Spare yourself the wrist strain of scrolling down — take the express lane.
1. Ralph Peters says keep the Turkish, Paki and Arab troops s out of Iraq.
2. Lex give you another chance to experience the greatness of cub.
3. Dig the new Baghdad Diary by Steve Mumford.
4. The facts are so good about the economy, funny how most people don’t hear about them …
I’m going to sleep now, so it will be a while, or never, before you will be blessed with my wisdom on Arnold and the California election, or an effusion about the totally excellent Muffs cassette (two live shows, 1997) I’ve been listening to in my super-cool new (to me) car, or about the remarkable book Army Life in a Black Regiment by Thomas Wentworth Higginson or the good article by Mark Bowden in the current (paper) edition of the Atlantic on torture and interrogation, (there‘s an interview here which I haven‘t gotten to yet) to say nothing about the William Kristol article about Leo Strauss I haven‘t even read yet, or these two books about John Boyd (this one and this one), or the very nice, illustrated copy of Moby Dick my wife just got (a smaller version of the Arion Press edition) and how funny it it seems to be and how I wish I had time to read it, or my musings on various of my friends getting seriously sick lately, and on a lighter note this one interview with Johnny Ramone and another one with Ivy Rorschach which I‘ve been going to share with you people once I get a few minutes to stop, read, think, type … .
So much stuff to read and to write about, so little time … .
New car ?
Picked up the Atlantic Monthly at Logan Airport. Started reading Bowden’s article while munching at McDonald’s and almost missed boarding as a result. Fascinating.
vanity, vanity….in the end, the making and even moreso the reading of books is but a piddling enterprise to fill in the Nothingness that is thought to be Wisdom but is merely another way of shunting aside the Void the beckons…
Wow, are you THE Son of a Preacher Man? The one Dusty Springfield sang about?
BTW, what beckons is not a void but the beatific vision. But, your Dad surely taught you that.
Theodicy: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the Law.
Still doesn’t tell us anything about Lex’s new car.
Oh, OK. The car is a 1994 Lexus with 124,000 miles on it. It’s in nice shape. I had to have a door panel re-attached. It has a few little dings. For $4,500, Not bad. My neighbor across the street is a mechanic, and it came his way and he sold it to me.
So, I gave my ’87 Toyota Corolla hatchback with 120,000 miles on it to a friend. It looks terrible, but it drives fine and he was glad to get it. The Lexus is a very different driving experience. Power everything. The Toyota was almost like a moped by comparison, manual everything — steering, brakes, windows, transmission. The Toyota was actually remarkably fast and nimble and had good pickup, and a stick shift. The Lexus is fast once it gets going, but is heavy and has an automatic transmission, so it is like getting a battlecruiser up to speed. The Lexus is probably safer, but I’d had the Toyota for 13 years, driven it all over the place in all conditions, and I was used to it. I don’t think I’ll ever have any sentiment about this new car. It is just a machine that does a job.
The Lexus has a cassette deck in the dash and a ten cd changer in the trunk. The cd thing is currently broken, but I’m going to get it fixed. So, for tunes it will be good. The Rockarolla had a broken cassetted deck — a kid put somethig in it years ago. So I had to sing my own songs.
The only thing that made it from the Toyota to the new car is a set of plastic rosary beads I’ve had since whenever. I frequently multi-task when I’m driving.
Cool beans. I like Lexus. But yeah, I know the feeling. I drove my VW Jetta 155,000 miles all over the Northeast from Bar Harbor to New York and back, blew tires, fried the battery on an insanely hot day, went through mighty blizzards on my way up and down 93 and 89 going to Canada, drove it on the ice of Lake Winnipesauke,…
Never mind the things that happened in the car….ahem…
The brand new loaded BMW will be nice but it just can’t be the same thing.
Only thing about the Jetta is that it was an automatic. And VW’s are better with a manual transmission.