Appointment in Samarra

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, "Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me."

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, "Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?"

"That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

Three bits of news

All of these come from the New York Times or the Washington Post. Registration required.

The first bit of news is the most horrific. While many people have made much of the lack of body armor on field soldiers is Iraq, the fact is most of the front-line troops are wearing some and have Kevlar helmets as well. But the roadside bombs take advantage of this fact by throwing shrapnel up from ground level, into the face and helmet.

The difference between this war and previous ones is that we can now save more people than we once could. The press focuses on the dead, but the injured are something else-- because of the body armor and changes in insurgency tactics, a frightening number of the men coming home are permanently brain damaged. "We're saving more people than should be saved, probably" said one neurosurgeon.

An average of one soldier a day is sent home with brain damage-- half of whom may live for years as vegetables, the other half of whom will be "functional," but will suffer paralysis, memory dysfunction, and personality disorders for the rest of their lives.

The Lasting Wounds of War

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Often the new diagnoses involve people who for years have been deemed rude, clueless or just plain weird because of their blunt comments or all-too-personal disclosures. They typically have a penchant for accuracy and a hard-wired dislike for the disruption of routine.

Answer, but no cure, for a social disorder that isolates many

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When Internet shopping became a big deal, the idea of a "perfect market" was really interesting to economists. But, as it turns out, it's not the price that makes a really big deal to most people, it's the selection. By having the ability to choose from the most obscure shops around, one can find the best products and those really rare items that one could not normally find. Alternatively, one has the power to locate the prices on a given product and determine if shipping and handling is worth the expense. Almost half of all Amazon sales are of books outside the "top 100,000."

Virginia Postrel tells us What's so great about Internet commerce?

23rd Post Meme

From jenkitty, find the 23rd post you ever made and enter the 5th sentence. This is a riff on the "find the nearest book, go to page 23, and enter the 5th paragraph" meme that was going around. (I tried that one, but I was reading Hobsbawm's Age of Empire at the time, and there are only four sentences on page 23.)

And then, after a while, the book is battered and the crisp white edge greyed with the grease of too many fingerprints, the insides stained here and there with coffee, and the promise of the book is faded as it fills with unanswered problems, shoddy perspectives, crude doodles, crossed-out paragraphs.

This was in response to a conversation we were having about our favorite notebooks and pens, and my lament that I never seem to be able to actually fill a notebook, just like I never seem to finish a novel. I just toss out short stories and plotless fragements. Still do, but I'm getting better at it.

Yamaarashi-chan's teacher rocks!

So, last night I stopped by Yamaarashi-chan's daycare and picked her up to take her to school for an evening get-together where I could speak with her teacher and her fellow students. Yamaarashi-chan complained that she was hungry even after her daycare had supplied her with Poptarts and a PB&J sandwich, but we were late and there was promised snacks at the school. She was a bit upset that Kouryou-chan wasn't there; she said over and over how she wished Kouryou-chan could come to her school and see everything.

Apparently, the teacher is big on Africa, because she went there as a peace corp volunteer for a number of years. So the kids demonstrated what they had learned, about daily life and a little faux-African dance they did. Yamaarashi-chan sat on the edges holding a handful of bells and played along with the music. She can be such a cheerful kid; I really love seeing her in her element.

We sat and watched, going through the art and drawings that the students had done. Yamaarashi-chan seems to be interested in actually writing stories-- there was a five-page story, complete with illustrations, reminding me of Scott McCloud's bit about how kids transition from showing, to telling, to learning how to show with words. It's amazing how far she's come since the beginning of the year.

I left a little early, sad to say; her mother was there to take her home, so I made my goodbyes. Yamaarashi-chan was pretty insistent about my not leaving and I had to be just as insistent that it was time for me to go.

I got home around 8:30 and Omaha had some leftover shrimp curry and rice waiting for me in the fridge. Yummy.

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The Pimsleur Japanese course has suddenly ramped up the vocabulary as of CD 10 (Lessons 19 and 20). I think that it's a bit of a test. They figure that if you've stuck with the lesson long enough to listen to the first ten CDs, you're serious about completing the course. For the first nine CDs it was one verb form every two lessons, plus maybe five vocabulary items. Now it's a new verb form every lesson, plus twenty or so vocabulary items. The density has increased remarkably. I'm struggling now to keep up, listening and exercising with the lesson two, sometimes three times.

The price of a perfect shave

Okay, I'm gonna confess. I bought something pimped by Queer Eye. I bought Zihr shaving cream. I bought the small tube: 3oz for $12. Damn, that's pricey. That's four times the cost of my usual shaving cream (Alba Botanical), and ten times the cost of the cheap crap you can buy at the supermarket.

The cost is offset by the value. I really liked using it. It was incredibly smooth especially with a decent razor (I use the Mach three-bladed ones). And when I'm done, my skin is really clean. I haven't cut myself since I started using this combo. And looking through Froogle, that seems to be the bottom price. It's not exactly for sale on discount.

Crud. I hate discovering that there's something so excellent out there, that's so damned expensive. The question now becomes: is this step-up in the quality and comfort of a ritual I go through every day really worth the price? Not to mention having to walk into the Bon Marche, where I have a reaction to that kind of branding similar to Cayce Pollard's in Pattern Recognition.

On the other hand, it doesn't help me show up on radar the way Alba Botanical claims their product does: although AB's shaving cream is on its third packaging redesign since I started buying the stuff, the package has always touted the product's ability to "prevent chaffing." I think they mean chafing.