Diva? Moi?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been nominated in the competition for the august title “Grande Conservative Blogress Diva 2008″ at Gay Patriot.

Whew. A mouthful. I tried to comment on the thread, but somehow the spam filter (or one of the other diva wannabes?) kept throwing my comment away, which was an observation that the word “blogress” contains the term “ogress.” And then both of my commenting attempts suddenly showed up, making me seem both redundant and pushy. Sabotage, as I said.

If you’d like to go over there and vote for me, the poll should be up tomorrow.

Although it still takes some getting used to for me to hear myself called “conservative.”

Longwinded

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t set out to write long posts. It just happens.

I get an idea and start writing, and often think it will take only a couple of moments to wrap up a few succinct thoughts, and then…and then…it grows.

Most issues that draw me are not simple, and I seem to like to explore their complexities. That, of course, would take a book for each topic, not a blog post. So in a way I am being very concise—relatively speaking.

Each day I have a choice: to post or not to post. Life with all its joys, sorrows, petty annoyances, and chores calls and competes with writing, but ideas for posts have a very loud voice as well. I find I’ve grown accustomed to this daily discipline/exercise of writing down my thoughts, just as I’ve grown accustomed to physical exercise every day and try to make time for that. And so I write. And write. And plan to keep on writing.

Sometimes it’s about politics. Not usually. More often I’m interested in the larger issues behind the issues: war and peace, pacifism, historical parallels. And then there’s the category of “everything else”—especially poetry, dance, and the arts. Those are the fun posts to write, the ones that sometimes almost seem to write themselves. But they’re dessert rather than the main meal.

All this is my characteristically longwinded (reframe: reflective) way of saying I’ve got an idea for a post on one of those more involved topics but I’m busy today and may or may not get around to writing it before tomorrow.

Theater genes

The New Neo Posted on by

If you ever get a chance to see “Au Revoir Parapluie,” I strongly urge you to do so.

The work is impossible to describe, although this NY Times review (and this post of mine) try. It’s playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through next weekend, and then on to various non-US venues.

Let’s see: there’s dance, acrobatics, circus, slapstick, music, mime, and scenery; part Twyla Tharp, part Pilobolus, and part Julie Taymor, as well as countless other parts. But even though there’s really no story to speak of, all of it is riveting theater.

I hesitate to put this You Tube video up here because you might get the wrong idea; the video consists of brief episodes that don’t even begin to do the performance justice. That hanging rope at the beginning, for instance, which looks tiny on the computer screen—something like a tassel—is actually gargantuan, spanning the height of the entire stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, hypnotically overwhelming as it twirls and spins for what seems like many minutes.

No image represented in two small dimensions can ever capture an experience experienced live in three large dimensions. But the video will have to do for now:

Continue reading →

Whom do you trust? (or, how the NIE learned to stop worrying and love…)

The New Neo Posted on by

The best analyses of the new NIE report on the Iranian “now we see it, now we don’t” bomb can be found at Richard Fernandez’s Belmont Club. Please take a look at any and/or all of them: this, this, and this.

Oh, and you can add this American Thinker article to your reading list, too. Then come back here if you’re not too exhausted.

Highlights of Fernandez’s thoughts on the subject are hard to summarize; almost everything he writes is a highlight. He makes the interesting point that, if Iran did indeed stop its bomb development program back in 2003 (and it is by no means certain that it did), the most likely precipitating factor would have been the invasion of Iraq. In addition, the report itself indicated that the new information leading to the NIE’s conclusions may have been a psychops by the Iranians. And, if it was not, and if we do have a reliable source high in the Iranian government, Fernandez wonders whether the gratuitous publication of some of the details as to how that intelligence was obtained has compromised the safety of that person.

Oh, but who cares, if there’s a good story, and if it appears to hurt Bush? Well worth it. Continue reading →

How the Democrats can co-opt the surge

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some reasonable advice for the Democrats on Iraq. It’s from Michael O’Hanlon, one of their number who first had the temerity to write that the surge was showing some positive effects in Iraq.

The gist of it? Take credit for the surge since it probably wouldn’t have happened but for their 2006 election, their criticism of how the war had been going, their previous calls to send more troops, and the pressure all of it put on Bush—even though, by the time the surge was proposed, they were set against it. Although that position seems a bit tricky (“I was for a surge before I was against this surge before I was for it again”), it seems the only one with any chance of making sense, especially if things keep looking better in Iraq. It even has the advantage—and the rarity, in politics—of probably being true.

Whether the Democrats will take O’Hanlon’s advice or not remains to be seen. The fact that even John Murtha has now said he thinks the surge is working is a sign that it may be time for them to do so.

Don’t tie yourself into knots

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a question for all you techies out there: how (and why) do the cords of earbuds for cellphones spontaneously tie themselves into knots in a single instant?

And I don’t mean modest knots, either. I mean large tangled masses of knots.

And how can this happen when I’ve done nothing more convoluted than to take my phone out of my purse and raise the bud to my ear?

