Thursday, February 26, 2004

Take me to... the Volcano!!!


William Safire once again reminded us today that he's from another planet -- Riga may have provided the setting for some home-grown constructive nationalism, but it is anything but beautiful.

Now the language, on the other hand. Quoth In Your Pocket: Riga: "Latvian is an Indo-European language (not Slavic) just as old as Lithuanian. It has six declensions and a lot of funny accents. Even the most heavily accented and ungrammatical attempt to speak their language will please Latvians, who are prone to cheer your 'proficiency' and slam the Russians who 'have lived here for fifty years and still can't even say hello'."

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Meet Nathaniel.



Yes, I think about luggage. Is it the central preoccupation of my life? Of course it is. Is Nathaniel guaranteed to make my life better in a yes-I'm-going-to-the-rainforst-in-two-days way? Friend, if you don't know, I can't explain it to you.

Take me to: the Volcano!

Let's see what I'm up against these days. [Courtesy of Vecernji List.]



[To appreciate this one, I think you have to pick sides in the ongoing debate about where to put i's in south slavic languages. Quote my linguist/teacher: no one knows, put them wherever it makes you happy. Now that's a language I can grow to love. This cartoon plays on the pun manjak versus manijak -- deficit and maniac, respectively. On the left, you see a "maniac in the budget." On the right, "Oops, I goofed, our problem is actually a budget deficit." And so on.]

So at least one Central American dictator is an ordained priest. So the President brags of running a budget deficit of only $230 billion -- assuming (hoping?) that the world will end in 2009. But when the gym decided to switch the locker rooms tonight, vertigo quickly set in.

Well, the man-in-the-hat has confirmed our worst fears: the Catholic Church has completely turned its back on the light. The Vatican today issued a report denouncing the American bishops' conference's zero tolerance policy for priests who abuse children as "too strict." The Times quotes a psychiatrist who lambasts a "tendancy to overreact and rob accused priests of even legitimate support." Well, there is is. Abusing priests of the world unite. You denied the problem, then you denied the numbers, now you deny that 4% of American priests should even be so strictly punished for molesting children. Morality ho.

Monday, February 23, 2004

Finally -- I fixed the commenting script so IE users will now be able to grace us with their acerbic jabs and pointed insights.

Clearly society is sending us mixed signals -- if everyone's so excited about the prospect of wearing pants (and perhaps, being around people likewise wearing pants), they might make it a bit easier to acquire these aforementioned pants in something that approximates the correct size. Not that I haven't looked. Over the past week, I've gone three rounds with the pant-conveyers of the greater Washington area. But I'm not throwing it in yet.

Round 1. I went to the mall. I purchased two pairs of pants. I brought them home, tried them on, and discovered they didn't fit. Days passed. Still didn't fit. Flummoxed, I decided to return them. Pants 1, Josh 0.

Round 2. I went back to the mall. I returned the offending pants. I spent an hour trying on other prospective pants. (Apparently, the good pants-pushers of Pentagon City are paid simply to remind defense contractors and Arlington teenies that they look "oh-my-gawd-seksy.") I eventually emerged with some that fit but needed hemming -- I sent the pants out for alteration. Draw -- Pants 1, Josh 0.

Round 3. I returned to that d$rn pants emporium in Virginia to retrieve my new hemmed lovelys. And they fit. I can't imagine it takes most people 10 days to buy pants, but I can hardly complain. I am: clothes-clad. Pants 1, Josh 1.

You have not heard to the last from me, pants. Pleated or plain, cuffed or not, I will seek you out. And when I find you, I will see if you fit me. And if you do, I might buy you. Else, I won't. And then we'll dance.

A special message to Internet Explorer users: see that way off in the distance? That's the curve. It's getting away from you. That said, in what can only be described at a self-less act of humanity, I have been tweaking PMJ's layout to work better with IE. I still encourage you to get Firefox at your earliest convenience, of course.

In other news, I've spent much of the day wondering why I spend so much time puttering with this website that so few people use (yet!). I can only think it's because I don't have a garage.

