Every spring my father would say, in a kind of Jimmy Durante accent:

It is soitenlee spring time here, crocuses busting up through the ground, sunshine and life. It makes me feel taller!
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From the book I mentioned earlier, Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, an interesting idea:

The Rosetta Project, which is part of the Long Now Foundation has opened up their Swadesh word database, which has searchable word lists available for 811 distinct languages, representing a total of 121,000 terms. It is astonishing how many are in this list, most of which I have never heard of. Just in the A's I find Agarabi, Aghu, Agi, Abog, Aguacateco, and Aiku.
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Weekend Wrap-up Saturday was spent lazing about the house. Reading Finite and Infinite Games which had me exclaiming periodically and buttonholing Stewart to read him yet another passage out loud. Sunday Bruce and Ann Marie were having a kind of performance salon, and Stewart had promised to play the guitar and I had promised to sing, and so Saturday evening we decided to get our act together. We'd decided to to sing Aguas de Março by Tom Jobim, one of my favorite songs, but I eventually decided that I shouldn't try to perform a song in a language I don't know. Bill Richardson and his troupe performed a fancy bit of doggerel about a pugilistic nun battling a Turk on the Bosphorus, Michael and Ann played one of his compositions on their gamelan-like Balinese instruments, followed by poetry recitation and singing, and Ann Marie and Bruce doing a hilarious song with Bruce on tuba.

Then it was off with Martha to the theatre at the Jewish Community Center for a multimedia avant-gardist one-woman-performance of a piece about memory, violence and innnocence, and then to Urban Fare for some delicacies -- smoked scallops and picholine olives -- and ingredients for dinner. Cooking, wine and conversation, during which we considered the Downtown East Side and whether or not legalization and/or decriminalization of narcotics and prostitution would do anything to help the problems there. We talked about the idea of responsibility in recent feminist theory, student protests, the WTO, and whether or not the Georgia viaduct was deliberately built to keep the middle class separated from the poor.
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The Secret Life of Numbers. Golan is at it again! This time, an interesting little applet he wrote to examine the frequency of certain numbers. From the intro:

Via Metafilter I found this series of paintings chronicling the increasing psychosis of a painter of greeting card cats, as he was overtaken by schizophrenia. It's amazing how fractalish the latter ones look, and how much they resemble psychedelic art following the introduction of LSD, such as the work of Alex Grey. Looking around the web, I found this cool series of psychedelic art and diary pages from the 70s, done under the influence of LSD.
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Let's just take a moment to applaud Daniel Drucker here, who sent me this intriguing-looking book called Finite and Infinite Games. Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap. This is what the back cover blurb has to say:

Sounds like a book I can get behind. In fact, I'm going to get behind it right now, once I fluff this cushion over here. Thank you, Daniel!
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Hey! I'm back! The electricity's back on. Might be a fluke, so I'm hitting propellor-S over and over so I don't lose any work. (I am using a Macintosh.)

Stewart filched the above from some unknown source. Anyone know where it's from?
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• Flew back from Florida yesterday. Both legs of the flight were completely full. Sardine City!
• I had a good cry this afternoon, and while I think it's generally an excellent thing to have a good cry every now and then, those that are due to slicing onions are not especially cathartic.
• Read three books in Florida: The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, and The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth. I read Portnoy's Complaint a long time ago, but barely remember it. Roth has an interesting chambered nautilus kind of unfolding to his stories -- at least these. I kept on "waiting for the narrative to begin", fruitlessly, as it turned out, because the periodic anecdotal asides *were* the story. In this way the two books reminded me of that Cheever book I'd read in November, Oh What a Paradise it Seems, a kind of narrative offhandedness.
• Dos Pesos came on the plane and stayed in the cabin in his little carrying case for upwards of 8 hours. He was such a good dog. Today, he's all tuckered out, and sleeping by the fire.
• There is an excellent story by John LeCarré in this week's New Yorker about his father, a con man.
• In Florida, I went to my parent's health club and met a couple of women in my mother's yoga class. One of them, Kay, said my mother has the most amazing ability to talk to anyone and everyone. She said she'd been coming to the yoga class for four years and never said hello to anyone, until she met my mother, who'd just started, and who introduced her to everyone.
• This propensity to talk to strangers is much like Stewart and his father, and, well, me. Having taken so many cabs lately (the car is perpetually in the shop) I feel as if I know all the cabbies now. At least the guys in 111, 97, 106, 84, 110 and 116. They're all from Punjab originally, and I've been learning all about Punjab. Like: it is a state, for one thing. It was split up in 1947 -- which is why all the New York cab drivers who are Pakistani are also Punjabi. Most East Indian Vancouverites are from Punjab. Punjabis have a reputation for being hard workers, and Punjab has a lot of agriculture. Thus one of my cab drivers, who was a farmer in India, keeps a blueberry farm in Surrey. Punjabis are roughly 70% Sikh, and Punjab is only 2% Hindu.

