the Internet you gotta love it

[Michael Eisenstadt]

having lotsa fun with the Internet this morning (in 
concert with my current roommate)

this is to keep at bay my depression at the state of the
nation in the hands of lunatics (exacerbated by reading
a piece in the current issue of The Weekly Standard by
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the folks who thought
up invading Iraq. the gist of their article is that 
US should forget about asking others to help out in
Iraq as they wont do it, neither India nor Turkey nor
France nor Germany. nope, fellow americans, we need
to beef up the army send many more troops and do what
we gotta do ourselves -- i note that in the article the
authors make no mention of any rationale for invading
Iraq in the first place -- its like Euclidian geometry
to them where certain things are assumed to be the case
as first principles, parallel lines never meet, that
sort of thing)

a friend of mine has lost his job programming (SQL
databases -- the work has been shipped out to India)
and is planning to go to law school. via email we
have been talking about the LSAT workbook and he is
urging me to go to law school too. i can't wait to
take my bar exam when i will be going on 75!!!!!!!!
maybe i can get an internship with Dewey, Cheatam 
& Howe

a great resource on the net is http://www.imdb.com
which is a database of ALL movies with links to 
reviews of them in newspapers. I have rented Jean-Luc
Godard's next to last movie In Praise of Love
(L'eloge de l'amour) from Waterloo Video.

from the review of it in the NYTimes:

"...two young girls wearing the traditional lace caps 
and white aprons of Brittany arrive at the door with 
a petition to have "The Matrix" dubbed into Breton. 
Earlier, in the black-and-white Parisian section of 
the film, the camera has lingered on a poster 
advertising that notorious exercise in cultural 
imperialism (i.e. The Matrix), side by side with a 
poster for Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket." 

explication de texte: Pickpocket is an excellent 
gangster film noir based on Hollywood B movies,
the contrast being between ok cultural imperialism 
of the 40's and evil cultural imperialism of such 
as The Matrix.

Brittany (the province not the singer) is the most 
reactionary/conservative part of France where the 
church still rules the minds of the peasants -- 
where they still oppose the revolution of 1789 and 
were eager collaborators with the Nazis under the 
Occupation during WW II. Hardly the natural 
audience for The Matrix.

res ipsa loguitur, folks!

and, finally, all of Google's servers are down at
the moment (since at least 9:32am). how can this be? 
aren't they a linchpin of the hole Internet thang? 
is it a DOS (denial of service) attack?

cui bono?

Mike advocatus