=jr5x1 Journal / October '05 / Save1 Follows =jr0510e.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------ Re: IHT 20 Oct '05 (Edward Wyatt) A suit by 5 major U.S. publishers to block Google from scanning books into "searchable digital copies" -- it's not clear whether the contents of the book will be searchable, or only its title -- "Google has maintained that is program is covered by the fair us eprovision of coprright law and that it therefore doe snot need permission of the coprright holders for the library project. The programn makes only small portions of copyrighted text available. "The publishers maintain, however, that the act of making digial copies itself violates the law, whatever use is contemplated for them" First of all, digitalized input adds two new features to a printed book -- stable rendundant preservation, and searchability. Those are the reasons I input R. Shlomo Carlebach and PVK material. The publishers seem to have relied on an unintended literalistic reading of the word 'copyright'. It was not intended to deny the right to copy a work -- as monks did in the Dark Ages of European culture -- but only to prohibit the right to reproduce and sell copies of work that someone else had already produced and was attemtpting to sell. As for file_sharing, this is merely a more efficient way of doing what libraries do. A publisher might as well argue that libraries violate copyright because they reduce potential sales of a book, but making it available for free to persons who might otherwise buy the book -- if they could afford and would budget it, both of which are infreqent. For that was the argument used againt Napater et al. With regard to RSC material, I think one can reasonably conclude after more than 10 years that those who clame copyright to it have not and will not make any substantial publication. With regard to PVK material, and with RSC material, there is far more material than could ever be published with any hope of profit. Moreover, the profit in publishing books, except for the most lurid, is minimal, often negligible. I would only add that Google should make the entire text of the book available to the public, although it might try to restrict the quantity that could be downloaded by a single user. Although that should be restricted to books in print, and of books in print, to those that, after a reasonable time from publication -- say, one year -- showed indications of making a significant proit. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Today's IHT, 20 Oct '05, has two self_referential comic strips -- in one, Garfield , the first panel shows a hamburger, the 2nd shows an empty plate, and in the 3rd, Garfield says, 'You'd have to slow the comic strip way down to see that.' In the other, the first panel shows Beattle Baily thinking, the laundry room is a great place to hide, in the 2nd panel he is caught by Sarge, and asks How did you find me, in the 3rd Sarge says, 'I read your thought_balloon in the first panel.' So those are 2_level comics -- the lst level is statement, the 2nd level is self_reference. I wonder what a 3_level comic would be -- the 3rd level being, a reverence to the self_reference. Amd of course so on, ad infinitum. Which really feels like an exercise in abstract mathematics. -------------------------------------------------------------- Modern architectural planning considers every aspect except that of the people who must live, work, and/or study in the buildings. The Reform Center in Jerusalem is all concrete buildings a bare plazas. It must have looked great in mock_up , but a human being has no place to sit in the shade of a leafy tree, no lawn to sit on, barely a shaded central courtyard. An atricle (IHT 20 Oct '05, Ourousoff) on plans for the reconstruction of New Orleans seems to consider every aspect buit the people who live there. The writer regrets that driveways cut residents off from interaction with the street. All of which sounds frightfully cute, but most parents would rather keep their children away from the street. Sentimental for the 1940's or some such, the writer opts for testoring 'shotgun houses', really no more than well_built shacks. And regrets that Wal_Mart now dominates shopping, not noting that it makes more goods available at low prices to poor people. The fact is, the best one can hope for in the reconstruction of an old city is a sort of Disneyland. But that's not all bad, the reality would not have been so pleasant to live in. What we are nostalgic for is never the reality, but our romanticization of it. Disneyland exists in our aspiration long before it is built. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Intelligent design? Well, moderately intelligent perhaps. ----------------------------------------------------------------- As I said in a previous jr*., I no longer expect to be happy; it is in some ways a rather liberating realiztion. I know now that whenever I get what I thought I wanted, or am able to do what I intended, there will be some drawbacks; and whenever I don't I may be able to find some good within it, or even make something of it. Too, after decades of practice, I have learned to be poor, at least if I know I don't have to do it on an indefinite basis. That too is a matter of making the best of whatever you happen to have. As I have said, the genius of Little Joe Gomez, of Taos Pueblo, was that he could find the harmony in whatever situation he happened to find himself in. Even getting buried. When I heard of that, my hit was that he was delighted at the chance to make love to Mother Earth. So, if I am in a situation in which I feel safe -- and that in general would be only Israel and Switzerland -- I feel that I have a place, even if I don't entirely belong, in both those socieites, and none other that I think of -- then I can go for weeks or travel 50 miles from home with barely enough money for bus and trainfare, and a few coffees -- a social necessity if one has to go somewhere to piss in rather than on a city. --------------------------------------------------------------- I'm sure ZIK is dazzling, but not if you wear a pair of Polaroid sun_glasses. He seems to have let his charisma, and maybe other psychic powers, develop in advance of other factulities -- humility, literary precision, maybe intellect. If so, then he is off_balance, and will be awkward. My touchstone for rationality is Chabad. Just don't let yourself be swept up by someone's charisma, sit low, avoid eye contact much less soul contact, and let it blow past you. Test it by your own rationality, and if it doesn't pass, let it pass by you. "Don't follow leaders; watch the parking_meters." (Bob Dylan) ----------------------------------------------------------------- I'm not that scared of black_magic now. The risk of being shot down by a rogue F_14 is rather small as long as one travels only by tram. ------------------------------------------------------------------ George W. Bush, Jr., is the best President Clown the U.S.A. has ever had. Starting with Ike, that has been the primary role of the U.S. President -- to be a clown. We have to look at him almost every day for 4 years, so he'd better be a clwon. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 29 Oct '05 (Sarah Lyall (as no doubt she does), "One must win over the U.S. Press" To the Editor of the International (formerly New York) Herald Tribune Dear Sir: Your correspondent is a trollop, a doxy, and quite possibly a hussy. Details follow: It is not the Amerians whom one must win over -- most of them have quite enough to do in their rain forests or herding llamas and the like -- but the Yanks. With regard to your most disrespectful reference to his "'horse_faced wife'" , this will no doubt be most welcome to those of the equine persuasion. We do, after all, eventually come to resemble our true friends. And as to his Royal Highness' allgaedly being "jug_eared", many distinguished Americans have had a similar physiognomie. Alfred E. Neumann for one. I need say no more. -------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 28 Oct '05 (Anne-Marie Slaughter, Op Ed) The writer notes "an opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel [ to the President ] saying that existing federal law prohibing torture did not apply to the president in wartime, because it unconstitut9ionally infringed on his pow4ers as commander in chief." But that is preposterous. First of all, the USA is not legally in a state of war 'against terroism', whatever that might mean -- nor against 'Al Quaeda' whatever that really is or was -- the Congress was never asked to declare one. Second, and essentially, the powers of the Commander_in_Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces -- a power that is only exceptionally exercised, most notably when Truman relieved MacArthur of command -- are limited, as are the powers of alll officers in the U.S. Armed Forces, by all applicable U.S. laws. The only respect in which the military powers of the U.S. President are unlimited in wartime, is that he has no superior officer -- except that his is subject to impeachment by the U.S. Senate and then trial by the U.S. House of Representatives. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Last weekend in October Honest George closes the Restorante for vacation. Clear sky, bright sun and so many cars & 'bikes' that a turtle could not cross the road, but that don't matter, Honest George closes the Restorante. (Campra, 29 Oct '05 ) --------------------------------------------------------------- The Tragedy of a Lover Betray'd by his Best Friend: Venus the penis and Al the pal. --------------------------------------------------------------- To JP: THE LATTER WAS BETTER: Y'all should change your name to The Jerusalem Saturday Evening Post. Bland man bland. Vapidity City. And Riskin's thinly_reasoned apologetics. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Italian Scaduto, -- finished, expired. USA Slang 1940's -- skeedaddle -- 'get away from here' Modern Hebrew -- haKol beSeder -- everything ok. USA slang, heard in the 1970's -- copacedic -- same meaning. Onions Dictionary of English Etymology, published by Oxford U., seems to ignore Hebrew. Yet it must have been a significant influence on the languages of Western Europe, with so much of the intellectual tradition carried by the monastaries, when presumablyx most monks would have read Hebrew in addition to Latin -- and biblical Greek too. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Sex, like youth, is wasted on the young, and unjustly withheld from us elders. Old age is not a chronologic state, but a disease to which science must find a cure. [ PVK speaks of an 'age_ing gene' . As Henry Miller writes, sex is the shortcut to spirtual transcendence of the ego. But to young men -- "and I once was one, as you once were too" (Brecht) -- it is scarcely more than a matter of scratching an itch. I once knew "the peace that passeth understanding" (an Anglican phrase that, I suppose) but I did not think of, much less consider, marrying her. Since Simchat Torah was almost over, I picked up a copy of Playboy at the Lugano train station. The German edition, for its spectacular cover, almost a miniaturized hologram -- well, a guilded picture, maybe with multiple angles of sight -- of 100 semi_naked chicks. But German Playboy is much less than the USA magazine, at least as it was through my frustrated and I had assumed interminable youth. No enticing poses -- the young women appear either surprised, or going about their daily business having forgotten to dress -- no suggestive cartoons, and for all I know no good short_stories nor politically provocative reportage. Only an increasingly dated and declasse pretense of being the cutting_edge arbiter of style for the upwardly mobile young gentlemen "on whom assurance sits like the silk hat on a Bradford millionaire", as T.S. Eliot siad with is customary ineptitude. --------------------------------------------------------------- "A blow job" (USA xxxSlang, contemporary) "Thar she blows" -- USA 1800's whaler's cry on spotting a whale surfacing and blowing out water from its spout --------------------------------------------------------------- Scooter Libby perjured himself most honorably, to protect his boss. Similarly Clinton perjered himself to protect the reputation of the young woman whom he had enticed, and the wife he loved, and I would like to draw your attention to an exceptional investment opportunity to acquire a controlling interest in an historical single_span suspension bridge immortilized by the famous American poet Hart Crane ("and love -- a burnt match floating in a urinal"), may he never stop swimming. So Libby did nothing immoral apart from backing the wrong horse -- one of the four rode by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and so presumably darned fast . Cheney, of course, should be impeached, and possibly shot for treason. One don't out a secret agent. Something similar applies to Judith Miller -- she most honorably defended an assistant bastard. And why they ain't yet measured Mr. Neo_Conservative__Columnist Novak for a Hemp Necktie I can't yet imagine. Frank Rich insinuates that one motive for Bushie's Iraq War was to make Israel more secure. Mazaltov. Just because a few of the White House neo_cons were Jewish. What Rich says is: (IHT 24 Oct '05, "Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure"); " "Abstract (and highly debatable) neocon notions of marcing to Baghdad to make the Middle East safe for democracy (and more secure for Israel and uninterrupted oil producton) would never fly with American voters as a trigger for war or convince them such a ware was relevant to the fitht against those who attacked us on 9/11." Now personally, I think the leading supects for the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers -- one could not have chosen a better symbol of USA imperialist capitalist power, even the name fits -- I mean, quintessential hubris -- are Sadaam Hussein and Paul Wolfkowitz, possibly in reverse order. Or even in collaboration. I don't think that Israel particularly wanted either Gulf War. Much too risky. Israel sits in a very precarious situation, and has managed its foreign policy with very carefully callibrated diplomacy backed by a very carefully callibrated demonstration of its capacity to use force. That's the way the mid_East is. You can't afford to deonize your enemies, you always keep lines of communication open to them, and are always prepared to compromise. Or rather, that's how Israel plays the game; the Arab states placate their own oppressed peoples by a show of demonization. Actually I was in Israel during that time, and we did watch the news pretty carefully for a week, and they made me buy a cellphone -- I was still recovering from a few yeaars flipped out, playing the part of a bum -- what I missed most was the lack of a place to shit -- one winter some guy broke open the beach toilets, for which I was most greatful -- I played the part of a bum so that nonbody would identify as respectably middle_class, in which case they would have locked