I just found a little cache of articles written by Thomas Pynchon on the New York Times site:Is it OK to be a Luddite? and The Deadly Sins: Sloth which includes this passage about Ben Franklin:

I'm always interested in how little people sleep, seeing as how I'm a terrible insomniac myself. Rumor has it that Pynchon sleeps til noon or one, but then works non-stop until three in the morning. I also recently found Napoleon's position on sleep: Six hours of sleep for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool.
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The Nature of Evil This month's issue of Cabinet takes on the nature of evil, and all of my reading of late has seemed to center upon the same subject. For example, yesterday I was digging around my library and came up with Klaus Theweleit's book Male Fantasies, an examination of the genesis of Nazism that Theweleit made by studying the letters, biographies and histories of the soldiers and officers of the proto-Nazi Freikorps, particularly their attitudes and actions towards women. Theweleit concludes not that these men were abnormal, or inhuman in any way, but that they were consciously doing exactly what they wanted to do. (Note the Adorno quote in the reader reviews: Fascism is psychoanalysis in reverse.) (It also amuses me that Amazon has a little Valentine's day shipping reminder on the book page, as if you'd be sending this book about the nature of hatred and evil to your sweetie.)

Picking up a completely different book, the novel A Personal Matter by Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe (excellent, BTW), I found a similar idea:

And prior to that I'd been reading Crime: An Encyclopedia, for no reason I can fathom. What's all this musing on the nature of good and evil lately? I suppose it comes from trying to get inside the mind of the evil little thug I've been writing about.
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The Vancouver Sun has an article about the famous much-envied internet lovebirds Gail and Dean today, with clips from their actual emails, and an account of their initial meeting at the Listel on Robson! Photographs of Dean in his present living situation with Gail in the South of France show that he is growing a handsome beard and looking relatively calm. Love and calvados will do that to you. The article also includes a strange, brief and inexplicable clip about the Caterina and Stewart love story. What's it doing there? Stewart notes that the Vancouver Sun is directed towards people that live in Vancouver, whose dream is not to fall in love and move to... Vancouver. Crap! We should've moved to Tunisia, like we'd discussed. Makes for better copy.
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Jessamyn appears to be reading The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many by Noam Chomsky, and in it she found this interesting idea:

UPDATE: Jessamyn writes to say she found this quote in "The Hacker Ethic", not Chomsky.
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Uh, that was a mistake. More later. A lot of smarty-pantzes are coming to dinner, including Juliet of Eclogues, and I have to go get some polenta.

But quick, have you been wondering why that flu is lingering? Illness caused by sin says Vatican official. It's all your fault. Pray!
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I wish the comments thing were working. I asked Evan to switch me over to Blogger Pro, and managed to screw something up with it, so that it wouldn't post, thus the hand-coding over the past few days and the lack of anchor tags for the entries and the lack of comments. As soon as it's working again, I can post all these entries to the past (!) and continue on into the future.
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From Michael S. comes an article in The New Statesman by Theodore Dalrymple Psychobabble that shields the seriously selfish. This article is more articulate than the New York Times article mentioned below on the distinctions between self-esteem and self-regard and outright egomania in the criminally inclined.
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Dropping Stewart off at work this morning, we discovered that the left turn signal wasn't working. Being a real stickler for safety, I managed to drive around for the next several hours without making a single left turn.
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• I've been reviewing sites for the Webby Awards, which is an interesting job. I've been finding all these sites I wouldn't have necessarily know about, such as Kakosa.com, a site for Pilipinos, but most of the sites are, well, not very great.
• Taking Dos Pesos to the SPCA for a shot, I saw the most incredible dog, which was getting groomed in front of a plate glass window across the parking lot. I went to ask what kind of dog it was and it turned out to be a Bouvier.
• Wow! more music arrived in the mail today, this time from Shannon. Thanks so much! Listening now to Joe Henry, Go With God

