Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:00 AM

Very shortly, we will be leaving for San Francisco. I probably won't be online at all until Tuesday, and I'm not bringing in any guest bloggers, so I'm dimming the lights for a few days. Don't forget about me while I'm gone.

For those who use this blog as a way of keeping up with the news, here are a few links that may get you through, just off the top of my head: Atrios, Corrente, Counterspin, Demagogue, The Left Coaster, Political animal (formerly CalPundit), Sisyphus shrugged, Seeing the forest, Suburban Guerrilla, Talking Points Memo, Talk Left.

There are many other good news blogs out there, depending upon the topic you're interested in. [For recent news about Iraq, I've been finding the perspectives at Intel Dump and Democratic Veteran particularly insightful.] But there's a shortlist at any rate.

Also, if you happen to run across anything you think I should read, whether on your blog or somebody else's, please share the links with me in my comments. I sometimes have trouble catching up with things after a weekend. Five days means I'm invariably going to miss stuff.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:15 PM

Went to the bedroom to empty out my shoulderbag for the trip, and discovered that Boopsie barfed all over the bed, on the sheets narrowly missing the pillows, although she did tag some of the quilt. She somehow managed to soak thru the sheets and thru the mattress pad. Fortunately, we use a plastic anti-allergy/anti-wet zippered thingy around the mattress itself, which prevented anything from damaging the mattress itself.

Still, incredibly gross and ill-timed. Usually she waits to do this kind of thing until we return, as a "welcome back, don't ever leave" present.

Well, Ian was going to change the sheets before we left anyway, but we didn't want to have to do these loads of laundry tonight...

Boopsie was sleeping at the foot of the bed when we discovered this, and I was sorely tempted to wrap her up with the sheets we were removing and throw her in the wash. I resisted, but it was a close thing.

In short, <Ew> and <sigh>

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:45 PM

Literally. While the recent warm weather has been pleasant, and I love seeing all the flowers in bloom (yay! lilacs!), all that tree sex has meant pollen counts for the area have been "very high" for the past week, and my allergies have been off the charts. Dry eyes, post-nasal drip, sore throat, coughing, stuffy headedness... Gug

And tomorrow, I'll be flying to California, probably eight hours in the air...

Oh joy...

I think I'm throwing a tissue box (rather than one of those teeny "travel-size" packets) in my carry-on luggage. And I'm already expecting the antihistimines I'll need to make takeoff and landings bearable will probably cut into the reading time I had been hoping for...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:25 AM

Lots of blogs today are quoting Krugman's latest column, Just Trust Us:

If America's record is better than that of most countries -- and it is -- it's because of our system: our tradition of openness, and checks and balances.

Yet Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil, doesn't believe in that system. From the day his administration took office, its slogan has been "just trust us." No administration since Nixon has been so insistent that it has the right to operate without oversight or accountability, and no administration since Nixon has shown itself to be so little deserving of that trust. Out of a misplaced sense of patriotism, Congress has deferred to the administration's demands. Sooner or later, a moral catastrophe was inevitable.

July 4th, I found a John Adams quote that seems particularly apt:

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

-- John Adams, "Notes for an Oration at Braintree", 1772

Smart man, that Mr. Adams.

And, yes, I was thinking of our current administration at the time I posted it.

Ooh! As I was looking for something pithy with which to title this post (did I succeed?), I came upon another timely quote from an ex-President:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

-- John F. Kennedy

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:35 AM

The Leaky Cauldron has obtained the production notes for next month's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Loads of spoilers, and I found the costume designers' insights to be particularly... insightful, but this passage made me laugh:

To help the three young actors deepen their understanding of their characters, Cuarón asked them each to write an essay detailing how they viewed their character's growth from their early days at Hogwarts to the beginning of the third story. "I remember handing in my essay and being so pleased, as neither Emma or Rupert had done theirs yet," Radcliffe remembers, grinning. "I wrote a whole page on my character. But then the next day, Emma came in and had written sixteen and a half pages!"

Knowing their characters, that seemed so appropriate. Then, after a paragraph about Emma's comments about Hermione, I came across this gem:

Cuarón is still awaiting Rupert Grint's essay.

Heh.

"But hey, that's my character!" Rupert protests. "Dan and Emma helped me give Alfonso all the usual excuses, like the dog ate my homework, that kind of thing. But Ron has never liked schoolwork, and he'd have found every excuse possible to get out of doing the essay, so I was just being in character!"

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:50 PM

By the way, we will be in San Francisco this coming weekend. [Eight-hour flights... Ugh!] Ian and I would like to get together with folks in San Francisco, perhaps sometime on Sunday?

I'd love to do something uniquely San Francisco. We're probably going to do the usual touristy rounds on Friday with Ian's family, but since they keep kosher, maybe a dim sum lunch on Sunday in Chinatown, or I'd love to go to Castro Street (I've read enough Randy Shilts and Tales of the City and gay history to want to see those places I've been reading about).

We're flying out early Thursday morning, so there's not too much time to make arrangements, but I'm ambitious. Worst case scenario, we can agree to meet at landmark at time and work out more specifics from there...

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:45 PM

I haven't posted much about Abu Ghraib because it so sickens and disgusts me that, really, what can I write? But sinboy just found a very interesting letter to the Washington Post.

It is a fact that the Pentagon asked CBS to delay airing their program for two weeks.

