I have no more excuses

As I mentioned earlier, I had to go into work this weekend. It's a quick drive, no more than 20 minutes when the traffic's good, which it was, so one trip out and back has just enough time for one lesson of my Japanese classes on audiobook.

I haven't been posting about my Japanese studies because I haven't been doing them. Too much to do, and I've started to feel the need for more downtime from my busy and crazy life recently. I'm not really getting it-- children don't allow for it-- but I have put aside some extra-curricular activities that one might consider life-enhancing. (Sadly, one of those seems to have been dating, recently. I should get out more often.) So I put it on random and let it pick a track for me.

The lesson was one of the transitionals: it started with "How many people in your family? How many boys? How many girls? Are they here with you in Japan?" and ended with "Please put 40 liters of gasoline into my American car, which is really too big for me. I have to go to Tokyo. Which road do I take?"

I had no problem at all with the lesson. I tore through it, only once losing a vocabulary point, expressing someone else's desires, "My wife would like wine." Other than that, everything was in place: grammar, conjugation, tense.

It was mildly frustrating because I now know that I have no excuse for not continuing. The mechanics of this language are easy for me, now. I'm now carrying, along with a library of 1,500 books, the finest Japanese-English dictionary available, 24/7, in my pocket. I can look up Kanji with radicals and with hirigana, with English and romajii if I have to. I have every tool I need to complete my study.

I just need to memorize 2,000 kanji and 40,000 combinations.

News time.

You can take my incandescent lightbulb only from my cold dead hand. Yes, compact flourescent lightbulbs will save the Earth. They'll also contaminate your soil and, Gods forbid, you should break one and turn your house into a Superfund site.

An article in the NY Times Magazine this weekend shows how the farm bill distorts our food chain to our detriment. A dollar can buy 1200 calories of Twinkie but only 250 calories of carrots. Carrots are a root vegetable. Twinkies are 39 chemically processed ingredients, yet the subsidies of the farm bill make the soybeans, corns, and wheat ingredients of a Twinkie so cheap that carrots can't compete. I've often thought it perverse that Pepsi was cheaper than milk.

The current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

And given the recent brouhahah over the communalist milk system we have in this country, the whole thing seems sadly more twisted than it should.

I was gonna write about the officer who dealt with Pat Tillman's parents and said he resisted their inquiries into his death because he believed their rage was motivated by their atheism; after all, if they were believers they'd expect Tillman to have gotten a better deal in Heaven, right? But Sparky says it better.

Meanwhile, the NY Times reports that seven of the eight rebuilding programs that the Pentagon and the Executive tout as successes are in fact dismal failures. Mostly due to plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenence, looting, and lack of knowledge on how to use the facility. Even better, the Executive's people disagreed with the basis of the report, claiming that actually teaching the Iraqis how to use the equipment would be "colonialism" and "micromanaging!"

Lest we think anything better is going on at home, The Washington Post follows up with news that of $854 million that our allies offered for relief in the days following Katrina, only $40 million was ever used. Much of it was wasted. The "we don't need no help" attitude that came from the Executive was so pervasive that cargo containers of medical supplies donated by Italy were left to rot at cargo terminals and decayed in the Louisiana sunlight. The incompetence, malfeasance, and malevolence of our current administration continues to be breathtaking.

That itch. That annoying, crawling, horrible itch.

It's terribly, horribly unfair. I shouldn't be bothered by this. I really shouldn't. It normally doesn't bother me to read other people's stuff: normally, I can either say it's trash or it's treasure with little room in between.

But I'm halfway through Charlie Stross's Wednesday Addams vs. The Nazis From Planet X (aka The Iron Sunrise) and I'm having this weird, "Hastur, if he can get away with this kind of heavy-handed silliness..."

Of course, he'll probably pull something marvelous out at the end and I'll be left all bleak again.