Today I read an article on self-esteem in the New York Times, which said certain studies published this year found that having self esteem is potentially harmful to others, as their research showed a correlation between high self-regard and violent or abusive behavior. Which doesn't surprise me at all; what surprises me is that psychologists believe in the concept of "self-esteem" to begin with. I mean, don't you know people who have a really high opinion of themselves and who believe their superiority entitles them to be cruel to others, while at the same time they are completely blind to their own cruelty?

It was generally thought that antisocial behavior had its roots in low self-esteem. The author of this article writes that she has "seen therapists tell their sociopathic patients to say "I adore myself" every day or to post reminder notes on their kitchen cabinets and above their toilet-paper dispensers..." The idea that "low self-esteem" can be fixed by reassuring oneself that one is a good person over and over again is ludicrous.

Later on she quotes another researcher who says "we've put antisocial men through every self-esteem test we have, and there's no evidence for the old psychodynamic concept that they secretly feel bad about themselves. These men are racist or violent because they don't feel bad enough about themselves." She also points to two new schools of therapy which look quite interesting, the Morita therapy from Japan, and a program centered on Domestic Violence called Emerge in Cambridge, MA. These focus not on self-esteem but taking responsibility for one's actions. I was especially convinced by the writings of the patients themselves that are posted on the Morita site; it struck me how much more empowering it is to own up to one's life rather than trying to whitewash one's badness with flimsy affirmations.
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• "Loofah" must be a relatively new word. It's not listed in my Webster's (New Collegiate) Dictionary, though it is on the web site.
• I received a whole bunch of CDs from Marshall today, which he put together after I posted that bit about "what should I listen to". Awesome. I am listening to an Oxford American music compilation one right now. Bluesapalooza. And here's some groove. I love it.
• Dos Pesos is loving it too, he's sitting by the speaker with his ear cocked like the Victrola dog.
• Today I talked to Marc, my old boss from Salon. He made me laugh at least 20 times during the call. Whenever I call someone I've been out of touch with for a while, I always wonder why the hell it's taken so long for me to call them.
• My daughter-of-60s-radicals story is going swimmingly. Woo!

Judith found some really nice art made out of books.
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I am going to be in Gainesville, Florida visiting my parents February 13-18 and then in San Francisco visiting my sister and all my friends March 22-27. I'm not going to be at SXSW this year; It seemed indulgent to just go so I could see my friends, when all the people I would be seeing would be in San Francisco the rest of the time.
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Weird. I lost some posts somehow...I thought they'd gone up, but...they're gone!

I invented a new game today. I used to have a policy that I would accept any reasonable dare which of course has a loophole as big as the Ritz, because, after all, I would be the one who decided what was "reasonable" or not. I didn't end up doing anything big -- just stuff like skiing down double diamond pistes in whiteout conditions and mooning certain people. But today I thought up this game of meaningful dares in which Stewart and I are going to dare each other to do something which we want to do, and which we know would get us further along the true path as we ourselves have defined it, but which we are avoiding because of fear, or laziness or the ever-handy "reasons". I haven't gotten a dare yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
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Ruthie's Double after six months offline, is back on! Our pal Ruthie has a brilliantly oblique way of thinking about things that I've always admired, such as when she described a dream of sheep knitting sweaters out of their own wool or her bit about the LA Freeway being a body of water, and the cars shiny shoals of fish. [via syntheticzero]
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Ruthie's Double after six months offline, is back on! Our pal Ruthie has a brilliantly oblique way of thinking about things that I've always admired, such as when she described a dream of sheep knitting sweaters out of their own wool or her bit about the LA Freeway being a body of water, and the cars shiny shoals of fish. [via syntheticzero]
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