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The dog days of October
Oct. 2nd, 2005 11:47 pm
High temp today, here: 25. Dewpoint then: 14. High dewpoint: 14.
High temp today in TO: 22. Dewpoint then: 14. High dewpoint: 15.
High temp yesterday, here: 22. Dewpoint then: 11. High dewpoint: 11.
High temp yesterday in TO: 24. Dewpoint then: 10. High dewpoint: 11.
Southeasterlies off the lake keeping the temperature down in TO today. Supposed to be in the high twenties for the next few days, which is fairly insane. Stan turns out to be what originally looked like it'd be Stan; now the newer one has fizzled.
Apparently Blue Jays poet laureate Miguel Batista's four batter, four strikeout performance last weekend was the first such in MLB this year--and today Dustin McGowan pulled off the second. Last four outs of the season. Woe.
Made a tour through a few weeks of newsmagazines yesterday, and a bunch of Times Literary Supplements, which for some reason suddenly appeared in a clump. Might as well not have bothered, except for one review in TLS, of a book about "virtual democracy" in Russia--the story goes, the major post-Soviet parties were cooked up by the Communists in the latter days of Gorbachev, new parties and candidates are cooked up by the government to divide the opposition, Zhironovsky is a cipher who takes on whatever role suits the government, etc. Sounds amazingly like Nabokov ... and really bewilderingly depressing. The reviewer takes the author to task for not talking about how the Orange Revolution was produced by the Americans--all kinds of Americans, Republican and Democrat organizations, Soros and the CIA. Come to think of it, I was wondering at the time just where all that free food and whatever else for the demonstrators was coming from.
So, after that I went off to the Orange Revolution entry on Wikipedia, and found one of the more tendentious entries I've seen there--the Americans didn't do it, or if the Americans did do it, it's a good thing they did. Speaking of exporting democracy....
Anyway, it leads me to wonder again whether the Russians and the Chinese don't have it right--whether, really, you might just as well not take the whole political show seriously, because it really doesn't make any difference to the lives of the great majority of people. (But it does, of course, make a difference to Free-Thinking Intellectuals like, well, me, and like the sorts of liberal hawks who supported the overthrow of Saddam to save their Iraqi kindred spirits.)
Today, more D&P. Fifteen more pages to go. Man o man but it's hard to pay attention to this book. All those little things that I've learned to do writing a dissertation--"this is what I'm doing, and this is why I'm doing it, and this is how the pieces fit together"--and that I try to get my students to do--Foucault doesn't do any of them, just writes around in circles. No wonder this book has been so badly misunderstood.
High temp today in TO: 22. Dewpoint then: 14. High dewpoint: 15.
High temp yesterday, here: 22. Dewpoint then: 11. High dewpoint: 11.
High temp yesterday in TO: 24. Dewpoint then: 10. High dewpoint: 11.
Southeasterlies off the lake keeping the temperature down in TO today. Supposed to be in the high twenties for the next few days, which is fairly insane. Stan turns out to be what originally looked like it'd be Stan; now the newer one has fizzled.
Apparently Blue Jays poet laureate Miguel Batista's four batter, four strikeout performance last weekend was the first such in MLB this year--and today Dustin McGowan pulled off the second. Last four outs of the season. Woe.
Made a tour through a few weeks of newsmagazines yesterday, and a bunch of Times Literary Supplements, which for some reason suddenly appeared in a clump. Might as well not have bothered, except for one review in TLS, of a book about "virtual democracy" in Russia--the story goes, the major post-Soviet parties were cooked up by the Communists in the latter days of Gorbachev, new parties and candidates are cooked up by the government to divide the opposition, Zhironovsky is a cipher who takes on whatever role suits the government, etc. Sounds amazingly like Nabokov ... and really bewilderingly depressing. The reviewer takes the author to task for not talking about how the Orange Revolution was produced by the Americans--all kinds of Americans, Republican and Democrat organizations, Soros and the CIA. Come to think of it, I was wondering at the time just where all that free food and whatever else for the demonstrators was coming from.
So, after that I went off to the Orange Revolution entry on Wikipedia, and found one of the more tendentious entries I've seen there--the Americans didn't do it, or if the Americans did do it, it's a good thing they did. Speaking of exporting democracy....
Anyway, it leads me to wonder again whether the Russians and the Chinese don't have it right--whether, really, you might just as well not take the whole political show seriously, because it really doesn't make any difference to the lives of the great majority of people. (But it does, of course, make a difference to Free-Thinking Intellectuals like, well, me, and like the sorts of liberal hawks who supported the overthrow of Saddam to save their Iraqi kindred spirits.)
Today, more D&P. Fifteen more pages to go. Man o man but it's hard to pay attention to this book. All those little things that I've learned to do writing a dissertation--"this is what I'm doing, and this is why I'm doing it, and this is how the pieces fit together"--and that I try to get my students to do--Foucault doesn't do any of them, just writes around in circles. No wonder this book has been so badly misunderstood.