So what happened during those two weeks? Well, officials certainly didn't use that time to read the report, as Rumsfeld testified before Congress he got no further than the executive summary. In fact, despite the early warning, few steps to mitigate the damage seem to have been taken while they had that advanced warning.

So what significant event did happen during that crucial delay?

By requesting that CBS delay its report on prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib by two weeks [news story, May 4], Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deprived the country of a full and forthright oral argument before the Supreme Court on the rights of U.S. citizens whom the government has detained as "enemy combatants."

Oral argument in those cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Padilla v. Rumsfeld, ended about noon April 28. CBS aired the report eight hours later. Had the report aired the previous week, the government's responses to certain questions at oral argument would certainly have been different. Specifically, it would have been clear what abuses could be perpetrated under the government's theory that "enemy combatants" have no rights.

As it happened, the justices asked Principal Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement what in the law would check the executive branch from torturing prisoners. He responded that the government would honor its obligations under the "convention to prohibit torture and that sort of thing."

He also explained that as a practical matter torture is not the best means of extracting information from prisoners, because one "would wonder about the reliability of the information you are getting"; the "way you get the best information from individuals is that you interrogate them, you try to develop a relationship of trust. . . ." Mr. Clement said that it is "the judgment of those involved in these processes, that the last thing you want to do is torture somebody." He concluded in response to a question about checks on the executive branch's authority to engage in torture: "You have to recognize that . . . where the government is on a war footing, you have to trust the executive. . . ."

As the abuses at Abu Ghraib show, one cannot simply trust the executive branch to protect human rights under U.S. criminal law, the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. For the sake of our security and for the protection of human rights everywhere, we believe the court should agree.

JAMES F. FITZPATRICK

Washington

The writer, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter, filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court in the Hamdi and Padilla cases on behalf of Global Rights, a Washington-based international human rights group that he chairs.

I almost got it in my first post on Abu Gharib, when I contrasted the government solicitor's noble talk that "our executive doesn't" torture with the awful reality. And I hoped the Court would take note of these actions in making their decision. But I wasn't aware of the government's two week jumpstart -- their awareness that these charges were lurking in the background when they piously claimed such things could never happen...

And again, words can't express how appalled I am by this behavior, so I'll just stop writing about it for now.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 AM

It's Monday morning, people need something to laugh about.

The latest issue of Sequential Tart (an ezine about comics by and about women) includes part one of a lengthy interview with Wil Wheaton. And I simply have to share this bit:

ST: Going back to writing sketch comedy for ACME, tell me about a time where something you wrote just killed and a time where something you wrote just died. [Note: "to kill" is to get an overwhelming positive reaction from the audience, "to die" is to get an overwhelming negative reaction.]

WW: I wrote a sketch called "At the Theater". It's a parody of Ebert & Roper but I wrote the entire sketch in iambic pentameter, in Elizabethan English and they are reviewing movies performed as plays. So Dan Fester and I are sitting on the side of the stage in doublets and stuff, [and the scene continues], and I say, "Our first play this evening is 'The Carriage Driver.'" And [my friend] Oz comes out with an olive green doublet on and he goes, [in a tough-guy voice], "Art thou talking to me? Art thou talking to me? I cast mine eye about this place and in doth find none other but me here, so again, I say to thee, 'Sir! Art thou talking to me?' Who art thou talking to?" And then he goes, "A pox on me? A pox on me! A pox on thee!" And he pulls a sword out from his back and goes, "Fie! Fie!"

ST: [Doubled over in laughter] Oh my fucking God.

WW: And I love it. I just love it because it's like nerdy and it's smart and oh, it's great. I absolutely love it. And what's funny is I can't remember any of my lines. I was "Roper." But I remember the lines I wrote for all the other people. I did this other thing where we called it "The Empire's Remembrance" for The Empire Strikes Back. My friend Liam comes out as Luke Skywalker and my friend Brook was Darth Vader. Brook was wearing a tragedy mask that's painted black. [Chuckles] And they're sword fighting and Brook says [in Darth Vader voice] "Obi-Wan ne'er spake sooth to thee about the death of thy father, Luke." And [Liam] goes [in whiny Luke voice], "He did speak as much as mine ears did need to hear. He said it was thee that did slay him!" And Brook goes, "Nay!" [Dramatic pause] "I am your father!" And Liam goes, [drawn-out, quavering voice], "Nay... Nay! It's not true! It's impossible!" And [Brook] goes, [more dramatic Darth Vader voice], "Search thy feelings, thou shalt find as sure as dawn doth march daily upon yon eastward hill, thee doth know it to be so!" And [Liam] goes, [even more whiny Luke voice], "Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!" And the curtains closed. It was so much fun and it always killed. There were applause breaks in the sketch and I was so proud of it. One night I went up, I got totally lost. I forgot what I was supposed to say, and I had to improvise — and thank God, I did improvise Shakespeare with the Los Angeles Theatre Sports — and I had to improvise, in Elizabethan English until I could remember where I was. Because it's kind of a stunt sketch, too; we're parodying Ebert & Roper and these films, but the stunt is also that we are using the language. It was great. I am so proud of it, and I absolutely loved it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:28 AM

Via Khaosworks, I just found out that Anthony Ainley, who portrayed the Master on Doctor Who passed away, as did comedian Alan King, via Julia. I have fond childhood memories of them both.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:40 AM

Blogger has just added a whole buncha new features... That's a huge surprise to wake up to. I'll have to think about which and whether to implement...

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:20 PM

I just started frantically hunting around for my wedding ring... and then realized it was on my ring finger.