Month: January 2003

Yea me!

While I was at work today I ran across a website of pictures of London. Places I had been and places I did not get to. I realized, for the first time, that I miss London. Not only because I miss C███████ and that is where she is, but I miss the city itself.

While I was in London I did not really miss the US, I missed people that where here, but not being here. Now that I am home I miss London. Strange, I bitched about London while I was there. To the quote by Samuel Johnson:

“A man who is tired of London is tired of Life.”

I used to add, ‘yes, but Sam Johnson had money—if you don’t have money you can’t do anything in London.’ And I did not have much money while I was there, in fact I left early because I ran out of money.

I also looked at pictures of other places, Germany, Italy and France mostly. I realized that I would love to live in any of these places—ex-patriot syndrome I guess, but I would love to live there (thought Italy has to be on the top. Umbria or Tuscany!) Thinking about it, I realized that one of the things that makes London special is that it was the first time I lived ‘in’ a city, where I could walk or take public transportation anywhere I needed to go—and most places I wanted to go. Another thing that makes London stand out is that no matter how long I could live there it would never lose it’s foreignness for me. Cities in the US will always be more familiar than London, even if I have never been there.

I live in DC now, but I don’t know anyone in DC, and there is so much to do around me—but nothing to do alone. It’s hard to meet people, I have never met people well. I will talk your ear off if I know you but I won’t say hello unless you approach me if I don’t. The extrovert hiding behind the shy, embarrassed introvert. Most of the people I know either live outside the city and never come it, or don’t live anywhere near DC. I need to meet more people here, but have not figured out how to do it. I don’t even know anyone in my apartment building.

Anyway, I am going to stop ranting now… this whole thing is somewhere short of intelligible, but not quite a stream of consciousness.

Last night I went out with some friends and one of them posed a question, one he had been asked at an entrance interview for medical school: ‘if you where throwing a dinner party and could invite one living person and three dead people who would you invite?’

Humm… that’s a very hard question. For the three dead people I would invite the Buddha, Socraties and my great-grandfather who I never met. There are so many people I would like to have know; Marcus Tullus Cicero, Lucius Sulla, Julius Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Levi, Peter, Francis of Asissi, Ghangis Kahn, Charlemagne, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Bolivar, Lincoln, Tolkien, Oh there are so many, the list goes on and one… one day I should write it down.

As for the living person… most likely the Dali Lama, although Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, the Pope, Che Guivara (he’s still alive isn’t he?) and a number of other people would be just as good.

So, who would you invite?

We should change the order of the English alphabet. ‘Q’ should be the first letter. Why? Because thats the way the key board is. ‘W’ should be second, then ‘E’ and so on. This will, of course, only work for the English alphabet and the English key board. Other languages will have to modify their alphabet accordingly.

Really this makes a lot of sense. I mean, if children are tought the alphabet in the same order as the key board they will be able to type faster. It used to be that all the keys on you key board, with the exception of a few like ‘enter’ and ‘space,’ where the same size and you could rearange the keys into alphabetical order—then, once you got used to it, you could type faster, because that is how your mind learned the alphabet.

I mean the only real reason of the whole alphabet thing is putting words in order, and how often do you do that by hand any more? Just selcect the right button on your computer and it does it for you. Now for those of us who learned the alphabet already this will be a little disconserting at first. But kids learning the alphabet now will have no problems, to them ‘Q’ will be the natural start of the alphabet—the rest of us will have to look at our key board when we need to order things by hand.

Phones will have to change too, but that won’t be so bad—everyone gets a now cell phone every year. So in a few years it won’t matter. This really is a good idea, I mean the arbitrary ordering of the alphabet makes now sense—just because the Greeks and Romans did it that way does not mean we need to!

So, tonight you should begin learning your ‘new’ alphabet, qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm and to help you should practice by going and putting all the hanging folders in your file cabnets in the ‘correct’ order —and the spices on the spice rack!

codejunkie posted an interesting ‘call to arms’ to protest the coming ‘war’ with Iraq (go here to read it.)

War is never good… sometimes it is necessary to defend what we believe is right from the ‘tyranny of evil men,’ but war is never good. If Iraq, once again, defies the United Nations, a body it is a member of, should the UN then approve the use of military power to enforce it’s rulings?

No doubt Saddam Hussein is an ‘evil man,’ he had ruled Iraq for twenty years using violence and fear. He had gassed citizens of his own country simply because they are a different ethnicity or religion. He had started wars, ignored the UN, threatened other countries and just plain been a bad boy—we can all agree on that. But should we, again, go to ‘war’ against Iraq?

Back when the ‘war’ with the Taliban was imminent I said that though I did not agree with Bush, I would support the ‘war’ if that was the will of the nation. As an American I would exercise my first amendment right and voice my dissension. That was for a different situation. The Al Qieda and Taliban posed a clear and present danger to the United States and it’s citizens. The situation with Iraq is different.

I do agree that Saddam needs to be reformed and beat into submission to the UN resolutions. The whole idea of ‘preventiative war’ scares me more than anything else. At what point dose the difference between ‘preventiative’ and ‘aggressive’ break down?maybe

If the leaders of the US have proof that Iraq is not complying with the various resolutions of the UN and is in fact producing Chemical, Biological or Nuclear weapons then, before any action is taken, they should use this proof to guide the inspectors to these illicit programs and show the world that Iraq is indeed lying. With out this evidence I cannot support a second war or continued sanctions against Iraq—so we don’t like Saddam, that does not give us the right to go into another sovereign country and remove it’s leader; I don’t like paying taxes but that does not give me the right not to pay them.

On a side note: While the world if focused on Iraq, North Korea is playing nuclear brinkmanship—not a good thing. The UN should request that the Russian Army take out all the nuclear facilities that the regulatory agencies have been kicked out of; they need to send the world a real message, one that says “don’t fuck with us…”