Yesterday I was out doing an errand to help a friend’s daughter with her passport. This involved an unbelievable number of frustrating hours in the Post Office and elsewhere, including (but certainly not limited to) watching the nearly non-English-speaking clerk take a half-hour in an attempt to measure the oddly-shaped parcel of the man ahead of us, whose package seemed to have grown an extra appendage; a slight but constantly spitting snowstorm; MapQuest directions that did not correspond in any way to the territory traversed, a deadline of three o’clock that fast approached, finding someone’s lost cell phone in a pile of leaves in the gutter—and, finally, when all seemed lost, the successful accomplishment of our task.

Somewhere towards the end of it all, waiting for the umpteenth time while a clerk disappeared out of sight with our papers, I noticed the aforementioned knot in my cellphone earbud and thought, in the way bloggers often do, “Aha! A fitting subject for a post! I’ll write about this, and I’ll take a photo.”

That’s when I discovered that overnight my camera had developed a mysterious afflication. Here’s the photo I took, in which the lens seems to have tunnel vision. I’m sure some of you can instantly diagnose what ails the camera, and whether the disease is curable or whether the poor thing needs to be euthanized (the camera, that is, not the earbud):

100_2049.JPG

The best laid schemes….

The New Neo Posted on by

o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley…

Any opportunity to quote and link to one of my favorite poems, “Of Mice and Men” by Robert Burns, can’t be all bad (I’m in a hurry and couldn’t find an annotated version that explains all those strange and archaic Scottish words, so that one will have to do for now).

I’m in NY, having driving down yesterday—pedal to the metal—to attend a friend’s surprise birthday party last evening. The get-together was exceedingly enjoyable and well worth the trip—both the food and the company of people I grew up with, most of whom I haven’t seen for decades. And no, we don’t look a bit older. No way.

So, what’s my beef? Today as I was writing my post and planning a visit to my mother this afternoon, and a visit with more friends this evening, I was pressed into service to help the NY-dwelling college-attending daughter of another good friend of mine deal with the convoluted bureaucratic maze of passport expediting. This involves several trips to various Byzantine offices, and must be accomplished before 3 PM, so I’m off to do it. My presence is necessary as an adult who can vouch that she is indeed who she says she is.

The post must wait for now; perhaps I’ll finish it towards this evening.

But one thing to be grateful for—at least I’m not dealing with the Motor Vehicle Bureau.

Big Story, non-story?

The New Neo Posted on by

Pity the poor Nation.

The magazine, that is, not the country. The Nation’s editors must ache from bending over backwards to prove there’s nothing especially good about the good news in Iraq.

The editors feel it’s their duty to make sure the American public gets the right idea:

The outcome of the domestic debate on Iraq depends in large part on the perception of success or failure: public opinion is liable to swing in favor of staying in Iraq if people think the war is going well. This poses a challenge–and opportunity–for the peace movement, which Tom Hayden outlines on page 11. Without question, it is important to counter GOP propaganda about the surge’s “success.”

Our effort in Iraq must fail for the peace movement to succeed. Makes sense to me. Continue reading →

Venezuela: the loser (and the winner) is—Chavez!

The New Neo Posted on by

My first thought late last night on hearing the news of Chavez’s defeat in yesterday’s referendum was, “Great (and surprising)!”

My second thought was a more cynical one: “How bad must the defeat really have been for Chavez to announce he lost by two points?”

My third: “Why didn’t he just fix the results and say he won?”

My fourth: “I bet he’ll say this proves he’s a real democrat (lower case “d”), and not a dictator at all.”

And indeed, that latter thought has already come true:

Chavez said his respect for the outcome should vindicate his standing as a democrat.

“From this moment on, let’s be calm,” he declared. “There is no dictatorship here.”

Chavez is described as “humbled” by the defeat, saying his proposals may have been too “profound” and “intense.” I doubt that “humbled” is the correct word for what Chavez is feeling, just as “profound” and “intense” don’t quite cut it as a description of his proposals. My guess is that he is more humiliated than truly humbled, as I would also guess that the vote was a lot less close than announced. Continue reading →

Annapolis: for better, or for worse?

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t written at length about Annapolis, and I probably won’t do so now; I’ll leave that to others.

There is hardly an issue more controversial, more heated, and more designed to get the metaphorical blood flowing in the comments section (and elsewhere) than that of Israel, Palestine, and what to do about them. If you want to read what I’ve written on the subject, just go to the right sidebar under “categories” and click on Israel/Palestine; I’ve no intention to engage in the deja vu all over again of repetitive discussions on the subject.

I will observe, however, that I’ve read countless MSM articles in the last few months that begin: “Bush has spent his entire Presidency ignoring Israel and Palestine, and now…” I beg to differ. He hasn’t ignored that area, he made a decision to refuse to regard Arafat as a potential partner for peace, after many tries by his administration and others. The Road Map was supposed to set certain reasonable standards for negotiations which have not yet been met, although the players have changed, including the counterproductive (to say the least) consequences of the Gaza elections.

And yet we have Annapolis. Continue reading →