me up in a NutHouse and made me crazy there -- and worse, stupid -- stupified and stupid -- Barbara Streissand makes this point in her movie, Nuts -- if you're lower class -- and Greece is as classist a nation as ever I've seen -- "When I Greek builds a privy, he makes two seats, first class and second classs " (sa= -- if you're lower class then nobody gives a damn what you do, but if you're middle class they lock you up to protect their reputation -- -- but I never did get around to puttingg plastic on the windows of the house I was in. I certainly recall no particular enthusiasm for the war then in Israel -- nor any vast anxiety either. A small clacque of right_wingers on the Jerusalem Post tried to beat the drum for Bushie -- an easy enough way to curry favor on the cheap -- but I doubt that Israel foreign policy was more than nominally in favor of it -- much too risky, as the current debacle has shown -- if a state falls into chaos, there is no address to whom Israel can address demands for restraint -- and indeed it is for just that reason that HaAretz is today quoted as advising a diplomatic approach to Syria -- there have been no terrorist attacks on the Golan, because the Syrian dictatorships have prevented them. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To the JP: But for a couple of stolen elections, Dershowitz might be sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court instead of on the sidelines of USA politics. But he, or more likely one of your editorial gremlins, has little justification for bashing Amnesty International (JP Int 28 Oct '05; "Ugly iceberg of bigotry: For Amnesty International, Israel can do no right." Amnesty International's primary purpose, and raison d'etre, is to apooitically seek to alleviate all confirmed cases of torture of prisoners that are brought to its attention. This is done primarily through its 'Urgent Action Network' of individual letter_writing. It is the purpose of a protest organization to challenge the failures of a government, especially its own. It is disingenuous to fault such organizations for not noting the things for which most governments merit praise. It may well be, as many have charged, that anti_Israel phrasing has seeped into many Amnesty International Reports. In Western Europe, including poor old ratty_tatty England, it is politically fashionable to be anti_Israel. Much of the cause and blame for that falls on Israel's lack of 'hasbara' -- political public relations. Dershowitz has done more than most Israel officials to try to meet that lack. --------------------------------------------------------------- The nice thing about a garter belt is that it frames it. --------------------------------------------------------------- "Every day I wake up / then I start to break up / lonely is a man without love" (USA pop schlock song, maybe 1980's) Every day I start out / then I let a fart out / ---------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT Editorial, 31 Oct '04 Of course there should be an .xxx address for pornography, and , generally speaking, pornographic sites shoiuld be required to use it. Pornography, like xposing one's usually private parts, is not immoral per se, but only when imposed upon those who would rather be viewing, eg, Klee, if not necessarily Michelangelo. And indeed, pornography may be of much redeeming social value, eg for gentlemen who have not learned to cook and whose interest in such matters has been surpassed by that of their wife. I recall noticing an ultra_orthodox lad looking through a few used beaverbooks at a shop in Jerusalem. I suppose in some sub_cultures that may be the only sex education available to an anxious young bridegroom. And as for us elders, watching the world go to wrack and ruin along with our bodies, it is always a comfort to know that such nice things still exist. [ Cf. an annecdote about Frederick the Great, as his carriage surpised a couple in the Park -- "Oh, do people still do such things."] ------------------------------------------------------------------ I have hitherto argued that not merely is there a 'right to privacy', but that this right is the pre_suppositiojn pre_requisite of all other rights and maybe most civil liberties. But it is not clear that a 'right to privacy' entails a 'right to abortion.' Under present Israeli law (as noted in JP Int, ____ '05, ca. Oct.), there is no right to abortion, except to protect the life of the motzher, in cases of incest (which is prohibited by Jewish religious law, in contradistinction to ancient Egyptian law, at least as applied to Pharoh's), and maybe rape. Otherwise abortion must be justified as a medical procedure presumably necessary to safeguard the health of the mother. Those who oppose abortion feel, if not precisely believe, that the fetus is a living being in the same sense that the parents are, and hence that abortion is murder. Well, that raises both spiritual questions, and questions of philosophic analysis. One course one will have to abandon the simplisitc, binary, black_and_white conceptualization so comforting to the feeble_minded, eg Georgie Bush. One will have to acknowlege that there gradations of life, from the Weltanshauung of a retarded amoeba, to Einstein if not Mozart, to Bach, and to the Awarness of a spiritual Master. So that is the problem for philosophic analysis -- to indicate those gradations of life, from a reptile to a fetus, to a cat, to George E. Bush, and upward to a dog. But seriously, one wants also a being of unlimited insight -- Buddha will do nicely, but he's not around -- to tell us how conscious a fetus really is. Is he sitting there for 9 months reading the unedited edition of the Zohar Kodesh -- or is his consciousness pretty much limited to OK__not_OK. I was once told that someone asked Chungyam Trumpa, Rimpoche, about abortion and that he replied, "A lot of souls going to be reborn in hell." Well, if that's the case then abortion should be prohibited. I mean even those folks who watch Who Gets The Electric Chair on TV would not want to send anyone to hell. TIK is said to have said that if a woman miscarries, it is because the soul that was in her fetus was needed and called back to Heaven. Would she then say that of an abortion. Might one not argue that it was the Will of Heaven that the woman be moved to have an abortion. Well, one might say that, but only "in fear and trembling" (to borrow a phrase from Kierkeggard) -- for if one says it as a truism, then it loses all meaning. -------------------------------------------------------------- "Forget about naked Rhine maidens, ..." catch_phrase, IHT 3 Nov '05 (Alan Riding), "With the 'Ring', everyone's a critic." Actually we hadn't thought of them until now. