On the road at last

On Wednesday, the plan is: get the U-Haul, pack the truck, kiss mommy goodbye, enthusiastically leave, get stuck on the highway somewhere in New Hampshire, get a new truck, get lost in New York, get sleep, get stolen.

Hopefully, nothing will go wrong.

Summer Hole

I'm on holidays until the beginning of September. Next blog, from Washington DC.

What would you do?

I had finally made my mind about it and wanted to blog on what I thought Londoners should do in face of the recent attacks: ignore them. Stay calm. Keep behaving the same. Etc.

And then I went to London for 18 hours.

Arriving was a piece of cake: Thameslink from Gatwick, off to King's Cross. But leaving was different. I was taking the tube from Russel Square with enough bags to look like a nuclear suicide bomber - except for my skin color. As I was walking in the station and getting on the tube, I was seeking suspicious looks or people getting off the train as I got in. But none of this happened. A few stations later, a Pakistanese-looking guy gets on the tube with a large bag bag. He tosses it in a corner and sits a few seats further.

I got nervous.

I was thinking to myself that I shouldn't be nervous. I was tying to focus on my book. But I couldn't help it: every 15-20 seconds, I would look at the bag, wondering if... I was about to calm down when the guy took his mobile in his pocket. I thought about the previous bombings where the bombs had been detonated with a mobile. I stopped breatyhing and resumed only when he started talking to the other person. A few stations later, he got off the tube. I was relieved.

The Clown is Dead

I just learnt that Mitch Hedberg died. A few months ago.

I've never been to one of his shows, but I became a fan just by reading his stuff on the Internet.

This quote says it all.

''Young comedians are always trying to ape someone else,'' says Conan O'Brien. ''Even when they're good you can always tell where their influence was. 'This guy is doing a Seinfeld with a twist.' 'That guy is doing Sam Kinison toned down a notch.' And then you see someone like Mitch, and it's like his brain was put in backwards.'' (Comic Tragedy, Entertainment Weekly, 2005)

Jesus !

I'm absolutely thrilled about going to work and live in the US for a few months. This is a time that will go down in history, I can tell. I think the biggest thing is the so-called intelligent design debate. The war in Iraq, the deficit, the Supreme Court nominee, all of this are very significant events. But intelligent design is a civilisation defining issue. How can a country, in the 21st century, engage in this irrational debate?

This denial of facts, of science, is astonishing. If I were to meet a single person with those views outside of the US (maybe at the Vatican?), I would be in shock. But to think that a strong lobby and a freakin' majority of the people thinks it should be taught in class - I'm at loss. And now, the President. Good God! Make no mistake: the goal is to pretend that there is a debate, so Bush endorsement that he can't take side is exactly what the supporters of intelligent design want to hear.

The popularity of intelligent design makes so little sense to me that I want to talk to those people. I want to hear them, I want to debate them. No: just listen to them silently, trying to understand. This is the biggest case of group think I can think of.

In the long run, intelligent design proponents cannot and will not win the argument - their position is nonsense. The real question is: will they take the American empire down with them? Will they cause the empire to crumble down by throwing out reason and science? Will they erase in the US the values of the Enlightment and take a whole nation back into to dark ages? What will be the consequences for the rest of the world, especially the Western world?

Sheer force is nothing against reason. Humans are not the strongest animals, yet they are the most powerful on the planet, thanks to their brain. I don't fear for reason and that's why I don't fear that the rest of the world will fall into the intelligent design trap (here, the French expression "attrape-nigaud" lousely translated as "ninny-trap" is fit).

The US are to the Christian world what Iran is to the Muslim world: a self-centered and self-spinned religious regime supported by the people. They can no longer pretend to be the light of the world, the way Rome has been in the past. They are slowly turning into the Barbarians they are pretending to fight: narrow-minded, in denial of facts, religious zealots, and what more.

Some argue that irreductible complexity is an evidence of intelligent design. Since all the pieces have to be in place for a system to work, how could it have been created step by step? There are a lot of arguments out there, but here's my take. By coincidence, after a gazillion trials, I say. The elements fall into different combinations, to no results, during millions of years. At some point, they do fall in this magical combination and it produces something. Think about the lottery: only one combination of numbers can win the grand prize. Does the coincidence of having the exact combination is evidence that there's an intelligent person who chose the numbers?

Serendipity has never let me down

This is a love story gone right. There aren't that many out there, so read on.

The situation was shaky at best in New York. No job for me, an internship for her. Then came the DC offer: great job, my domain, well-paid. We had a very difficult discussion about it and came to the conclusion that I should take the job. And we'd get into one of these long-distance relationship.

On the very day that we made that decision, she sent an application to a Washington DC organisation. Get this: 15 minutes later, they called her to say they were interested. One thing though: as a test, she'd have to translate a short text from English into French. Did I mention that she's a native speaker in French, English and Italian? So it was a piece of cake and a few days later, she received a formal offer. On that very day, again, she's been told that her contract in NY would be shorten by a month and finish at the end of August. It means we'll arrive in DC at the exact same time, both with a place to work. Hallelujah.

We're now looking for a 1-bedroom in NW Washington DC for September. Anything to suggest? Speaking of suggestions, if anyone has an idea of how a European national could find a job in DC that would provide her with a pay and a US work permit, I'm all ears.

Still, this adventure left me with nagging doubts. Will I always have to struggle to coordinate my career and love life? Is this the fate of all international workers? Will I ever settle down? Where?

Almighty Apple

With the Mighty Mouse, Apple might be innovating, or maybe not. Hum, probably not.

PC World makes a good point. I like the click-click of my mouse buttons.

Who Wins?

"Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur said work on major murder investigations had "slowed to a trickle", because so many specialist detectives had been moved to tackle terrorism."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4744107.stm