all directions.

The cautious reading would stay within the parameters of the visual evidence. If, as the satellite network al Jazeera says, it’s a real tape made sometime in April or May, then he was alive as of this past spring, healthier than we thought and living in the mountains, which makes sense given what we know of his presumed last whereabouts somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But mountains aren’t that simple. Intelligence analysts will no doubt scan the tape for every geographical clue they can find. But mountains are also mythic space, which means, in this strange war by video valentine, that bin Laden is everywhere.

“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come?” reads the 121st Psalm. Mountains aren’t just a place one retreats to, but a place of refuge, a place closer to God. Bin Laden may, in fact, be harried to the last limit of his strength — the mountains may be his only choice for survival — but simply by walking through them, calmly and with a nicely turned walking stick, he seems to be almost transcendently at peace.

[…]

Bin Laden is wandering in a surreal, biblical place, green and serene, and the apocalyptic language is somehow fitting.

The tape shows not just that he’s alive, but that he’s alive and in a better place. If you were carefully controlling your own mythology, this is precisely the kind of tape that would be inspiring right now. Osama in the clouds. Osama among the cedars.

And if you were savvy about the meanings of these kinds of images in America, you’d release this tape just now, not only because of the proximity to the 9/11 anniversary, but because this is the season when Americans come off their summer vacations. We are back from the mountains, back to work, back to breathing the eerily familiar, clear, crisp air of early September, remembering what that air smelled like two years ago. And there’s bin Laden, still on holiday.

Het helpt natuurlijk ook niet dat Bin Laden er uitziet en zich op video gedraagt als een vriendelijke, zachtaardige, man. En dat hij er uitziet als een mooie, grote, rijzige christusfiguur.

Moeilijk te demoniseren hé meneer.

Te gek om los te lopen. En nog geen reactie van de media in de VS.

Two years on, a weary nation takes stock. [via Instapundit]

How very, very droll.

A flawed analogy if I ever I saw one: Pearl Harbour = WTC, Yamamoto = Bin Laden, and Italy = Iraq?

Puh-lease.

Leonardo da Vinci zou nog ne goeien geweest zijn voor stripverhalen:

Tjaha. Zo blijft ze wel in de kijker natuurlijk. Nu is het alleen nog wachten op dergelijke foto’s van de Olsens zeker?

Twins! Think of the possibilitites!

Ahem–kinda got carried away there.

Miljaar.

BoingBoing pal Gil Kaufman breaks the news on MTV.com that after more than a decade, the legendary Pixies are reuniting in April for a world tour. Gil says: “The Eagles declared ‘Hell Freezes Over’ when they reunited a few years ago, and indie rock fans are about to feel the same way.” Link Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog]

Kom het gedomme tegen: Robert Heinlein zijn nieuw boek. Of beter, zijn eerste en nooit eerder gepubliceerde novelle, nog vóór Life-Line (over die mens die de sterfdatum van andere mensen kon voorspellen, en al).

Ik heb uiteraard niet alles van Heinlein, die mens heeft teveel geschreven, maar zou ik dat boek nu ook kopen? The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was fantastisch (TANSTAAFL, ha!), ik heb zeer genoten van Stranger in a Strange Land als was ik er nog te jong voor, Starship Troopers was fijn, The Number of the Beast was goed maar verwarrend omdat ik toen nog te weinig van hem gelezen had, Job vond ik zeer goed beginnen maar eigenlijk teleurstellend, en dingen.

Hrm. Kopen dan maar zeker?

De nieuwe catalogus van Bechtle is binnen. Op pagina 815 begint het hoofdstuk TabletPC’s.

Ik wou dat ik er zo één had. Snif.

Jeroen, Thierry en Kelly zijn genomineerd. En Sabrina gaat niets veranderen.

Zo zijn de drie mannen genomineerd.

Thierry is content blijkbaar.

“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said
“You look like the silent type.”
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

’t Is maar om te zeggen dat ik bijna vergeten was hoe onnoemelijk goed Blood on the Tracks was.

’t Was al weer eens lang geleden… De top 20 van de meest gebruikte zoektermen om op dit weblog te geraken:

1. veronique de cock
2. m-kids naakt
3. veronique de cock naakt
4. katrien schotte
5. michel vuijlsteke
6. katrien schotte naakt
7. boygirlbang
8. veronique de kock naakt
9. m kids naakt
10. francesca vanthielen naakt
11. veronique de kock
12. alison irwin naked
13. julie taton nue
14. boredom
15. boygirlbang password
16. “veronique de cock”
17. m-kids nude
18. “katrien schotte”
19. julie taton naakt
20. julie taton

Spot de vreemde eend in de bijt. Daar eenzaam op nummer 5. Zucht.

Uit de top 20: cemal cavdarli (25), olsen twins naked (30), olsen twins (31), olsen twins nude (32), scandinavische voornamen (40), martine tanghe (53), appelmoes (68), groene laserpointer (70), martine tanghe naakt (129), baardkonijn (161), ron mukherjee (197), hansi hinterseer (219), jodelmuziek (221), michael vanslembrouck (257), dana winner naakt (267), freakynipples (295), laxeerpillen (474), fientje moerman (599), “i am either deceased or passing gas” (605), blote dikke madammen (719), hand of a dead man kauwgomtoetsen (840), neuken doe je zo veronica (1007), i said i enjoyed it i tolerated it buzzcocks (3026), what the fuck is er te doen in toscane (4767), wijven met blote tetten (4770), zalm met gebakken patatten (4855).

Wel fijn, weblogs. Ik zag in mijn referrers een verwijzing staan naar dit weblog. Dat gehouden (geschreven? gedaan?) wordt door, voor zover ik kan zien, iemand uit Gentbrugge, getrouwd, met kinderen, een Ipaq, een wireless router en een Inspiron notebook, en die waarschijnlijk werkt bij Namahn, mannen die usability & dingen doen.

En ik weet hoe z’n rechtertepel er uitziet.

Huhu.

Daar moet ik dus mijn referrers voor nakijken, om te zien dat Graham een weblog heeft!

En dat ik begod op zijn blogroll sta, in such august company as Real Live Preacher.

Adam Lipkin vraagt zich af:

I also found that my review of the most recent (and nigh-unreadable) Anita Blake book has been mentioned in a blog over here. However, I can’t read the blog, nor can I get Babelfish to do anything good to it. Anyone know what they’re saying about me?

Anonymous of guest comments of zo disabled, en not an e-mail address in sight (can’t say I blame him), dus vandaar:

I don’t mind bad books, I really don’t. That I’m re-reading the entire Wheel Of Time mess should make that more than clear. That, the fact that my formula to choose which books to buy used to be

price	x length of series
#pages

I think I reached my nadir with the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. It’s so bad I didn’t realise I’d already read it until I re-read the fifth book in the series.

Well, now there’s an eleventh Anita Blake. Adam Lipkin over at Bookslut is not impressed:

The eleventh book in the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series confirms that the series, never much more than a guilty pleasure to begin with, has long since degenerated into a muddled series of sex scenes interspersed with a nonsensical plot. This is The Color of Her Panties for the x-rated set.

Which reminds me: I should keep my book database up to date. It’s been so long, and I’ve bought so many books since my last update that the Wheel of Time is missing the last three installments!

That Color of her Panties-thing is a reference in to Xanth, by the way. I’ve got twelve Xanth novels. Not that that’s something to be proud of.