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Faye asked me to search the RSC files for teachings on bereavement. To do that I'd need a data_base and a Search engine. I used to do it all hte time, back in HaOn, using PatriSoft PSearch. But then my data_base was smaller. Naybe 7 Mb. More to the point -- and my guess is that this is what's crucial - - my hard_disc was only about 20 Mb. So my guess is that the first step is to use Partition Magic to create a virtual disc or around 20 Mb. I don't recall what I have at hand now of RSC material. Everything RSC I've done is on my Websites, but one would have to collect it from there. I do use docname =sc*.txt for almost all rsc material that I Post to my Websites. What i find at the moment is: /rscyc -- that's Yossi Chajes 's CD -- much of which is my material -- and there is a lot of duplicationof my files, as I rcall. The root directory alone is 3.4 Mb Then I have /learning, which is about 1 Mb And /Wittturf which is 1.8 Mb, but that includes the ZIP of it, which is 0.5 Mb. But anyhow, so far I have not gotten PS.EXE to deliver results consistently. I did get it to give me 80 hits with matching and related text -- that means about a paragraph for each hit -- but I haven't been able to replicate that. Obviously, I don't know why yet. The beauty of PS.EXE is that it gives you the hit in context -- otherwise it's about a 5_step process to dig out each hit -- get the file, search for the keyword or better , phrase in which it occurs, highlight the context, save , then pack all the save's into a new doc. So for 80 hits htat would be about 400 extra steps. There must be something designed like PS that can handle this decades systems and data_bases, but I don't yet know what it is. I'll try to ask the RSC List. That's about as far as I can go on this for now. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Re: IHT 2 Nov '05 (Ann Althouse, Dep0tof Law, U. Wisconsin) Althouse writes: "Writing for the majority in 'Employment Divison v. Smith' v. Smith in 1990, Scalia took the potion that 'neuitral, generally applicable' laws do not violate the Constituions's guarantee to the free eccercise of rleigion. Thus, he wrote, a state law could penalize the use of peyote without making any accomodation for its ritual use in the Native American Church." Althouse goes on to note that he ruled that the Police Department could not forbid Muslim employees the right to grow a beard, becasue "the ir police deaptment's policy of banning bears was not 'neutral and generally applicalbe' because it included a single exception )for people with a skin problem aggravated by shavng.' But minority religious observance is by its nature an exception to usual norms of conduct. Scalia seems to have ruled in the first case that only a law which unintentionally impedes the exercise of relligion is unconstitutional. But a ban on drinking wine would impede Jewish and Catholic observance. One not in law retreat to intention, since that quickly becomes indeterminable and unknowable (pace Wittgenstein -- yes, one can adduce cases where intention is quite clear -- eg the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution . But apparently so_called judicial Conservatives, who in fact are militant judicial activists -- albeit reactionary, not progressive -- wander in a conceptual twilight zone of vague nuances and neurotic refinements of meaning if not feeling. So the decision to block a recount in the U.S. 2000 Presidential Elecdtion rested on the rather subtle point that -- if we allow the recount to go through, and Gore prevails, then, if we rule that the recount was not allowed, the people may say we were biased, and thus bring the Court into disrespect, therefore we should block the recount to that such a situation will not arise. The notion of a 'neutral' law is new if not neutral. Constitutionally, laws must be founded on principle, not honed to privilege or penalize particular groups or persons. Though in fact most are shaped in just that way. The Sciavo case, targeted at a domain of one person, was such a law. Too, a law is not unconstitutional if it admits exceptions, provided those exceptions are based on principle, not on particular interest. It seems to be accepted that favorable exceptions may be made, but that puitive exceptions would be unconstitutional. Of course the principle of 'no injury' applies here. If Mickey Mouse is the one saved by a new copyright law, there is no injury -- at least no obvious injury. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Heard at AFSC WorkCamp , Matewan West Virginia, 1956: "How is a woman like a frying pan. You've got to get her hot before you put in the bacon." "Keep a cool tool, you fool and if you spot a hot twat, don't let your meat loaf." USA folkwisdom, elementary lessons in gallantry. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Sitting at the table eating lunch looking at the view about to bentsch I reach out and knock over my water glass which falls to the floor and breaks. Sure do make them thin nowadays. My hands didn't used to do that much. It ain't going nowhere now but the Swiss come over and move me to another table and sweep up the glass and then tell me I can come back. They ask me if I'm done eating. I say I wanted to drink more water. But I can use my wine glass. ---------------------------------------------------------------- DIARY: Friday 4 Nov '05 PVK started his final interview saying, I don't see why anyone would be interested in my life. Or mine. It's not what you do, but what you make of it. Oy, civilization. But the details make for a humdrum plot. Walked down to Olivone. Hills bare up here, but some trees in beautiful yellow leaf neaer Olivone. Got there just after the noon lunch break. Nothing to do but eat lunch. Ate lunch. Nice view. Choice of pig bones or rice with cheese. Chose the latter. OK, but not particularly interesting. And anyhow, I hadn't had anything to eat but rice for the past few days. Eat it with jelly in the morning, eat it with soy sauce (bio of course) and olive oil (extra virgin of course) and garlic salt at mid_day. Washed down with a bottle of stolen near_beer. One copes. They ask me what I want to drink. I say Table_water. In the USA they bring you water and bread as soon as you sit down, even before they ask if you want to buy something. And salt always on the table. That IS Biblical hospitality. We darned near ostracized the Edomites for a thousand generations because they didn't do that. If we hadn't made an exception for Ruth, we would have lost King David. That's the standard commentary on the Book of Ruth. Here you have to ask specially for Table_water. Make you feel like a peon if you don't order a bottle of Mineral Water. Marked up a few hunded percent, but let's not be petty about it. And you get get bread until you order lunch. I have to ask twice for salt. Cook says, I already put salt on your salad. So I ask for olive oil too, to put on the bread, with salt. If I could get some garlic, it would make a meal. Used to eat that for a treat on Shabat. Bread dipped in olive oil with garlic. Wash my hands in the toilet room. Halacha don't say you can't, just says, don't say the bracha until you come out. But the Rabbi's were never above a bit of opportunistic fudgning. I say, don't go into the toilet room if you don't have to go. Or if you're hands are really dirty, so you really have to wash them, and there's no place else to do so. I'm not really being a davaka_nik, a contrarian as you would call it -- on the legal dimension maybe you can do it, but on the spiritual dimension, you can't. Ain't you sorry you asked me to write my Diary. Boring boring boring. Food at the Osteria used to be better. Everything you got was just a little bit better than one expected. Today it's just ordinary. Eat too much rice for lunch. Stop at the other Restaurante/Pension for a cup of coffee. Only CHF 2.70 . That's over two dollars. "Buddy can you spare a dime for a cup of coffee." That was USA 1930's. The Gret Depression. I don't remember coffee being over 25 cents in the USA. Stop by the Pharmacy to get a flu shot. Last year, with a flu vacine shortage in the USA, I walked in and the pharmacist gave me a shot on the spot. This year there's a new young woman, she says, you have to get a prescription from the doctor, then you come back, we sell you the vacine, and you go back to him and he vacinates