gonewest

I’m sitting in the St Lazarre station waiting on my train to Caen. I did not end up doing much in Paris this time around except for a visit to the Arc de Triumph (jet lag got me good this trip).

I should be in Caen in a few hours.

Got into Paris about two hours ago. Took a train down to Gare du Nord but then decided that I did not have the energy to devote to getting to the hotel via train/metro today so I took a taxi for the rest of the trip.

Now I am sitting in front of the hotel with about two hours to burn until I can check in (I need sleep!).

Maybe a walk or two around the block…

Took a shuttle down to SeaTac since the clutch is still out in the Miata (three months without missing the car — I’m leaning toward selling it now). I got here way too early and discovered that the Air France counter doesn’t even open until noon.

So, now I have to cool my heels in a little coffee shop for three hours before I can check my bags and get into the airport proper.

Sucks.

Well, I have been too lazy to do much research but I still do not know why my mobile blogging tools cannot get an image or any other HTML uploaded properly to this blog. So, while I may add a few text blog entries here during my vacation, I will not be uploading photos.

What I will do is try to take regular random pictures and upload them to a MobileMe gallery that I just created (see it here).

Another day begins. Maybe I will figure out how to get pictures uploaded from my iPhone today.

Well, it’s been about a year and a half, but I finally got off my lazy butt and made a decision on how to replace the previous version of this blog — the one that was on the server that died.

I don’t feel like trying to recover the data from the old hard drive, but my blogging software still had many of the old entries, so I have uploaded them to this new blog. The images didn’t come across however, so I may eventually delete the entries that relied on them them.

The gloomy sky doesn’t do it justice, but here is a quick shot out the window of the new apartment. On sunny days this view should be great and in good weather the sunsets should be pretty close to spectacular — at least they better be considering how small the apartment itself is. You can find a few more shots here.

Republican plan for world peace and American hegemony:

Phase 1 - Find bee’s nest and whack with stick, repeat.
Phase 2 - …
Phase 3 - Celebrate world peace and American hegemony.

Sometimes you have to wonder about American conservatives; call them Republicans, neocons, modern conservatives, or right wing nut cases — it doesn’t really matter any more since they all get more extreme and harder to distinguish every year. I honestly think the underpants gnomes in an old South Park episode were more competent with their business plan than the Republicans are with anything that they get their hands on.

We were lied into a war in Iraq which took a stable, secular country that was (no matter how much we hated Saddam Hussein’s rule) a check against Iran’s influence in the middle east and turned it into a violent mess which is simultaneously:

1. A quagmire that consumes almost our entire capacity to field troops anywhere for anything (read: makes us little threat to anyone else).
2. A recruiting paradise for Sunni (i.e. Al Queda) terrorists.
3. An emerging ally of Iran (a Shia controlled country) which will probably help them cement their domination of the region in the long term.

This could not have turned out worse if we had let Colonel Klink run the war.

So how do we plan to fix this awful turn of events? Well, if you thought this country was lead by people who are grounded in reality, then you might guess that we are preparing to cut our losses and find a quick way out of Iraq that doesn’t require us to admit that we started an unnecessary war and then lost it (the “declare victory and go home” strategy) and then put some serious elbow grease into long term diplomatic efforts to re-stablize the region and limit the influence gain that we handed to Iran on a silver platter when we created this mess.

But then no one in the Whitehouse is actually sane these days, are they? According to this article in Vanity Fair, there is every reason to believe that we are about to try to fix our Iraq problem by launching a massive air and naval assault on Iran (with no ground troops to speak of to back it up, of course). Basically, having been stung by the bee’s nest in Iraq that we’ve been whacking for more than three years now, we are about to whack an even bigger nest with the naive belief that that will somehow solve our current problem.

I’m sure that will work though, after all, isn’t there an old saying that goes something like:

“If you accidently stir up a bee’s nest, be sure to find a hornet’s nest and stir it up too or you may get stung.”

Oh, and before you go trying to defend Republicans or other conservatives by claiming that this madness comes from the Whitehouse neocons and not the Republican party, remember that:

1. The Republicans in congress are still trying to give this administration’s insane Iraq policy cover by fighting tooth-and-nail against any votes to end, limit, or even disapprove of the war in Iraq or the recent antagonism toward Iran.
2. Neocons are still frequent guests on national media outlets and they are always treated as conservatives and as having “serious” opinions, even by other conservatives.
3. The more traditional conservative icons still frequent the national media outlets and still support the Iraq war (and the newer pre-attack “tough talk” on Iran) even when they are nominally critical of Bush.

Republicans, neocons, and conservatives may have recently started to lay the groundwork for distancing themselves from the miserable failure that is George W. Bush, but they also still support the insane policies that this administration has been driving for years and you can bet that 9 out of 10 of everyone who identifies as conservative still:

1. Hates Iran.
2. Knows the lyrics to the “Bomb Iran” song.
3. Would like to see it happen.

And that is just what Bush appears to be set on giving them.

I’ve been bad this weekend. Well, not really bad, just your garden variety jumped-the-gun bad. I bought a Sony A100 DSLR on impulse yesterday while wandering about downtown. I had planned to buy a good DSLR this summer anyway, but the intention was to buy one after I move to the new apartment and start saving a lot of money on rent, not before I move.

By the way, did I mention that I am moving again? Seattle is a great city and I like the apartment that I’ve been in for the last year, but living in Queen Anne is more expensive than I am willing to deal with right now and none of the Seattle suburbs appealed to me (I’m just not a suburb kind of guy). I moved up to Washington so that I could seriously work on buying a boat — hopefully one to live on — not just to live in a big urban area (I was doing that just fine down in San Diego). I will be moving up to Bellingham for a while to cut the rent by a big margin and to see how I like the area (there is also a good marina nearby for when I do buy that boat).

I took a few shots with the new camera today. They came out rather lack luster, but then this was not a good day for playing photog. One of the shots is below; note how the bit of the boat in the foreground is slightly blurred to de-emphazise it, this is one of the effects that is much easier to do with a DSLR and one of many new techniques that I will need to learn. You can find more of today’s trial shots here (they are the files begining with “DSC”).

Oh yeah, I sign the lease next weekend so, if the weather is good, I’ll take a shot out the window (killer view) and maybe one or two of the place and post them here.