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Regular viewers (I flatter you to include you in this elite grouping) will note that I've tweaked the banner layout a bit. Granted, little in the way of substantive changes, but I thought it would be a nice public service to clean up the table alignment and such. Also, perhaps one day I'll introduce some site navigation -- talk about chick magnet! I mean wow, that's what fills the seats.

I though it wise to include a brief FAQ on the new, improved PMJ.

Q. Josh, it's great that you've chosen to focus on message delivery, but shouldn't you, you know, get a message?
A. Over the past 6 months, I've received countless emails -- granted, mostly from myself -- praising PMJ for its simultaneous emphasis on communication infrastructure and hard-hitting content. That said, I think what you're really asking is: when are you going to make an unsolicited bid for Disney? I agree that the iron can hardly get hotter. That said, I find the recent tumble of Comcast stock troubling [see below].

Q. What prompted you to reach deep into your ice cream budget and purchase missionofjoshie.com?
A. Well, let me just reiterate how much I like ice cream and how important ice cream workers are to the success of this beautiful nation. You see, as the son of an ice cream lover, I am just like you. And together, we can take back Amerika.

Q. Does that really answer the question?
A. I think what the President's remarks do is very clearly illustrate how high the stakes are in November.

Q. Switching gears for a minute here, I notice you've added a comments feature to your site. Who do you really think will comment on this stuff?
A. It goes without saying that the sages and literazzi of the land will flock to PMJ to engage this virtual community of scholars in witty debate and rapporte. And, failing that, at least I'll now have something to do at work.

Q. I know you get pretty up in a lather when you think about a Pope -- understandable given the alarming propensity of the college of cardinals to choose male pontiffs. How are you dealing with the pressure of ultimately being the Democratic nominee this fall?
A. I think the key to mounting a successful and unintentional challenge to a self-proclaimed popular war-time president is to deny your candidancy as long as possible. Did we win in Wisconsin? On some level, I suppose it depends on how you define winning. If winning is getting more votes than anyone else, more media coverage than anyone else, or more convention delegates than anyone else, then no, we did not win. But if winning is eeking through the primary without anyone even knowing you're running, then I think we scored a big win for democracy in Wisconsin.

Q. Do you have friends?
A. Honestly, fewer and fewer.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

W is troubled over same-sex marriages in San Francisco?? Troubled? Of all the things that have gone so abysmally wrong over the past three years, this is what he chooses to worry about? He should be troubled he's still President.

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

I suppose it's really not that unusual for me to be home at 2pm these days. But today, breaking from memorizing hundreds of vowel-less Croatian words, I opened the door to a Royal Mail registered letter from the University of London -- tada, my official MS degree from LSE. I am: careening towards employability. That said, for just $400, the good thieves that compromise the discursive UL hierarchy will sell me a frame for my diploma. For that, we know, I could just go to Costa Rica. Where frames are significantly cheaper.

Finally -- you can now visit PMJ at www.missionofjoshie.com.

Sunday, February 15, 2004

The maelstrom over Gregory Mankiw's recent remarks on the "out-sourcing" of American jobs overseas offers an excellent reminder why perhaps America desparately needs a governing council of elders instead of this unwashed masses "election" system we currently have. [NB: An editorial in today's Times suggests they might be one in the same -- apparently St. Louis has recently been disenfranchised by beaucratic fiat.]

What happened? On February 10, Mankiw -- once eulogized by Paul Krugman when he decided to follow in the footsteps of Glenn Hubbard and leave academia for the take-no-prisoner world of Washington yesmen -- testified before a Congressional Joint Economic Committee that, "Outsourcing of professional services is a prominent example of a new type of trade. The gains from trade that take place over the Internet or telephone lines are no different than the gains from trade in physical goods transported by ship or plane. When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically. This allows the United States to devote its resources to more productive purposes."