you. OK. She calls up. They talk a long time in Italian. She laughs a lot. Looks like I'm getting the run_around. I wind up talking to another pharmacist, in Dangio or Dongio -- there really is one of each -- who says, in French of course -- almost no_one speaks English in Switzerland, it's de_classe -- so he says, all the flu shots are reservee -- we have to save them for our patients -- there is no more vacine in Switzerland. I try to ask him if he expects to have more in stock in a week or so. He seems to say No. I say, Merci. He says, Pour rien. I say, Vraiment pour rien. More pleasantries and then I hang up. Maybe I can zap the system later, at leisure. If I don't fall into a drooling diarethic funk first. I'll have to avoid crowds for the rest of the winter. To save money, the Swiss pack their schoolkids into the regular buses. So I'll have to come back up the mountain in the morning -- which means gettng a hotel room for the night, for about 50 SwissFrancs -- or in late afternoon, which would mean walking back up in the dark. Go to bet a haircut -- what I really need is a beard_trim, I'm getting tired of chewing on my beard -- but it's Friday, and she has no time. Some days nothing works. Polisport has taken out the Internet, not that I wouldn't rather not hear from almost everyone who writes me -- ghosts with problems for which I can offer only a pat_on_the_back -- all in virtual reality. Why should I play the gentleman with anyone who's not feeding me or going to bed with me. A teddy_bear would do more, and have more call on my affections. But I suppose I'm too old for that now. Go buy groceries. About three hundred dollars -- OK, Swiss Francs -- for not much more than a week_and_a_hhalf supply, plus a few staples. Mostly whole_wheat pasta, potatoes, and bread for toast. With a bit of what passes for granola hereabouts. Mostly dried chopped_up oats with a few bits of dried fruit and nuts. They call it Museli, and they should use it to pack China. Add milk, let it sit for a while if you don't have hardly any teeth left -- just a few broken_down stumps and metal posts from used to be rebuilt teeth -- probably ought to have them cleaned out before the leech out any more and I turn into a walking toxic_waste dump -- like half the populace, no wonder caancer is epidemic nowadays, though nobody admits it -- if a Presidential candidate ever did, he might sweep to victory -- but I guess overybody assumes they can beat the odds -- except a few of my best friends who didn't -- Anyhow, I wind up spending all my money for the month, when I go to buy sliced bread for toast -- hard to get real bread sliced for toast here -- either too soft , all filled with fluffy agents, or too heavy -- and pick up a jug of Chianti, mostly to make hot mulled wine -- find some cinamon, too -- but haven't seen real Vanilla extract in years -- maybe they don't make it anymore, maybe the vanilla bean went extinct -- all you get nowadays is that artificial vanillin, been around so long it seems like a natural product -- good old vanillin -- You're sure Eric Rohmer made a go of this sort of bourgeois neo_realism? Go to mail two package_letters -- first substantive thing I've done since I hit town, the only raison__d'etre for this trip -- though I am glad to get a break from the mists of Campra --- and find that even when I dig out the last of my spare change from my pockets, I'm 30 cents short. So I go back to the bank and draw out my last 30 francs. They're young kids there, always glad to have something to smile at -- real courtesy, in a very under_stated way -- never make me feel small, even when I have to draw out my last 10 francs, or ask for a few hundred more in overdraft -- I have all these rich relatives, and maybe a few rich friends to - - from connections of my mother's generaation, mostly -- and nobody thinks to offer me money. They have more than I need, and most of them ain't doing much in life anyhow, and I have somewhat less, and am -- at last -- trying to do somthing, however arbitary and even in a sense artificial a project it is -- I guess it just ain't done, to offer a poor_relation money. Years ago, just down from the commune -- I passed through New Buffalo on my way back from grad school in Santa Barbara, and darned near stayed there -- we were sitting in the long house, this was the kitchen__common_room of the first house, that burned down the next spring -- all those adobe walls, and firelight, and so many people I truly cared for -- most of them got hepatitis a month or so later -- and it had just started to snow, and I said, I'll stay. Then later the snow stopped, it had been just a short flurry, and I dscided I'd go anyhow. Justin Case said, something about, decisions made on a snowy day. It had seemed so perfectly romantic. I was sad about it, selling out, sort of. George Robinson said, Exiled to the Virgin Islands. So I got there, and my father gave me some spending money, though I'm not sure I even needed it. He said, I don't you walking around like a poor relation. I was a rather substantial ammount. He always had a solid sense of quality. Like when he was helping me buy a wool sports jacket -- sort of Harris tweed, as I suppose they later called it -- at the Harvard Coop, where you do get quality -- they used to measure me for pants, that was before everything was ready_mades, off_the_rack -- pants always had to be cuffed, and the waist taken in too as I recall. In those days I bought those almost useless real shoes that everyone wears -- for about the past 30 years I've only bought what we used to call work_boots -- ok for trails and snow and mud and work too. Darned if I know where I was in this narrative. Once the coffee kicks in there's no stopping me, not if I've got up in the middle of the night. Time to back_track and wrap this up. And do something they pay me for. "Earning a living" as they say. Cavell once remarked on what an odd phrase that is. He meant, conceptually problematic, it expresses and presupposes a rather odd Weltanschauung. Someday I have to see if I can take down Cavell. Before I get too senile. He gave a talk at Hebrew U. once, this is maybe early 90's, and just about admitted, I am a Rogue. I wanted to ask him, Did you ever figure out what Wittgenstein was doing -- in his lectures at Berkeley, 1962, he seemed right on the verge of a breakthrough -- I took notes as fast as I could, this was before pocket tape recorders -- wrote up those notes after bicycling back to my shack in the mudflats, as soon as I could -- then left all those notes in the Maxine's garage -- this would be Santa Barbara, about 4 years later -- and when they moved they threw all of that out. Good old American realists, none of that Jewish sentimentality about the written word. But I didn't have the nerve to raise my hand. Well, I read that he finally turned those lectures into a book -- after aping the WASP's at Harvard College -- reckon that ruined him -- he took to posing as an afficiando of 30's and 40's USA movies -- so in you can put it on your coffee table -- and then davka wrote a book about Walden -- and even Emerson too, or so I see on Google -- Google, goo_goo -- baby_talk in Cyberspace -- Oy. I used to ride my bike in Harvard yard and go swimming in Walden Pond, and then this parvenu Jew from Atlanta comes up and figures he's got it made -- Cavell said, at Hebrew U., they took the name because it was so goyish -- So ok, where was -- in Olivone, buying groceries for the next week_and_half -- So then I paid for my letters, bought an espresso with lemon -- sort of a caffein