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maandag, januari 17, 2005

Continental chardonnay under ten euros

Hey kids - some dude from the UK Ministry of Defence cited my blog post about the recent hoo-haw in Ukraine in a paper! Getcha!

I haven't had time to read it yet, but the dude is from the Centre for Conflict Studies, which is part of the Defence Academy, apparently.

Shizzle. The New Statesman turned a version of the flipping piece down, yet the MoD feels comfortable enough about its politics to cite it. I must be doing something wrong.

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Trying to find a fucking decent chardonnay under ten euros on the continent is much like decent American comedy: it exists, but damn, you've really, really got to look.

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Mildly disconcerting: The Washington Post has issued two editorials in the last week attacking Venezuela. The kids at the 'liberal' WP seem to be paying a lot of attention these days to the scandalous reduction in child mortality/success in combatting adult illiteracy/historic programme of land redistribution going on there. All of which clearly needs to be stamped out. And last year, of course, a number of articles started appearing in the US press suggesting that al-Qaeda had built a base on an island off the coast of Venezuela, ha ha. (A charming fellow and journeyman journo y'all may be familiar with under his real name did manage to have a piece in the Staggers about that one)

The selling of Hugo Chavez as a latter-day, latino Saddam proceeds apace.

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Latest Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, received as Crimbo prezzie: Starts off crackingly; but ending doesn't have courage of novel's premise - a faith in basic righteousness of American project undermines the It Can't Happen Here narrative. Furthermore, however bad things get for the Jewish characters in the book, in an imagined fascist America, it was far, far worse for blacks in the all too real America of the period the book covers and afterward.

I don't think Roth intended to diminish the oppression blacks faced mid-century in the States, by imagining American anti-Jewish pogroms in the Forties, but he did nonetheless. Lynching, anyone?

Disappointing. Still - worth picking up just for allegory skewering Bush Junior's 'Mission Accomplished'/Top Gun photo op.

A demain.

PS. Want markedly higher traffic to your blog? Write a post with a title that includes the words dirty and bum and sex.