Politblogo

Chupaqueso!

Soon an arbitrary moment will pass, and we will write our cheques for 2008 rather than 2007, if we haven't already been doing that.  But more important is my discovery of this:

It is something my friend made at a party a few days ago.  He called it "chupaquesos."  It apparently comes from some webcomic.  Is it not awesome?  There is only one ingredient: grated cheese.  That's eat.  Just eat the fried cheese.  It is like a cheese omelette without the annoying eggs.

Rather than ring in the """New""" """Year""", I am ringing in the chupaqueso.

PS: I also had dessert at said party.  With another friend's awesome pineapple carrot cake.

By comparison, your tables were meagre indeed.

My stealth spamulator

Huh.  Turns out that a coooouple of coooooments were stuck in my spam filter, which I didn't know I even had.  Well, they have been released, a bit belatedly.  So billy pilgrim is not, in fact, banned.

This means that I have to check my TypePad control panel more frequently.  Sheesh.  I can't just leave it for weeks at a time like I normally do.

A death triangle

I've been in Canada with my family for approximately a week, and today I woke up to overhearing my parents talking about the death of Benazir Bhutto, which was enough to get me out of bed and wide awake.  It is next to impossible, these days, to tell who in Pakistan is responsible for what, although that's nothing new.

I was in Pakistan in the general vicinity of a year ago.  There was political turmoil then as now, though nothing so dramatic as the assassination of a major leader, but for most people life goes on.  Pakistan is no Iraq, and people know how to live even with a certain amount of background political chaos.

I have been in Pakistan during an assassination however, depending on how conspiracy-minded you are, which in the case of the average Pakistani, is very. I was with my mother visiting my grandfather, and we were in the Pakistani International Airlines planetarium watching whatever sort of educational show that Karachi planetarium had on---I can't remember now.  Ten minutes in, the show abruptly cut out, and the lights came on.  The planetarium manager walked in to tell us the show had been cancelled, because Gen. Zia ul-Huq, the head honcho of the previous dictatorial regime---who was in some ways far worse for Pakistan than Musharraf has been---had died in a plane crash.  Thereafter proceeded days of televised prayer and mourning.  Never had there been so many empty and false declarations of public grief.

His predecessor: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he had executed. His successor: Benazir Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's daughter.

As a leader, General Zia ul-Huq was missed by few, regardless of whether or not his death was an accident.  I will not say that Bhutto père was a necessarily a great leader---there are lots of reasons to think that he was not, including that fact that some of his power stemmed from the lack of needed land reform in Pakistan---but he was missed, if only that his death heralded yet another discontinuity in the Pakistani republic.  Bhutto fille died today; though some people say that it is not auspicious or polite to talk ill of the very recently deceased, I will say that she was not good for the country either, and if you believe the rumours---which is up to you in Pakistan---neither was she particularly shy of extrajudicial violence herself.

Neither is Musharraf, of course, and in her defense, she would have had a veneer of legitimacy that he can never have.  It's not clear whether he had a hand in her death, though at the moment, I think it is unlikely, breaking the symmetry with their predecessors.  And he may yet share her fate, turning this triangle into a square.

But now pair of ghosts that has haunted Pakistani politics for decades has become a trio, father and father's killer and daughter.  And what this means for ordinary life in Pakistan in the near future: probably not all that much. Life has gone on and will go on for what is a chaotic and poor society, but also a consumer society quite recognizable at some level to Westerners.

Woe unto the Men of Númenor

I felt obliged to post now in order to counter the litany of slander and lies against me and my fellow competitors in a certain bake-off in which I am participating with some US bloggers. 

But this contest is completely over.  Yes indeedy, the Doom of Mandos has decended.  Fear my wrath.

My goodies, of course, arrived first, first of all the goodies in the bake-off.  Were it not for the Númenorean stubborness and rejection of inevitability by the competition, that should have been that.  I would not only be the Vala of Doom, I would also be Cookie King for a year. 