lemonade when you add a packet of sugar into that tiny cup -- bought it with darned near my last few francs, so I wouldn't look like a piker when I went in to piddle in the potty -- just don't do to piss against the fennce_post in the middle of town -- once I'm sitting in the bay, and the skipper has gone over the side with a face_mask to check the rudder, and I ask him if he's through doing it, and he says why, and I say, because I wanted to use the crapper, and he says, Ah, what politeness. Well, he was from MIT, and did have grace. We're in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between Rhode Island and New Jersey, and we see this other sailboat going the other way, and we try to hail them, every way we can, and they are just passing by, and we are eating banannas -- the skipper got them for his little boy -- and the skipper stands up in the cockpit and shouts over at them, maybe half a mile across the water on a calm sea, "Do you want a bananna. Got a ride with another guy once. Quit an Abode Retreat half_way thorugh to meet him in Newport -- his young wife comes on deck in an almost_bikini -- I think, ok, we split the watches 3 ways, this is manageable -- and then he says, My wife doesn't stand watches. And then he tries to stiff me for part of his watch. As we're heading into New Jersey, with all those trawlers draggng long circles, and freighters in holding patterns before dawn, I'm so tired I'm seeing Moire patterns -- look to me like fortifications in the middle of the ocean -- at one point he says to me, if I asked you to climb the mast, would you do it -- I think for a minute or so, and say, I don't think so -- anyhow, he puts me ashore at Atlantic City, though I had signed up to continue down to coast -- to North Carolina, if I recall. I wind up taking the bus back to Boston, where it turns out Susie Harrison is visiting friends and staying in Cambridge , so I see her. She has close_cropped hair now, dark with a touch of grey, and is into jogging -- she hopes I had found another woman to live with, and says of my living at home with my mother, "You can't find happiness with an old woman. 'Old woman' was also the hippy phrase for one's -- mate, as the British might say. I remind her of the time she visited my home -- she won't come back there this time, to see my mother -- and she says, of herself then , "That naive girl." Well, she had a beautiful joy then, not that she hadn't had her share of hard knocks from life. Including the time I gave her the clap, after she made a special trip out to New Buffalo to see me. How arrogantly ideologic I was then, leaving her in Santa Barbara, taking her for granted -- she once said, "I always knew that 'Someday, my Prince will come' , and now he did, and it's -- Steve." -- "I was very young then. I would say Jesus, Mary, have you ever -- She would smile, and say, No -- " -- that's Sharger, at 18 -- 18 years old, or a year or so thereafter -- what lyric control -- Carl Sharger -- rather a genius, I suppose -- even before he started taking LSD like one_a_day Vitamin pills -- OK, so anyhow, I pay the post_office the last 30 cents to send off my packages -- this being Switzerland, they probably would not have done so otherwise, for all that we're almost friends -- in Israel, of course, they postman would just send them off and remind me the next time I met the mail truck -- So then I walk across the street, and there is a bus, and he takes me up to the top of town -- this is Switzerland, so of course he charges me -- and I get out, and figure I'll try thumbing for a few minutes, though I really feel like walking -- and a pickkup truck stops within the first minute, and the guy is going up to Camperio, and we sort of commiserate about having to slog through life, sharing only a few words of Italian but various sighs and intonations and shrugs -- and from there it is an eay walk, all on roads -- only I have forgotten about the time_change, so I am back after the start of Shabat -- And also it is Shabat now, but I'm darned if I'll lie in bed trying to contend with broken sleep -- Went out the door to piss -- rainy out today, as forecast, so no light from the stars -- here the air is so clear you really can see by starlight, even without a moon -- though when it's out it's usually behind the mountains that frame this valley -- so anyhow, I just grope my way along the outside wall of my shack to the end of it, lean my right shoulder on the wall, and aim by sound. Now I know why cowboys always 'Excuse myself against the fence.' Well, that was my Diary for today. I'll have to do this again, maybe in a month or so. --------------------------------------------------------------- Don't say this shack gets cold but I keep the computer on all night just to keep warm. (Campra, 6 Nov '05 -- 4 CheShvaN ) ---------------------------------------------------------------- The pain of homelessness is not primarily the lack of a place to sleep and eat -- one can wrap up in a rug on the beach, by the surf and sunrise -- but the lack of a chance to organize one's life. This shack is a bit of that too. It's so cramped I have to pack most stuff away in boxes, and can't remember half of what's I've got. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Never mock people for their weaknesses. They're doing the best they can. If HIK didn't say that, he should have. Like, one of his "Iron rules" -- rules for derekh eretz in the age -- or phase, or dimension -- for living as decently as possible in the Age of Iron. (That's a hindu notion of course -- the successively degenerating ages of Gold, Silver, Copper, and Iron. Plato took that notion for his social castes of Philosopher_king, Warrior, Merchantman, and Worker. Slaves, for Plato, didn't count, their domain was in Hades , with the rest of the public utilities. Coal_mines and all that. Bob Dylan, "But to live outside the law you must be honest." (I really ought to have that an an audio quote, if they hadn't busted Napster.) What Dylan is mocking here is is the irony of incarnation.. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Only a man who forgot his cock could dismiss out of hand Norman O. Brown's 'Love's Body' -- most post_Freudian, sexual imagry as cultural metaphor -- And if Joyce had had anything to say, Finnegan's Wake might be almost worth reading. What Whackoff ( movie, 'Flesh Gordon', featuring Dr. Jerkoff -- "Gosh, Jerkoff .... ") imagined an apocalypse -- any apoclypse will do (Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice") -- as a redemptive event. From that crew of fools from Rome who fancied chastity enhanced, and was even pre_requisite to, spirituality. No wonder they never let women be priests, that nonsense wouldn't last 5 seconds in a woman's mind. Of course sexuality is problematic for spirituality -- as PVK would say, that's one of the challenges that was given to you when you asked -- some would say, volunteered -- to come to earth. Tameh is out the opposite pole from tahar (as what a mistranslation 'defiled' is of 'tameh' -- 'funky' would be much better (and Sonia Labove, who married Neil Nelson Fomous Poet, said, the definition of funky is, a room in which 30 people have been screwing -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Applied Footware: My mind is like an alligator -- slow. If I acquire, eg, new shoes socks or software might take me a week before I think to put them on. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Finished Ursala le Guin's book Tehanu, and still don't know what to make of it. Looks like all she knows of spirituality is that one can have siddhi's, and lose them, and be sad and baffled at the loss of it all. She makes much of 'true names' but 's far as I can see, has no ear for them. She does write with clarity of poignancy of the finer feelings of a woman. But her feminism is scarcely past the 'men and women are different species' (Nancy Nayhard said that) -- and the 'you forgot to put down the toilet seat again' -- indeed, she even weaves 'it's your turn to do the dishes' into the plot, as anachronistic as you please. And her notion of evil is gross, stock horror schlock. And her spiritual odyssey is no more than a riff from T.S. Eliot's Wasteland. In contrast, that chick who writes all those dragon stories really does detail the spiritual quest -- mostly from the Knight's perspective -- the apprentice Knight, rather -- for all that she don't have the subtlty of a real novelist, chich leGuin might have become. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Being newly neo__ultra_orthodox -- a 'ba'al tchuva' , master of return, as such an 'escape from freedom' (Erich Fromm) unduly styles itself, she had, in lieu of a nun's vows, taken upon herself the yoke of a non_Euclidean logic -- every possible thought could be trusted to eventually return to its starting point. (Cf. "their world of ideas is an aviary" (sa)) --------------------------------------------------------------- Bellow again, that poseur, "More die of Heartbreak" -- what an old_age comedown from 'The Adventures of Augie March' -- that querrulous bitchy narrator should be cut out, and the whole thing rewritten as a simple third_person -- story, if not novel. Bound to chop it down to about 20% of the original. Writing of a Tokyo strip_show, which he gratuitiously puts in Kyoto, deities defend us, he remarks that at the climax, so to speak, the young women 'spread their knees and dilated themselves' -- which makes it sound like a bow_leggeed plieE or some such -- oy, 'dilated' -- why can't he just be a man about it, and say, each in turn spread her legs and then demurely put in a few fingers and spread her twat -- One of the Gabor's, Zsa_Zsa no doubt, those Hungarian concubines, met Norman Mailer and said, 'Oh yes, you're the young man who can't spell 'Fuck'." That was back in the '50's, of course, before the rediscovery of sex was made official, presumably because of its commericial possibilities. 'Repressive desublimation', as Marcuse so precisely put it. And so down on the Lower East Side of Manhattan -- the cutting edge of what used to be called Behemia -- Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, et. al. in the '60's formed a mock__rocK_group called 'The Fugs'. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Notes on sci_fi cout out to next JR doc -- =jr0511a ------------------------------------------------------------ It was a day of great excitement for the monks of Notre Dame College, for their fraternity, Sigma Phi M -- the monks fraternity, a necessarily decorous branch of the schlock jocks' Sigma Phi -- had made it to the semi_finals of the intramural football competition. Although of course they could attend -- think, or rather try not to, of those cheerleaders flashing their scanties -- the monks had assigned one of their noviates, Brother Sebastian, a most innocent lad late of the Indiana Home for the Retarded, to wait in the belfry and ring the carillion if their fraternity scored. Unbeknownst to Brother Sebastian, the Campus Cat had also wandered up to the Belfrey, perhaps in quest of mice, and then fallen asleep , almost entirely hidden inside the great bell. All went uneventfully, until suddenly Brother Sebastian, for no apparent reason, irrationally believing that the fraternity had scored a touchdown -- the playing field was distantly visible from the belfrey, so no doubt what he saw was merely the arrival of the ice_cream truck, attended by great cheers and much rushing -- reached out to pull the bell_rope. Mistakenly, what he grabbed was the tail of cat, who needless to say gave great and prolonged voice to her indignation, the more so since she could not escape from under the bell as long as Brother Sebastian, not one to readily desist from any accomplished action, continued to pull. There was much excitement at the Brothers' Frat House -- Sigma Phi M -- but also some confusion, and eventually one of there most trusted members, Nearsighted George, was sent to investigate. He returned shortly, with scarcely a trace of lipstick on his tonusre, with an air of great disappointment, to explain that their team had still not scored. As he explained the great noise from the Belfrey: "It is a tail tolled by an idiot, full of sound and furry -- Sigma Phi M -- nothing." ------------------------------------------------------------------ Introduction to 'One Dumb Rock' (HaOn, 1998) "and and the end of the world, if it comes, is likely to be, not from any contending apocalypse, but simply from one dumb rock" The following tale, of which I am not the author, came to my attention in a somewhat unusual way. I had be hiking all day in the Arava -- one of the few relatively safe trails still left in our land -- when I saw the first signs of a sandstorm. Look for shelter, I found what seemed to be the broken_down remnant of some old structure -- possibly a canavanarsarie of the Nabateans. It was just barely high enough to shield me from the increasing wind, which still came through the cracks in the wall. Fortunately I spied, so to speak, what seemed to me at first glance to be merely the pages from some old catalog, or possibly telephone book, of whose previous use I chose not to speculate. However, on closer glance I saw that these scattered sheets were in fact pages of foolscap, written in a faded but still legible hand. However closer examination had to wait, for the storm was increasing and I had first to secure my shelter. I had shored those fragments up against my ruins when, glancing more carefully at them, I was able to piece together the tale which I now recount. (T.S. Eliot, Wasteland, "'I have shored these fragments up against my ruins ...'" ) ---------------------------------------------------------------- I'm not precisely tired but this morning to read anything more intellectually complex than a picture in Playboy would be challenging. (9 Nov '05, I think) Footnote: "can't find my a__hole with a roadmap" Toenote: Prospector was travelling across the desert with his donkey. Donkey died. Prospector dug a hole to bury it in. Nun comes along and says, 'Oh, what are you digging, a post_hole?" "Nope." ----------------------------------------------------------------- COLLECTED SHORTER POEMS, CONTINUED An Illustration of the Relative Conciseness of Poetic Expression: (News Item: Approaching the grounds of the Nursing Home, the railroad engineer suddenly noticed an elderly woman, apparently on of the residents, on the tracks. He repeatedly signaled a warning, but was unable to stop in time.) Senile female; futile tootle. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Re; IHG 11 Nov '05 -- European Court upholds scarf ban The human right to freedom of religious expression surely includes the right to cover one's head at whatever time and place on chooses. ------------- R. Zalman sat down in the tipi. An Indian woman said, Why is his wearing his little hat. Little Joe said: It's his head. Once I was fired from a temporary job at First National Bank in Boston, for not taking off my hat -- a hat, not a kippa -- as I worked. Once I did Haga training (the Granddads' Army -- Reserves over 45 or so, given 3 weeks training total ) -- and I wore a hat. I once said to Yael M_Sinai, a kippa is non_functional. She said back, 613 revelations and it's non_functional? So anyhow, the guy who was training us said, take off your hat. I said, No. One can do that in the Israel army, though usually not without consequences. He said, Go back to your tent and think it over fpr 15 minutes. I decided, I did not cross the Atlantic to make problems for the IDF, so I took it off on the spot. I had come to Israel, still half_hairless from a nervous breakdown, as a civillian volunteer to the IDF. That was Davidi's inspiration. Ostensibly we were there to fill a manpower shortage, but his real motivation, he once remarked, was to ensure that any Jew in the USA, especially those recovering from a trauma of any sort -- eg, the death of an elderly spouse -- would have a chance to regain their self_pride and sense of identity by participating, however inessentially, in the IDF. It was a Zionist principle that everyone serves in the IDF, for national defense primarily, but secondarily to build a culturally integrated society. It is also a principle in the IDF that there is no infringement upon the religious practice, or rejection thereof, by anyone. So the IDF keeps strict (mainstram, rabbinute) kashrut, maintains a Bet Knesset on every base, and puts challot on the dining room tables on Shabat. ----------- It is most surprising that "The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday ( 10 Nov '05) threw out an appeal byx a Muslim sudent against Turkey's ban on women wearing headscarves in universities." The case was brought by a former student who had been expelled from Instanbul University medical school in 1998 for insisting on wearing a headscarf. ""Sahin, 32, now lives in Austria where she finisehd her studies and works as a doctor. So obviously this was as strong a plaintiff as one could imagine. There was real injury to a demonstrably qualified person evidently discriminated against only on the basis of exercise of her religious beliefs. "Brining her case against the Turkish state, she had argued that the ban biolated Article 9 of the Eruopean Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, and religion." Obviously any ruling against Muslim women wearing headscarves would apply to Jewish men wearing kippot. And, as noted in France, to Sikh's wearing turbans. I do not see how one could argue that it could not be extended to refuse students the right to at least eat, if not purchase, kosher food in a campus cafeteria. One might argue that there is a greater invasion of personal privacy -- personal space, one might say -- in being required to put something into one's body, than in being required to put, or not put, something upon one's body. And then, if mores changed, might pre_adolescent girls be required to bare their navels at a co_ed school. Might Jews (and strictly observant Muslims, and all Sikh's) be required to bare their heads during the playing of the National Anthem at a baseball game. Or if mores were still more different, might young women at the Ca'ananite Univeristy of Ba'al in Gaza be expelled for refusing to participate in the Spring Fertility Orgy. Would one then argue -- as in fact most secular law assumes, in ciminalizing rape but not Greasy Spoon Doggie Diner's , that there is a greater invasion of privacy in being required to take something into one's self_styled private parts -- as if the rest of one's body were, if not public, at least the property of the state -- then in being required to take somethinginto one's digestive tract. The Court's reasoning seems to have had that roundabout charactaer typical of the reactionary majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court did not conclude that it was not a human right to cover one's head. Rather, it concluded that because there was in that country an extremist movement which sought to make strict religious observance obligatory -- including the obligation of women to cover their heads in public -- then there was no right to do so. It's not clear what the Court's reasoning was on this point. Did the Court seriously imagine that were a minority of women to cover their heads at a co_ed university, then Islamic neo_fundamentalism would conquer Turkey -- with no further effort, presumably. Incidentally, the same reasoning would apply, and with more justification, to the practice of orthodox Jewish women, especially in Israel, covering their hair in public. And it would certainly apply the Israel Army making the observance of kashrut mandatory on all military installations. In Israel there clearly is a movement that seeks to make, albeit nonviolently, the observance of religious law mandatory throughout the county. There are even occasionally small extremist groups that seek in particular cases to enforce that violently, eg burning down a pork_store. (Throwing stones on cars on Shabat is a less clear case, since that occurs on roads -- mostly only Rehov Bar Ilan in Jerusalem -- that bisects a neighborhood which is almost entirely strictly observant. So there it is the autos that violate the right to privacy. OK, let us suppose that it was 'Decreed in Heaven' -- or discovered by the Department of Statistical Neurophysiology -- that if 100 or more young women at Istanbul University wore headscarves on campus, the entire nation would become an Islamic theocracy that would impose Islamic law upon all citizens, or all persons, who dwelled in that country. First of all, there is a right to religious expression, but is there a right to non_religious expression. Well, one could argue that secular_humanism is a quaisi_religion, or (whith more difficulty) that it is the religion of the soi_disant religious. The USA definition of a conscientious objector, originally applied only to those who refused to kill -- or rather, to voluntarily put themselves in a position where under certain circumstances they might be obliged to attempt to kill -- on religious grounds. That would apply to Mennonites and to J's Witnesses, but I don't think to any other ogranized religon -- Brahmin Hindoo's , I presume. But that definition was soon extended to 'those for whom a system of belief serves as does religious belief for a religious person'. And surely many non_observant Israeli men do go bare_headed, even in the worst of weather, just to demonstrate that they are not 'doti'. But that is not a quaisi_religious -- as is eg the neo_paganism of a nude be_in -- for which I was once almost busted at Big Sur by State Troopers who watched through spyglasses from a cliff a mile away, but that's another story -- it is merely the Davka Principle -- I'm only doing it because you say I can't, otherwise I wouldn't even have thought about it. So ok, even if wearing headscarves was known, but mystic means or pseudo_science, to lead to not precisely the curtailment of the religious freedom of the non_religious, but to the imposition upon them of feigned religious observance -- that ban would not be justified. For "two wrongs don't make a right." The MEANS of curtailing the religious freedom of some canot be justified by the END, however justified, of preserving the religious freedom of all. Even if, per impossible, one KNOWS , for certian, that that means only only that means would bring about, or ensure, that END. =============================================================== THE END; CUT AN PRINT. sa, Campra, 11 Nov '05 -- 9 CheShvaN Clear skies, Campra in shadow for the next 3 months. ================================================================