Then the attacks started -- both from the DNC salivating to use this quote as proof that the Bush White House is out of touch with voters and Bush's own brethern concerned about their reelection chances if get painted as anti-jobs. Displaying a brilliant command of the issues at stake, Dennis Hastert lambasted Mankiw for not realizing that "an economy suffers when jobs disappear." Senator Daschle referred to the Mankiw report as "Alice in Wonderland" economics. Jagdish Bhagwati opined today that by seizing on Mankiw's statement, Kerry is stepping-up Democrats' opposition to free trade, rather that reverting to the Clinton model of using NAFTA to educate American voters about how service sector trade actually works.

Does it matter anymore that Mankiw was, of course, right? Is there a place in our public economic discourse for an academic to remind us that sometimes thing actually do work according to theory to the betterment of the population -- even if the electorate does like his choice of words? Indeed, I say, please pass the philosopher-kings.

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Today's unintelligible Croatian reading exercise: "Little Ivica's teacher asks him in class one day, 'Suppose you were to come across a wounded Croatian soldier in the forest. What would you do?' Ivica pauses and replies, 'Nothing!' 'What do you mean, nothing?' retorts the teacher. 'Well, nothing!' insists little Ivica. 'Fine,' says the teacher, 'and little Jovanovica, stop whispering in his ear!'

[Balkan-watchers will here recognize the contrast between the distinctly Croatian name Ivica (as in Ivica Racan, the former community leader and now recently deposed head of the communist successor party, the Croatian Social Democratic Union) and the oh-so-Serbian Jovanovica (as in Jovan, the eastern (read: Serbian) variant of the Croatian Ivan). I mean, if you can't joke about 6-year-olds instructing their classmates to leave wounded veterans for dead in the woods, what can you joke about?]

I'm afraid there's little time to blog -- the Ikea bedroom event ends on February 28.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

In a footnote to its indictment against Milan Babic for crimes against humanity, the ICTY defines the Log Revolution as follows: "On 17 August 1990, the Croatian government declared that referendum [NB: on 16 August 1990, the Serbian National Council resolved to hold a plebiscite "which would confirm the autonomy and sovereignty of the Serb nation in Croatia."] illegal. Rumours surfaced that the Croatian police moved towards several Serb towns in the Krajina region and towards Knin. Serbs, organised by Milan MARTIC, put up barricades and "Martic’s Police" distributed weapons to Serbs. This incident became commonly known as the log-revolution. From 17 August onwards, armed Serb formations supported by the JNA were in control in Knin."

Balkan-watchers of course appreciate the special place Knin has in the hearts of Krajina Serbs (and tourists may wonder why Europe experienced four years of war over the single ugliest town in present-day Croatia). But appreciating the importance of the Knin uprising is a long way from understanding a political cartoon about the new Zagreb-Split expressway still under construction but sure to ease summer traffic out of the capital down to Dalmacija. The cartoon features a boy discussing the highway with his father. "Dad," the boy asks, "why are they constructing a huge expressway instead of just a normal highway with wire fences to separate both directions of traffic?" "The experience from the 1990s," explains his father, "was to watch out for logs."

Now, this is not the first time I've found reading a Croatian political cartoon -- no need to mention either how incomprehensible those from Le Monde can be -- similar to reading some Lyndon Larouche campaign flyers. I'm pretty sure I understand the words but have absolutely no idea what the sentences might mean. As for this cartoon, my teacher explained, in preparation for the {siege, liberation} of Knin (depending on your orientation towards these things), Martic et al. blocked all the rail tracks in and out of town with logs to prevent re-enforcements from coming to aid the small Croat community in Knin. So (apparently) the message is clear: ye who hope to fly down the highway from Zagreb to Split in August best watch out for logs.

I am, incidentally, failing out of Croatian.

[Franjo was back in Knin by 1995 -- no logs here.]

Monday, February 09, 2004

Michael Lind's review of David Frum and Richard Perle's latest book is a rare intersection of hysterical, terrifying, and a dead on depiction of the neoconservative moment.

Friday, February 06, 2004

While I readily concede this is very sad, it's Alabama that really kills me.




New Jersey domicilee watch day #151: we may have the last in the nation presidential primary (June 8), but NJ is something of a tax haven for domiciled non-residents. My ice cream budget grows daily.

Danas je . Čitate stalno Joshievo izaslanstvo.