Let us examine!  Emerging great and terrible from a smithy I borrowed from Aulë is but the merest beginning of the total pwnage.  Behold!  The brownies of the Noldor, in their natural splendor:

And then, made from the remaining sap of Telperion, is the secret family egg dish of the Valar.  Here is its humble but amazing batter beginning:

It prepares to enter the furnace of Aulë:

And here it emerges, to be placed among the stars (and served to the judges)!

Last, there is the sacred spicy nut brittle of the Vanyar, eaten only every 157 years, at the special feast of the Movement of the Foot of the Lark.  It is cooling.

Arrogant mortals will always regret going up against the forces of the Valar.

And looks like it is ready to ship to the cookie judges, including the great Cookie Queen and her co-judges themselves via the Eagles of Manwë.

And we have some beautiful music to accompany it!

(Thanks to some nameless Canadian Maiar who will remain unlinked, alas, until the contest deadline has passed.  But this was a team effort.)

Public service announcement

Sadly, No! has a post on the congressional Democrats' complicity in torture, just in case you might have once thought, like Bradrocket, that the Dems were better on that issue.  The credibility of the report is disputed in comments, but there's an overall discussion on the crediblity of the Dems in general.

Why do I even bother voting for Democrats again? I mean, WTF. It would be nice, really really nice, to have at least one goddamn party in this doomed nation that stands fully against torture. Jesus H., you horrible assholes. Don’t you have any damn principles? Don’t you have any ethics? Have you ever, at any point in your miserable lives, taken a principled stand on any issue?

Again, I feel sick.  Favoring torture is now a bipartisan issue.  David Broder must be very pleased.

This Kos diary by Jerome à Paris contains a link to a fascinating Financial Times report.

Minimum wages are new in Germany, where pay is traditionally negotiated by business federations and trade unions. Yet they are hugely popular – a survey this week showed 78 per cent in favour. Yet Mr Westerwelle said the CDU’s decision to bow to popular pressure merely underscored the weakness of its leadership.

The horror!  Leaders bowing to popular pressure?  Next thing you know, they'll want democracy.

The FT editorial on this issue is a hoot too.

None of this will be new to most of you.  I don't know why I posted it---which is the general problem with blogging for me, it's so hard to post anything original, and there's nothing more banal than hatred for democracy.  But then you get those public service ads on TV from the Shriners about not cooking your kids, so I'm thinking of this post in that vein.

Dashing my haber

Yes, yes, a nothing post and then a post about haberdashery.

So, every six months or less, I must buy a new pair of shoes.  Walking is my main mode of transport, so my shoes wear out very quickly.  Buying shoes is a difficult task for me, because I have big feet, and worse, one foot is a bit larger (wider) than the other.

In my own weird way, I also have stylistic concerns.  You'd think that for someone who walks a lot, I'd buy a lot of comfortable runners.  Not so; I have my own peculiar image to maintain, not to mention the fact that I simply am too mentally lazy to juggle which shoes to wear for what.  What I want is nice black shoes that are comfortable for miles of walking with good grips and high durability that don't hurt my peculiar feet.

Yes, that is a tall order.  And it takes a correspondingly long time to fill it.  Grrr.  Why do so many shoes have no grip?  Who wants to slip and slide across, say, tile floors?  Well, I found something.  But it is not perfect.

In the same vein, I am also looking for a new wallet.  I bought my old wallet in Karachi, Pakistan last winter.  At a big gift shop warehouse festooned with reassuring anti-child-labour posters, a sure sign that children had indeed been harmed in the making of my wallet.  (As they probably have with yours, which I do not say in my defence...)  I need to carry a large number of cards around with my at once.  I imagine that nowadays, most people do.  I've got change, receipts, and on rare occasions, even cash.  It's a big bulgy wallet that I keep in my trouser pocket.

But why is it next to impossible to find a wallet that can store any reasonable fraction of that now?  What's this with ridiculously thin wallets?  What, so people are afraid of a little pocket bulge?  Seriously.  I can't find a decent wallet anywhere.  Not a one of them even has a change pouch.

Finally, while at the mall, I noticed a major department store's "Big and Tall" men's clothing collection catalogue.  Lots of tall, but no big.